FICTION
Wrecker by Summer Wood
Opening “Wrecker” is akin to unwrapping a gift wrapped with great care. You don’t know what is inside, but you know it’s something special. Summer Wood, in her second novel, delivers a rare treat in this story of a boy and his mothers. It unfolds along a deliciously unpredictable path, one that can and should be savored.
Len is hardly prepared, walking into Family Services in San Francisco. His wife’s sister, Lisa Fay, is the single mother of a 3-year-old boy. She is going to jail for a long stay; Len and Meg are the boy’s closest relatives. The man who worked wood for the last 30 years takes on the responsibility because that is what families do.
Wrecker. A little boy with eyes “the color of sea squall, not clear sky.” His mother gave birth to him in a San Francisco park in 1965; she waited for his personality to emerge before naming him. Len soon discovers the boy’s energy and fearless nature when he manages to lose the child in the parking lot of a diner, the first stop on their way home. Wrecker has taken himself to a nearby river, where he is found standing on a boulder, chucking rocks into the water.
Len is already full-out with his wife’s care. She had, six months earlier, “gone in for a root canal and come home with an infection that spread to her brain and rampaged like a wild beast. Penicillin saved her life, but it couldn’t save her mind.”
The women at the adjacent Bow Farm are an undisguised blessing. There are three of them: the elegant Willow, an artisan working in rugs; Ruth, a solid woman rescued from an attempted suicide by drowning; Melody, the youngest, who’d drifted until she found her anchor at the farm. Len thought of Melody as careless — he’d winched her VW bus out of a ditch more than once. Willow describes her more sharply: “Haphazard and impulsive . . . Slapdash. But generous, and as loyal as a person could be.”
After Len disappears too, the women take turns sleeping in a chair next to Wrecker and try to keep up with him by day. The state is working on the paperwork to take the boy back, but the process drags. In the meantime, he becomes a fixture at Bow Farm. The women “thought of him as a puppy, and they took him in.”
The novel unfolds through five sections, each marking a year in Wrecker’s life. The 3-year-old’s year is tumultuous, as the adults wrestle with finding him a place in their lives. By the time he is 8, Melody is his de facto mother. At 13, they buy him a motorbike. He bends the front fork the first day out, and works for Len to earn its repair.
Lisa Fay is a presence, which gives Wrecker a back story and makes her human. She’s in jail because of a single bad decision, and though the separation from her son is anguishing, the determination to see him again keeps her alive. Wrecker is 18 when she is released from jail, and he’s grown into a sturdy young man. The novel ends when he is 20.
Wood’s prose is crisp, and she mines the rich vein inherent in her premise. Wrecker is the North Star around which the other lives turn, but these characters are hardly incidental. Wrecker’s life plays out against the evolving lives of those who love him. By the time he is 20, he is just one of several who are older and wiser.
A Gift of Freedom Award, offered every other year by A Room of Her Own Foundation, helped make “Wrecker” a reality. The recipients of this $50,000 grant are, without exception, gifted writers. Works by past recipients include poetry and memoir. Wood well belongs on the path of those who’ve come before.
Robin Vidimos is a freelance writer who lives in Centennial.
