He tracks the strange couple as they navigate through the crowd until, at last, Carol Christensen falls upon them. After her effusions, she pulls away, keeping a hand upon the man’s narrow shoulder as if to hold him in place. Michael watches her survey the surrounding guests, alight with her new self-image, burning to display her guru to some benighted soul. Her eyes spark upon Michael, and as she raises a hand to wave him over, he swivels away.
He will be sorry not to meet the brunette, but has no need to engage with Carol’s god of lightning. He knows the type. Like all fanatics, they want only to sermonize. Trying to pin them down is like playing racquetball on a buttered court. There is no way to win, no arguing for the validity of medicine or the supremacy of biological systems. There is, for these people, no such thing as brain disease—least of all in themselves. The spirit world is something external, untouchable, a higher order of reality beyond the mundane perception of science. When their own brain scans show unusual electrical patterns, they consider their point proven: their spiritual experience made manifest. It’s not a biological flaw; it’s a gift.
Before Carol can seize him, Michael circles around to the far side of the pool. From there, he ambles over the grass, away from the party, willing invisibility upon himself. Finally, he takes refuge in a shadowy place near the privet hedges and stands alone with his Scotch glass. Too late, he notices the glass is empty. Still, he feels an intoxicating breeze here, away from the crowd. He breathes deeply of the rich, darkened air and instinctually scans his surroundings. As if in a dream, his eyes catch on a shadowy figure near a hedge several yards away. A dart of adrenaline pierces him, and hot blood slams out to his extremities. Just like that, he is fully, poundingly alive. His right hand goes across his chest, feeling for the pistol at his heart.
The figure turns slightly, and the pool glow illuminates the profile of a teenage boy. Stepping closer, Michael sees a polo shirt and khakis. Their eyes meet, and the boy glances away. Michael lets his right arm drop to his side, but the adrenaline is still circulating and needs a place to go. Without thinking, he walks toward the boy with a little jig in his step. He smiles sociably and nods. The boy hesitantly returns the nod. Michael can see the Adam’s apple burrowing in his throat. The boy has obviously come to this spot to be alone, and Michael feels suddenly sorry for having approached. Standing there, he rubs his hands together as if to warm them. He is bristling with the urge to run, to do a lap around the pool, to sprint all the way to the end of this feeble spit of land, to swan dive into the sound. Instead, he turns and adopts a relaxed pose alongside the boy.
“Which ones are yours?” he asks, nodding toward the crowd.
“Sorry?”
“Your parents.”
“Oh.” The boy points toward the pool house, where there is a unit of men. “That’s my dad, in the blue shirt.”
Michael points to Rosalie, who is laughing with Bill Gregory’s wife. “That one’s mine.”
“Your—?”
Michael laughs. “My wife.”
The boy has an easy, symmetrical face, eyes that are brown and lamblike.
“Are you at the high school?”
“Yeah. I’m a junior.”
“Ah, good year,” Michael says ludicrously. “What are your plans after school?”
The boy gives him an incisive look. The Adam’s apple goes up and down. “I don’t know.” There is a pause. “Maybe the army,” he mumbles.
“Did I hear you say army?”
The boy folds his arms over his chest and stares into the pool water.
“You know there’s a war, right?”
“Well, yeah,” the boy says without looking at Michael. “That’s what armies do.” His voice strums a low register of notes, like a saw blade going through wood.
“How about college?” Michael hears himself ask. “Have you thought about college?” It is insane, he knows, to be grilling the boy this way. It seems to arise from an instinct he cannot readily identify. Not fatherly, exactly, but something approximate.
“I’m afraid college isn’t right for me,” the boy answers. He looks at Michael with a shimmer in his eye. After a moment, he breaks his gaze. “You don’t know my father, do you?”
“I don’t recognize him, no.”
The boy nods. “Well, if you do meet him, please don’t say anything. I haven’t told him about it yet.”
Michael’s mouth crimps into a smile. He is mystified by these young men who volunteer themselves for the armed forces, who willingly put themselves in harm’s way—not necessarily through love of country or desire to serve, but in some kneejerk rebellion or plain lack of direction. He supposes that legions of youth have lazily ricocheted into service to their country this way; there is a reason the armed forces target the young, after all.
Michael looks back to the party, singles out the boy’s father. What has that man done, he wonders, to drive his son to war? Rather than thinking of his own sons—immersed in battles on athletic fields to the exclusion of all else—he reflects on his own teenage years. Whereas this boy seems driven by muscle and instinct, Michael’s body had adopted the features of manhood while slouched indoors on a stained basement couch, day after sunlit day, playing Atari. He would choose a single game and flog it single-mindedly until he had conquered every level. More than shooting aliens out of the sky, he’d gleaned the greatest satisfaction from climbing the cubes of a pyramid and strategically making them change color. He believes that the addictive pleasure of repainting those squares and standing at the summit each time—a squat little creature with a tubular nose, invincible—may have tinted his worldview in some permanent way.
He and the boy loiter in silence. Michael scrapes his mind for another question, something to keep the kid standing here. He is not sure why, but he does not want the boy to move away. Perhaps there is something Michael could teach him, if they hit on the right vein.
As they stand together watching the mingling herd on the far side of the pool, Michael spies a woman in white—tall, long-haired—he hadn’t noticed before. He feels a tingling begin at the tips of his ears, hears a ringing. He takes out his glasses and finds the woman through their lenses. At once, he identifies the coppery hair in its licentious cascade. The dress is too long for a cocktail party, too much like a bridal gown, or the robe of a ghost. Only Diana would make this mistake. He sees the resolute smile on her face as she makes her way along the edge of the crowd, near the lip of the pool. The reflection of her dress accompanies her, an ice floe on the water. At the other end of the pool stands Rosalie, in animated chatter. Michael feels a gelid lump in his chest, which drops swiftly into his groin. The ice radiates, freezing him in place. He watches the space between the white figure and his wife shrinking. It is a disaster beyond any he might have concocted. About to happen.
There is no drill for this. He runs through the obvious actions first—interception by foot or by water—but sees that he cannot run around or swim across the pool in time. Shouting would do nothing. He stands in place, feeling the chill ascend to his head. The tinkle and chatter of the party is amplified as if it were taking place inside his skull. A switch flips. His hand goes to the inner jacket pocket and finds the pistol grip. There is a dreamlike feeling as he slides the weapon out and exposes it to the air, as if revealing his genitalia. His thumb releases the safety, his arm lifts, and the barrel points to the sky.
The shot is followed by a pixel of silence. The faces turn toward him. Diana stops. Then the screams of women. The next moment, he is on the ground, gasping dirt, a weight like an anvil rammed into his spine. Through the thrum of blood in his ears comes an underwater confusion of faraway shouts and near, beastlike panting. His vision is blackened, reduced to the tight study of grass roots. The smell of the soil through his crushed nostrils holds the deepest and darkest of messages, the raw beginning of things.
He feels the gun being taken from
his hand. His white shirt, he thinks dimly, will be streaked beyond rescue. The anvil leaves his back, but a stabbing pain remains. Perhaps a broken rib, or worse. He lies still for a moment, a rare thing. For a moment, he postpones whatever will come next, clutching a peculiar bead of gratitude for this small respite, this fleeting breath of defenselessness. Finally, he is being helped up. Two men, one on either side of him, grip his arms and pull him to his feet.
“What the hell was that about?” one barks.
It hurts Michael to straighten his back, but he does it. “Nothing, nothing,” he murmurs. “Just having a little fun. Just making fireworks, you know?”
He does not recognize the men from the party. Security, maybe. Christensen is wiser than he thought.
There is another figure, a polo shirt. Michael meets the teenage boy’s eyes, bright with fear or exhilaration. “I-I’m sorry,” the boy stammers. “I mean, I’m sorry if I hurt you.”
Michael stares. Beneath the polo shirt, the boy’s chest is broad, the torso tapering to a muscular abdomen. His arms are athletic without being sinewy. His face is radiant from exertion. The stabbing pain returns to Michael’s ribs.
“What’s your name?” he gasps.
The boy swallows. “Mason Hatfield, sir.”
Michael nods, keeps nodding.
“We’ll take you to your car,” says a man at his arm.
The women are still on the far side of the pool, a wall of gaping faces. He does not see Diana among them. There is no one in a white dress, short or long. She must have run, he thinks. In the roil of his brain, beyond the distant congratulation, is another, more distant thought. Perhaps she hadn’t been there at all.
The men shepherd him over the lawn toward the front of the house. Rosalie comes running in her wobbly heels, her face ashen. Her mouth opens, but nothing comes out. She takes a few backward steps, then pivots and marches out ahead of them. As they walk in this awkward phalanx, Michael thinks briefly, bizarrely, of Carol’s healer. He hates, for some reason, the idea of that man witnessing this.
Suddenly, as if remembering something, Rosalie halts and spins around.
“He has a stalker,” she announces with sudden force, standing in front of them like a barricade. “That’s why he did it. There’s someone who’s been stalking him, I don’t know who. Ever since the magazine article.”
Michael’s escorts do not respond, and after a moment his wife turns away and continues walking. He is ushered forward again, albeit more slowly, the torque on his arms slightly reduced. He stares at Rosalie as she walks with aristocratic carriage, the back of her dress like a dull mirror. For the first time in their married life, she is entirely opaque to him.
He thinks about the bullet. Where would it have finally landed? He hadn’t absorbed enough of advanced physics class to hazard any estimate of a .40-caliber shot’s degree of curvature, or to reckon the height of its apex. Perhaps just a slight tilt seaward would have placed it on the sliver of beach beyond the house, where it would rest for the duration, commingled with the clutter of gray stones. Or a small cant north might have landed it on the tennis court. Michael pictures the bullet striking the pristine green clay and creating a divot. He sees it bouncing over the painted white lines, coming to rest at the base of the chain-link fence, harmless as a thimble. It may not be discovered for days or weeks or months, or whenever one of the Christensens or their offspring happens to jog to the spot and bend to retrieve a ball.
Or maybe—is it possible?—the bullet hasn’t yet landed. Maybe it is still streaming upward, freewheeling, unchallenged by any impediment in the clear night. He thinks of this last possibility with a kind of wonderment, like a boy releasing a bottle to the waves. He tilts his face briefly to the sky as the men press him on toward the blue-shadowed lawn where the car is.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ENORMOUS THANKS to all at Grove Atlantic who helped bring this book into the world, especially Virginia Barber, Elisabeth Schmitz, Morgan Entrekin, Katie Raissian, Deb Seager, Judy Hottensen, Charles Rue Woods, Gretchen Mergenthaler, Amy Vreeland, Patsy Wagner, and Justina Batchelor.
I’m deeply grateful to Bill Clegg for his abiding faith, wisdom, and guidance, and to Chris Clemans for his always invaluable assistance.
I’m fortunate to have the support of many brilliant friends, and would like to thank Melissa Hile, Anne Fentress Nichols, and Deborah Shapiro in particular for their responses to these stories. For invaluable writing time during playdates, thanks to Karen Ruscica Haitoff, Sara Carbone, and Andrea Jaffee.
Thanks to Irini Spanidou for her inspiration and enduring belief. For solid advice and encouragement, thanks to Susan Choi, Michael Cunningham, Jenny Offill, Jonathan Baumbach, Emily Mitchell, Sara Shepard, Cari Luna, and Bryan Charles.
I am indebted to the MacDowell Colony for the calm before the storm of parenthood and for providing the time and space for my characters to gestate. Thanks to Evelyn Somers Rogers at the Missouri Review for her editorial help. I’m grateful to Dr. Daniel Spitzer and Mike Cho for their help with neurology and neurosurgery details; any inaccuracies in this arena are my own. Thanks also to the Wilton Historical Society for insight into colonial New England and historic home renovations, and to the staff of 02 Living, who allowed me to turn their café into my office.
Loving thanks to my mother, Mary Ann Acampora, for all that she’s given me over the years and for her careful reading of these stories. This book is dedicated to the memory of my father, Raymond Acampora, without whose unconditional love and faith I would never find myself writing these words.
To Amity, for brightening my days.
And to Thomas, who is at the heart of everything.
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