"What happened?" I asked.
"We got in a fight at the bar," Chad said. "We were drunk, and we got in a fight about you, and I told him I knew what was going on, that I'd figured it out already in California, that something was going on, that he was fucking my mother, that I knew it, and he just kept denying it, he kept saying there was nothing between you. I said I'd seen it. I told him I knew. He'd come to the fucking house. He was kissing you on the steps of the fucking porch. And what kind of an idiot did he think I was? What did he think I thought was going on—with him over here all the time, whispering to you in the kitchen? He said there was some other guy, tried to blame it on that teacher again, and then I just lost it, and the fight ended up outside, and I slammed his head against the car, and then he finally admitted it—" Chad began to cry more loudly. "And then when he was on the ground, and I—"
"Stop crying," I said.
My own eyes were so dry, it was as if I'd never shed a tear in my life. They were so dry, I couldn't shut them. I couldn't blink them. I said, "We have to think clearly, Chad. We can't waste time crying."
Chad put a hand to his mouth as if to hold it in. The tears were still on his cheeks, but he stopped crying.
I asked, "Did anyone see you?"
"Yeah, people saw," Chad said. "Sure, people saw us, but nobody stuck around. Nobody saw the end of it."
"Where's his car?"
"I drove it over to the gravel pit," Chad said. "After I brought him here, after I—and then I walked back home."
"Have you told anyone?" I nodded at the computer. "Did you write to Ophelia?"
"Yes," he said.
I shook my head. I put my hand on his cheek. He looked up at me. He was a child.
I could see it.
In the blue haze of the computer, he was the child I'd always feared would drown at the bottom of the public pool. He didn't know how to swim. If I didn't keep my eyes on him every second, what might happen? He would have no idea what to do—out of breath in the deep end, trying to reach the edge, the rope, the stairs. He would sink to the bottom. I would find him there. In that wavering blue light, he looked, now, like a man—but he was that child.
IN THE afternoon, Chad and Fred and two other men in the landscaping crew came out, cleared the rest of the scrubbrush, and planted the beginnings of my topiary garden.
I watched them from the bedroom window.
Twice, Chad turned away from the work, and looked toward the house, then turned back when he saw me watching from the window.
The day after that, he was gone.
I gave him my car.
"You can never come back here," I said. "Anything could happen. You have to stay away. I can't know where you are, in case anyone comes looking for you—because, someday, they will come looking."
"I know," Chad said, and he started to cry again.
I could not, myself, cry.
Many years would have to pass before I could, again, breathe, or dream, or cry.
IN SEPTEMBER, my father died. He was buried beside my mother. Standing above their graves, I wondered, absurdly, if she was surprised after all these years to find him returned to her. They told me he asked for Robbie over and over at the end.
Sue and Mack split up.
Mack got custody of the twins and took them to Canada to be closer to his parents. I learned of it through other members of the English department. Sue and I, after that last afternoon in the hallway, never spoke directly to one another again. Twice, I left messages for her, but she never called me back. Once, I tried to stop her in the parking lot; I called out, "Sue!" and she didn't even pretend not to have heard me. She turned, looked directly at me, turned back around, and continued to walk to her car.
Now, I almost never see her. Occasionally, a gray shadow passes my office, or flits out of a bathroom stall in the women's room before I've really realized who it is, but I've gotten used to the ghost of our friendship, in this form—glimpsing it once or twice a week out of the corner of my eye, like the hundreds of other ghosts of my past, recognizing it for what it was, and letting it go.
Bram married Amanda Stefanski.
("She's perfect," he told me, passing me in the hallway. "She's sweet. But that damn dog, that Pretty, that fucker hates my guts.")
Now and then we stop to speak, but if Amanda comes upon us, she gives Bram, and then me, a cold look—a warning.
Robert Z moved to New York City to teach poetry to inner-city kids, but Beth continued to speculate about Amanda, and Bram, and Robert Z ("Do you think he married her for money? How could she have given up Robert, for him?") until the day she died—a small plane with Beth in it breaking into brilliant pieces over Lake Michigan.
And, the topiary garden.
Here it is, in all its splendor.
A swan. A swirled cone. A rabbit. A deer. A perfect pyramid.
Jon takes photographs. He posts them on a Web site for to-piarists. It could be, I tell Fred when he stops by to see the garden, a full-time job.
"That's how it is with anything you love," Fred says. "It takes everything you've got. It rips the time right out of your hands. It requires your whole heart."
The Henslins come down to see it, too, and shake their heads.
All that work, for nothing.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank Bill Abernethy, Lisa Bankoff, Ann Patty, Sloane Miller, Tina Dubois Wexler, and Carrie Wilson for helping me write and rewrite this novel—and for the many other kinds of support, friendship, brilliant advice, and assistance they so generously gave to me.
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