Instantly the kids went wild, dancing, shouting, flailing about. They made such loud howling noises, I called, “Shh, shh,” but they paid me no attention, clapping their hands and stomping their feet and shaking their whole bodies in rhythm to some unheard music. Fack grasped both of Fick’s hands in his and they twirled and twirled in a circle, leaning far back from each other, screaming and laughing. I remembered—or was I just imagining?—doing the same thing, the centrifugal force pulling us as we went round and round, the willful, happy dizziness, the feeling that I would go flying backward if he let go. Even then, so simply and naturally at his mercy.
Fick and Fack fell to the ground, giggling and squirming in the grass, not yet vented of their endless energy. Their limbs, erratic, spastic, flailing, hardly seemed like their own. They looked possessed. I watched them with some of that flying-backward feeling; I always seemed to have some of that feeling now. Their legs tangled sloppily together, her foot poking his thigh, and their arms flopped about. At one point one of his hands sat wedged in the crook of her neck. They hardly seemed to notice, laughing and laughing, calling my name, wanting to start over again.
At home, during the few waking hours I spent there, I watched my mother’s frenetic energy reawaken, this time by the computer. She discovered the Internet and its support groups for grieving parents, and the long squeal of a modem quickly became the birdsong of our household. She had barely used a computer before but with single-minded determination rooted out Internet Relay Chat rooms and usenet groups. Soon she’d migrated from the kitchen chair next to her cabinet to the household’s only unused computer, conveniently located in Danny’s room. She became friends with people named Sheela_Bird and DoctorREYREY and would talk about them frothily.
“Sheela Bird’s daughter was killed by a thresher,” she said, trapping me in my bedroom or at the kitchen table. “I didn’t even know that kind of thing happened anymore. It sounds so 1850s. Death by thresher. She went to a friend’s farm after school one day and got caught up in the arms of it, or whatever it is a thresher has, and bled out right there in her friend’s field. Never even made it to the hospital.”
I never knew what to say to these stories. It was usually just the two of us in the house, since my dad was working later and later. Whenever he finally arrived, he was sweaty and bedraggled, as if he’d ridden home in a sauna. His hair had turned a bright and sudden white in patches near his temples, giving him a distinctly Bride of Frankenstein appearance.
“How was your day?” he would sometimes ask me, a banality so rare I would stumble for words, trying to think of something that set this day apart from others. “We had a quiz in trig,” I told him, and “The French word for mud puddle is flaque de boue,” and “I saw a deer on the way home,” a lie born of my panic for material.
Our only family outings were trips to the cemetery. In the beginning all three of us went every Saturday morning, but soon the schedule grew loose. The trips splintered to just me and my mom or me and my dad, a pattern I would look back on as an obvious sign of things to come. One of them would stick his or her head into my room on a Tuesday evening or a Sunday at five and ask if I wanted to go. I hated the cemetery and chafed at the idea of the long trip there and back, but I was seduced by the inclusion, surprised each time that they thought to ask me along. It was unusual for them, the inclination toward doing something consistently and together, and I found an unexpected pleasure in being asked, a little like being picked not-last for softball.
I had no idea what to do with myself there. I found myself wishing we were Catholic so I could at least have a rosary to move meaningfully through my hands. My parents each had their own ritual, my father’s to do with pacing and a low, indistinct mutter, though occasionally I could catch a terrible few words. Dearheart, I could’ve sworn he’d said once, baby another time. My mother knelt in the dirt, crying and unafraid of dirtying her pants or pantyhose.
I gnawed on hangnails, dug my heels into the soft ground, slapped my thighs. If I closed my eyes and forced a vision—the pine box eroded beneath us with worm holes, Danny’s eight broken fingers, the crushed phalanges, the ripped flexor and extensor muscles, the cracked fingernails—I could sometimes build a heat in my throat or get a slick feeling behind my eyelids. But mostly I went blank. Grief on demand, the sort expected at my brother’s fresh, grassless grave, required a flattening of all complication of which I was not capable.
“Girl. Tragically. Loses. Brother,” I could hear the narrator from Unsolved Mysteries saying, and it made me incapable of standing still. I marched around to other gravestones. Annabelle Grier died when she was twenty-four, in 1976. I imagined her feathered hair, her knobby knees and spindly arms. Lamont Eyers when he was forty-three. He was the son of Lucille, the father of Laura and Leonard, the alliteration both admirable and annoying.
“Ready?” my dad said one time when he found me at Griselda Jenkins’s gravestone, and I heard the note of consternation in his voice. I made an apologetic noise, a swallowed murmur.
“Her name’s Griselda,” I said by way of explanation. My hand flew from my side, pointing. He looked at the gravestone, then at me, his face pale to the point of being spectral, his eyes bleary and swollen. When he shook his head, it barely moved, and I felt a regret so deep it seemed to swim up from my toes.
“You like your job?” I asked him in the car, a couple minutes from the cemetery, Fairfield still nearly a half-hour away. My voice was crazy-sounding, unmodulated and loud. I had already pressed all of the preset buttons on his radio but found only country or classical. The look he’d given me told me to stop fiddling.
“You like it?” I repeated. It had been nearly two months since the funeral, and I could count the total words spoken between my father and me on my fingers and toes.
He looked at me, made a long Uhhhh sound, and then, “Sure,” and then, “Most days.”
“What do you do exactly?” I said, because I’d never really understood. Or cared.
“Manage the mortgage lending,” he said, though in a thin, tired voice.
“Is it hard?” I wished I could stop shouting. I tried to remember how normal people talked.
“Some days,” he said.
“I wonder what I’ll be,” I said. I wanted us to have a real conversation. The thought of our house, miles away but growing closer by the minute, made me want to bash my head against the passenger window.
“President,” he said, and the word came out strangely, as if he were accusing me of something.
“No, really,” I said.
“You can be anything you want,” he said, though he was looking blankly at the windshield and his voice lacked conviction. It sounded like a line out of a parenting manual or a Dr. Seuss book. I watched the yellow lines in the road, the empty words on the passing signs. Two-for-one sale on preowned videos at the Blockbuster. HAPPY ANNIVERSARY RITA AND MARTY at the Holiday Inn.
“Hhhh,” I said, a noisy stream. He didn’t ask what in the world. He didn’t ask anything. My chest tightened, disappointment welling up. Through everything, it seemed, I still harbored visions of a reconstituted family. Some part of me remained stubbornly convinced there had to something beyond this precarious place, someplace we three would find together, and in it a smaller table, low conversations, newfound rhythms. There—what?—my mother and I would stand hip to hip in front of the stove, she beating a whisk against a metal stirring bowl, I fingering the rows of spice jars? And my father would take me on the day trips he used to take Danny on: fishing on Lake Erie, snowshoeing outside Saline?
But as I watched his drooping profile beside me now (what had happened to his chin? When had it shrunk so fully into his neck?), it was clear what a child I was. And not a child as in mirthful innocent or even as in precocious cherub, but rather as in someone who, in the face of all contrary evidence, was still full of witless hope. What we were doing now was not a forward march together. It was something else entirely: biding our time, counting the days, s
ilently gnashing and moaning beside each other.
Soon we would be home and my father would absent himself to the television. My mother would say hello from the computer, maybe turning her head to look, maybe not, the last lingering smell of dirty teenage boy replaced with the oniony odor of a grown woman who’d long forsaken bathing. That we had come fully apart was abundantly clear, though I grew more and more doubtful that we’d ever been anything but. Maybe all Danny had done was mask our very basic incapabilities as a family. He had always been the loudest, meanest, strongest, funniest, dumbest one in the room. How easy it had been to fix our collective gaze on him, how reflexive and lazy and natural. So how effortless—inevitable, really—to just keep forgetting and forgetting each other without him.
School ended without my failing any classes, primarily a result of my teachers’ collective sympathy. Papers had been left undone and more than one final exam flunked, but still, my final report card read all A’s except for Ms. Villara’s still generous B+. Looking at the grades left me with an uneasy feeling of erasure, as if the past however many months had simply not occurred.
Lola had a barbecue in her backyard the weekend after school was out. It was an end-of-year party, an event that I didn’t have the wherewithal to refuse, especially since her overtures had increased in frequency and urgency as I’d begun to drift. She called several times a week. Did I want to go get some frozen yogurt? Did I want to shop for purses with her? I always told her no, though even as I tried to dodge her calls, I found something admirable about her dogged persistence in the face of constant rejection.
“You’re coming on Saturday?” she’d said every day during the final week of school, as if by sheer stubbornness she could bend my will. And it felt, in the end, like the least I could do.
Bayard and I went together and shared one of the green plastic Adirondack chairs, him in the seat, me perched uncomfortably on one of the wide arms. Paper plates of hot dogs and chips sat balanced on our laps. I watched the scene from a distance. Lola’s dad manned the grill, her mother brought out trays of bright blue virgin cocktails, the flag team huddled around a picnic table, the JV quarterback, a wiry guy named Lucas something, stood beside one of the house’s downspouts and looked bored. There weren’t very many people and no graduated seniors since it was daytime, without alcohol and with parents. Lola bounded nervously around, scanning the sparse crowd and whispering furious-looking orders to her parents, who then did needless things like bring out more chips or drag the kitchen garbage can onto the patio. “You can throw out your stuff here,” Lola announced, waving her arms officiously.
“Can we go yet?” I’d whispered to Bayard minutes after we’d arrived, initially a joke, though I kept repeating it at regular intervals. He kept shushing me.
Lola circled most closely around Lucas the quarterback, touching his arm a lot. She was telling him a story, a loud one about a really funny commercial she’d seen on TV with a dog driving a sports car. “It was a dalmatian,” she said, the apparent punch line, and Lucas flashed a thin smile. When he dipped inside—an escape to the bathroom?—she came our way.
“You guys having fun?” she asked loudly. Lola had been asking this or a variation on this every twenty minutes or so. Tension belied her usual cheerfulness. She bit the corner of her lip and checked her watch with a ticlike frequency. It was four. The party was supposed to have started at two-thirty.
“Fun, fun,” Bayard said in typical Bayard fashion, the line between sincere and sarcastic indiscernible. “It’s good,” I said, a pronoun intentionally without a referent. Having steeled myself for a flurry of unwanted attentions and sympathies, I had expected the party to be different. But aside from Mrs. Pepper having asked about my parents as I came in and one of the flag girls squeezing my hand too hard and asking a meaningful “How are you doing?” there had been nothing. People ate their potato salad with quiet determination. Flag girls stuck their blue tongues out at each other. This tepid barbeque brought that same feeling of erasure.
I had no idea what I was doing here. How had I ended up as someone who came to Lola Pepper’s end-of-year party with the French exchange student? Narration ran continually through my head, as if I were trying to convince myself that what was happening was in fact happening: Here we are eating our hot dogs and pickles. Here we are listening to a story about the camp for kids with cancer where Lola will soon be a counselor.
“So what have you two been up to?” Lola said, attempting to sound breezy, though she eyed me and Bayard in much the same way she’d come to in recent weeks, with a probing, what-exactly-is-going-on-here? look.
“Nothing much,” Bayard said. Nuzzin match.
“Flag won’t be the same without you next year,” Lola said, pressing a palm against his shoulder.
“No, it will not,” he said, not one for false modesty.
“When will you go back to France?” she said.
He explained how his parents were vacationing at the beach through July. Bayard did not like the beach. Too much sun, too many people. He would stay here till August, then return to Chateau -renaud when his parents were home.
“You’ll like it?” she said, glancing at the sliding door for signs of Lucas.
“Will I like Chateaurenaud?” he said.
Lola looked at him like he was being silly. She checked her watch. “What?”
“Will I like what?” Bayard said.
“What?” she said again, her brow knitting with confusion, her eyes clouding for a second. Something dark passed over her face. A flush of red deepened her cheeks. She looked suddenly angry—about this failed party? I wondered. About the shifting configuration of the three of us? It was one of the few times I wondered if I might have underestimated Lola Pepper. But as quickly as it appeared, it disappeared, replaced by her toothy smile and her fervent voice. “I’m so glad you came,” she said, quavering with sentiment.
“Of course,” I said, because I felt for her. She was made up of only two things, good intentions and need. If I had been a sweeter and more forgiving girl, less prone to judgment and scorn, I would have stayed friends with her. Even as I sat in her backyard, desperate for this to be the last time, already envisioning how the summer would grow long between us, her phone calls finally petering out without my even noticing, I looked at her speckled skin and bright eyes and almost convinced myself that maybe I was wrong, maybe we’d forge on together. “Thanks for inviting us,” I said.
She gave me a quick, unexpected hug, squashing my plate between us. “Careful,” I said, meaning the ketchup and her dress, though it came out more stern and she let go quickly and I didn’t explain.
“I thought there’d be more people,” she said, her shoulders drooping just a bit. When Lucas came back out, she did not see him. I watched as he grabbed his windbreaker from a patio chair and disappeared quickly back into the house. Bayard watched too, and neither of us told her that he’d gone.
• • •
I spent the summer at the McAllisters’, escaping my house most mornings before my mother was awake. The nightmares had begun in earnest by then—ones that would continue for years—of Danny, broken-faced and gurgling bloody words, or Elvin Tate slithering beneath my blankets into my bed, or my mouth filled with loamy earth. So my sleeplessness, if possible, was even more pitched and intense than usual. Mornings, then, became the time to coax myself back into normalcy, to talk myself into the coming day.
Usually I arrived well before Bayard was out of bed, when Mr. and Mrs. McAllister were still scurrying around getting ready for work, Fick and Fack bleary-eyed before day camp. I helped tie Fick’s shoes. I offered to clean the dishes. I asked if they had any errands needing done. Mrs. McAllister always told me not to be silly. She told me to sit and offered cooling scraps of bacon. Sometimes she kissed me on the top of my head before she left, just the same way she did to Fick and Fack. It often made me want to cry.
After everyone was gone, I fingered ceramic ducks and Russian nesting dolls.
I scanned up and back, up and back through the several hundred TV stations. I flipped randomly through the paper, reading headlines aloud. “Sales tax will go up a quarter cent in September,” I announced to no one. “Fourteen people died in Gaza.” I spun the chore chart. I slammed kitchen cabinets and turned up the volume of the TV to wake Bayard.
“What do you want to do?” I would say as soon as he appeared. He usually just rubbed his eyes and blinked at me, his hair nappy on his head. It took Bayard a long time to fully wake, to shower, to start his day with me, when we would walk around the neighborhood or flip through TV channels or just sit. Bayard was often trying to convince me to just sit. I hated the just sitting. “Come on,” I was always telling him.
When Fick and Fack returned each afternoon from day camp, I would watch the princess cartoons and Power Rangers shows with them for a little while before trying to bribe them into going outside. I would help them make a lemonade stand, I said. I would find them a big anthill. I liked the way they ran themselves ragged in the yard. I liked their blur of motion, their “What next? What next?,” their go and go and go.
“I’ll draw you a hopscotch course,” I said. “I’ll turn on the hose.” The hose was one of their favorites, me spreading my thumb over the spout, creating a wide, feathery arc for them to leap in and out of. They’d scream beneath the freezing water, their hair plastered to their heads, the outlines of their ribs visible along their scrawny chests. Sometimes they grabbed me with their wet hands and I worried they could feel something red-hot in return, some unstable electricity beneath my skin, but they never gave any indication, never stopped their jumping around and yelping.
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