Setting Free the Kites

by Alex George

  At school, my brother threw himself into everything. He directed a production of Oklahoma!, edited the school magazine, and played clarinet in the wind band. He had started learning the instrument because the controlled breathing would strengthen his weakening lungs, but he quickly discovered a profound joy in the music he created. Tunes poured out of him, released from beneath his fingers as they fluttered across the instrument’s silver keys. Every day our house was filled with rich, woody melody. The clarinet’s high, hopeful tone cleaved through the walls, bearing us all along on its joyful river of notes.

  It wasn’t all Poulenc sonatas and Finzi bagatelles, though. Liam loved his clarinet, but his deepest passion was rock and roll. His favorite bands were the Ramones and the New York Dolls, and there was nothing he liked more than listening to their records in his bedroom with the volume turned up too loud. The heavy whomp whomp of the bass would reverberate through the house like an earthquake. My parents would exchange baleful looks as the walls shook, but they never asked him to turn the volume down. I, on the other hand, was constantly being reprimanded for clomping up the stairs or blowing my nose too noisily. My parents couldn’t forget, not even for a moment, that Liam would die too soon, and so they indulged him at every turn, terrified that one day they would look back and wonder if they could have been kinder. I was expected to abide by the household’s many rules, but my brother always got a free pass.

  Sometimes Liam would call me into his bedroom and insist on playing a particular song for me. I watched him bounce up and down in his wheelchair, invigorated by the brutal onslaught of noise that came out of the speakers. I desperately wanted to like my brother’s music. I craved a bridge that would allow us to traverse the chasm of his disease and let us escape the fact that I was going to live and he was going to die. But as much as I tried, I couldn’t enjoy the anarchic, coiled anger of Liam’s musical heroes.

  “Hey, Robbie,” he would tell me, “when you’re older, we’ll take a trip to New York together, just you and me. We’ll hang out on the Lower East Side and watch the bands.” He would wave at whatever record was on the turntable. “Imagine hearing these guys play live!” By then his limbs were as thin as the bones beneath his skin, the flesh and muscle atrophied into extinction. His left lung was dangerously compressed. I would nod, baffled by his ability to make plans for a future that we knew would never come. I would eventually creep away and put on one of my mother’s Elton John records to becalm my jangled nerves. All I could hear in Liam’s music was fury, but he saw beauty in those bruising three-chord explosions. But that was my brother all over. He was always able to ferret out joy where others could not.

  —

  WHEN THE SERVICE FOR Mr. Tilly ended, our little group walked quietly out of the church. In a corner of the adjacent graveyard was a rectangular pit next to a hill of freshly excavated dirt. The coffin was carried to the graveside on the shoulders of six men I hadn’t seen before. I supposed there were volunteer pallbearers the church could call on if the deceased didn’t have the requisite number of friends to do the job. We stood and watched as the men lowered the coffin into the ground.

  The minister opened his prayer book and began to speak. Nathan stood on the other side of the open grave, standing stiffly next to his mother. I watched Mrs. Tilly curiously. She wore a dark gray coat that went all the way down to her ankles, and her blond hair was tucked up beneath a large black hat. Much of her face was hidden behind a pair of oversize sunglasses, even though there were dark clouds scudding low across the sky. She looked like a movie star trying to pass incognito.

  Nathan and Mrs. Tilly did not look at each other while the minister spoke. They shared the studied indifference of strangers standing side by side on a platform, waiting for the next train to pull in. When the prayers were finished, Mrs. Tilly bent down and threw a handful of earth onto the lid of the coffin. She turned to Nathan, but he shook his head angrily and put his hands into his pockets. After a pause, my father stepped forward and a second volley of soil landed on the coffin. My mother went next, and then she nudged me. As I threw my handful of dirt into the hole I could feel Nathan’s eyes on me.

  As I stepped back, Nathan turned from the grave and began to walk away. His mother set off after him, murmuring something I could not hear. The minister watched them go and then nodded to the gravedigger, who was standing to one side, leaning on his shovel, waiting to get to work.

  My parents and I walked back through the cemetery. The only sounds were the scrape of the gravedigger’s blade as it bit into the mound of earth and the rhythmic thud of soil landing on mahogany.

  Nathan was standing just outside the cemetery gates. A few yards away, his mother sat behind the steering wheel of an old Impala. She was smoking a cigarette with the window rolled down. She said something to Nathan, who did not reply. Finally Mrs. Tilly threw the butt of her cigarette out of the window and backed the car out of the parking lot. Nathan did not look up as she drove away.

  My mother nudged me. “You should go and see if he’s all right.”

  “He looks fine to me,” I said.

  “Robert,” she said gently. “How is he going to get back home?”

  I scuffed my shoe against the gravel pathway and shrugged.

  “Nathan was kind to you in the locker room last week.” My mother put a hand on my shoulder. “So now he needs you to be kind back. Remember Proverbs: ‘Do not let kindness and truth leave you. Bind them around your neck. Write them on the tablet of your heart.’” She smiled at me, and I knew the game was up.

  My father’s cheery agnosticism had never been a match for my mother’s faith. I had been raised on a strict regime of regular attendance at Mass and the dutiful saying of prayers at bedtime. When my mother quoted the scriptures, it was as if she were casting a spell over me that I was powerless to defy.

  I looked across the parking lot at Nathan Tilly. I would not let kindness leave me. I walked toward him.

  FIVE

  Nathan looked up as I approached. “She shouldn’t have done it,” he said.

  “Shouldn’t have done what?” I asked.

  “She shouldn’t have buried him.” His eyes were dark. “She should have scattered his ashes into the air and set him free.”

  I didn’t know how to respond. “Do you want to come back to my house?” I asked him. I pointed toward the station wagon, where my parents were pretending not to watch us through the windshield.

  Nathan turned to look at them for a moment. “No thanks,” he said.

  “How are you going to get home?”

  He shrugged. “I suppose I’ll walk.”

  “At least let us give you a ride,” I said. “It might rain.”

  “Okay,” said Nathan. “Thanks.”

  The four of us drove in silence out to Sebbanquik Point. My heart performed an anxious somersault as the Tillys’ house came into view. There was no evidence of the accident. I don’t know what I was expecting—a flag fluttering at half-mast, perhaps, or yellow police tape cordoning off the area—but the place looked the same. Nathan’s father was dead, and life was going on without him, exactly as before.

  Mrs. Tilly’s car was not in the driveway.

  “Are you sure you’ll be all right on your own, Nathan?” asked my mother as we pulled up. “Wouldn’t you prefer some company right now?”

  Nathan glanced at me. “Some company would be okay,” he said.

  My mother twisted around in her seat and fixed me with an unambiguous look. “Dad can come and pick you up in a while,” she said.

  I had been ambushed. “I’ll see you later, then,” I said reluctantly, and opened the car door. Nathan clambered out the other side. As my parents backed out of the driveway, Nathan pulled a key out of his pocket and unlocked the front door. I kept my eyes firmly on the ground, unwilling to look up at the roof. I wanted to ask Nathan whether he stayed awake at night, like I did,
replaying his father’s fall over and over again in his mind. Since the accident I had been unable to escape the nagging thought that if we hadn’t appeared when we did, Mr. Tilly never would have waved at us, never would have lost his balance, and never would have fallen.

  We stepped into a hallway floored with flagstones. “I’m going to change out of this stupid suit,” said Nathan. “I’ll be right back.” He set off down the hallway and then I heard footsteps as he climbed the stairs.

  Off one side of the hallway was a study. I wandered in. The room was empty apart from a table and chair in the middle of the room. On the table there was a typewriter and a glass ashtray half-full of crushed cigarette butts. A curtain was drawn across the room’s only window. I pulled back the fabric and watched the dark waves of the Atlantic smash into the rocks farther down the coastline.

  My family lived in a neighborhood in the middle of Haverford, a couple of miles inland. The view from my bedroom window was of our fenced-in backyard. There was a crabapple tree and a pond, whose waters were never troubled by more than an occasional breeze. It was a safe place, and that was what I liked. The ocean outside Nathan Tilly’s house was ferocious, untamable. I let the curtain fall back in place.

  I sat at the desk and pressed down on one of the typewriter keys. A thin metal arm rose up in a tight parabola, and the blackened ribbon rose to meet it. I allowed the hammer to hover for a moment and then took my finger away.

  “There you are.” Nathan was standing in the doorway.

  I turned to face him. “What is this place?”

  “My mom’s study. It’s where she spends most of her time.”

  “Doing what?”

  Nathan pointed to the table. “She types. At least, that’s what it sounds like. I’ve never actually seen a single piece of paper with words on it.” He paused. “I don’t think she puts paper into the typewriter—she just sits there and hits the keys all day.” He looked at me. “Hey, I want to show you something. Come on.”

  We went through the house to a utility room next to the kitchen. A mountain of unfolded clothes was perched on top of a washing machine. Cleaning supplies had been stuffed into a dirty yellow bucket. In the corner of the room was a freezer, humming quietly to itself. Nathan opened it, reached inside, and removed a black trash bag. He carried the bag into the kitchen and put it in the middle of the table.

  “Open it,” he said.

  The top of the bag had been secured with a green plastic twist. I unwound it.

  “Go ahead,” said Nathan. “Take a look inside.”

  I opened the bag, and then I yelled in terror.

  Gazing out at me were two yellow eyes, fogged by death.

  It was Nathan’s mongoose.

  The creature’s jaw was frozen open in a rictus of horrified surprise. It was baring its small, pointed teeth at me, as if I were one last rattlesnake to confront. “What’s this doing in your freezer?” I gasped.

  “I wanted to keep him,” explained Nathan. He reached into the bag and pulled out the mongoose. The fur on its back was frozen into tufted peaks, each one crested with a dusting of ice. Whatever kind of postmortem care Nathan had administered, there was no mistaking the fact that the mongoose had been badly squashed by Mr. Tilly’s fall.

  “It’s frozen,” I pointed out.

  “If you put him in the oven he warms up pretty fast,” said Nathan.

  And so we put the dead mongoose on a baking tray and warmed it up. Soon it had defrosted sufficiently for us to be able to wiggle its paws and turn its head from side to side. Once it had lost its ghostly patina of ice, the mongoose looked almost lifelike again.

  “What’s its name?” I asked.

  “Philippe. After Philippe Petit.”

  I looked at Nathan blankly.

  “You know, the guy who walked between the Twin Towers on a tightrope a few years ago. Can you imagine?” Nathan’s eyes shone. “What do you think it must have felt like, being that high off the ground? With nothing to support you, nothing to catch you if you fell?”

  I frowned. “It sounds awful.”

  “You don’t think it would be amazing? Suspended in midair over New York, balancing on a rope!”

  “The guy must be crazy,” I said.

  “Of course he is,” agreed Nathan cheerfully. “He thinks that the usual rules don’t apply to him.”

  “The usual rules?”

  “You know. Gravity. Physics. Laws of all kinds, actually. He was arrested when he climbed off the rope.”

  After we put the dead mongoose back into the freezer we sat in the kitchen and each drank a glass of milk. I thought about Mr. Tilly’s funeral.

  “I liked your dad a lot,” I said.

  “I can’t believe he’s gone,” said Nathan. “It’s like there’s this big black hole inside me now, and it’s going to keep on growing until there’s nothing of me left.”

  I said nothing, thinking about my brother. I knew about big black holes.

  “Dad and I used to do everything together,” said Nathan. “He took me places, taught me stuff. We had adventures.” He was silent for a moment. “Now that he’s gone, I don’t know what I’m supposed to do anymore.”

  “Your mom will take you places,” I said.

  Nathan shook his head. “The only places she goes are inside her head.”

  “What sort of things did you do with your dad?”

  “I’ll show you. Come on.”

  Nathan led me to a wooden shed that stood behind the house. He pulled back the latch and ushered me inside. There were two large windows, one looking toward the house, the other toward the ocean. The walls, floor, and ceiling had all been painted dazzling white. There was a long table in the middle of the room. Forests of color-flecked paintbrushes stood in grimy glass jars. There were hacksaws of various sizes, hammers, pliers, spools of thread, and a regiment of glue pots. A heavy iron vise was fixed to the edge of the table. From its grip emerged a complicated, three-dimensional matrix of pale balsawood rods. But it was the display on the walls that really caught my attention. Kites were mounted in neatly ordered rows. There were squares, rectangles, and fat diamonds of tautly drawn fabric, a glorious riot of color.

  “This is my father’s workshop,” said Nathan.

  I looked around the room at the kites. “He made these?”

  Nathan nodded. “Pick one,” he said. “We’ll take it out to the beach and fly it.”

  “Really?”

  “He didn’t make them to hang on a wall, Robert.”

  I didn’t need a second invitation. I pointed to an orange lozenge with flashes of bright yellow jagging diagonally between its corners. “That one.”

  Nathan unhooked the kite. “We’ll need that,” he said, pointing to a spool of nylon line that lay on the workbench. I picked it up.

  The moment we stepped outside, the fabric began to billow and snap in the breeze. Nathan steadied himself as the kite came to life in his hands. Just beyond the workshop was a weathered wooden staircase leading to the beach. I followed Nathan down the steps. The beach was in fact a cove, cut off at both ends by jagged promontories of rock.

  “Dad and I came down here to fly kites,” shouted Nathan above the wind. He pointed to the southern end of the cove, where a squat, windowless hut sat by the water’s edge. Next to it an old wooden pier stretched into the ocean. “His lobster boat and traps are in there,” said Nathan. But something else had caught my attention. All along the beach there were columns of sun-bleached stones stacked one on top of another. No two piles were quite the same shape or size.

  “What are those?” I asked.

  “My mother builds them,” said Nathan. “If she’s not in her study, she’s down here.”

  I remembered Mr. Tilly standing on the roof, watching his wife. I wondered which column she had been working on when he fell. “What are they
for?”

  Nathan shrugged. “They remind me of some kind of army,” he said. The columns stretched up and down the shoreline, windswept sentinels, vigilant against the onslaught of the ocean and whatever dangers lurked over the horizon. “Sometimes she builds them too close to the water, and the tide knocks them down.” He paused. “Those are never good days.”

  We wandered among the ghostly piles of stones. It felt as if they were watching us. At the ocean’s edge, Nathan threaded the white line through a tiny metal eye in the center of the kite’s frame. Then he handed the spool back to me.

  “You first,” he said.

  Still holding the kite, he began to walk down the beach. The line unraveled with each step he took. When he was about thirty yards away from me, Nathan turned and held the kite out in front of him. “Start running on three,” he shouted.

  I nodded.

  “One, two—three!”

  I began to run along the sand, lifting the line high above my head, tugging it upward as I went. The kite caught a gust of wind and streaked into the sky. I allowed the nylon to unspool quickly, giving the greedy winds what they wanted. Nathan joined me by the water’s edge. We watched the kite bob and weave above us. I could feel the tug of every gust of wind in my fingers. I lost track of time then. There was nothing except the kite and me, and the thin cord that connected us. At some point Nathan stepped forward and took the line from me. I surrendered without protest but did not take my eyes off the kite. We stood side by side, hypnotized by its gentle dance. Neither of us said a word.