Setting Free the Kites

by Alex George

  —

  WHEN THE MEAL WAS OVER we went outside and pushed Mrs. Tilly’s Impala out of the snowdrift. By the time we had heaved the car clear, everyone’s faces were as flushed as mine and Nathan’s.

  As we walked back inside, Nathan nudged me. “Let’s go and fly that kite,” he said. He assembled the balsawood frame and showed me how to pull the fabric taut across it. The finished kite was an elongated lozenge, elegantly proportioned, perfectly sized. Nathan attached the white nylon line with a complicated-looking knot. He handed it to me. The kite weighed almost nothing, but I could feel its resilience beneath my fingers. We went out into the backyard, our footprints leaving trails in the snow. The winter light had begun to fade. I gave the kite to Nathan. The thread unspooled through my fingers as he walked toward the pond at the far end of the yard. He turned to face me.

  “Ready?” he called.

  My fingers tightened around the plastic reel. “Ready!”

  And then the kite was aloft. There was a brisk breeze from the east that made it dip and flutter in the sky. I felt the tug of the line and let out more, and then some more. I watched as the vivid green flash grew smaller and smaller. The kite hung in the air, high above us. It was the most beautiful thing I had ever seen in my life.

  We stood there for fifteen minutes or so, taking turns to hold the line, not speaking, our eyes lifted up to the heavens.

  Nathan was staying in Maine because of me. We stood in the snow with the sun going down and the winter wind rushing in off the ocean, but I didn’t feel the cold.

  Then, the next time Nathan gave the line back to me, I saw what was in his hand.

  “Oh no,” I said.

  Nathan said nothing.

  “Please don’t. Not this time.”

  The blade of the penknife shone dully in the afternoon twilight. “You know how this goes,” he said.

  “But this kite is mine,” I said. “You gave it to me.”

  “I gave it to you so you could set it free.”

  “I don’t want to set it free. I want to keep it.”

  Nathan handed me the penknife. “It’s your kite, Robert,” he said. “You choose.” He turned and walked back to the house.

  I stood alone in the middle of the yard for what felt like an eternity. Now every gust of wind chilled me to the bone. My toes became numb. I could barely feel the plastic reel through my gloves.

  I looked up sadly into the sky.

  When I finally trudged back to the house the sun had disappeared. I was so cold I could barely talk.

  “There you are!” said my mother. “We thought you were never coming back in.”

  “Where’s Nathan?” I asked.

  “He and his mom already left,” said Liam.

  I looked down at my shoes. The snow that had compacted around the bottoms of my pants had begun to melt.

  “Come into the kitchen and get warm,” said my mother. “I’ll make you some hot chocolate.”

  “Where’s the kite?” asked Liam.

  —

  THAT NIGHT I COULDN’T SLEEP. I lay awake and stared at the ceiling. The happiness I’d felt over Christmas lunch had vanished along with my kite. I’d felt a keening, jagged sense of loss as I’d watched it disappear into the sky.

  At eleven thirty I climbed out of bed to go downstairs for a drink of water. At the end of the corridor, my parents’ bedroom door was framed by a pale silhouette of light. I could hear them talking, but their voices were too soft for me to make out the words. Suddenly my mother raised her voice sharply. I crept closer until I could hear more clearly.

  “It’s not right,” my mother said. “How can you say this is right? Liam is going to die, Sam. He’s going to die, and you and I are going to watch him die, and then we will bury him. How can that be anything other than terribly wrong?”

  “It’s not a question of wrong or right,” replied my father. “It is what it is. Call it the natural order of the world.”

  “This isn’t natural,” said my mother.

  “Illnesses, diseases, they happen.”

  “Not to us. They shouldn’t happen to us.”

  “Oh, Mary. We don’t get to choose. You know that.”

  “What if this was his last Christmas?”

  My father was silent for a moment. “Liam’s life will be as long as it’s supposed to be,” he said.

  “But it’s scarcely begun,” moaned my mother.

  “All the more reason to be grateful for every day we have.”

  I leaned against the wall, desperate to escape but unable to move.

  My mother had started to cry. “He’s so young,” she sobbed.

  “I know.” My father sighed. “But we don’t get to choose when people die, Mary. We just have to love Liam as much as we can while we have the chance. If we do that, his death won’t be sadder, just because he’s young.”

  “How can you say that?”

  “Because our son is happy, fulfilled, and loved. That’s what matters. Age is just a number.”

  “Just a number,” echoed my mother tonelessly.

  “So let’s not ever say that Liam died too soon. Let’s just say that he lived a good life.”

  “He’s seventeen years old,” whispered my mother.

  “Yes, and he’s had seventeen years full of joy and wonder.”

  “But it’s not enough!”

  A terrible bark escaped my father’s throat. “Well if that’s how you feel, take it up with that God of yours.”

  There was a stunned, awful silence.

  “Can’t you be at least a little bit kind?” said my mother.

  “All those candles you lit. All those prayers you said. What good did any of it do?”

  “Don’t blame me for wishing that things were different!”

  “I don’t blame you for anything. But wishing for something doesn’t make it so. You know that better than anyone, Mary. The answer to most prayers is no.”

  “Sam, please—”

  “But still you go to church! Still you get down on your knees and beg for a miracle!”

  “At least it’s something,” said my mother. “Praying seems like a better bet than not praying, however long the odds may be.”

  “Maybe we should play the hand we’ve been dealt, rather than always wishing for different cards.”

  “Go to hell, Sam.” I heard my mother stand up and walk across the room. “I’ll pray if I want to pray.”

  “Mary, come back to bed.”

  “Don’t—just don’t.”

  “Please.” My father’s voice cracked. “We can’t do this alone.”

  There was a long silence before my mother spoke again.

  “I’m not alone,” she said. “I have God.” Then she burst into tears.

  I listened to my parents cry, two separate cycles of tears and snatched breath, a jarring counterpoint of misery. I left them then. I didn’t go downstairs for water but tiptoed back to my room.

  I’d always assumed that my mother and father had propped each other up as they’d struggled through Liam’s illness, but now I realized that they were as alone as I was. Grief did not bring people closer. Loss turned you inward and shut you down.

  Back in bed I watched the clock on my bedside table as Christmas Day expired, one neon minute at a time.

  1977

  ELEVEN

  That spring my brother’s breathing became more labored. His respiratory system was slowly collapsing in on itself, and he found it increasingly difficult to swallow. Eating and drinking became a struggle, and Liam shrank before our eyes. His face became a ghoulish mask of the boy we used to know. My mother bought a set of new pillows to prop up his frail, brittle body, cocooning it from the unforgiving world of sharp objects around him.

  A nurse began to come to the house every day.
Her name was Moira. We knew her from St. Mary’s—she regularly attended Mass and often delivered scripture readings in a soft Irish brogue that always sounded wonderfully warm to me amid the hard, flat vowels of the locals. She must have been in her sixties, I suppose. Each morning when she arrived she disappeared into Liam’s bedroom. She kept up a cheerful dialogue while she tended to him, and we heard them both laugh frequently.

  My mother suffered through these visits. She had always been the one to care for her son, and it was difficult for her to step back and watch a stranger administer to his needs. She stood wretchedly in the hallway, wishing she could be on the other side of the bedroom door.

  There was no more argument about Liam’s going to school, but he still insisted on completing his assigned coursework at the kitchen table each day. The house began to echo with his prolonged fits of coughing. At night I lay in bed and listened to my parents clomp wearily up and down the stairs to help Liam drink a few sips of water and turn him from one side to the other—he was too weak now to roll over on his own. The threat of infection became almost as dangerous as the disease itself: Liam’s body was too decimated to resist the assault of other people’s germs. Visitors were no longer welcome; my mother stood sentry at the front door and politely refused to allow guests across the threshold. Liam slept for much of the day, and during those moments of respite my mother cleaned the house obsessively. Every surface sparkled with freshly applied disinfectant.

  It didn’t work, of course. Not even my mother could quarantine the house forever. In the last week of March, Liam caught a cold. Within two days it had mutated into pneumonia.

  Only certain bleak memories of that first hospital visit remain with me now. My brother’s pummeled body, what was left of it, lying in the hospital bed. Liam cracking jokes from behind the plastic mask of his respirator while the rest of us looked on, hollow-eyed with fear. The digital display above his head that tracked the oxygen saturation level in his blood. I remember those green glowing digits best of all; I stared at them for hours, silently willing them upward.

  We returned home after three days.

  Things changed after that. I saw a fresh terror behind my mother’s eyes. For years, Liam’s death had been the first thing she thought of when she woke up every morning and the last thing she thought of before she fell asleep at night. Now she knew that she would never be ready.

  After that first hospital stay Liam was issued with a portable respirator, which my father tethered to the wheelchair, its mask always within reach. The unending effort of pulling air in and out of my brother’s ruined body exhausted him. One evening I sat on his bed and watched as he held his clarinet to his lips. His fingers rose and fell over the keys, trying to conjure up a melody, but no notes emerged. He didn’t have the strength in his lungs to blow air through the instrument. Finally, he laid the clarinet down across his lap.

  “That’s that, then,” he said.

  “Try again tomorrow,” I suggested.

  “Do you know what music practice does, Robbie? It changes you physically.” Liam held up a hand and scrutinized it. “These fingers aren’t like yours,” he said. “They’ve been trained. They’ve developed muscle memory. They can do all sorts of clever things. These are talented fingers. The only problem is that they belong to me.” He paused. “There’s no point having clarinet-playing fingers if you don’t have clarinet-playing lungs.”

  Just like that, there were no more melodies floating through the air, filling the house with light. For years the clarinet had lain on top of Liam’s chest of drawers, ready to be picked up and played whenever the impulse took him. But he didn’t want to look at it anymore. He packed the instrument away.

  For some days after that, Liam stayed in his bedroom. Moira still came every day, but there was no more laughter from behind the door. My parents and I crept around the house, listening for clues. Finally the silence was shattered one afternoon by the riotous, squalling guitar riff of “I Wanna Be Your Dog.” The music was so loud that the sugar bowl on the kitchen table rattled. My mother had never been a big fan of the Stooges, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d seen her smile so widely.

  For the rest of that day we were treated to a selection of Liam’s angriest records, all played at the same ear-bleeding volume. The noise was pounding, relentless. I couldn’t imagine what it must have sounded like in his bedroom. It was never possible to gauge Liam’s mood by the music he played, since every track seethed with the same fractious aggression, but I guessed that he was trying to obliterate the memory of his clarinet-playing by the sheer amount of noise coming out of the speakers.

  Just before supper, the music stopped. I heard the bedroom door open, followed by the low whirr of the wheelchair motor as it trundled toward the kitchen. When Liam appeared, we all turned toward him. “There you are,” said my father.

  “I need to think about the future,” announced Liam.

  “What do you mean?” asked my mother.

  “It’s time to think about college.”

  “College,” said my father.

  My mother sat down in the chair next to Liam. She reached out and took his hand in hers. “We can certainly look at all the options,” she said. Then she stood up and left the room.

  —

  THE REST OF THE SPRING was marked by the frequent arrival of thick, heavily embossed envelopes in the mail, postmarked from across the country. Liam sat at the kitchen table and read through each university prospectus, making notes on a yellow legal pad. There were piles of glossy brochures, stacked and arranged according to a complex system of preference and priority. Then, with my mother’s help, Liam began the process of filling out application forms. The two of them spent days carefully completing questionnaires, collating documents and transcripts. I couldn’t remember the last time Liam had been so excited. He loved to discuss the relative merits of different colleges and what courses he might take. These disquisitions usually took place over supper, once the papers had been cleared away for the day. Liam would explore his academic options, contemplating future career paths. My parents listened in numb silence. Liam seemed oblivious to their distress. I watched them wilt under the weight of his words but was unable to stop him. My brother’s illness trapped any rebuke in my throat. I could no more tell him to shut up than he could stand up and dance to one of his lousy records. And so we sat and listened to Liam talk about a future that we all knew would never come.

  TWELVE

  Each year in the weeks leading up to Memorial Day, Haverford performed its metamorphosis from a sleepy backwater of winter hibernation to a crucible of moneyed hysteria. The streets were swept daily and the municipal flower beds bloomed. Everything was designed to charm each fresh flock of tourists into parting with their hard-earned cash. Locals opened their arms in welcome, just wide enough to coax the money out of people’s pockets. Shop shelves groaned beneath mountains of newly arrived nautical schlock. Everywhere you turned there was another lobster, one more anchor, a new confection of sea glass. Racks of postcards stood sentry outside every establishment, four for a dollar. The images were brilliant, Technicolor sharp, and of a place I hardly recognized. Ice cream parlors reopened and the restaurants in town took on extra staff. People rented out their spare rooms at whatever rates they could get away with. Along the roads in and out of town a caravan of whitewashed trailers appeared, each one promising the freshest seafood in Maine. Every year enterprising locals cooked up new moneymaking schemes. There were historical walking tours or boat trips to be taken, a thousand boxes of saltwater taffy and hand-carved lighthouses to be purchased. Memories were for sale on every corner. Everyone was hustling to make a buck.

  This seasonal squall of industry was no more than opportunistic scavenging, of course. The townsfolk picked off the tourist dollars that Fun-A-Lot left behind, as nakedly hungry as the squadrons of gulls that followed the trawlers that edged along the ocean’s horizon
toward Nova Scotia. It hadn’t always been this way, though. Haverford’s shameless courting of the tourist trade was a relatively new phenomenon.

  —

  THE HAVERFORD PAPER COMPANY was founded in 1872—so proclaimed the inscription in the limestone lintel above the doors of the paper mill that sat on the banks of the river that ran through the town. For the first fifty years of its existence the company had employed more Haverford residents than all the other businesses in the area combined. People came to the town from across the state and beyond, looking for jobs. The mill was the sun around which everything else orbited. Tons of pulp and newsprint were produced every day and shipped off to all points south. Orders rolled in, new jobs were created, profits rose. Houses were built to accommodate the growing population of workers. Whole new neighborhoods sprouted up, sprawling inland on a crest of optimism and prosperity.

  Then came the Depression. The Haverford Paper Company survived, but it never recovered. The mill limped on for several more decades after that, suffering one setback after another—increased competition from Wisconsin and New York, a reluctance to embrace new technologies, complacent management, an icy economy. The place finally closed its doors for good in 1964.

  The building had been an unshifting landmark of my childhood. I often cycled past its fortresslike walls but never really gave the place much thought. For all its familiarity, it felt entirely alien to me, forbidding in its silent, industrial vastness.

  Since the closure of the mill, Haverford had been forced to reinvent itself, and my family’s quixotic enterprise on the outskirts of town was the best it had to offer. This was Maine, after all: every summer there were carloads of cash passing the town by as tourists stormed up Interstate 95 to the natural glories further north. And so, in the absence of any viable alternative, Haverford stuck out a leg and pulled up its skirt. Little by little travelers were lured off the road, hoping to buy themselves a few hours of peace on their journeys to elsewhere. Without the amusement park, tourists would have had little reason to stop, but thanks to Fun-A-Lot the town soon had itself a small tourism industry.