“Look,” she said. “I know why you’re not leaving.”
“You do?”
“I think I do. I think you think if you leave me alone, I’ll do something stupid.”
“Um . . . ,” I began. And did not finish. Probably wisely.
“I’m not making you any promises about the rest of my life, kid. But if you go home today . . . I’ll still be here when you get here tomorrow for your run.”
“How do I know that for a fact?”
“Because, for all my faults—and if you ask around, you’ll hear they’re legion—I never look somebody in the face and tell them a damn lie. And besides, I already took every pill I had in the house.”
My eyes went immediately to her pickup. Her old blue truck. She must’ve seen them go.
“You think any local doctor’s going to write me a prescription or any local pharmacist’s going to fill it? After what just happened?”
I wasn’t sure, so I continued to sit.
“Look,” she said. “Kid. Believe me or don’t. It’s up to you. But there’s a better reason why you can’t sit here on my porch for the rest of your life. Because you can’t control other people. You can’t be responsible for somebody else. Not if it’s a fully grown adult human, you can’t. Sooner or later you have to go home, and you know it.”
I sighed. Pulled to my feet.
I stood facing her and the dogs. She cut her gaze away from me, and it struck me that she was ashamed. She hadn’t meant for anyone to know as much about what she’d just done as I knew. She hadn’t meant to let anybody in so close, to make so many observations.
“Well,” I said. “Goodbye, Vermeer. Goodbye, Rembrandt. Goodbye, Mrs. Dinsmore.”
She gave me a little wave, her eyes still angled away.
“Here’s a question,” I said, while I continued not to leave. “Your daughter said you saw me running off with the dogs every morning. All along.”
“I did,” she said. Quietly.
“Why didn’t you stop me? Why didn’t you say, ‘Hey kid, those are my dogs—leave ’em alone!’ That’s what most people would’ve done.”
“It was nice for them to have somebody to run with. They’re young dogs. They need that.”
“But you trusted me to bring them back?”
“I trusted them to come back. They know where they live.”
“Right,” I said. “Got it. Well . . . bye.”
I couldn’t think of any more reasons to stall, so I turned to walk away. I got about ten steps, then was seized with a thought. A weirdly disturbing thought.
I stopped. Turned back. The three of them had not moved.
“Wait a minute,” I said, walking closer.
“Now what?”
“You saw me out the window. With the dogs. For a couple of weeks.”
“What about it?”
“And you figured out that I liked them.”
“Yeah. What of it?”
“You figured I would take care of them if you couldn’t.”
This time, no answer from her.
“So here I am thinking I saved your life, but I’m the reason you tried to take it in the first place. If I’d just stayed away, none of the rest of this would have happened.”
We stood there in silence for a painful length of time. Well, I stood. She sat. The dogs lay.
“Listen, kid,” she said at last. “Here’s a lesson for you in the fact that you’re not the center of the universe. You don’t run the world. I make my own choices. You can’t keep me here, and you can’t make me leave. You don’t control as much as you think you do. I’m not trying to be cruel. Just the opposite. You’ll have a much happier life if you get a strong bead on what’s your responsibility and what isn’t. Now go home and have a good summer and stop worrying about me.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
I went home.
But I did not stop worrying about Zoe Dinsmore.
“I actually do think I heard about that,” Connor said. “Now that you tell me all those details.”
Then he passed me the basketball.
We were playing a game of H-O-R-S-E in his backyard. In the driveway, right where the concrete went wide in front of the two-car garage. His dad had mounted a hoop over the garage doors. Years earlier. Connor couldn’t have cared less about it. He never wanted to use it. I’d had to practically drag him out here.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, and then began to dribble.
He tried to block my drive to the hoop, but I turned my back to him and did a spin move and left him in the dust. My spin moves always left him in the dust. For a compact little guy, he was surprisingly heavy on his feet.
I leapt into the air and dunked the ball with both hands.
“R,” I said.
Connor had no part of the word HORSE. Only I had three letters of it. Only I had any letters at all.
Maybe this was why Connor never wanted to shoot hoops with me. Odd that the thought hadn’t occurred to me sooner.
“Time,” he said. He made the time-out gesture, the T, with his two hands.
I dribbled in place while he leaned on his knees and panted.
“So why didn’t you tell me?” I asked again.
“I didn’t know,” he said.
“You just said you heard about it.”
“Now that you tell me all the details, yeah. I’ve heard a couple of the details before. But nobody ever said ‘Zoe Dinsmore’ in front of me, so how was I to even possibly know it had anything to do with your thing?”
“It’s not my thing,” I said, and dribbled over closer to him.
At least, I really wanted it not to be my thing. But I was pushing back against a strong—and growing—sense that it was.
“It’s the thing you were trying to find out about.”
“Right,” I said. “That’s true. So what did you hear?”
He leaned back against his garage door. Looked up and squinted into the strong afternoon sun, then looked down at his feet to give his eyes a break.
“A few years ago I remember a lady saying something to my mom about two kids who died. She didn’t say how they died, but it sounded like they were on their way to school. She just said something like, ‘Sure, Pauline, we all want to think our kids are safe. But what about those two poor little souls who never showed up to school that day?’ Those weren’t the exact words, of course. It was a long time ago. But you get the idea.”
“Yeah,” I said. And just stood for a minute. Maybe longer. “So, come on. Let’s finish the game.”
“I forfeit this game,” he said.
He walked across his yard and sat under the big oak tree, leaning his back against the trunk. Right where we’d found that bird’s nest back when we were six or seven. With three tiny blue eggs that had tumbled out of it when it fell. It was just a thing that came flooding back into my brain as he sat.
I put the ball down and joined him under the tree.
I should have considered the fact that he would tire out faster than I would if I pushed him to play basketball. I had been out in the woods running lately. He had been up in his room worrying.
“So you think that’s why she tried to kill herself?” he asked.
It was such a blunt statement. So much more direct than anything I had ever said about it, even in my head. It felt like a knife, just hanging there in the air between us, warning me to be careful not to cut myself on it.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I have no idea why somebody would do a thing like that. I mean, it was seventeen years ago, the bus thing. Kind of a weirdly delayed reaction, don’t you think?”
“I don’t think you really get over a thing like that, though.”
“Maybe not. But still.”
“Maybe she got tired of the fact that it wasn’t going away.”
“I don’t know,” I said again. And then I really thought about it. About making a decision like that. And I was just bowled over by how much I couldn’t imagine it. “I ca
n’t even . . . I mean . . . how can a person even do a thing like that? I mean, you’re in bed. And you’re alive. And you have this handful of pills, and suddenly you make this decision that now you’re not going to be alive anymore? I can’t even stretch my brain around it.”
“You don’t know if it was sudden,” he said.
“It doesn’t matter how fast or slow it was. It was her life. I mean, a person’s life. It’s all you’ve got. It’s everything. Without it, you’re . . . well, you’re not. You’re literally not anything. You’re not even . . . I just can’t understand a thing like that at all.”
“Well . . . ,” he began. And I could tell an opposing viewpoint was coming, though I couldn’t imagine where he would find one. “We all think about it.”
“Well, but . . .” Then it hit me. Kind of belatedly like that. “Wait, what?” I whipped my head sideways to look at him. Possibly for the first time that day. I usually didn’t look too directly at Connor. It seemed to make him nervous. So I had learned to use a series of near misses. “You think about it?”
“No,” he said.
“You just said you did.”
“No. I said everybody does.”
“But I don’t. And you’re part of everybody.”
“I’m going in,” he said.
He pushed to his feet, and I followed him.
I followed him into the house. Through the back door. Into the mudroom, where we wiped our feet carefully on a scratchy mat before stepping onto the Persian runner carpet in the dimly lit hallway. Past the kitchen and up the stairs to his bedroom.
“But—” I began.
He whipped his head around and stopped me with a finger to his lips.
I followed him into his room, and closed the door behind us.
“So, seriously, Connor. Anything you want to tell me?”
“No. It was nothing. I was just talking. I wish you’d drop it.”
“How can I drop it? You’re my best friend, and you just said you think about it.”
“Not seriously, though. Not . . . I just think weird thoughts sometimes. Don’t you ever think about weird things like that?”
“I think about weird things,” I said. “But not like that.”
Then neither one of us knew what to say.
I knew he was done with our visit and wanted to be alone. But I wasn’t leaving yet. I didn’t even feel close.
He flopped onto his back on the bed and I just stood there, feeling clumsy and awkward. And thinking about what Zoe Dinsmore had said. About how I’m not the center of the universe and I don’t control things as much as I think I do.
“So . . . ,” I said. Kind of testing the water. “Just one question. And then I promise I’ll go home and get out of your hair.”
“Yeah,” he said. “That would be good.”
It was the closest he’d ever come to saying he didn’t want me around, and it made my face burn. But I talked right through it.
“Are you okay?”
He sat up and looked directly into my face. Which was weirdly rare, to put it mildly. Then he looked down at his bedspread.
“How would I even know that, Lucas? I have no idea if how I feel is what other people would call okay. I’m just the way I’ve always been.”
It was such a blazingly honest—unguardedly honest—answer. It was so direct and so true that even though it didn’t put my mind at ease, I really had no choice but to thank him for it and go home alone.
Now I had two people I was worried about. But it was even worse than that. When I was worried about Zoe Dinsmore, I could go talk to Connor. But when I was worried about Connor, where could I go?
I pondered the question all the way home, and got exactly nowhere.
Well. I got home. But I got no closer to an answer regarding what was weighing on my mind.
Chapter Six
Asking for a Friend
When I got out to the cabin the following morning, the lady was outside, hanging up her wash on a clothesline. And the dogs wouldn’t go running with me. They would only come along when she was inside the cabin. They weren’t about to give up the chance to be close to her.
She glanced halfway over her shoulder as I walked up behind her.
“Oh,” she said. “You again.”
She didn’t really make it sound as bad as those words could have been.
“Yeah,” I said. “Me.”
“Well, make yourself useful. Grab the other end of that bedsheet.”
The wet laundry was piled in a basket, which was sitting on the dirt at her feet. I wondered if she had a washing machine. I didn’t think she did. I had been all over the property and hadn’t seen any such thing. I figured I would know if she had one. Then I wondered how hard it must be to wash a bedsheet by hand.
She lifted it out of the basket and began to unfurl it, and I took it by one corner and stepped away until it was pretty well stretched out.
“Give it a good shake with me,” she said.
So we did that.
The dogs were wagging all around us, weaving in and out. Brushing under the wet sheet, which I figured was probably not ideal for something that was freshly clean. They seemed over-the-moon ecstatic to have both of us out and moving around at the same time. Some kind of doggie jackpot.
“Fold about four inches of that corner over the line,” she said, and handed me a clothespin. “So it won’t come down again.”
We pinned it up, and I stepped back to see if it would hold. When it did, I really had no idea what to do next. So I just stood there and watched her work. Watched her hang socks one at a time. Then, when it came to her unmentionables, I had to avert my eyes.
“What would you do if you had a friend . . . ,” I began. I waited to see if she was listening. She seemed to be. “Who you thought maybe wanted to . . .” But it was hard to go on.
“To what?” she spat after a time. “Just say what you’re thinking, kid.”
“Go,” I said.
“Go where?”
“Like . . . die. But not accidentally or anything.”
Her hands stopped moving and she shot me a scorching look. I mean, I honestly felt burned.
“You’re not supposed to do that ‘asking for a friend’ thing to the friend in question.”
“I’m not talking about you,” I said.
She hung up the last item in the basket. The overalls. Pinned them by their straps.
“Oh,” she said. “A ‘friend.’”
“Right.”
“Got it.” She let out a big, deep sigh. As if preparing to run a marathon she really didn’t want to start. “Okay. Go ahead and tell me what’s so terrible about your life.”
We began to walk back toward the cabin together, the dogs wagging all around and between us.
“My life?”
“Yeah.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I wasn’t sure I understood. But I didn’t have it in me to disobey her.
We reached the porch, and I sat on the edge of it. The girl dog, Vermeer, took advantage of the lack of height difference and kissed me right on the face with her long tongue. Neither dog had ever licked me before. I was ridiculously flattered.
The lady sat next to me and picked up something she had clearly been working on before the laundry project. It was some kind of whittling. A curved knife and a thick stick of wood that was beginning to take a shape, but I had no idea yet what it was trying to be.
“Well,” I began. “My parents fight like cats and dogs. And I don’t just mean they argue. They scream. They throw things. My dad’ll try to get me to side with him just to spite my mom. Once he crashed his fist right through the living room drywall.”
“Better that than right through your mom.”
“Yeah, I guess,” I said. “But then there’s my brother. He got drafted. And I think he’s having a really hard time over there.”
“Who wouldn’t?” Then she waited a couple of seconds. I guess to see if I was done.
I wasn’t done.
“And the thing is . . . I just . . . love him.” I said it as though it was some kind of revelation. Something that had never crossed my mind before.
“Don’t sound so surprised,” she said. “He’s your brother.”
“But I never really thought enough about it until he was gone. So now I’m worried because I think maybe I didn’t tell him.”
“You have an address to write to him, don’t you?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“So tell him.”
I just sat a minute, letting that sink in. I never answered her.
“So, listen. Kid. Not to dismiss what’s bothering you, but . . . these are temporary problems. Your brother’ll come home. Your parents might not stop fighting, but you’ll grow up and move away where you don’t have to hear it.”
“But what if he doesn’t come home?”
Her knife held still for a beat or two. No curls of blond wood fell onto her porch boards.
“Well, that’s a whole other ball game, kid. But there’s a good chance he will. So you have to hang around and find out, don’t you? You’re talking about using a permanent fix on temporary problems.”
I just stared at her for a moment, and she stared back. I wasn’t understanding her. And then, a second or two later, I got it.
“Not me,” I said. “You thought I meant me?”
“Oh. An actual friend?”
“Didn’t you hear me say it was my friend?”
“Yeah. But I didn’t believe you.” More whittling. Then, “What’s your friend’s story?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “Well. I sort of know. But I don’t know that it’s any one great big deal, like . . .” But then I didn’t want to say like what. I didn’t want to make any reference to her situation. Her great big deal. “He’s just always been sort of sad. His parents don’t say a word to each other, and it’s just really heavy and dark and strained in that house, and it’s getting to him. I think. Maybe there’s more, but if so, I don’t know it.”
“So what makes you think he’s thinking about it?”
“Because he said he thinks about it.”
“Oh. That’s pretty damn clear.”
For a minute or two I watched the curls of wood, and the shape they were leaving behind as they fell. It was beginning to look like a monkey. I could see its long tail curved around the inside core of the stick.
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