He wasn’t a thug.
He was a thug.
For Christ’s sake, he was young!
He should never have moved back here. Why had he moved back here? EnviroTreks had been like a floating Shangri-la of nonchalant sex, easy fitness, learning, and teaching . . . why had he come home? His mother had written him about the job opening at the high school. Why? He had wanted to come home for the baby’s birth; why hadn’t he just sent a fruit basket?
There was nothing wrong with him. He had his friends, his beautiful old 1972 Fender that he was finally learning to play, his students, the occasional bright bulb among the mumbling throng of turnips. He was not lonely.
That was what was wrong with him.
He would be lonely . . . now.
Eager to close up this place, to run, Gordon riffled through her desk, her bookshelf, and her jewelry armoire, finding another copy of her will stuck in a folder of scrawled notes, notes that, so far as he could tell, dealt with Georgia’s suspicion that Keefer had allergies. A pamphlet from an agency in Boston called Families United. He had never heard of it. He snatched these up. This place. You couldn’t breathe. The air was greenhouse quality.
Why did he care so much, in point of fact, what he said at the funeral? Who’d be taking notes? The only things he was now able to think of were so poignant he would not be able to make his mouth say them without crying. (“She said yes, Bo! Can you believe that? You got to be my best man. I’m so happy I could shit.”) They would be vulgar or meaningless. Except to the two people who would never hear Gordon say them.
Damn Georgia.
She and Ray had an entire life that had nothing to do with him, but she had also not wanted to surrender her eminence in her brother’s landscape. She had been as selfish as he.
She had been.
She’d wanted the gratitude. Honor thy sister, who rescues you on a regular basis from the otherwise swift and direct results of your own slack-witted tendencies. Remember the First Date Recipe, for angel hair and broccoli, she’d be saying.
She hadn’t done it all for gratitude.
She had loved him and tried to color in his blank spots, out of love.
He was thankful she’d come home. He was thankful he’d come home. What if she’d died in Florida? She’d grown to hate the South as much as Ray loved it. (“Sex on the Beach,” she wrote to her brother once, referring to a cocktail popular at the time in local bars, “is a real oxymoron. When I watch Here to Eternity, all I can think about is the sand in her crotch.”) Even Ray could not have convinced Georgia to raise her baby there. Gordon imagined how it would be now, if all of them had had to troop down there to bring Keefer and all of her paraphernalia home.
He locked the door behind him and drove the few blocks to his own apartment. His lair. His slum. Opening the door, throwing himself down on his couch, he imagined Georgia saying, remember the time you wanted to impress somebody but you couldn’t get home and I cleaned the whole place and even put my CDs in the player, even though I was eight months pregnant?
That was one thing he could say. Marriage had remade her. Domesticated the girl who often purchased her outfit on the way to a party and dressed in the car. She became this sweetheart who not only cooked, but baked sourdough from a Nye family starter, who not only cleaned, but hand-covered a whole wall with quilted textile. She’d taken an interest in remodeling, her brother as well as her condo. Gordon, who’d never in his life owned more than two pairs of shoes, and one of those for running, who bought and wore out the identical four pairs of Lands’ End corduroys each year, was taken shopping for real slacks, Italian loafers, and a pillow-top mattress that sat on an actual frame, instead of on the floor. She’d made him feel like a hobo, a parody bachelor with his single set of silverware, his guitar, his bike propped against his scuba tank in his living room, and his unframed blowups of his underwater photos of Cod Hole at the Great Barrier Reef thumbtacked to the wall.
He had never really thanked her. In fact, he’d pretended he was the one doing her a favor, letting her work out her hormonal excesses, in Ray’s absences, on her poor single-guy brother.
But, he now realized, those few months after both of them had moved back to Tall Trees, before Keefer was born and new life collided with new peril, that had been the time when they had finally come parallel, after a lifetime in which one had pulled ahead and glanced back, and then the other overtook and surged ahead. They had been eye to eye, and so close.
It had almost made him forgive her growing up, so all at once, so without him.
And now she had gone on ahead, without him, again.
His phone rang. Gordon realized he had nearly fallen asleep.
He let it ring through to the machine. There were twenty-three unplayed messages on the tape, a few that he’d heard come in. Women. His cousin Dan. A couple from students, which touched him deeply, and three from Tim, who seemed to think he should come over or Gordon would kill himself. “Hey,” said his own slow voice, picking up, his before voice, ready for anything. “Depending on who you are, leave a message for either Gordon or Mr. McKenna, and don’t make it your life story.” Lindsay’s voice filled the room with its urgency.
“Gordon? Gordo? It’s me. I guess you’re not there, but if you need me . . .”
Lindsay could help me write this, he thought. Lindsay and Georgia had been friends since they were children. He picked up the phone, and said nothing. “Gordo? Is that you?”
There was no one who could help him. He put the receiver back in its cradle and let himself drift again.
His father had slept twelve hours straight after identifying Ray and Georgia.
Gordon had offered to do it in his stead, but after an hour of thinking it over, Mark had gone alone to the morgue.
All he had seen, he told Gordon, and told him reluctantly, was a close-up color photo of Georgia’s left hand, with its green diamond engagement ring, pale and unmarked except by the big sickle-shaped scar she’d gotten when they were little, fighting over a croquet mallet, breaking it in half. Then, softly lit behind a plateglass window, they’d shown him the side of Ray’s face that was most intact. The rest of Ray’s head and body had been layered in clean sheets. “But you could see that it wasn’t shaped properly,” Mark admitted. “I really tried not to look very much, because I didn’t want to remember it. I don’t think we should ever tell Keefer this.”
He dreamed of Lindsay kneeling next to the bed, her long red hair down, tickling his cheek.
It was Lindsay. She was there. Where was he? Gordon realized he had, finally, desperately, fallen asleep, and that outside, the sun was low. He sat up, streaming sweat, chilled.
“Did I miss it?” he asked. “How did you get in here?”
Lindsay sat back on her heels, her sleeveless peach-colored summer dress settling like a parachute over her knees. “I got the key from your mom,” she said. “You didn’t answer the phone. It scared the hell out of her, Gordon, if you must know. And me, too.”
She’d brought him food. Ham and Swiss, macaroni salad, a smoothie. He ate thankfully, voraciously, and for once, her solicitude made him feel only grateful, not leashed. He showered while she sat on the closed toilet seat and read the obituary aloud to him; she told him it would be okay to wear a T-shirt and a linen jacket for the viewing, that his father would not have the presence of mind to notice Gordon was not wearing a tie. After all, she told him, everyone knew he had only one suit, and that was for the funeral. And when he was dressed, Lindsay drove, though it crossed his mind that her driving would put them back here, alone together, sometime later that night, unless he fotched an excuse about having to ride home with his parents, which would keep him out of bed with Lindsay, which was where he should stay, and he was graceless to even think about that, but she looked wonderful, familiarly wonderful, and he could not help but notice the pure white strip of her bra through the open sleeve of her dress. He wondered how much of what he felt for Lindsay was born of her constancy, the r
eflection of her devotion to him. He would figure that out, once and for all. He would put it on his mental to-do list, at the top.
When they crested the hill outside of town where Chaptmans was set up on a small parklike verge near where the woods thickened toward Tomahawk, he was astounded: Cars were lined up for half a mile on both sides of the highway. There were two news trucks with their portable satellite dishes like upturned hockey masks. Lindsay had to brake for people crossing the road purposefully, hurriedly, as if to an auction or a concert, an event where being first in was of the essence.
Gordon made a pillow of his folded arms against the dash and hid his face.
“What?” Lindsay cried, reaching for his hand. “Are you feeling sick?” He shook his head, not trusting his voice. “Are you surprised . . . didn’t you think so many people loved her?”
No, he thought, squeezing her hand, her good reliable hand, as he would later that night hold her cool naked waist in his two hands, feel her tiny breasts with their startling large nipples like echinacea flowers crushed against his chest, unable in his grief and gratitude to even regret starting up again what he knew he should not start up again . . . no, he thought. I just didn’t think it would ever get this far.
That it would get this far so fast, so fast that he could not stop tumbling long enough to find a place to stand and make an analysis, dreads and doubts breaking free like pebbles from a fragile rock face.
After this night, he wouldn’t be able to rely on his sister to fill in his gaps. He’d have to return all his life’s ignored phone calls, or he would be alone. Alone with his parents and Keefer, in a life he had never planned.
He would grow up perforce. He would never be able to entertain an offer from Tortoise Tours for a sabbatical year, or even a summer. Not until he was old. He would never hang out with his students, still able to whip the Frisbee farther, still able to do more pull-ups on the door frame. He’d have things to do, even more and more urgent things than he’d had before. He’d have to rush home from school, the way Chris Ebbets and Mary Hermanson and every other . . . parent he knew did.
He would never be free again. It was monstrously selfish, but he had imagined that he would get back to his old ways after Georgia’s death. He had longed for those ways.
But he would not get his life back. It had not been on suspension. It had been over the day his sister became ill.
Worse, more wrenching, he would not have wanted it back if he could have claimed it.
It had been a stupid life. A life he’d treasured mostly in the retelling. His audience was gone. His audience was mortally distracted.
He might be happy again; he might feel joy when Keefer learned to walk. He might fall in love. He would certainly fall in love. But his would never, never again be an unadulterated happiness, a boy’s happiness. It would always be crossed with this.
Gordon had not realized how much he had cherished himself as a person who could sometimes feel truly carefree.
Georgia would have understood this, because though she had never been truly carefree, she had cherished it in him. She had never actually said those words, so with his mind, he made her say them, in her own voice. He could still remember her voice. He could.
I cherished it, she said, in you.
She added, because Georgia would not have left on a sappy note, otherwise I would never have put up with you.
As he and Lindsay got out of the car, a woman swamped him in the vigor of her bruin hug. Delia. He had not recognized her. And her kid, now almost old enough to be one of his students. He was all but overwhelmed by Delia’s hug, the damp mug of her heavy perfume. When Delia released him, the kid put out her hand in a dignified way, “I’m Alex,” she said. “I was in the wedding? I’m sorry about your sister. Georgia was a cool person.” Gordon felt moved to pat her head, but she was too old for that. He squeezed her hand instead.
As they turned into the hedges that bordered the door, a man motioned to Gordon, shamefaced. There was something about the man he recognized. A friend of his dad’s? No, a student’s dad. Was the kid’s name . . . Jules? But the man was apologizing, already, “I know I shouldn’t even talk to you at a time like this, and I shouldn’t even talk to you about this anyhow, it is probably inappropriate. I . . . it’s that I met with your sister and her husband . . .”
“I have to go inside right now,” Gordon said tenderly, aware of Lindsay gently tugging his arm. He could see his mother, just inside the foyer, her arms around his aunt Daphne.
“I’m a lawyer,” the man told him, “and this is my card. And I need to talk with Mr. Nye’s parents, about the will. The notes I have made. Nothing was finalized. We were going to have an appointment to do that on Friday. With the parents. I was helping Ray prepare . . . his . . . their . . . and I have no idea how this is all going to turn out, but I’m assuming your family will be able to reach some kind of concordance . . . but I wanted to talk with you, too, just as a . . . courtesy, a private courtesy, because you were a good teacher to my son . . .”
“Jules,” said Gordon.
“Julius,” the man repeated, “my son. He goes to Platteville now. He plays basketball. He’s never going to be a Rhodes scholar, you know? But he’s going to major in science. Maybe teach, coach?”
“I have my sister’s will,” Gordon explained. “Ray and Georgia went over all of it with me.”
“They revoked that will,” said the man, “weeks ago.”
Gordon turned to Lindsay. He said, “Don’t tell my mom.”
CHAPTER five
Dale Larsen leaned against the back wall of the church, a position in which he could watch without feeling that his uniform would seem an intrusion. It was a duty he normally liked, the funerals. Heading up the line of mourners’ cars, the silver cruiser freshly polished, its blue light silently and authoritatively rotating on slow beam, on what amounted to a last journey, past the hospital and the school, past the park, the pool, the creek, the Wild Rose and Soderberg’s Electronics Repair and Noon Buffet, past places that had contained the impressions of a life; it was a way of showing respect.
It was not an easy duty, not a day off by any means. Dale held grief in high esteem.
Even at his age, he had less real fear of wrassling a drunk to the pavement than of encountering grief, grief so wild it seemed even the longest string of seasons would never ease it. There was the time when the Redmonds’ toddlers were killed by that pitiable drunk Collins. The Redmonds had been on their way to the Smart Mart to buy microwave popcorn, and Collins—woozling from two beds and three bars—had been on his way from bad to worse. Or the awful funeral of David Abel, who’d just gotten a full-ride scholarship to Madison when he’d rolled his Jeep five times on the way home from a beer bash at Two Chimneys. Debbie Abel’s only child. And three other boys, all good boys.
His daughter, Stephanie, had been at that party. She could easily have been in the car. Stephanie, during the time in her life when she wouldn’t have recognized a set of car keys sober. Stephanie, or Georgia, though Georgia never took the most dangerous chances.
Larsen let his eyes rest briefly on the pallbearers, Kip Sweeney and Pat Chaptman and the youngest of all those Upchurch sons, a rascal, Tim or Tom. The tall boy with the mane of white-blond hair, who had a Southern accent, was Ray’s pal, from Florida. And there was a cousin, Craig. . . . the sheriff remembered him vaguely as the godfather of Keefer. And Gordie. Gordie had helped carry his sister’s and his brother-in-law’s domed coffins. He looked like a kid dressed for graduation in his sober gray suit.
How could a family absorb so many blows?
Father Victor Barry was normally so spry, Larsen used to tell his wife the priest was like an advertisement for good health through celibacy. But today his ritual movements were abstracted and slow; he looked his eighty years. Father was talking about the procession of ironies. “We expected loss,” he said, referring to Georgia’s illness. “But what we face here today is unexpected, and so devastating. A chi
ld has lost both her parents. Two families have lost their children. This is a magnitude we had not imagined. ‘Lord, my grief is so great I cannot stand.’ How can we see such a terrible event as proceeding from a merciful God? The truth is, we cannot and we must not. If the Lord is here, and I believe the Lord is here, he is here to console all of us, as a loving parent consoles a child when that child is hurt, despite all the parents’ best intentions to protect . . .”
Father Barry glanced down at Lorraine, who had averted her face. The baby had climbed into her lap and fallen asleep with her thumb upside down in her mouth. “Blessed are the sorrowful, for they shall be comforted . . . Let us offer our silent prayers, first, for the comfort we seek.”
Stephanie was there, with Sheila and their youngest daughter, Trina. She was whispering to that sweet kid who tended bar at the Wild Rose, Katie Savage, the tiniest and most effective bouncer in America. He could guess the text of her whispering. Stephanie was pregnant, but so newly nothing showed; and she had last night assured her father this did indeed mean she and Devon, the boy she lived with, were getting married. Devon’s family would have to be one of two Puerto Rican families in all of northwest Wisconsin—Stephanie would always be different, no matter how hard she had to look for a lever to move the world. But he was a good boy. Everyone loved him.