What We Lost in the Dark

  Juliet stepped between us, “But a sweater is better than nothing. And my mom’s sweaters are better than most things. She makes them really long, so you can put a chain belt low, around your hips? Over leggings or a mini and leggings? And they are so soft. I mean, what’s softer than alpaca? She shears her own alpaca. But you know that. You know our alpaca. You know our alpaca named Holly. And you know our alpaca named Soot. Do you like cable or plain?”

  “Cable,” Angela said. “I had one once. Duh. I was seven.”

  “Of course. Was that grey or black?”

  “Grey.”

  “I still think this one will be too big.”

  “Except not. I grew an inch while you were gone. I gained seven pounds, Juliet. And you wear them long. You wear them down to here.” She made a chopping motion at her mid-thigh.

  “Well,” Juliet said. “I don’t know. Come and show me how long.”

  To my relief, Angela followed Juliet, who told Jackie and me to send Mrs. Staples our way when she arrived. I pushed my lounge close to Rob’s bedside.

  My mother sat in a chair, her computer open.

  Rob’s condition was slightly improved from rest and fluids. His breath was slow, but quiet. For the next five or six hours, his parents would be gone, picking up Rob’s grandmother from Arizona, who normally came for a month in the summer. With a blanket rolled to provide some support for my neck, I fell asleep.

  When I woke, I heard a voice calling, “Brownie! Get back here. Right now!”

  It was a child’s cry.

  But it wasn’t a child. It was Rob.

  The skin of my face tightened and tingling, I sat up. Rob was wide-awake, too, and also sitting up in bed. “Brownie!” he called again. “Here.”

  In the dimness of the room, my mother looked straight at me. “This is all normal, sweetheart,” she said. “He’s hallucinating. He’s not in any pain. Remember what I told you, it doesn’t hurt.” Bonnie had told me the same thing.

  Brownie had been Rob’s chocolate lab, a huge, sturdy, and loyal dog who’d died three years before when she, and Rob, were fourteen.

  “You can talk to him,” Jackie said. “I’m not sure he’ll know it’s you. But he’ll hear you.”

  “Uh, what’s she doing, Rob?” I said, softly.

  Rob said, “She wants to go back in the water. See? She’s like half fish. Crazy old dog.”

  “I see.”

  “Mom, you call her,” Rob said. “Do the two-finger whistle!”

  My mother shook her head. Rob was talking to me, not to her. I studied my mother’s eyes. Calmly, tears forming, she nodded.

  Using the heels of my hands to push my own tears away, I called softly, “Brownie, behave. You get over here. Right now!”

  “Hah! She just kept on going, Mom! You’re losing your touch.”

  What could I do? Rob was not breathing slowly or in a labored way. He was not asleep. He looked stronger than he had in weeks. If there was something I was supposed to do, Jackie would tell me. She had not stirred from her chair, only closed her laptop and set it on the ground. From studying her face, I intuited what she would want, if the dying boy in the bed was her dying girl. I knew what I should do.

  Slowly, I said, “Should you run after her?”

  “Oh, fine, Mom. Leave it to the man. I can catch up with her.”

  “Well, go ahead, then, if you’re the big dog trainer. You’re just standing there talking. I don’t see you bringing that dog back.”

  “Mom, if Allie comes, make her stay here. I think Brownie scares her. Crazy old dog. Brownie!”

  “I will, Rob. I’ll make sure she stays here.” I gulped, a gasp caught in my throat. But I recovered. “I think she’s scared of Brownie. I guess we should have taught her not to be so rough.”

  Rob opened his arms wide. “Brownie! Get out of there! Don’t you dare go in that swamp. You’re going to be a slime ball. Wait for me!” Rob turned to me with a smile of blazing joy, then fell back on his heap of pillows.

  When I reached out for his hand, his fingers tightened around mine.

  “Go on, honey,” I said. “I love you. I’ll always love you.”

  In my hand, Rob’s fingers began to cool. Jackie reached out and took Rob’s other hand. Jackie stood, then tucked the blankets around his big shoulders as though he were a baby. In the dark, my mother and I sat, holding Rob’s hands. I only reached up long enough to unhook the chain from my neck and slip that beautiful ring onto my hand.

  After all, it was my eighteenth birthday.

  I hope Brownie really was waiting for him. I hope that she leaped up on him, her paws almost touching his shoulders. And then, I hope they ran, Brownie weaving around Rob’s knees as the sun spattered the water. Because the sun couldn’t hurt either of them anymore.

  30

  IN THE DEEP MIDWINTER

  We said goodbye to Rob on a cold winter night.

  It was all so familiar.

  The casket was a plain, polished wooden box. Rob would have insisted on that. Thick-bladed machinery had hacked a deep square in the iron earth at Torch Mountain Cemetery. I remembered all the nights we’d spent pranking Daytimers there, pushing the guy who jilted Juliet into the new grave.

  Only just over a year ago?

  How many lifetimes?

  We had all been so very young.

  The pallbearers, wearing dark shirts and slacks, with white gloves, were Rob’s cousin Victor, a Navy cadet at Annapolis, Mr. Sirocco, Bonnie, Gideon Brave Bear, Juliet, and me.

  The service at St. Dunstan’s of Canterbury had been excruciating: Rob’s aunts, mother, and grandmother were perfect ladies, but even the long old-fashioned mantillas they wore couldn’t conceal the deep lines on their faces. My mother used to say, “I can still look good; it just takes more sleep and more makeup.” Mrs. Dorn’s careful makeup made smudges under her eyes where she had cried and tried to wipe away the marks. Why, I thought briefly, didn’t she use waterproof? Then, immediately, I could not imagine her walking into Waldermann’s and asking for the right kind of makeup for her only child’s funeral.

  The church was beautiful, candlelit at the fall of evening, the pews draped with big red-velvet bows, as they would have been for a wedding. All the flowers were pots of holly, Christmas wreathes, or big tubs of red and white poinsettias.

  The Dorns were Episcopalian, but I’d never thought about that much until now. After the blessings and some Bible passages, the priest spoke. “Rob sometimes came to our Saturday night services, especially in the winter. Recently, he’d come to talk to me on several occasions. Every one of us has questions about death and what life has meant. This was difficult for me because the usual rules don’t apply. I still don’t understand why a young man who embodies so much good would try so hard to make the best of what he had and still lose his life so young,” the priest said. “I do know this. Rob was a child, still. But he also was a man. In St. John, chapter fifteen, verse thirteen, it says, in the Anglican tradition I came from, ‘Greater love hath no man more than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ ”

  The priest put a hand over his eyes and seemed to gather his strength. “Rob Dorn might have gone on living comfortably at least for a short time longer. But he laid down his life for a friend.” The priest paused and seemed to summon strength. “We all know evil exists in the world. Rob faced evil to save his friend, Juliet Sirocco, from a torment that was like the trials of the biblical Job. But the Bible says, in Luke, ‘Fear not them who can kill the body,’ because that is all that they can do. Even the evil can kill the body, but they cannot kill the spirit. So Rob’s spirit lives on, in everyone whose life he touched and renewed, in the good he did, because that can never die.”

  People sang then. Someone had picked a song that everyone knew, a song that Mrs. Dorn sang to Rob when he was a baby, “You Are My Sunshine,” which was awful, because someone had taken her sunshine away.

  The last person who stood and spoke was Juliet’s dad,
Tommy Sirocco. “Dennis and Elizabeth,” he said. “Dennis. And Elizabeth.” Tommy coughed and began again. “I want to tell you, Dennis. And Elizabeth.”

  Then, he just bent forward with his hands on the podium, his big shoulders shaking as though he were nodding his head in the rhythm of a song only he could hear. He had to sit back down without saying anything. What he wanted to say, we already knew. He wanted to thank the Dorns for raising a hero.

  There were only two things left, one more piece of ritual: the quiet finality of the cemetery. I thought, as I got ready to walk outside, how could I leave my Rob, whose body I had known and loved, alone in the cold? It was just a place, after all, and it wasn’t really going to be Rob. Still, everything I ever knew of Rob on this Earth was going to be there. The line of cars made its way up the steep road. In the black mourner’s car, I sat with my mother, my sister, and Gina, as well as Juliet and her parents.

  The funeral director had set up a line of small torches along the road, each enclosed in a glass globe. At the grave site, there were four big torches, muted lights set well away from the place that had been cleared of snow, where there was a rough piece of canvas and several rows of folding chairs, each with a blanket on the seat.

  In the car, Juliet and I put on our dark wool coats and white gloves. Unlike military pallbearers, we had been taught at Bergey’s Funeral Services to carry the casket three on each side, each using one hand, walking straight forward. At military funerals, Rob’s cousin had told us, the soldiers carried the fallen one with the coffin at shoulder height. Victor had that same frightening, flushed look of responsibility and grim excitement that was on Mr. Dorn’s own face. This isn’t real to him quite yet, I realized.

  Bonnie appeared at my elbow with a smile that combined pity and encouragement. Just a few more steps, she seemed to say, pulling on her own gloves.

  I straightened up and waited for Mr. Bergey to open the back of the hearse.

  There, just a little farther up the hill, was the grave of my friend, Nicola Burns. Next to her tombstone were those of Nicola’s mother, and Mr. Ackerman, our favorite tutor, who had XP and committed suicide two years before. And Nicola had died just … a year ago and a little bit. A spring and a fall and a winter, and now another winter. A year, and change. It wasn’t possible that all this could have fit into such a slender space of time, a few leaves of a calendar, just two of my little moleskin journals.

  “We’re ready now,” said Mr. Bergey.

  The six of us grasped the brass handles.

  I thought, I am carrying you, my dearest love.

  After we set the casket down on a kind of metal gurney, Mr. Bergey turned one of the lights up slightly. The soft pine of the box glowed against the fresh snow, on a big woolen blanket of dark blue with stars embroidered on it, which Ginny Sirocco had sewn to replace the usual roll of fake grass. The priest nodded to me.

  For the second time in three months I’d been asked to read a poem to commemorate my best friend. How does that happen in such a short space in one’s life? But now the body of my friend, my playmate, the only man I would ever love, was here, truly here, in this box. And instead, Juliet—my other best friend, my playmate, my confidante, the girl I’d believed lost to me forever—stood so close to me I could hear the soft, repeated catch in her breathing. Although she was still terribly thin, her cheeks had filled out; the sores that roughened the corners of her mouth had closed; and her short hair curled clean and soft.

  She stood Juliet-straight, the abrupt bones of her spine nearly like the wings of the angel zombie. She stood at my back.

  I could hear her crying. I realized that I could count on one hand the times I’d heard Juliet cry. Her mother Ginny leaned forward and handed Juliet one of Tommy’s big handkerchiefs. At that moment, I saw something else: Juliet’s immense joy and wonder at being here, despite everything. Once again she was under her mother and her father’s wing, and with me. She was the living embodiment of survivor guilt at its piercing pinnacle. Juliet was tough, but not tough enough for this.

  Jackie had helped me find the poem. She remembered hearing it read at a funeral in a favorite movie. Jackie thought that the poet, A. E. Housman, must have known a boy like that, a boy who never gave less than his best, like Rob, and then there was a war, and Housman had written “To an Athlete Dying Young.” I began to read it.

  The time you won your town the race

  We chaired you through the market-place;

  Man and boy stood cheering by,

  And home we brought you shoulder-high.

  I thought of big, boisterous Rob bouldering like an oversized marsupial from handle to handle along the walls and ceilings in his home gym. Rob, ripped in every muscle group, balanced shirtless at the pier on a summer night, in the handstand he could hold forever. Rob, a forward sinking three-pointers for hours before no cheering crowd on the dark half-court in his backyard, the mountaineer who never got to dance his triumph in the sunlight.

  To-day, the road all runners come,

  Shoulder-high we bring you home,

  And set you at your threshold down,

  Townsman of a stiller town.

  Smart lad, to slip betimes away

  From fields where glory does not stay,

  And early though the laurel grows

  It withers quicker than the rose.

  The flat bronze marker already set against a young birch tree had no dates. It read only:

  ROBERT ALEXANDER DORN

  BEST SON, BEST FRIEND

  I folded the paper.

  Mr. Dorn kissed my cheek. I hugged him. I didn’t dare go near Mrs. Dorn; it was as natural to shy from the white-hot power of a mother’s grief as it was to shun a wild horse. Turning away, I stood beside Juliet while the priest said his last words. He invited the group to join the Dorn’s for a small dinner in a private room at the Timbers Restaurant at Torch Mountain. The other restaurant Rob loved was closed. Passing the marquee at Gitchee, we noticed that where it usually read, 2 LGE, 2 TOPPINGS, $5, tonight read: MISS U ROB. Gid’s wife stood in the small crowd, hugely pregnant. Maybe Gid would have his son.

  At the last moment, Mrs. Dorn laid the blue blanket over the casket and tucked in the edges, in a way I recognized from the hundreds of times I’d seen my mother do that at Angela’s bedside … and my own.

  Everyone walked away, except for two people who stayed behind.

  We were the tres compadres.

  31

  THE LOVE YOU MAKE

  Juliet knew I might want to spend a few moments there alone, so, being Juliet, she stayed. If I could feel even a flicker of amusement, it was to recognize that Juliet’s concept of personal space always included her in it.

  She would drive me home. Halfway down the hill, her own car was parked on Methodist Avenue. Torch Mountain Home Cemetery had a quaint way of making sure birds of a feather slept together on the same branch.

  Juliet said, “How are you?”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “It’s cold, but not as cold as it was yesterday. That’s good. The wind has stopped,” Juliet said. “The stars are out.”

  “You sound like someone in an old play.” She took my arm and I glanced up, thinking, as a crescent moon appeared, of the gigantic star-spattered window above Rob’s bed.

  In five days, he would have been eighteen years old.

  Then, out of the corner of my eye, some distance away, I suddenly caught a glimpse of something unexplainable.

  There was old Dr. Simon Tabor standing next to Dr. Andrew.

  Dr. Andrew was holding the old man’s arm as Dr. Simon Tabor used an evergreen bough to dust the fine frosting of snow away from identical polished marble bricks. Two matching headstones, etched in silver, and one smaller, black marble.

  It was not just unexplainable, but impossible. Perhaps they’d stood, unnoticed, at the back of the crowd, to pay their respects to Rob. Now they were tending their own family graves. The new one was Garrett Tabor’s. For a moment
, I wanted to cry out: How dare fate let him lie so close to my beloved? I had to remind myself again. Neither one of them, small and evil or great and good, was really there. But I wouldn’t let the doctor walk away without paying their respects—to me. And to Juliet. If they would mourn Garrett Tabor, they had to acknowledge what he was.

  On impulse, with Juliet keeping pace, I walked over to where the two men stood. Then I stopped.

  I could see Dr. Andrew’s face. Always handsome, he was now haggard. He was a good man, and you could see how grief—over Rob and Dr. Stephen, over his nephew, and, probably, his own reputation, on the eve of his greatest advance in battling XP—had carved deep grooves in his skin. No longer did he look younger than most guys his age. He looked tired and beaten-up, as though something had been punched out of him.

  I nearly turned away, but he had seen me.

  “Oh, Allie. Dear Allie. Oh, Juliet,” said Dr. Andrew. “I don’t know what to say. Juliet, you’re the one star in all this blackness. There’s nothing I can say that can express how I feel. The shame is overpowering. The fear of what might prove to be true.”

  “It’s not what might be true,” Juliet said softly. “It’s all true, Dr. Andrew. There’s no doubt.”

  “I know,” he said miserably.

  Glancing at Juliet, I said, “Hello, Dr. Simon.”

  “Our family is so sorry for this loss, Allie,” Dr. Simon said. “We’re sorry for the role someone in our family played in this loss.”

  Dr. Andrew followed Dr. Simon’s sweeping hand down to the two identical silver headstones. Dr. Andrew cleared his throat. “This is my sister-in-law, Stephen’s wife, Merry Whitcomb Green, and their daughter, Rachel. Rachel died at just three years old. They died in an automobile crash. Garrett and Grant and their sister Rebecca survived, and we often wonder … it was twenty years ago now. There was no cell phone capability up here. It was Christmas Eve. Remember, Pop? Stephen knew Merry was gone the moment he looked at her. Her head was so badly injured from the roof column of the car. No one could have survived that.”