Jamal leaves for college, she will live another twenty-two years in intermittent spells of contentment and loneliness. She will know, at moments, a perfect joy made of simple things: a teacup throwing its shadow on a windowsill, a book she takes to the park on a warm September afternoon.
Will and Harry will stay together, not always easily, for the rest of their lives. Will will have an affair, be forgiven, and then have another. He and Harry will part for almost a year, in their early fifties, and then begin dating again. As Will’s muscles soften and his skin goes opaque with age, he will remain faithful.
Harry will die first, at seventy-eight. When he falls ill, Jamal will fly east from California with his wife and his son to be with him. They’ll stay for a few days and then Will will tell them to go back, return to their lives, they’ve said goodbye to Harry and there’s nothing else they can do. Will will kiss Jamal, who is weeping. He’ll tell Jamal he was a good son, and that Harry knew he loved him, it didn’t matter about visits. After Jamal and his family have gone, Will, nearly deaf, will sit another several days with Harry. He’ll whisper to him, lay his spotted hand over Harry’s wasted one. At the end, when Harry is shivering from an inner cold the heat of the room can’t touch, Will will carefully ease his own body into bed beside Harry’s and hold him, trying to give whatever warmth he can. He won’t be certain if Harry knows he’s there. He will tell Harry, softly, speaking close to his ear, that it’s all right now, he can go. It would be a good time to go. There will be no telling whether Harry can hear him. Harry will live another twelve hours, and slip away late at night, while Will sleeps nearby in the other bed.
Will will live another seven years. As he dies, Jamal will return to stay with him. Jamal won’t hire a nurse. He’ll feed Will himself, wipe his chin, change the foul linens. He’ll grow impatient with Will’s helplessness. He’ll curse, inwardly, but he’ll do everything that’s needed. He’ll feed and wash Will and when Will is able to talk he’ll talk to him. He’ll talk to Will about the fears he feels for his children. The boy from his first marriage runs wild, has no ambition. The little girl, born when Jamal himself faces the close of middle age, exhausts him with her fits of temperament, the magnitude of her will. Jamal will talk about his second wife, whom he loves with a desperation that wounds him, exalts him, drains him of energy. Will will nod, listening and not listening. He’ll be thinking of Jamal, not the facts Jamal restlessly narrates but the living fact of him, here in the room. He’ll think of the living presences of Jamal and Harry, who has not been much affected by his body’s death. He’ll be visited by everyone he’s known and he’ll see that they’ve been burned clean of their traits, all the meannesses and failures, all the virtues. There will be company, a certain satisfaction. There will be a trembling, as if the room itself is shedding its qualities—bed, table, picture on the wall—and melting into a ferocious light that has no name.
Now, right now, Jamal performs a loose-limbed, solitary dance among the stone tablets. When he fills his head with music he doesn’t think about his mother and Cassandra. He doesn’t think about Ben. He goes to another place. Will and Harry stand together, silently reading the names of strangers. They try to absorb themselves in the list because neither of them can imagine how he’ll get through this afternoon or the next day. Mary runs her finger into the corners of a stranger’s name, looks out at the harbor. If she read every name she would probably recognize somebody, a son of a friend of her mother’s or a slightly older boy she’d longed for in high school. She drinks from the cup her son has brought her. She fingers the pearls at her throat.
Will squeezes Harry’s hand. He has lived to this point, and he feels grateful. He’s lived to be a forty-two-year-old man who loves and is loved by another and who must pose, somehow, as father to a shocked, grieving thirteen-year-old boy. Here they are together, he and Harry, feigning interest in a roster of deceased strangers, about to spend a few hours going from store to store. Will knows how much Jamal wants a new pair of white Nikes. He knows Mary will buy them for him. He knows that, for Jamal, much suffering pales beside the vision of new white Nikes. A new pair of shoes will save him. In the right shoes he can jump out of harm’s way, walk an immaculate walk.
Will reads a few names, silently. George E. Swink, Leonard J. Szulc, William E. Talley. Men half his age, most likely—young men who fell burning from the sky or were shot or drowned or crushed in a war that has already lost its edges and become a fact of history. He imagines the names of his own dead, carved into the face of a stone, and he thinks of buying shoes for Jamal. This is what the living do, he tells himself. We perform the little errands, and visit the stones.
He beckons to his mother, who is standing between him and the harbor. She is outlined in light.
“Let’s go,” he calls.
She nods, and walks toward him.
Harry says, “Jamal? You ready?”
Jamal is nodding to the music. He performs a shimmy, half in and half out of the shadow of a stone.
Will speaks.
Jamal watches from inside the music.
2035/ “Where are you going?”
“I told you.”
“Where?”
“I’m going down to the bay. I won’t be too long.”
“What’s in that box?”
“I’ve told you this five times.”
“What?”
“It’s your grandfathers’ ashes. Do you remember your Grandfather Will?”
“No.”
“We went to see him, oh, more than a year ago. You were very small then. We flew to New York and we stayed in his house with him. He was very old.”
“I know that.”
“These are his ashes. His and Harry’s. I’m going to go put them in the bay and then I’m going to come home and we can start the garden together, all right?”
“I want to come.”
“You can’t come. I’ve told you and told you this.”
“Why not?”
“Because I need to go alone.”
“Why?”
“Well. Because I lived with Harry and Will a long, long time ago.”
“When you were a little boy.”
“That’s right. So now I need to be by myself when I put their ashes in the bay. I need you to stay here with your momma, and when I come back we’ll plant the garden. Okay?”
“I want to come.”
“You can’t.”
“I want to take the box to the car.”
“Okay. Will it make you happy if I let you carry the box to the car? Here.”
“It makes a noise.”
“What?”
“It makes a noise.”
“Well, sure, if you shake it like that. Be just a little bit careful, okay?”
“What’s inside?”
“Ashes. I told you. Just some ashes.”
“They make a noise.”
“It’s ashes and little bits of bone. It’s nothing to be scared of.”
“I’m not scared.”
“Don’t I know that? You’re not afraid of anything, are you?”
“I can hear them.”