box was the last thing I wanted. I slipped my hands inside the gloves. They were soft.
* * *
One night, Lloyd lay on a cot in my room. I tried to get him to talk about Marple Newtown, or his girlfriend, but he was strangely silent. In a corner of the room my Venus flytraps were silently digesting some hamburger. My plastic model of the human heart stood on my bookcase. By the dim glow of my night-light you could see the atria and the ventricles and the aorta and the vena cava.
“You’re a lucky stiff,” Lloyd said at last.
“Am I?” I said. I didn’t feel lucky. I felt like I was cursed.
“Duh,” said Lloyd.
There was silence for a while. But I had to ask.
“How am I lucky?” I asked.
“Because,” Lloyd said, “you still have yours.”
The windows were open, and from the woods that surrounded the house came the thick threnody of Pennsylvania night: owls, cicadas, crickets. It was like a rain forest out there.
“I’m sorry,” I said. It was the only thing I could think of. I still didn’t know if we were talking about his father or his dog.
* * *
Earlier, Lloyd and I had walked up Sawmill Road with Playboy on a leash, my arm being gently pulled out of its socket, as the last of twilight dwindled around us. Playboy began to sniff around a path that led into the woods. He growled softly, and the hair on his back stood up. I looked into the dark forest. At the top of the hill, just barely visible, was one of the ruined mansions. One stone wall of a nineteenth-century barn stood there as well, along with—as I knew from exploring this place—the stone cellar of a vanished milk house without any walls around it whatsoever, a place into which, if you weren’t careful, it was very easy to fall. And of course, the springhouse, the headwaters of the Thomas Run.
From the dark woods came Sandy Flash’s whispered voice. Death.
Playboy growled again.
Then he bolted up the trail. The leash snapped out of my hand.
“No,” I said. “Bad dog. Come!”
Playboy didn’t look back. I wasn’t expecting him to. Playboy didn’t give a shit.
He bounded into the forest and disappeared.
Lloyd just nodded, unsurprised. “Toby used to do that, too.”
We walked into the woods together, Lloyd and I. The sun was going down, and the woods were filled with long shadows and shocking sounds of croaking insects, a whole symphony of cicadas and crickets and other things whose names I did not know. The abandoned mansion in the woods looked as if it could fall over at any moment. Curtains blew from the windows. Most of the roof had fallen in. A voice said, “I love you.”
Lloyd put one finger on his lips. Who would say such a thing, and in this place?
We crept around the sides of the old house. There was one person talking and another breathing heavily or gasping. They didn’t know we were there. “Stop it,” said one of them. “Don’t be saying that.”
The voices were coming from the old milk house, the outbuilding that by this point in time had devolved into a large, square, stone-lined hole in the ground. The two of them were sitting very close to each other, their faces one face. My parents kissed sometimes, but never like this. We’d been taught mouth-to-mouth resuscitation at school on a waxy dummy. There’d been a whole morning where we all stood in line, waiting our turn to bring the dummy back to life. You had to tilt her head back first.
“Wait,” said one of the women. “Did you hear something?” They pulled away from each other. I couldn’t see their faces. Along the tree line beyond the ruined milk house a Harley leaned on a kickstand. Something snapped in the woods—a twig beneath a boot. My heart pounded in my breast, although a breast wasn’t what I had. There was a pulsing in the soft skin at the bottom of my throat.
“There’s nothing there,” said one.
After a while their faces drew together again. The women’s legs dangled down into the hole. I wanted to get out of there. But something held me. The women made soft cat sounds in the insect dark.
The door of the old house behind us creaked, and I turned to look back. There was Playboy, peeing on the wall. The half-open door behind him moved gently back and forth upon its hinges.