can see the life drain out of him. When his face goes slack our mother wails. A part of her flies wailing through the house, where it will wail and rage forever. I feel our mother pass through me on her way out. She covers Carlton’s body with her own.
He is buried in the cemetery out back. Years have passed—we are living in the future, and it’s turned out differently from what we’d planned. Our mother has established her life of separateness behind the guest-room door. Our father mutters his greetings to the door as he passes.
One April night, almost a year to the day after Carlton’s accident, I hear cautious footsteps shuffling across the living-room floor after midnight. I run out eagerly, thinking of ghosts, but find only our father in moth-colored pajamas. He looks unsteadily at the dark air in front of him.
“Hi, Dad,” I say from the doorway.
He looks in my direction. “Yes?”
“It’s me. Bobby.”
“Oh, Bobby,” he says. “What are you doing up, young man?”
“Nothing,” I tell him. “Dad?”
“Yes, son.”
“Maybe you better come back to bed. Okay?”
“Maybe I had,” he says. “I just came out here for a drink of water, but I seem to have gotten turned around in the darkness. Yes, maybe I better had.”
I take his hand and lead him down the hall to his room. The grandfather clock chimes the quarter hour.
“Sorry,” our father says.
I get him into bed. “There,” I say. “Okay?”
“Perfect. Could not be better.”
“Okay. Good night.”
“Good night. Bobby?”
“Uh-huh?”
“Why don’t you stay a minute?” he says. “We could have ourselves a talk, you and me. How would that be?”
“Okay,” I say. I sit on the edge of his mattress. His bedside clock ticks off the minutes.
I can hear the low rasp of his breathing. Around our house, the Ohio night chirps and buzzes. The small gray finger of Carlton’s stone pokes up among the others, within sight of the angel’s blank white eyes. Above us, airplanes and satellites sparkle. People are flying even now toward New York or California, to take up lives of risk and invention.
I stay until our father has worked his way into a muttering sleep.
Carlton’s girlfriend moved to Denver with her family a month before. I never learned what it was she’d whispered to him. Though she’d kept her head admirably during the accident, she lost her head afterward. She cried so hard at the funeral that she had to be taken away by her mother—an older, redder-haired version of her. She started seeing a psychiatrist three times a week. Everyone, including my parents, talked about how hard it was for her, to have held a dying boy in her arms at that age. I’m grateful to her for holding my brother while he died, but I never once heard her mention the fact that though she had been through something terrible, at least she was still alive and going places. At least she had protected herself by trying to warn him. I can appreciate the intricacies of her pain. But as long as she was in Cleveland, I could never look her straight in the face. I couldn’t talk about the wounds she suffered. I can’t even write her name.
JONATHAN
O UR seventh-grade class had been moved that September from scattered elementary schools to a single centralized junior high, a colossal blond brick building with its name suspended over its main entrance in three-foot aluminum letters spare and stern as my own deepest misgivings about the life conducted within. I had heard the rumors: four hours of homework a night, certain classes held entirely in French, razor fights in the bathrooms. It was childhood’s end.
The first day at lunch, a boy with dark hair hanging almost to his shoulders stood behind my friend Adam and me in the cafeteria line. The boy was ragged and wild-looking: an emanation from the dangerous heart of the school itself.
“Hey,” he said.
I could not be certain whether he was speaking to me, to Adam, or to someone else in the vicinity. His eyes, which were pink and watery, appeared to focus on something mildly surprising that hovered near our feet.
I nodded. It seemed a decent balance between my fear of looking snobbish and my dread of seeming overeager. I had made certain resolutions