Six months before he died of a brain tumor (at the unfair age of thirty-nine), and while his mind was still working (mostly), Chuck told his wife the truth about the scar on the back of his hand. It wasn’t a big deal and hadn’t been a big lie, but he’d reached a time in his rapidly diminishing life when it seemed important to clear the books. The only time she’d asked about it (it really was a very small scar), he told her that he had gotten it from a boy named Doug Wentworth, who was pissed about him cavorting with his girlfriend at a middle school dance and pushed him into a chainlink fence outside the gymnasium.
“What actually happened?” Ginny asked, not because it was important to her but because it seemed to be important to him. She didn’t care much about whatever had happened to him in middle school. The doctors said he would probably be dead before Christmas. That was what mattered to her.
When their fabulous dance was over and the DJ put on another, more recent tune, Cat McCoy had run to her girlfriends, who giggled and shrieked and hugged her with a fervency of which only thirteen-year-old girls may be capable. Chuck was sweaty and so hot his cheeks felt on the verge of catching fire. He was also euphoric. All he wanted in that moment was darkness, cool air, and to be by himself.
He walked past Dougie and his friends (who paid absolutely no attention to him) like a boy in a dream, pushed through the door at the back of the gym, and walked out into the paved half-court. The cool fall air doused the fire in his cheeks, but not the euphoria. He looked up, saw a million stars, and understood that for each one of those million, there was another million behind it.
The universe is large, he thought. It contains multitudes. It also contains me, and in this moment I am wonderful. I have a right to be wonderful.
He moonwalked under the basketball hoop, moving to the music inside (when he made his little confession to Ginny he could no longer remember what that music had been, but for the record it was the Steve Miller Band, “Jet Airliner”), and then twirled, his arms outstretched. As if to embrace everything.
There was pain in his right hand. Not big pain, just your basic ouch, but it was enough to bring him out of his joyous elevation of spirit and back to earth. He saw that the back of his hand was bleeding. While he was doing his whirling dervish bit under the stars, his outflung hand had struck the chainlink fence and a protruding jut of wire had cut him. It was a superficial wound, hardly enough to merit a Band-Aid. It left a scar, though. A tiny white crescent scar.
“Why would you lie about that?” Ginny asked. She was smiling as she picked up his hand and kissed the scar. “I could understand it if you’d gone on to tell me how you beat the big bully to a pulp, but you never said that.”
No, he’d never said that, and he’d never had a bit of trouble with Dougie Wentworth. For one thing, he was a cheerful enough galoot. For another, Chuck Krantz was a seventh-grade midget unworthy of notice.
Why had he told the lie, then, if not to cast himself as the hero of a fictional story? Because the scar was important for another reason. Because it was part of a story he couldn’t tell, even though there was now an apartment building standing on the site of the Victorian house where he had done most of his growing up. The haunted Victorian house.
The scar meant more, so he had made it more. He just couldn’t make it as much more as it really was. That made little sense, but as the glioblastoma continued its blitzkrieg, it was the best his disintegrating mind could manage. He had finally told her the truth of how the scar actually happened, and that would have to do.
10
Chuck’s grandpa, his zaydee, died of a heart attack four years after the Fall Fling dance. It happened while Albie was climbing the steps of the public library to return a copy of The Grapes of Wrath—which, he said, was every bit as good as he remembered. Chuck was a junior in high school, singing in a band and dancing like Jagger during