first time in his life he eavesdropped on a private conversation between his parents, and because the conversation was largely about him, it was the first time he had ever heard them, had ever heard anyone, talk about him behind his back.
He’s different, Willa was saying. There’s an anger and a coldness in him that frighten me, and I hate him for what he’s done to you.
He hasn’t done anything to me, his father answered. We might not talk as much as we used to, but that’s normal. He’s almost twenty-one. He has his own life now.
You used to be so close. That’s one of the reasons why I fell in love with you—because of how well you loved that little boy. Remember baseball, Morris? Remember all those hours you spent in the park teaching him how to pitch?
The golden days of yore.
And he was good, too, wasn’t he? I mean really good. Starting pitcher on the varsity team his sophomore year. He seemed so happy about it. And then he turned around and quit the team the next spring.
The spring after Bobby died, remember. He was a bit of a mess then. We all were. You can’t really blame him for that. If he didn’t want to play baseball anymore, that was his business. You talk about it as if you think he was trying to punish me. I never felt that for a second.
That was when the drinking started, wasn’t it? We didn’t find out until later, but I think it started then. The drinking and the smoking and those crazy kids he used to run around with.
He was trying to imitate Bobby. They might not have gotten along very well, but I think Miles loved him. You watch your brother die, and after that a part of you wants to become him.
Bobby was a happy-go-lucky fuckup. Miles was the grim reaper.
I’ll admit there was a certain lugubrious quality to his carryings-on. But he always did well at school. Through thick and thin, he always managed to pull down good grades.
He’s a bright boy, I won’t dispute that. But cold, Morris. Hollowed out, desperate. I shudder to think about the future…
How often have we talked about this? A hundred times? A thousand times? You know his story as well as I do. The kid had no mother. Mary-Lee walked out when Miles was six months old. Until you came on board, he was raised by Edna Smythe, the luminous, legendary Edna Smythe, but still, she was just a nanny, it was just a job, which means that after those first six months he never had the real thing. By the time you entered his life, it was probably too late.
So you understand what I’m talking about?
Of course I do. I’ve always understood.
He couldn’t bear to listen anymore. They were chopping him into pieces, dismembering him with the calm and efficient strokes of pathologists conducting a postmortem, talking about him as if they thought he was already dead. He slipped back into the bedroom and quietly shut the door. They had no idea how much he loved them. For five years he had been walking around with the memory of what he had done to his brother on that road in Massachusetts, and because he had never told his parents about the shove and how deeply he was tormented by it, they misread the guilt that had spread through his system as a form of sickness. Maybe he was sick, maybe he did come across as a shut-down, thoroughly unlikable person, but that didn’t mean he had turned against them. Complex, high-strung, infinitely generous Willa; his open-hearted, genial father—he hated himself for having caused them so much sorrow, so much unnecessary grief. They looked on him now as a walking dead man, as someone without a future, and as he sat down on the bed and considered that futureless future hovering dimly before him, he realized that he didn’t have the courage to face them again. Perhaps the best thing for all concerned would be to remove himself from their lives, to disappear.
Dear Parents, he wrote the next day, Forgive the abruptness of my decision, but after finishing yet another year of college, I find myself feeling a little burned out on school and think a pause might do me some good. I’ve already told the dean that I want to take a leave of absence for the fall semester, and if that turns out to be insufficient, for