By Nightfall

disastrous form (You know, I think my little brother has the hots for me).

On that February night (Milwaukee February, dark since just after three in the afternoon, the windows pelted by hard little balls of sleet-hail that might as well be particles of frozen oxygen) as Peter and Matthew lie side by side in their twin beds, talking as they usually do before Matthew turns out the light; as Matthew is going on about some foolish fumble on the part of Benton the boyfriend, Peter will get up out of his bed (wearing only his briefs and, as a concession to the cold, a pair of woolen socks) and sit on the edge of Matthew’s, wearing his deep-souled listening face.

Matthew is saying, “… he’s a decent guy, I mean, he’s nice and all, but you don’t have to be a doctor of romance to know you don’t get your girlfriend hockey tickets for her birthday…”

He stops, and looks in surprise at Peter, as if Peter has appeared magically on his, Matthew’s, bed. The gesture is so without precedent that it’s taken Matthew a few seconds to apprehend it at all.

He speaks into Peter’s softened, tell-me-everything face. He says, “You okay?”

“Sure.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. I’m listening to you.”

“Petey…”

“Peter.”

“Peter. I’m gonna go out on a limb here, okay?”

“Okay.”

Go out on a limb here and… TELL YOU JOANNA HURST IS IN LOVE WITH YOU.

Matthew says, “Have you been having some… this is embarrassing… feelings lately?”

“Um, yeah, I guess.”

Sorry, Benton, should have gotten her a better gift, I guess.

“It’s okay. I understand.”

“You do?”

“I think so. You want to tell me a little about it?”

“I don’t think I can.”

“I understand that, too. Hey, brothers. DNA, what can you do?”

“Uh-huh.”

A silence passes. Peter summons himself.

He manages to say, “So you love her, too.”

Another silence passes, a terrible one. Frozen air particles fling against the window glass as if they are being hurled by a giant.

Peter understands. Not fully, but. He understands in an inchoate, stomach-swirling way that an error has been made, a wrong door opened. Matthew looks at him with exactly the same soft-eyed expression Peter has been practicing these past couple of months. Peter, it seems, did not invent the gesture at all—he merely picked it up from Matthew. DNA, what can you do?

“No,” Matthew says. “I’m not in love with Joanna. You are, huh?”

“Please please please please don’t tell her.”

“I won’t.”

And that, implausibly, is the end of the conversation, not just for the night but forever. Peter gets up, returns to his own bed, and pulls the covers high. Matthew turns out the light.

Peter falls into… something… love?… with Matthew on a beach in Michigan, a month before Matthew’s sixteenth birthday.

They are on their annual family summer vacation, a week in a musky pine-paneled cabin on Mackinac Island. Matthew is by now, and Peter is about to be, too old to delight in these trips. The cabin is no longer a repository of familiar wonders (the beds still shrouded in mosquito netting, all the board games still there!) but a dreary and tedious exile, a full week of their mother’s quiet fury over the fun they don’t seem to be having and their father’s dogged attempts to provide it; spiders in the bathrooms and cold little wavelets plashing and plashing against the gravelly beach.

This summer, however—marvel of marvels—Joanna has been permitted to come up for the weekend.

There’s no accounting, in retrospect, for this lapse in the Harris tradition. Until Matthew graduated from high school, the Harrises maintained an almost patriotic devotion to what they called family time—sacrosanct periods of four-member isolation that were insisted on with increasing fervor as it became more and more apparent that no one particularly enjoyed them. None of Peter’s or Matthew’s friends was ever invited to stay for dinner or spend the night, and so Joanna’s presence for three entire days of the annual week on Mackinac was a true enigma. Now, as an adult, Peter suspects that their parents had belatedly begun to apprehend Matthew’s true inclinations, and were, at the last minute, eager to become, or at least to impersonate, parents whose handsome, popular older boy might just get some girl into trouble if he wasn’t carefully watched, and he could only, of course, be carefully watched if the girl was actually present. Peter had overheard a telephone conversation between his mother and Joanna’s, in which his mother assured the other that Matthew’s and Joanna’s movements would be strictly accounted for, and that Joanna would sleep in a room right next to her own.

Was it possible that either of these women believed precautions to be necessary?

And why, as a matter of fact, did no one seem concerned about Peter’s behavior? He was the one who, without question or hesitation, would put his eye to the doorcrack when Joanna was in the bathroom, would sniff any bathing suit or towel left out to dry, and who, if he had the nerve (which he clearly did not) would creep into the virginal little alcove bedroom next to the one his parents used, and risk everything—Joanna’s screams, his parents’ mortification—just to get the briefest look at her, asleep, partially covered by a moon-gray sheet.

It was a case of mistaken identity. It was another of the apparently infinite mysteries.

Of Peter’s excitement, there is too much and too little to say. He vomited twice from nervousness, once during the days before the five of them left for Mackinac, and again (surreptitiously, he hoped) in a gas station men’s room along the way. He felt the inner spasm, but did not vomit, after they’d reached the cabin and Joanna stood, amid her scent and the other emanations of her personhood, in the until-then-familiar knotty-pine-paneled living room, rendering it profound and eternal: its smoke-blackened stone fireplace, its swaybacked sofa and fiendishly uncomfortable rattan armchairs, its ineradicable underlying aspect of long winter disuse, its smells of weedy damp and faint mothball and something Peter had never smelled before and has never smelled since, a feral odor like that which he imagines must reside in a raccoon’s pelt.

“This is so sweet,” Joanna says. Peter still swears, decades later, that she put out a faint, scented pinkish illumination in that sad brown room.

Yes, he masturbated five or six times a day. Yes, he not only sniffed the bikini bottoms she’d slung over the porch rail to dry (not much smell to them, lakewater and something clean, elusive, and vaguely metallic, like an iron fence on a winter day) but, with the queasy disregard of an alcoholic at a dinner party, put them over his head. Yes, he felt life cracking open all around him and yes, there were times when he wished Joanna would go away because he wasn’t certain he could bear his own deep knowledge, which he disavowed with every fiber, that he would never have any more of her than this, that he was and would always be a little boy with a bikini bottom stretched over his head, and that as intoxicating as these days of Joanna were they were also the beginning of a lifelong, congenital disappointment. Some god had seen fit to bring him this close to what he meant by happiness (Joanna biting delicately but with real appetite—she wasn’t prissy—into a cheeseburger; Joanna sitting on the porch steps in cutoffs and a white tank top, painting her toenails pink; Joanna laughing, like any mortal, at an old episode of I Love Lucy on the decrepit black-and-white TV), in order to show him what he would always want and never get.

He will be in love with Joanna all his life, though as time goes on he will augment and supplant and reimagine her, enough so that, years later, when he is going through Matthew’s things in Milwaukee and finds his old yearbook, he will not at first recognize Joanna in her senior photo—a kind-looking, round-faced, conventional Midwestern beauty, with lovely full lips but rather narrow eyes, her hair lustrous and abundant but curtained down over her face so that it all but obscures her forehead and right eye, a style of the time that has been wisely abandoned for decades now. This is not the Lady of the Lake, not even close, and for a moment Peter will actually believe that Joanna’s photo must have gotten mixed up with someone else’s, some sturdy, reliable Milwaukee girl