When the families gather-rare, because Sean’s wife and her family have a stranglehold on Sean, and the distance is not insignificant-Duncan appears to be every bit as perfect as Sean, a dark and contained little soldier among his fluffy blond cousins. When they were younger, Tim’s girls had fussed over Duncan, but now Michelle and Lisa say he is stuck-up and boring. “Yeah, he makes his parents proud, with his straight A’s and cross-country running and jazz band, what a dipshit,” Tim wants to say. He doesn’t, though.
Aware of his daughters’ glares-even the little one is eye-fucking him and he hasn’t done shit to ruin her day-he hoists his golf bag over his shoulder and heads out to his car.
Maybe pizza will win him some points. From the good place, which he thinks is Fortunato’s. He better check with Arlene, though. Fortunato’s was the good pizza place last month, but things change so quickly.
Chapter Fourteen
G wen was the only one of us queer enough-that’s what we called it then, sorry if it offends-to look forward to the first day of school. Perhaps Sean did, too, but he had the good sense not to say as much. Tim, in his Tim-like way, accepted school as a fact of life. Couldn’t get out of it, so why waste energy complaining. Then again, he wasn’t about to celebrate the fact, either. Let Gwen and Sean grade-grub. Tim had carved out a groove for himself as a B student, the path of least resistance, as he saw it. To be an A student would have required more work, to slide down to C’s would risk his father’s ire. That was Tim’s particular genius at the time, getting by. Doing just enough, but never too much.
Poor Go-Go had no genius, except for destruction, with a subspecialty in self-destruction. He was miserable in school, and if there was some root cause that might have been treated-attention deficit, dyslexia-the nuns of that particular time and that particular school weren’t inclined to investigate or address it. Go-Go was told he was lazy, incorrigible, bad. Work harder, try harder, think harder, his teachers lectured him, and he would see results. He was almost grateful for the reprieve of Mass, boring as it was. Go-Go could fake his way through an hour of Mass.
As for Mickey-she hated school because she hated being indoors. Ironic, one might think, given her later choice to spend her working life inside a long narrow tube, but Mickey would argue that she never felt freer than she did on a plane, thousands of feet above the ground, hurtling through the air. Free, if she chose, to disappear into a new city, to start life over again in Chicago or Seattle or Dallas. Not that she ever did, but the opportunity was there. She could grab her wheeled suitcase and disappear.
So: Gwen was the only one who cared that summer, in 1979, when Hurricane David began moving up the coast over Labor Day weekend, threatening the first day of school. Well before it reached us, David was a monstrous storm, destined for the history books, killing more than two thousand people in the Dominican Republic. But all Gwen cared about was the possibility that she would be denied her triumphant return to school. Triumphant because she had a boyfriend now, one that almost any of her classmates would envy. Good-looking, a grade ahead of her-a high school freshman yet. She had a photo of Sean in her new wallet, ready to go. In a photo, Sean was perfect. Did this imply he was not perfect in the flesh? As the first day of school drew closer, did Gwen start to notice the things about Sean that her private-school friends would find uncool? His politics, for example, inherited from his father, were conservative. The way he dressed, almost as if he wore a uniform even when not in school. Plus, his family didn’t have money, which everyone at Gwen’s school professed not to care about, but-everyone at Gwen’s school had money.
Yet, no, that can’t be. Gwen could not have had any doubts about Sean because that foils the before-and-after symmetry of our story, in which everything was perfect until the moment it wasn’t. Gwen and Sean were still in their honeymoon period, although perhaps understandably with some trepidation about whether this was a flimsy summer romance or something sturdier. Tim and Sean, good soldiers, marched off to the first day of school at Cardinal Gibbons. Gwen, giddy with reinvention, rode in her father’s car to Park School. For the second year in a row, Go-Go was alone at St. Lawrence, where Sean, and even Tim, left behind long, long, long shadows that the nuns kept holding up to him, like some Punch-and-Judy silhouette on the wall, a play in which Go-Go was always the butt of all the jokes. Mickey stood on Forest Park Avenue, waiting for the bus to junior high, furious and forlorn.
The first day of school came and went, without incident. But just as a change in barometric pressure anticipates a hurricane’s impending arrival, things were changing, even if we didn’t acknowledge it. Tim, advised by his father at breakfast that he would need a scholarship if he planned to attend school beyond community college, came home and cracked the books. Sean and Gwen raced through their homework so they could be alone. Mickey and Go-Go were left to their own devices. The last month of summer had been like this, too, with Sean and Gwen isolating themselves from us. But their continued desire to be just two instead of five was somehow more striking, now that a new season had arrived. The first day of school established what we had long suspected: the five of us, as five, as a star, as a constellation, were over.
Hurricane David moved up the coast. It was not as destructive as feared, not in the United States. Five dead in Florida, which was as remote to us as the Dominican Republic. As was Savannah and the Carolinas and even Virginia and suburban Washington, D.C., and western Maryland. It was only when the rains started in Baltimore on September 5, the
“Mickey?” Tally said. “Mickey’s not here.”
S ean was. He was lying on top of Gwen in her bedroom, the pretense of homework abandoned. They had all their clothes on-Tally Robison was within earshot, after all, and the door was ajar, house rule-but they were dizzy and amazed at the things that could be accomplished through their clothes. At Tally’s polite knock, Sean jumped back with so much force he almost hit the opposite wall. But they had their clothes on. No one could prove anything.
Tally, who had come up the stairs on swift, stockinged feet, took in the scene-the rumpled bedspread, the mussed hair, the high color in Gwen’s and Sean’s faces-without comment. She told them that Mickey was missing and her mother was worried, asked if they might know where she was.
“There’s one place-” Gwen began.
“We’ll go,” Sean said quickly. “It’s just over the hill.”
He called Tim at the Hallorans’ house, who arrived with slickers and high-beam flashlights. Like Gwen and Sean, he did not invoke Chicken George’s name. Why didn’t anyone say his name? Did we really believe that we would get in trouble if our parents found out we had formed a friendship with the odd man who lived, off and on, in the woods? What was our transgression? That we had traveled so far from home in our walks there, or that we had stolen from our families’ pantries at his instigation? That Sean and Gwen had then used the cabin to do whatever they did? Or was it something less rational, a desire to have a secret for the sake of the secret? Chicken George belonged to us. He had been missing for many weeks at this point and we believed we would never see him again. Still, we did not speak of him, not then. Tim, Sean, and Gwen walked, calling Mickey’s name, the flashlights strafing in the growing gloom. The rain had started, heavy and thick. Hurricane rain.
When they crested a hill, still about a half-mile from Chicken George’s, they saw Mickey and Go-Go running
