The house and restaurant may not be much to offer in trade but that’s what I’ve got to give you.
I turned off the highway and headed west.
BOBBY
THE MOON is following us, a white crescent in a powdery blue sky. We are driving home from the grocery store: Erich, Jonathan, and me. Erich these days is a slippery presence. He comes and goes. If I wasn’t driving I might hold him to keep him from floating out of the car. Instead, I say to Jonathan, “How’s he doing back there?”
Jonathan looks into the back seat. “You okay, Erich?” he asks.
Erich doesn’t answer. He is suffering a fit of absence. Who knows what he hears? “I think he’s okay,” Jonathan tells me. I nod and drive on. Farms pass on either side of the road. Cows go about their ordinary business, steady as history itself.
At the house we help Erich out of the car, guide him up the porch stairs. He smiles with the confused beatitude of the ancient. He could be pleased that we’re home again. He could be remembering a toy given him when he was four. We put the groceries away in the kitchen.
“How about a bath?” I say.
“Do you think he needs one?” Jonathan asks.
“I think he’d like one,” I answer.
We guide him upstairs, start the bathwater. Steam puts a sparkle on the chipped white tile. While we wait for the tub to fill we help Erich off with his clothes. He neither resists nor participates. His face takes on its boggled look, something different from expressionless. When he loses track of himself he drifts into this look of mute incomprehension, as if he can’t quite believe the emptiness he sees. It is astonishment divorced from dread and wonder. It is nothing like a newborn’s face.
When he’s naked we sit him down on the toilet lid. The tub fills slowly. Erich sits with quiet obedience, hands hung limp between the stalks of his thighs. Jonathan reaches over and touches his hair.
“I’m going to put some music on,” I say.
“Okay.” Jonathan stays beside Erich, supporting his shoulder bones with one hand. With the other he keeps administering ginger, comforting little swipes at Erich’s hair.
I turn on the radio in the bedroom. It is tuned to an oldies station, the music of our childhood. Right now, Van Morrison sings “Madame George.” I turn the volume up so it will carry into the bathroom.
When I get back Jonathan says, “This is a great song. This has always been one of my favorites.”
“Care to dance?” I ask him.
He looks at me uncertainly, wondering if I’m making a joke.
“Come on,” I say, and I hold my arms out. “Erich won’t fall. Will you, Erich?”
Erich stares in the direction of his own bare feet. Cautiously, Jonathan pulls his hands away. Erich does not tip over. After a moment Jonathan walks into my arms and we do a waltz. Our shoes clop on the bare tiles. I can feel the agitation of Jonathan’s continuing life. It quivers along his skin like a network of plucked wires. I run my hand up and down the buttons of his spine. Van sings, “Say goodbye to Madame George. Dry your eyes for Madame George.”
“Bobby?” Jonathan says.
“Uh-huh?”
“Oh, never mind. I was going to say something stupid like ‘I’m scared,’ but of course I am. We all are.”
“Well, yes. I mean, I guess we are.”
We dance to the end of the song. I would like to say that Erich smiles, or nods his head in rhythm. It would be good to think he joins us in that small way. But he is lost in his own mystery, staring into a hole that keeps opening and opening. When we’re through dancing we help him up, and lower him into the bath. Together, we scrub his head and his skinny neck. We wash the hollow of his chest, and the deep sockets under his arms. Briefly, he smiles. At the sensation of bathing, or at something more private than that.
After his bath, we put him to bed. It’s late afternoon. Jonathan says, “I’ll buzz down to the restaurant and do the reordering, all right?” I tell him I’ll replace the missing shingles.
We go about our errands. It’s a normal afternoon, steaming along toward evening. Jonathan drives to town, I prop the ladder against the house and climb up with an armload of new cedar shingles. They will look raw and yellow against the old coffee-colored ones. The old shingles, strewn with pine needles, are crisp and splintery under my hands and feet.
From the roof I can see a distance. I can see our small holdings, and the fields and mountains beyond. I can see a red convertible gliding past. In the grass near the porch lies a toy of Rebecca’s, a doll named Baby Lou. It lies grinning with stony rapture at the sky. I can’t believe Clare forgot to pack it.
I pass through a moment of panic. I know Clare and Rebecca aren’t coming back. I’d have said something before they left but I couldn’t risk it—what if Jonathan had decided to go along? I can’t let the house break up. It’s taken too long to build. Jonathan and I belong here, together. Clare has taken Rebecca to the world of the living— its noise and surprises, its risk of disappointment. She’s probably right to have done that. It’s where Rebecca should be. We here are in the other world, a quieter place, more prone to forgiveness. I followed my brother into this world and I’ve never left it, not really.
I have work to do. I have a roof to fix.
The panic passes.
Rebecca will be back someday, and the house will be waiting for her. It’s hers. It isn’t much—a termite- gnawed frame building remade in small pieces, with the work of inexperienced hands. It isn’t much but it stands now and will still stand when she’s twenty. Now, right now, I can see her. It’s as clear as a window opened onto the future. What I see is a woman with light brown hair, no beauty by the world’s standards but the owner of a sly grace and a steadfast, unapologetic way of filling her skin. I can see her come to stand on the porch of a house she’s inherited. A house she never asked for, a house she can’t quite think what to do with. I can see her there, standing in a winter coat, breathing bright steam into the brilliant air. That’s all I see. It’s not a significant vision. But I see her with surprising clarity. I see her boots on the floorboards, and the winter crackle of her hair. I see the way her jaw cleaves the frigid light as she stands before this unwanted gift. I touch my own jaw. I kneel there, on the roof, feeling the plain creaturely jut of my lower skull. Time is passing, and I get to work. The hammer makes a metallic, steady kind of music that shivers up and down the framework of this house. I hammer one shingle into place. I hammer another.
Late that night, Jonathan wakes me by touching my hair. I open my eyes and see his face, bright in the bedroom darkness, so close his breathing tickles my cheek. He puts a finger to his lips, and beckons. I follow him out into the hall. The dots on his boxer shorts swim in the darkness. He is wearing only the shorts; I am in Jockeys and an undershirt. He beckons again and I follow him downstairs. Shadows cling to the complications of his back.
In the living room he says, “Sorry to wake you up like this. But there’s a job I need your help with.”
I ask what kind of job needs doing at midnight. By way of answering, he picks an object up off the table beside the sofa. I take a moment to focus—it’s the box with Ned’s ashes in it. Holding the box in both hands, he goes to the front door.
“Come on,” he says.
We walk out onto the porch and stop at the rail, looking into the deep black like two passengers on an ocean liner. On moonless nights this house could be afloat; it could be sailing through space. All that offers itself from the surrounding night is a starfield and the restlessness of trees.
Jonathan says, “I’ve changed my mind about waiting to scatter these. It’s suddenly occurred to me that this is as good a place as any.”
“You mean you want to drop Ned’s ashes now? Right here?”
“Mm-hm. I want us both to do it.”
“Um, don’t you think Alice would want to be here, too? I mean, shouldn’t we have some kind of ceremony?”
