never considered bringing the boards along.
“We have to go in there,” Mark said. “You know it. You’re softening up. Little by little, my logic is wearing away your resistance.”
They reached the bottom of Cathedral Square and turned left on Jefferson. Two blocks ahead, a lot of people were milling around alongside the Pforzheimer Hotel.
Mark jumped ahead and turned around, dancing on the balls of his feet. “Don’t you believe in my stunning logic?” He aimed a fist at Jimbo’s left arm and gave him two light blows.
“All right, let’s think about it, okay? There’s this empty house, except it might not actually be empty.”
“It’s empty,” Mark said.
“Be quiet. There’s this house, okay? For a long time you don’t really see it, but when you finally do, you want to spend most of your time looking at it. Then your mother makes you promise to leave the place alone. You get spooked out, but you decide to break in anyhow and look around. And the next day, you find out she killed herself. And
“Sounds logical to me.”
“You know what it sounds like to me?”
“Ah, a great idea?”
“Guilt.”
Mark stared at him, momentarily speechless.
“It
Mark glanced around at the streetlamps, the parked cars, the placards before the buildings on Jefferson Street. He looked almost dazed.
“I swear, no one understands me. Not my father, not even you. My uncle might understand me—he has an imagination. He’s coming here today. Maybe he’s already in town.”
Mark pointed at the Pforzheimer, unaware that I was looking down at him from a fourth-floor window. “That’s where he’s staying, the Pforzheimer. It costs a lot to stay there. For a writer, he makes a lot of money.”
(This was sweet, but not very accurate.)
“Maybe we should go see him right now,” Mark said. “Wanna do it?”
Jimbo declined. An unpredictable adult stranger from New York could only complicate matters. The two boys continued up the street until they were within about twenty feet of the film crew. A burly man with a ZZ Top beard and a name tag on a string around his neck waved them to a halt.
“It’s that dude from
“Michael J. Fox? You’re crazy. Michael J. Fox isn’t that old.”
“Not him, the dude who played his father.”
“He must be really old by now. He still looks pretty good, though.”
“No matter how good he looks, that car’s going to mess him up,” Mark said, and both boys laughed.
Mark’s father spoiled everything, that was the problem. They had seen Timothy Underhill’s car pull up in front of the house, and Jimbo could tell that his friend was excited just to see his uncle walk up to the porch. Jimbo thought he looked like an okay kind of guy, kind of big, and comfortable in jeans and a blue blazer. He had a been- around kind of face that made him look easy to get along with.
But when they turned off the boom box and went out of the room, Mark’s dad made a dumb, dismissive remark even before they got to the staircase—something about “the son and heir” and his “el sidekick-o faithful-o,” making them both sound like fools. When they were being introduced, Mark’s dad referred to Jimbo as Mark’s “best buddy-roo” and insisted on treating them as if they were in the second grade, which made it impossible to stay in the house. Then Mark’s dad got all anal about what time they had to be back, and Jimbo could see Mark getting jumpier and jumpier. He looked like a guy who had just put down a ticking suitcase and wanted to get the hell out of there before it blew up.
Once they managed to get out, Jimbo followed Mark reluctantly to the sidewalk in front of 3323, where no shadowy nonfigures had not-appeared in the living room window. Jimbo had to agree: whatever might have been true earlier, now the house was as empty as a blown egg. You could tell just by looking at it. The only movement in that place came from the settling of the dust.
“We are going to do this,” Mark said. “Believe it or not, we are.”
“Do you want me to come along to the thing at the funeral home tonight?”
“If you’re not going, I’m not going, and I have to go, so . . .”
“I guess I am el faithful-o sidekick-o,” Jimbo said.
Alone and massive on its little hill, Trott Brothers struck Jimbo as looking like a castle with dungeons and suits of armor. Inside, it was both grand and a little seedy. They were pointed to a small, tired-looking room like a chapel, with four rows of chairs facing an open coffin. To Jimbo, this was terrible, cruel, tasteless: they were forcing Mark to look at his dead mother’s face! It was one thing to respect the dead, but how about respecting the living? Jimbo risked a peek at the pale figure in the coffin. The person lying there did not look like Mark’s mother, exactly; she looked more like a younger sister of Mrs. Underhill’s, someone who’d gone off and known a completely different life. Immediately, the men drifted to the back of the little room, and Jimbo and Mark sat down in the last row.
Mark’s father handed him a card with a Hawaiian sunset on one side. When he turned it over, Jimbo saw the Lord’s Prayer printed beneath Nancy’s name and her dates.
“You okay?” he whispered to Mark, who was turning the card over and over in his hands, examining it as if it were a clue to a murder in a mystery novel.
Mark nodded.
A couple of minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, “Do you think we could sneak out?”
Jimbo shook his head.
Philip ordered his son to get on his feet and pay his respects to his mother. Mark stood up and walked the length of the center aisle until he was in front of the coffin. As Jimbo watched, Philip staged a dramatic moment and put his arm around his son’s shoulders, probably the first time he had done that since Mark’s tenth birthday. He couldn’t help it, Jimbo thought. In fact, he didn’t even know that he was putting on a photo op for a nonexistent photographer. He thought he was being genuine. Jimbo could see Mark squirm beneath his father’s touch.
As soon as Philip relented and walked away, Jimbo got to his feet and moved up to join his friend. He did not want to look at that cosmeticized not-Nancy in the coffin, so he moved slowly, but he could not bear the thought of Mark standing up there by himself. When he reached Mark’s side, he glanced in his direction and saw by a softening in his eyes that Mark was grateful for his presence.
In a voice almost too low to be heard, Mark said, “How long do you think I’m supposed to stand here?”
“You could leave now,” Jimbo said.
Mark stared down at the woman in the coffin. His face had settled into an expressionless mask. A single tear leaked from the corner of his left eye, then his right. Startled, Jimbo glanced again at his friend and saw that the mask of his face had begun to tremble. More tears were brimming in his eyes. All at once, Jimbo felt like crying, too.
From the back of the room, Mark’s father said in a pompous stage whisper, “You have to feel sorry for the poor kid,” and Jimbo’s tears dried before they were shed. If he’d heard it, so had Mark.
The boys’ eyes met. Mark’s face had turned violently red. Timothy Underhill said something too soft to be heard, and this time all but forgetting to keep his voice down, Mark’s father said, “Mark found her that afternoon— came home from God knows where . . .”
Jimbo heard Mark gasp.
“By the time I got home,” Philip was saying, “they were taking her to the ambulance.”
“Oh, no,” said Mark’s uncle.
His face rigid but still flushed, Mark stepped back from the coffin and turned around. A few minutes later, all of them were moving back outside into the roaring heat. The huge sun hung too close to the earth, and the light burned Jimbo’s eyes. Mark’s father buttoned his suit jacket, straightened his tie, and set off down the hill like a salesman off to close a deal. Timothy Underhill gave the boys a look brimming with sympathy, then followed his brother down the descending path. Lines of heat wavered up from the roof of the Volvo.
