In the corner of this anteroom was an easel holding a large cardboard mosaic with pictures of Gene from childhood through his adult years. Jonathan stood before it momentarily and felt the years slip behind him. There he was as a child. All of them together, smiling at a birthday party or standing on the roads with their bikes. All of them so young, their faces grainy on old Kodak film, their clothes from another era. Certainly, something more than just a friend had been lost. Age. Jonathan felt it. It was more than just growing older; it was a shift from one world to another, leaving behind people and moments – the beauty and value of those moments preserved in two-dimensional still shots of fading, corruptible memories. The past was gone, seemingly eaten up by the mundane horrors of life.
Jonathan leaned close and stared at a picture of himself, Gene, Conner and Michael standing with their bikes on the road, arms and legs nothing but joints and awkward angles. He stared into Gene’s young eyes and wondered if he somehow knew back then these dark days were ahead.
He turned to leave and found Conner and Michael standing before him, each a head taller, each mumbling a ‘hey’. They all shook hands in the strange way old friends do who know so much about each other it breeds boredom and resentment.
Conner leaned down close to Jonathan’s ear. “We have to talk,” he said quietly and then stood straight again.
Jonathan looked around and then waited, arching his eyebrows, waiting for Conner to begin, doing his best to be a prick.
“Not here. Can you meet us tonight? East Side Tavern around seven?”
Jonathan said nothing, but nodded. It was an excuse to get out of the house and get a drink away from his wife and son, whose presence during his drinking binges just made him feel more desperate and alone. The brothers walked away and Jonathan watched them go. He then made his exit and walked outside into the deep light of an autumn evening.
Conner’s tone was serious, worried even, which was odd for him – a man who seemed unshakeable most of the time. The fact that they wouldn’t or couldn’t discuss it at the wake made him uneasy. Gene, the poor bastard. He’d become such a drunk in the past few years it was entirely possible he’d broken down and told someone, spilled his guts. He was always the weakest of them in that way. Perhaps he was the weakest in every way. He had been like a big, dumb, injured animal and every year he became worse. Jonathan had at least been able to discipline himself enough to live with the guilt. He could be a good little actor, go about the stage of life, go through the motions of kissing the wife and kid goodbye and going to work and pretending he was a good little battery in the great machine. It was an entirely manufactured persona, he knew. But it was also his only survival mechanism. Time doesn’t heal wounds, he thought, it just hides them in the little, everyday treacheries until you can’t tell the difference anymore.
But there were still those times when his heart and mind spun out of control. When the guilt overwhelmed and consumed him. When he would drink himself to sleep and hope to wake in the morning to find the past ten years were nothing but a misstep in a waking nightmare. But it never happened like that. He was trapped, trying to be the best man he could be, while that noxious memory grew tendrils reaching out for the light of day, killing him from the inside out.
Jonathan drove home in the soft light of September dusk. Theirs was a home situated in a small enclave of his hometown. The house was a small but fairly new Colonial on an acre of land that dipped into trees and a surrounding lowland area of swamp and streams. The forest had been carved out of those trees, and the house was surrounded on three sides by remaining tributaries of wet, woody land.
Technically, the forested backyard was considered wetlands and they had to obtain special permission to build. In reality, their property was the lowest point on the street, a dip in the landscape, and all the runoff water flowed into their patch of land, muddied the forest and settled into a marshy swamp between two long, low ridges. In the summer, with the leaves in full bloom, Jonathan could barely see his neighbors to the right and left through all the thin trees with their leafy branches. They had a yard that seemed forever choked with clover and crabgrass, a small patio with a firepit in the back, and a two-car garage that was barely large enough to actually house two cars. He and Mary purchased the property after learning she was pregnant, and, shortly after Jacob was born, they moved into a newly constructed house. The neighborhood was set off from Route 4 – which had the distinction of actually bringing people to shopping centers – and shaped like a horseshoe with a few cross streets. The only cars that traveled the neighborhood roads belonged to those who lived in its confines – blue-collar people who were striving for middle class and almost pulling it off, men who wore work boots and women who
