Albert had cultivated the ability to become Tad. That is, he could imagine himself in Tad’s body, his lips on the boy’s, the fear and anguish in his massive chest. He could inhabit in the same way, as in a dream, Tracy, Sydney, John, Fil, her husband, Skinner, their daughter, Beatrice. He could inhabit the boy’s mother. The boy. The boy, mesmerized by the strange skin of the water, the winking reflection of the sun. A horsefly riding the surface, and his frustration at not being able to reach the insect as it flicked its wings, his arm stretching, knees on rough concrete, the enclosure of the water as he tipped in and sank. The weird, not-unbeautiful moment of descent. Then the larynx snapping shut, the heart still beating normally, the brain, unperturbed, dawdling for a few more seconds. Then panic, a child’s panic, which is not fear of death but fear of separation from his mother, and he cries Mama, the water flooding into the esophagus, forcing the larynx into spasm, the trachea sealing off, oxygen level dwindling, the painful astringency of inhaling chlorinated water, the larynx pulling down yet more water, great gulps of water, the little hands seeking purchase, grasping at the cool liquid, thrashing, finding nothing to hold on to but water until it is over, his life is over. The boy hangs there, suspended above the bottom of the pool, and no one sees him. His blond hair spreads in a corona around his head. The surface of the water is smooth. The spirit leaves the body, and the body becomes a place as serene as deep space, and as cold and airless, a place of acute absence.
For Albert, it was a sharper punishment to plunge into the memory chest of the grieving mother, to sit in the discord of her inner sanctum, to hear nothing but the accumulated voices of the world’s every farewell echoing off the walls. At battlefronts, on train platforms, beneath hotel awnings, in airports, at prison gates, at hospital beds, across courtrooms, at gravesides. They resonated endlessly in languages known and unknown, Xhosa mixing with Giligudi, an Irish fisherman’s watery cry as he is pulled to the bottom of the North Atlantic, the Chinese miner’s to his family, scribbled on a cigarette package after the cave-in, the slave’s grievous, unspoken farewell to her children at the auction block. And not all tragedies. In balance and provocation, the tossed-off seeya as a roommate leaves for class, a see-you-in-a-minute run to the corner for cigarettes and milk, the paratrooper’s truncated Geroniii— as he hurtles away from the jumpmaster.
They mock her, Albert thinks, these farewells, all of them. It’s torture. There’s a keening beneath the collective din, and that’s her voice. She, after all, could not say farewell, because the boy never left. He was right there, wasn’t he, right beside her chair, arranging his stuffed animals in a row, speaking through them the concerns of his day. But no, he was not there. She’d failed to watch over her own son. Until the day of her own death she will call out that animal wail. Awake, asleep, she will never be without the sense that she’s left it undone, that the most essential part of herself is lost, drifting, stranded on an ice floe carried out to sea on the tide. A cliché? They exist to make horrors like this comprehensible.
Bronwyn was a good girl, trustworthy, and lost in the way of all Californians who abandoned that coast’s optimism for the great soldiering-on of the granite-willed East. She and John had gotten married in July 1968. She had a broad, substantial face that Albert liked. He approved of her shapely body, sharp mind, the unadorned beauty that wasn’t exactly innocence, but related. He saw what attracted John—the same thing that had attracted him to Sydney. Neither of them put up with any bullshit, and he could see that Bron kept John in check. He was erratic, an easy mark for provocateurs, a peculiar and dangerous characteristic for a New Yorker to possess. When introduced to Bron, Albert had recognized the iron will immediately. They carry it in their shoulders, women like that. There was a drunkard father back in California, or a dead mother, a brood left to fend for itself, something along those lines, and Bron would have been their protector. As it turned out, neither death nor drink had shaped the girl—it was the other thing, success, a father who had worked hard, provided for his family, prospered, and a mother who commanded equal respect, and exuded a sunniness that seemed to endlessly billow up from within her. Albert was as stupidly misled about his daughter-in-law as he was about his own son. It was a father-in-law’s hopeless enchantment with the girl who he feels is at least in part his own, part daughter, part lover, and who, in turn, should adore him back.
Her family was physically imposing. That was what you noticed first. When Albert and Sydney had taken the Breckenridges up on their offer to spend Christmas at their home on the Russian River, Albert felt as though he’d walked into a hallucination. The house, built from the ground up by Bron’s father and her brothers, was
