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  That night as I parked my car and sat outside my house, I thought about how distant Rajiv and I had become. How much I’d wanted everything to be different. He was a gifted boy. Bold in ways I once was. I was immensely proud of him, so much that I imagined he’d written something he might not yet be capable of. Perhaps it was my vanity that screwed all of this up. It would be untrue to say that I never looked at Rachel in the wrong way. And even now a part of me hopes that I’ll see her in her towel leaving the shower, her damp hair falling lushly down her back. It reminds me of a period in my life in which I wouldn’t have cared what my own father said or thought. I would have done what I wanted in the name of love.

  Howling at the Moon

  We sat on the screened-in porch of my new family’s summerhouse, passing bottles of red wine and telling death stories. I was twelve and wasn’t drinking.

  Charles had a friend whose cousin lost his ear to a wolf, then froze in a blizzard. He’d been spring camping on Mount Hood in Oregon and hadn’t planned for snow.

  “He was iced solid . . . curled up like a fetus,” Charles said. “Took them four days to find him. He bandaged that poor ear to his head with a handkerchief and duct tape.”

  “I know that mountain. You can’t trust it,” Walt said. He was puffy and pale in the candlelight and expertly rolled his own cigarette as he spoke. Behind him a hundred yards away, I saw a single lit window in the house’s back wing where I guessed my mother and their father, Norman, were having a late supper alone, away from us.

  Deborah said when she was ten, she watched camp counselors pull a drowned girl from a lake in Switzerland. The girl had slipped out of sight, away from the roped-in swimming area, and she’d hit her head against a rock.

  “They gave her mouth-to-mouth, but looking at her you can tell she was gone,” Deborah said. She dipped her finger into a pool of wax at the candle’s base and then let the hot liquid slide across her palm before hardening.

  “That was the only dead body I ever saw,” she said, and she spoke toward me. Everyone else, I guessed, had heard this before. “I kept thinking ‘That could have been me.’ Absolutely.”

  Walt said he saw a football player sever his spine during a game; the boy never heard the linebacker behind him. And on Nan’s way onto a train in Calcutta, she said, she nearly tripped over a corpse before realizing what it was.

  At my turn, I told them about watching my brother die in a car accident. He was thirteen years old at the time and I was nine.

  “My mother was driving home from the lake and I kicked a pile of tennis balls around her seat to the front,” I said. “They rolled beneath her feet and she smashed the car.”

  I told them more, about the ride to the hospital, and the waiting: the dismal yellow waiting room, my mother on a separate bench, rubbing her hands over her pant legs rocking forward and back, lips moving, blaming me, I thought. She’s never stated this, but even now, twenty-two years later, I can’t see how she wouldn’t want to shift the burden. How she wouldn’t tell herself she was driving safely and nothing would have happened had I followed the car rules. I would understand that.

  “Shit, Lou,” Walt said. “No one told us. No one said a thing.”

  They stared over as if a person had taken my place on the porch. Nan reached her arm around me and held me tight. No one asked me anything else.

  That was the summer Mother and Norman had decided to test us all as a family: four weeks in Norman’s summer home off the coast of Maine. He and my mother weren’t officially engaged, but the subject was in the air.

  My new brothers and sisters were in college or older; I didn’t know their ages exactly, but again and again I’d heard about their lives. In the stories my mother told, they soared untethered, like people in magazines or movies. They weren’t like anyone I knew. They’d driven motorcycles in foreign countries, won grants and awards, performed onstage or in the living rooms of glamorous apartments. My mother saved newspaper clippings about them. “They’re all creative,” she said on the trip from Auburn, New York, to Maine. She spoke as though they were already hers.

  “Charles is the painter. Remember?” she said. “He had a show of some sort in SoHo? I told you about it. Nan’s the sculptor; Walt plays in the jazz band. Deborah is the actress; she’s been in two films.”

  Deborah had a small role in a movie we saw last Christmas, my mother said. The closest one to my age, Lauren, was studying in France. As an artist, she hadn’t defined herself, my mother said, “But she writes nicely. Like you, she’s got a good sense for people.”

  In Lauren’s room, where they put me, there were piles of letters, diaries, and typed short stories, “The One-Eyed Jack,” “Lantern Night,” “Late Show,” “The Tall Man with the Purple Felt Hat.” Mostly, though, there were pictures. They lined shelves, covered corkboard: collages of the family in faded beachwear or thick, wooly sweaters, heads gazing forward over their folded arms, wild hair whipping back in the wind, on the boats, on the beaches, groups of them touring museums, walking narrow city streets, picking mussels in the fog. I tried to imagine my mother and me in those scenes on the walls. I felt as if something had passed us by.

  Lauren’s bedcovers were white goose down and the floors were dark lacquered wood. On the blue night table was a photo album with handwritten captions about people. “Me and Nan in Paris,” “Charles after the ski trip . . .” “Bongs Away!”

  When the house was empty, I dug around like an archaeologist. I raked over the CDs, the photo albums stacked in the corners, and flipped through the yearbooks, reading the inscriptions. On a bureau top there were pictures of Lauren in shorts and in a bathing suit, her legs tawny and long. It was strange to think of her as a relative; I looked at pictures of my new sister and I was hypnotized. It didn’t feel right and in many ways I was glad she wasn’t with us that month. I didn’t know how I would act. It’s a funny thing to meet a group of people older than you and be told that they are your family, you will live with them and not hate them or ignore them or fall in love with them. I stayed up late one night studying Lauren’s clothes and desk drawers and books. I found her diary and I read a few pages. What I read embarrassed me; it was about her and a boy in a field at night. I looked at her in a photograph and then at the boy in her album. I imagined them behind some trees in a darkened glen. I searched through her clothes for what she might have worn that night and settled on a thick gray sweatshirt, crossed oars on the chest, paint and grass stains flecked across the back. I threw it in my bag under my windbreaker.

  For a while after my brother, Tim, died, my mother slept in his room, in his bed with the Buffalo Bills sheets. She kept his posters and papers and model warplanes intact. About a year later she moved back into her own bedroom and began throwing those things out. She swept through the house like a wind, cleaning, clearing, and rearranging. She said crisis was something you could turn around, you could make something positive out of it.

  One time, while I was asleep, she put all our photo albums and my brother’s things in cardboard crates and carried them to the curb. She pulled the curtains from the window in his room, so sun would shine in always. She made the room her den. She went back to school for her master’s degree. She rode her bike to class and carried her book bag over her shoulders. In addition she took yoga, then tai chi. Early mornings when I looked out the window, I could see my mother crouching low, arms leveling out as if sliding across an imperceptible surface. She’d spend hours in the attic sculpting naked figurines, and then she painted our house with the same energy, inside and out.

  When Tim and I were little, my mother forced her way into a group of fathers who organized Scout trips and fishing weekends. “I’m their father and their mother,” she said. She took Tim and me to football games and karate movies and professional wrestling and she feigned interest until we told her we didn’t like them, and then she found other things for us to do. We quit Scouts and went on our own trips. My mother consulted a field guidebook that showed how
to coax a fire, how to pick edible berries and avoid the poisonous ones.

  One time, under the full moon, she taught us how to howl like wolves. We’d pitched camp illegally at a lakeside summer camp a half hour outside of town, but the season had ended and there were no cars parked in the spaces behind the cabins or at the foot of the slate gray mess hall.

  “Point your lips straight out like this,” she said, and from the side she looked, I remember, like a fish. “Oooooooo,” we moaned.

  “That’s it. Now like someone’s dropped a box on your foot. Oowwww! Wooooooooooo. Put them together.”

  “Jeez. We know what a howl sounds like,” Tim said. I swung my fist down hard on his foot and he elbowed me harder in the arm. “Oowwww,” we both yelled.

  And my mother answered, “Wooooooooooo.”

  Long after my mother went to sleep, we didn’t let up. We howled for hours until our throats were hoarse and our eyes burned for want of sleep. Tim’s howl was loudest and sounded like a moose call. Our joke was that there were moose heading across the lake from Canada because of Tim’s howl.

  After Tim died, I had a dream we were camping, the three of us crammed into our tent along the lake. We’d zip the sleeping bags together, and our heads lay in a line, like bowling balls on a rack. We glanced over at one another or stared straight up at the roof of the tent, listening for bears or moose or a wolf. We heard them and saw their shadows run along the outside of the tent. They whined and growled and they poked shapes into the pea green fabric. But we kept them out with our voices. When I awoke once from that dream, I walked the house for signs of him. I stepped into his room and saw my mother there and we looked at each other with the same face of disappointment and I knew that she’d heard him in my steps, or seen him in the shadows I threw on the walls before I walked through the door.

  Two winters after the accident, my mother took cross-country ski lessons. She saved her money and went for a ski weekend in Stowe, Vermont, with four of her classmates. They stayed at the von Trapp family lodge, the place the Sound of Music family moved to, and it was there that she met Norman.

  He came to our house six or seven times after that for weekends or short vacations, but he never seemed at ease. Ours is a depressed area even by upstate standards. He made promises to us when he walked through the living and dining room—about couches and tables he’d buy for us, and trips he’d take us on. He praised the simplicity of our town but he meant something else. He meant it was no place to live.

  The day we arrived in Maine, my mother and Norman disappeared into what they called the adult house, really just a separate wing with its own entryway. I saw them for short snatches in the mornings or before I went to sleep, but during the first two weeks I think I had only one meal with my mother. She and Norman took long trips on Norman’s boat and went out for dinner. Sometimes I’d run into my mother in the morning on a walk and we’d look at each other surprised, like former neighbors glancing at each other across a restaurant floor, friends that had neglected to call each other or stay in touch. She would say, “I’m sorry, but Norman and I need this time together, to get to know each other. It’s very important.”

  Everyone had a routine. Charles set his easel up in the living room at sunrise and painted watercolors of schooners, yachts, and lobster skiffs. He blasted the Beastie Boys while he worked, and by one he’d finished. Walt squalled sax for hours in his room, but never before noon. His eyes were vein red and his room smelled like cigarettes. He taught me how to play a few notes but his mouthpiece tasted ashy, and my stomach pitched. Around sunset, Deborah read scripts in the big back bedroom with the light violet walls. I could hear her alter her voice, crying, laughing, or rattling in anger. Twice I read parts with her and watched her forget for a while who I was. Nan stripped furniture on the porch in those late hours and sometimes when I helped her we could hear Deborah soliloquizing through the window.

  If I was ever noticeably alone for too long, someone would sit beside me. They took turns taking me for walks.

  One morning, when I’d been watching him paint, helping him mix colors and clean his brushes, Charles told me I was on an island and I needed a pair of big shorts. The ones I was wearing were too tight. He ran with me down the upstairs hall to a closet piled high with old clothes. He dug his head in like a wino leaning into a Dumpster and he handed me two pairs of shorts.

  “Try these on,” he said.

  I squeezed out of the shorts I had on and into the baggy pair he’d handed me. The legs were down almost to my knees and spread out like sails. The waist was loose, but Charles pulled a strap on the side and it contracted. He smiled. They were just like his.

  “We’ve got tons more where that came from,” he said, and I could see it was true. There were old jerseys, lacrosse shirts, rugby sweaters, clothes I’d seen in a picture on Lauren’s walls.

  “I’ve got T-shirts,” I said. “I don’t need any more.” I had one of Lauren’s on that said CALIFORNIA with a picture of a wave.

  “Well, they’re here if you want them. They’re right in the closet there and you can take whatever you want.”

  When he left, I picked out an old gray shirt that said PROPERTY OF DARTMOUTH ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT. I liked the idea of belonging to an athletic department. It seemed like an honor, a sign you’d caught the passes or done the required push-ups. I carried the shirt and shorts to Lauren’s room and slipped them into my bag.

  I was in the bathroom washing my face when I heard muffled voices from Nan and Deborah’s room, then laughs, a room full of laughs. Everyone was in that room. I walked to the doorway.

  Walt and Deborah were under the covers in one bed, Nan was in the other fixing a cassette tape with a pencil. There were bags of Oreos and bottles of pop strewn about and serious books, opened on their spines, then abandoned. A music box sat on the nightstand surrounded by tapes separated from their cases. Charles was flitting about the room imitating someone.

  I watched this scene for a while and for a moment I imagined Tim telling the story. He would be near Charles’s age and I would be sitting there listening.

  The woman Charles mimicked was someone he’d waited on the night before, someone he spilled wine on. She wanted Charles fired. She told him she would write a letter to the owner of the restaurant about Charles’s ineptitude.

  “Oh, there’s nothing you can do now. Not now,” he said in a mock falsetto.

  Charles said he offered to buy a new shirt and to give the couple their meal on the house. The woman said that wasn’t the point. The shirt was from Indonesia and it was irreplaceable.

  He told the woman to try cold water and salt. “Oh, what’s the use?” she said. “What the hell is the use?”

  I saw Nan glance at me. I felt I was peering through someone’s window.

  “How long have you been there, Lou?” she said. Then everyone looked at me.

  “Just a couple of seconds.”

  “Well, get your butt in here,” Walt said. “We need some new discourse. The air’s getting stale in here.” He nodded his head toward Charles.

  I felt this was a cue for me to speak, to say something interesting or fresh, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. I felt disconnected. The fog outside was so thick I could imagine it rolling into the house, filling it completely like cotton in a bottle.

  “Crummy day out, huh?” I said.

  “I love days like this,” Nan said. “These are my favorite days.”

  “I’m with you, Lou,” Walt said. “I hate this shit. Look out there. You can’t see ten feet.”

  “Why do you need to?” Nan asked. “For a few days the world is a ten-foot bubble in front of you.”

  I thought about walking around the island in a bubble, passing cars for a moment, then horses and dogs. I’d walk to the other side to the beach, seeing the sand only when it sprung from between my bare toes.

  “Are you worried about what’s going to happen to you?” Deborah asked.

  I said, “Yes, I am wo
rried.”

  Deborah laughed and then hushed herself. “I’m sorry, Lou,” she said. “I was asking Charles.”

  That night I sat up late reading Lauren’s diary, the white quilt covering me in the cool damp room. I was beyond the sex scene to the day after and Lauren was filled with regret and angst. The boy had called her three times and she wouldn’t come to the phone. Everyone was to tell the guy she was out, or sleeping or gone for a run. She was confused by her feelings. She said she wanted to die or curl away for a month or so. She lay for hours in bed—this bed, under these covers, and sipped from a bottle of Bénédictine. I felt as though she was confessing to me, that it was just the two of us up late talking in her room and no one else could hear. I would tell her things. I would tell her about the accident. About Tim and my mother.

  He was in eighth grade when he died. I was in fourth. To this day I do not remember resenting him, or envying him, or whispering beneath my breath or to anyone else that I wanted him killed. I believed I kicked the balls to spite my mother although I cannot remember why. That she would slip harder onto the accelerator and lose her steering, that she would brake too hard so the car would whir, like a loosed top, off the road into a tree, were not things I could have imagined. That I would see my brother twisted ghastly, suspended like a night-blinded bird in broken glass, was something I could not have dreamed.

  My father had been gone since I was three, dead of a heart attack. But my mother said the sadness that she felt then was nothing like what she felt when Tim died.

  For a few months we both saw counselors but we did not talk about that day or my brother. It was as though we had lost our history, as if time started the day after the crash. The counselor said we should have had a mourning period together, a time in which we could just sit and think of Tim and be sad. It was absolutely the healthiest thing to do, he said, to vocalize, to mourn out loud. It never came about.