“No,” she said. “I’m calling my field office. We’ll need a cleaner.”
Let’s go back to your relationship with your sister. What was she like?” I asked as we passed Morgan Hall—the main administration building—on what had become our routine walking route across campus. The brick exterior of the building was chipped and scratched beneath the windows, as if something roaming the grounds at night had done its best to claw its way inside.
Jason offered me that half smile of his—ironic and sad, but not completely devoid of hope.
“She always looked out for me, protected me. It’s what I remember most about our relationship.”
“What sort of things did she protect you from?” I asked, and he was silent for a while, as if the conjuring of those memories required a force of will, a certain mental preparation.
“I tend to think of my early childhood as being fairly happy, although I wonder if I was just too young to know any different. It wasn’t until I was about fourteen, though, when things really started to change for me.”
We’d come to a stop near the east end of the perimeter. There was a small gate built into the fence here. From the looks of its rusted hinges and neglected condition, I guessed it had been padlocked shut for the past twenty years, maybe longer. I’d forgotten it was here, and it occurred to me now that so much of Menaker was like that. It lay quiet and unobtrusive, like a water moccasin sunning itself on the trunk of a fallen tree along the riverbank. There are parts of this place that you can almost forget exist until you stumble upon them and they strike out at you from the high grass. I glanced over at Jason, who was looking out past the fence at the tree line beyond, his expression lost in recollection. I said nothing, only waited for him to continue.
“Fourteen is a … turbulent age. I think we were all rediscovering girls back then. I still remember how strange and terrifying and wonderful that was. It was like we’d known them as one thing our whole lives but were encountering them for the first time as something other than what we’d established them to be. Part of it was their physical development. Their bodies were changing—maturing and becoming different from ours in obvious ways that could no longer be ignored. Part of it was our own hormones kicking in, awakening from over a decade of dormancy and demanding to be dealt with.
“I had this friend, Michael. I guess you could say he was my best friend. He lived a block over from me, used to stop by every day after school—you know: hang out, ride bikes, toss the football around, that sort of thing. We’d both been living in the same neighborhood since we were born, had grown up together. Our families sometimes even spent vacations with each other, renting out a beach house for a week or driving up to Pennsylvania for a few days of skiing. We were pretty close, and I valued that friendship—relied on it, I suppose—in a way that I didn’t fully understand or have the ability to articulate.”
The wind moved through his hair—tussled it almost—making him look much younger. I could imagine him as an adolescent.
“Our best friends are those we make in childhood,” he said, his eyes clearing for a moment as he looked over at me. “Do you ever notice that? You can live to be a hundred and meet all kinds of interesting characters along the way … but our best friends are the ones we had as children.”
He turned his face away from me, absently brushed a lock of dark hair back from his brow. “Michael and I were in the same grade at school and shared several classes—used to even copy each other’s homework from time to time.” He smiled. “There was this girl in our English class—Alexandra Cantrell, I still remember her name—who joined us midyear when her parents relocated to Maryland from somewhere in the Midwest, maybe North Dakota.” He paused for a moment, then continued. “Man, she was beautiful. Long blond hair that she liked to wear pulled back into a French braid; tall and thin with a slightly athletic build; light blue eyes that reminded me of the way the sky looked just before dawn. She was smart, too—easily one of the brightest students in our class—and had this sort of innocent kindness about her that made you just want to be around her, even if you were only in the periphery of her circle of friends.”
“She must have been pretty popular,” I commented, and he nodded.
“All the guys went crazy when she got there. Most of them were too chickenshit to do anything about it, but the way they used to talk about her …” He grinned. “The general consensus was that she was untouchable, out of our league, although I don’t recall wondering whose league she might’ve been in.”
“Girls like that,” I said, “spend a lot of Saturday nights at home without a date.”
“I know that now, but I didn’t back then.” He shrugged. “It didn’t matter, though. I was less intimidated by her popularity than most of my peers. I hung out with her because she was a nice person and fun to be around. Michael, too. The three of us spent a lot of time together that year.”
“So there was you, and your best friend, and this beautiful girl,” I summarized. It wasn’t difficult to see where this story was heading.
“Right,” he said. “There were other kids, of course. Like I said, lots of people liked to be around her. But for the life of me, I can’t remember who they were. In my mind, what it came down to was the three of us.”
“Three is an unstable number,” I commented, and he nodded his agreement.
“There was a pond close to our house that would freeze over in the wintertime. We used to go there to skate and play hockey. I remember telling Alex about it one day after school, and her eyes lit up like a Christmas tree. ‘Take me there,’ she said, and so I did, neither of us bothering to stop home on the way. I don’t know where Michael was at the time, why he wasn’t with us that day, but he wasn’t. We took the school bus, Alex getting off at my stop instead of hers, and we walked two blocks down the street and cut left through the woods to the pond. It had snowed lightly the night before, and we walked mostly in silence, listening to the soft crunch of wet powder beneath the soles of our shoes.
“I remember how, when we came to the edge, she dropped her book bag on the ground and just charged out onto the ice without testing it first, trusting that it was thick enough to hold her weight because I said it was. And of course I ran out after her, planting my feet when I was three-quarters of the way across and sliding the remaining distance to the opposite side. I could hear the ice cracking and settling beneath us—we both could—but she never paused, never cast an uncertain look down. I gathered a snowball and lobbed it out toward the center of the pond where she was standing. It missed her by a good two feet, but she grabbed her chest and fell to the ice like a wounded soldier, lying with her face turned up at the sky, her arms and legs fanned out as if she were in the midst of making a snow angel. I went back out onto the pond, dropping down on one hip and using my momentum to slide into her. We bumped and our bodies did a half turn on the ice, coming to rest with our heads together, our torsos angled slightly away from each other. Laughing, I started to get up, but she reached over and put her hand on my arm. ‘Wait,’ she said, and so I lay there in the quiet of the afternoon, looking up at the blanket of gray above us. I could hear the steady beat of my heart in my ears, and I wondered if it was loud enough for her to hear as well. I began to say something, but she said, ‘Shhh,’ and so we lay there together in silence as the wind moved through the trees and the ice buckled and cracked beneath us.
“That was when I started to wonder just how strong that ice was. There’d been a warm spell the week before, and I counted in my mind the number of days since then that the temperature had hovered around freezing. Five—no, four days, I realized, and I wondered if that was enough. I could feel the chill of the frozen surface biting through my jeans, imagined the paralyzing temperature of the water just beneath, and considered the thin barrier that lay between. In my mind, I could suddenly see it giving way, the two of us plunging downward, the startled expression on our faces as