“Does Kate ever come out here?” Lindsey asked. She took his hand as they walked across the grass toward the tombstone. Keith took her other hand.
“She says she doesn’t.” He was about to explain that Kate didn’t come to the grave because it made her think of Tim’s actual body buried a few feet under the ground, what it would look like decomposing. She had come out a few times and always wound up trying to imagine what would be left of him at that point. What the hands that used to stroke her face would look like. What would remain of the lips she had so often kissed. “She feels like she can talk to him just as well at home,” he said, and with his eyes told Lindsey he couldn’t explain fully with Keith there.
At the grave, Hank folded his hands together and lowered his eyes. Alongside him, Keith and Lindsey did the same. The site was marked by a marble stone engraved with his brother’s name and dates: Timothy Mason Walker, 1955–2002. In the sunlight, the gravestone glistened. With its rolling green lawns divided by lines of neatly kept graves, surrounded by a network of paths and gently curving blacktop roads, mountains in the background, the cemetery was a restful place, and Hank supposed that was mostly why he came, for the few minutes of serenity in a tranquil setting. In the beginning he would close his eyes and say a few words to Timmy, and he still did occasionally. Mostly now he just closed his eyes and was quiet for a minute or so.
Lindsey told Keith to wait for them in the car, and the boy walked away without a question. He put his hands in the pockets of his shorts, bobbed his shoulders, kicked playfully at something in the grass, and then took off, zigzagging around graves as if avoiding gunfire. “I’m sorry about last night,” she said. She looked up at Hank with an expression composed and sincere, as if she had carefully thought through what she meant to say. “I know I’ve been drinking too much,” she said, and then stopped, her composure suddenly weakening as her face went slack. A moment later she was silently crying, her eyes closed, the tears spilling out, her head turned away.
Hank put his arms around her to comfort her. He intended to say that if she felt her drinking was a problem she couldn’t handle on her own, they could try to get her some help, they could work on the problem together, but when he put his arms around her, she was rigid and ungiving. He let her loose and took a step back.
“We should just go,” she said, sounding for all the world like she was angry at him. She wiped the tears from her face with a tissue and, without giving him another look, started for the car.
He took a couple of quick steps after her, meaning to make her stop and explain herself; but when he remembered where he was, in public, at the cemetery, with Keith nearby, he stopped and turned back to face his brother’s grave. To anyone looking he would have seemed like an ordinary guy in a moment of contemplation. He waited there a long time, several minutes, until the heat and frustration boiled away and he was able to go back calmly to the car.
Three summers ago, the first summer after his brother had died, she had tried to kiss him on a sweltering evening under a black sky, out in the yard, with constant cicada night music in the weeds, in the fields. He was back from a long weekend fishing trip on the Jackson, and she’d missed him. In some ways it wasn’t a complicated thing, and in other ways she was still trying to figure it out three years later. He was standing in the grass with his hands clasped behind his neck looking out at empty fields. She had just put Keith to bed after the three of them had spent a half hour rocking on the wood swing, Hank with his arm around the child’s shoulder, she with a hand on his knee. She couldn’t remember what they had talked about, but it was an easy back-and-forth, probably about nothing at all. She could still feel it, she and Keith and Hank on that swing in the backyard on a beautiful summer night. Then she put Keith to bed and came back out to find Hank standing at the edge of the patio light. She came around him and put one hand on his chest and the other around his neck as she closed her eyes and tilted her head up, lifting her lips to his. He was supposed to wrap his arms around her back and pull her tightly to him and kiss her hard because he loved her, because he had missed her, and what she was starting there, by the way she touched him, by the way she offered herself to him, was supposed to end in the bedroom—but when she opened her eyes she saw him looking back at her as if she were a mystery to him. He lowered his head to hers and gave her a peck on the lips, followed by a friendly smile. That was all that happened. She let him loose and then she went in to bed and was asleep before he came in, whenever he came in and joined her.
The next day, nothing was said. The next day or ever, and yet her mind often wandered back to that moment. It was like a door had been slammed shut in her face. She could feel the back of his neck ungiving under her fingers, his closed mouth glancing against her lips, the hard little peck and the dismissive smile. The memory now brought tears to her eyes, and then Hank, in the present moment, in the car on the way to Kate’s with Keith quiet in the backseat, leaned over and whispered, “Can we please keep it together. Please,” as if they both somehow knew what they were talking about, when neither one of them, she’d guess, if someone put a gun to their heads, neither one of them could have found the words to say exactly what it was.
WHAT did people see when they saw her? Cute girl, jeans and a T—a mom in a few years driving her kids to soccer. But that was not Avery. Whomever she was, that was not it. Sometimes she thought that was what the tattoos and the piercings were about, all her girlfriends: a way to say, This is really more like who I am. Nipple ring: I like that I know I don’t look like it, but I do. Nose ring: I’m different than what you would otherwise have thought. There’s something strange and savage inside me. Indian tribal armband, Cecilia Brown. Snake coiled around the base of her spine, Leslie Weinstein. Sorority girls. Tiger clawing up her arm, scorpion on the back of her neck. Alice Wen, Ashley Caputo, intramural soccer team. Avery said, “Oh my God!” loudly when she saw Gabrielle’s tattoo. Gabrielle: quiet demure shy girl with an angry edge. Avery knew her from art history, a few other art courses; they were sort of friends. In the shower, after gym, Gabrielle pulled away her towel and there, below her hip bone, low, toward the inner thigh, a trompe l’oeil rip in her skin out of which black spiders poured. “Don’t ask,” she said, and rubbed at the spiders with her fingertips as if she might erase them that easily. “I was not in a healthy place,” she added and turned on the water and stepped under the shower with her head turned up to the cascading stream. That was all that was said. Avery didn’t ask. She knew “healthy place” meant healthy emotional place, and she had wondered ever since what might have happened, what might have been going on in Gabrielle’s life to make her choose that tattoo.
As she thought about Gabrielle, Avery buried her head under pillows to block out noise. Melanie was up, doing something in the kitchen. It sounded like Dee might be in there with her, and someone else. People kept knocking at the front door. She pushed her head into the mattress, struggled to hold on to the dullness of sleep, where her thoughts could bounce off the one thing she didn’t want to think about yet. Instead she thought about Gabrielle’s tattoo. She wondered what might have happened to Gabrielle. Avery had gone through her own terrible years from middle school, roughly, through sophomore year, when things had changed a little for the better. She remembered those two years, junior and senior year in high school, as a respite, a little halcyon period between the fury of her early teens—when she had talked to almost no one and lived with Nine Inch Nails and Marilyn Manson blaring through earbuds—and the blow of her father’s death. She saw her childhood as ending somewhere around age ten, when she could still remember her father putting her to bed at night, tucking her in, reading her a book until she was sleepy and then she would give him a hug, and tell him she would always love him, always, and he’d tell her the same, a little ritual between them. Sometime after that the anger came on and she wouldn’t let either of her parents into her room. They let her put a bolt on the door and she lived alone in that room behind that bolted door.
Something about Grant brought her back to those years, to thinking about those years, as if somehow he stirred up the same intense feelings, or as if those feelings had never gone away, really, she had only