She had joined the Service after UNH, seeking something difficult and pure. She went through basic agent’s school at Glynco, Georgia, which was supposed to be like boot camp, calisthenics in the dawn, running by platoons while the DIs scream at you, sit-ups till you throw up, that whole aesthetic. The other recruits at Glynco were a mix of law school dropouts, recent Army dischargees, the kids of Secret Service dads, and backwoods deputies who wanted to be feds. They had PT every morning, classes until lunch, PT and more classes until five, evening meal and study hall until lights-out in the dorm. Everybody would be aching from the day, but Vi would bounce a basketball over to the gym and shoot around alone, trying to burn off enough energy to sleep. Vi graduated seventh in a class of twenty-seven, and was sent to New York station for a Crim Division tour.
Vi stood on the court behind the beach, the basketball tucked under her arm.
She kicked her sandals off, laid her shades in one of them. She juked left, took a shot, head-faked, took a fall-away, sundress flying, bare feet slapping on the asphalt. She clanged three balls and aired the rest — her timing was for shit. She walked to center court, a white circle faded by the sun. The court was hot where it was black, but cool enough to stand on in the circle.
It was time to face Evelyn and Jens. Vi bounced the ball, hard dribbling. It was comforting, the timing and the smooth against her palm, again, again, the sound that everybody knows, basketball on asphalt, a rubberized cry, sprain, sprain, sprain.
It was hard for Vi to think of Jens as an adult, as a husband and a father, yet there he was on the lawn with his wife, Peta Boyle, and their son, Kai Boyle-Asplund.
“Vi,” said Jens as he hugged his sister on the lawn.
“Vi,” said Peta as they hugged. “I am so so sorry.”
Jens had married Peta Boyle, the rich mortician’s daughter, in the granite parish on the rotary downtown, a good match everybody thought. Jens, though a talented computer scientist, was scattered and erratic. Peta, an ambitious village realtor, was sturdy, warm, and sensible; she remembered birthdays, cried at sappy movies, and knew how to change the spark plugs in her car. The wedding had been Catholic to placate Peta’s family. Jens was a nothing, religiously, not even a systematic atheist, and Peta, a realtor at Moss Properties in Portsmouth, went to mass at Easter for the choir. Because they didn’t care, Jens and Peta had been willing to be married by a priest — if this would keep the peace, why not? Their son, Kai, had been baptized for the same reason. Do you reject Satan? Yes, said Jens for Kai. Salt on the tongue, cross of oil on the forehead, water in the baby’s eyes — Jens sent Vi a funny e-mail later about how weird it was.
Vi went in the house with Jens, Peta, and their son. In the front hall, she saw her father’s tennis shoes parked under the radiator, smelled his pipe smoke in the drapes, the Wild Cherry Borkum Riff — it was the only wild thing about her dad.
She spent a weekend in New Hampshire that July, beetles zzzzzing in the trees, marshes blooming almost purple, Vi sitting Yankee-style shiva in the kitchen with her mother. The house seemed crowded the whole time. Jens was bustling around, being strong for everyone, annoying Vi no end. Peta did the cooking, coffee, sandwiches, lasagna, which, at least, was useful. The dogs were in, the dogs were out, the dogs were getting at the food. Kai teetered through the living room, or played with pots at Peta’s feet, then fell asleep upstairs on what had been Jens’ bed. Boyle the mortician, Peta’s somber father and Walter’s closest friend, was around the house, making arrangements for cremation, pursuant to the will. Other people stopped by or called, friends and neighbors, former neighbors, a rep from The Connecticut, Mullen from the arson squad (who ate a sandwich from the platter and told Vi that no one could read scorch marks like her father). In the kitchen, Evelyn kept telling the story of the morning Walter died — how she got up, saw him lying there, head under the pillow, how she let him sleep, assumed he was asleep, how she ran her errands, came home before lunch, saw him in the pillows, how she touched his shoulder, what she knew. Then the phone would ring, or someone else would stop by, and she would start telling it again.
Vi took frequent walks to get some air. Early Sunday morning, she took a long run through the sandy trails of the state forest. When she got back, Jens was in the basement, going through old boxes, Walter’s archives from The Connecticut. Jens went through the boxes slowly, file after file, reading them and tossing them into a large garbage bag.
He said, “It’s therapeutic. Want to help?”
Vi didn’t want to help, but she sat on the stairs and talked to Jens about his work as a software engineer. He wrote patches and utilities for a start-up in West Portsmouth called BigIf, a massive multiplayer war game on the Web.
Jens opened a folder — pictures of assorted fatal auto accidents from 1968 or so, smashed-up Cadillacs, big dented Impalas. “These are great,” said Jens. “Everyone looks drugged up but the troopers.” He tossed the file in the bag. “We’re going public soon. BigIf is, I mean.”
Vi shot water from a bottle down her throat. “That’s a good thing, right?”
“That’s a great thing, Vi. I’ll cash out and be comfortable for life. Have you played it, the game?”
Vi had logged on to BigIf one night in New York out of loyalty to Jens. The game — or the parts of it Vi saw — looked like a giant livid desert with little cartoon people moving through it. The cartoons represented humans, teenaged paid subscribers, coming in by modem from around the world. They moved in silent, shuffling processions or milled around a deep smoking crater. There were also monsters in the desert, man-sized rats, feral dogs, vicious, spitting cats, which popped up like the targets at a shooting gallery. When a monster appeared, the cartoons ran in a herky-jerky panic, a slow stampede across the screen. Some players stood their ground and died, others fought and killed the monsters in a gory spectacle. Or this, at least, was what Vi saw in the first twenty seconds.
“I didn’t get to see too much,” she said. “A rat ate me.”
Jens said, “Hamster. That monster model’s name is Hamsterman. He’s not a rat. I would never write a rat.”
“Did you write the hamster?”
“I wrote his software, sure, his decision trees. That’s my department — monster logic.”