The reality of Wesley’s death hadn’t really hit him until he got to the house, walked across the lawn, and went inside. Then, although he hadn’t seen Wesley for years, and had never been to the house, Nick felt that Ena didn’t belong there, and that Wesley was very far away.
Ena had been waiting for them, and the house had been burning with light — hard to see from the highway, she had told Benton on the phone — but inside there was a horrible pall over everything, in spite of the brightness. He had not been able to get to sleep, and when he had slept, he had dreamed about the gigantic, bent sunflowers. Wesley was dead.
The movie they had shown on the plane, which they stared at but did not listen to, had a scene in it of a car chase through San Francisco, with Orientals smiling in the back seat of a speeding car and waving little American flags. It did not seem possible that such a thing could be happening if Wesley was really dead.
Ena was at the house because she thought that assembling there was a tribute to Wesley — no matter that in the six months he’d lived there he never invited the family to his house, and that the things they saw there now made Wesley more of an enigma And they had already begun to take his things. They obviously felt guilty or embarrassed about it, because when the three of them came in the night before, people began to confess: Elizabeth had taken Wesley’s Rapidograph, for Jason; for herself she had taken a dome-shaped paperweight, a souvenir of Texas with a longhorn cow facing down a cowboy with a lasso underwater, in a tableau that would fill with snow when the dome was shaken; Uncle Cal had taken a picture of Ena as a schoolgirl, in a heart-shaped frame. Ena had taken a keyring with three keys on it from Wesley’s night table. She did not know what locks the keys fit, because she had tried them on everything in the house with no luck, but they were small antique keys and she wanted to get a chain for them and wear them as a necklace. Wesley was dead, drowned in Lake Champlain, two life vests floating near where the boat capsized, no explanation.
Benton came out of the house. It was a cold morning, and it was early; Nick did not feel too cold because he had found a jacket on a hook by the back door — Wesley’s, no doubt — and put it on. Benton, in the black velvet jacket, hugged his arms in front of him.
“I just realized that I dragged you here from California,” Benton said. “What are you doing out here?”
“I couldn’t sleep. I came out to look around.”
“What did you find?”
“Pumpkins still growing in his garden.”
At the back of the lawn, past a tangle of leafless berry bushes, was a fallen-down chicken coop. The roof barely cleared their heads. There was a cement floor, and most of the walls were still standing, but they were caving in, or missing boards.
“Long time since this was in operation,” Benton said.
“Imagine Wesley out in the country,” Nick said.
Most of the back wall was missing from the coop. When they came to the end, Nick jumped down, about five feet, to the ground, and Benton jumped behind him. The woods were covered with damp leaves, thickly layered.
“Although the shape that coop was in, I guess he was hardly the gentleman farmer,” Benton said. “What do you think about the way Ena’s acting?”
“Ena’s edgy.”
“She is,” Benton said. He pushed a branch out of his face; it was so brittle that it snapped. He used the piece of broken branch to poke at other branches. “I went into Jason’s bedroom and thought about kidnapping him. I didn’t even have the heart to wake him up to say hello.”
“What time was it when you came out?”
“Seven. Seven-thirty.”
They saw a white house to their left, just outside the woods, and turned back for Wesley’s house. Wind chimes were clinking from a tree beside the chicken coop — long green tubes hitting together.
Nick hadn’t seen the chimes when he walked back to the chicken coop earlier. They reminded him of the strange graveyard he and Wesley and Benton had gone through when they were in college and Wesley was a senior in high school, on a trip they took to see a friend who had moved to Charlemont, Massachusetts. It was Christmastime, after a snow, and Benton and Nick had been wearing high rubber boots. Wesley, as usual, had on his sneakers. They had sighted the snowy graveyard, and it had been somebody’s idea to walk through it. Wesley had been the first one out of the car, and he had also been the first to sight the broomstick slanted into the ground like a flagpole, with wind chimes hanging from the top of it. It was next to one of the tombstones. There was a deep path leading to it — someone had put it there earlier in the day. It looked crazy — a touch from Mardi Gras, nothing you would expect to see standing in a graveyard. The ground was frozen beneath the snow — the person had dug hard to put the broomstick in, and the chimes tinkled and clanked together in the wind. Wesley had photographed that, and also a tombstone with a larger-than-life dog stretched on top — a Borzoi, perhaps, or some odd cross — and the dog appeared to be looking toward a tree that cast a shadow. There was snow mounded on the dog’s head and back, and the tree branches it looked toward were weighted with snow.
“You know that picture Wesley took in the graveyard?” Nick said.
“The dog? The one you told him would make a fine Christmas card?”
Nick nodded yes. “You know what fascinates me about photographs? Did you ever notice the captions? Photographer gets a shot of a dwarf running out of a burning hotel and it’s labeled ‘New York: 1968.’ Or there’s a picture of two humpbacked girls on the back of a pony, and it says ‘Central Park: 1966.’ ”
“I remember those, too,” Benton said. “I wonder why he never showed them? Nobody else in this family is modest. Even Elizabeth tacks her drawings up alongside Jason’s.” Benton kicked some moss off his shoe. “It irritated the hell out of him that I’d put my camera on a tripod and wait for the right shot. Remember how he used to carry on about how phony that was?” Benton had stopped to look at some mint, sticking out between the rubble. “He idolized you,” Benton said.
“He’s dead and I work at Boulevard Records and handle complaints about chicken that doesn’t show up,” Nick said. “He didn’t idolize me.”
They were coming closer to the house, and the tinkling of the chimes was faint. They were walking by the pumpkin vines that wove across the ground in front of the tall black-green trees.
Nick was thinking of another one of Wesley’s photographs — one he had taken when he and Benton were still in college. The three of them had been in a booth in a restaurant in New Haven, on a Sunday, and Wesley had said, “Don’t move.” They were waiting for their order, and Nick’s hands were resting on the New York Times. The picture was pale gray and Nick had been absolutely astonished to see what Wesley had made his hands look like. One hand seemed to be clasping the other as though it was a strange hand. Both hands had been eerily beautiful, the newspaper out of focus beneath them — hands, suspended, with one cradling, or sheltering, the other. When Wesley showed him the photograph he had been so surprised that he couldn’t speak. Finally, having had time to think, he said something close to what he meant, but not exactly what he wanted to ask. “How did you get that softness?” he had asked Wesley, and Wesley had hesitated. Then he had said: “I developed it in Acufine.”
They went quietly into the house and stood by the heat grate in the kitchen. Nick took down a pan hanging from a nail in the beam over the stove and filled it with water for coffee. Then he sat on the kitchen table. The only real detail they knew of Wesley’s death was that the life vests had been floating near the boat. Ena had told them about it the night before. The life vests had stopped in time for Nick. She did not say anything about the color, but Nick knew as she talked that they were bright orange, and the water was gray and deep. One floated beside the boat, one farther off. He had to catch his breath when the image formed. He was as shocked as if he had been there when they recovered the body.