Wynn and I have come from New York. Every year we borrow his mother’s car and drive from Hoboken to Virginia. We used to take the trip to spend the week of Nicholas’s birthday with him. Now we come to see Spence, who lives alone in the house. He is making jam early, so we can take jars back with us. He stays in the kitchen because he is depressed and does not really want to talk to us. He scolds the cat, curses when something goes wrong.
Wynn is in love. The girl he loves is twenty, or twenty-one. Twenty-two. When he told me (top down on the car, talking into the wind), I couldn’t understand half of what he was saying. There were enough facts to daze me; she had a name, she was one of his students, she had canceled her trip to Rome this summer. The day he told me about her, he brought it up twice; first in the car, later in Spence’s kitchen. “That was not my mother calling the other night to say she got the car tuned,” Wynn said, smashing his glass on the kitchen counter. I lifted his hand off the large shard of glass, touching his fingers as gently as I’d touch a cactus. When I steadied myself on the counter, a chip of glass nicked my thumb. The pain shot through my body and pulsed in my ribs. Wynn examined my hands; I examined his. A dust of fine glass coated our hands, gently touching, late at night, as we looked out the window at the moon shining on Spence’s lemon tree with its one lemon, too heavy to be growing on the slender branch. A jar of Lipton iced tea was next to the tub the lemon tree grew out of — a joke, put there by Wynn, to encourage it to bear more fruit.
Wynn is standing in the field across from the house, pacing, head down, the bored little boy grown up.
“When wasn’t he foolish?” Spence says, walking through the living room. “What kind of sense does it make to turn against him now for being a fool?”
“He calls it mid-life crisis, Spence, and he’s going to be thirty-two in September.”
“I know when his birthday is. You hint like this every year. Last year at the end of August you dropped it into conversation that the two of you were doing something or other to celebrate his birthday.”
“We went to one of those places where a machine shoots baseballs at you. His birthday present was ten dollars’ worth of balls pitched at him. I gave him a Red Sox cap. He lost it the same day.”
“How did he lose it?”
“We came out of a restaurant and a Doberman was tied by its leash to a stop sign, barking like mad — a very menacing dog. He tossed the cap, and it landed on the dog’s head. It was funny until he wanted to get it back, and he couldn’t go near it.”
“He’s one in a million. He deserves to have his birthday remembered. Call me later in the month and remind me.” Spence goes to the foot of the stairs. “Pammy,” he calls.
“Come up and kill something for me,” she says. The bed creaks, “Come kill a wasp on the bedpost. I hate to kill them, I hate the way they crunch.”
He walks back to the living room and gets a newspaper and rolls it into a tight tube, slaps it against the palm of his hand.
Wynn, in the field, is swinging a broken branch, batting hickory nuts and squinting into the sun.
Nicholas lived for almost a year, brain-damaged, before he died. Even before the accident, he liked the way things felt. He always watched shadows. He was the man looking to the side in Cartier-Bresson’s photograph, instead of putting his eye to the wall. He’d find pennies on the sidewalk when the rest of us walked down city streets obliviously, spot the chipped finger on a mannequin flawlessly dressed, sidestep the one piece of glass among shells scattered on the shoreline. It would really have taken something powerful to do him in. So that’s what happened: a drunk in a van, speeding, head-on, Nicholas out for a midnight ride without his helmet. Earlier in the day he’d assembled a crazy nest of treasures in the helmet, when he was babysitting the neighbors’ four-year-old daughter. Spence showed it to us — holding it forward as carefully as you’d hold a bomb, looking away the way you’d avoid looking at dead fish floating in a once nice aquarium, the way you’d look at an ugly scar, once the bandages had been removed, and want to lay the gauze back over it. While he was in the hospital, his fish tank overheated and all the black mollies died. The doctor unwound some of the bandages and the long brown curls had been shaved away, and there was a red scar down the side of his head that seemed as out of place as a line dividing a highway out west, a highway that nobody traveled anyway. It could have happened to any of us. We’d all ridden on the Harley, bodies pressed into his back, hair whipped across our faces. How were we going to feel ourselves again, without Nicholas? In the hospital, it was clear that the thin intravenous tube was not dripping life back into him — that was as farfetched as the idea that the too-thin branch of the lemon tree could grow one more piece of fruit. In the helmet had been dried chrysanthemums, half of a robin’s blue shell, a cat’s-eye marble, yellow twine, a sprig of grapes, a piece of a broken ruler. I remember Wynn actually jumping back when he saw what was inside. I stared at the strangeness such ordinary things had taken on. Wynn had been against his teaching me to ride his bike, but he had. He taught me to trust myself and not to settle for seeing things the same way. The lobster claw on a necklace he made me was funny and beautiful. I never felt the same way about lobsters or jewelry after that. “Psychologists have figured out that infants start to laugh when they’ve learned to be skeptical of danger,” Nicholas had said. Laughing on the back of his motorcycle. When he lowered the necklace over my head, rearranging it, fingers on my throat.
It is Nicholas’s birthday, and so far no one has mentioned it. Spence has made all the jam he can make from the fruit and berries and has gone to the store and returned with bags of flour to make bread. He brought the Daily Progress to Pammy, and she is reading it, on the side porch where there is no screening, drying her hair and stiffening when bees fly away from the Rose of Sharon bushes. Her new sandals are at the side of the chair. She has red toenails. She rubs the small pimples on her chin the way men finger their beards. I sit on the porch with her, catcher’s mitt on my lap, waiting for Wynn to get back from his walk so we can take turns pitching to each other.
“Did he tell you I was a drug addict? Is that why you hardly speak to me?” Pammy says. She is squinting at her toes. “I’m older than I look,” she says. “He says I’m twenty one, because I look so young. He doesn’t know when to let go of a joke, though. I don’t like to be introduced to people as some child prodigy.”
“What were you addicted to?” I say.
“Speed,” she says. “I had another life.” She has brought the bottle of polish with her, and begins brushing on a new layer of red, the fingers of her other hand stuck between her toes from underneath, separating them. “I don’t get the feeling you people had another life,” she says. “After all these years, I still feel funny when I’m around people who’ve never lived the way I have. It’s just snobbishness, I’m sure.”