Both cars are gone from the front of the hotel by the time I leave the building. The streets are empty and I walk down Little West 12th Street toward Washington. I only make it a few blocks before I start getting anxious and the magic air that glowed between the buildings just minutes before vanishes and is replaced with the stench of meat and the low grind of delivery trucks.
I make it up to 14th Street, and as I turn back down toward the hotel, a guy my age in a jogging suit and a trucker hat says hello. He is scruffy and cute and fit and looks like just the right thing to lift the descending gloom. He asks if I’ve been partying and I say yes, and before you know it he’s back in my room, getting high. We take off our shirts and kiss awhile. He isn’t there very long when my phone rings. I step away from the bed and after wrestling with several rounds of Memory Filled, New Text Rejected, I listen to the message. It’s from Malcolm, whom I have completely forgotten about and now hear as I would a long-ago friend from summer camp. He sounds serious and his message begins Hey, Bill, I really need to tell you something…
I hang up the phone and never hear the rest of that message because it is at that instant that someone knocks on the door. It is loud and urgent, and when I go to the door and look through the peephole, it’s Noah.
Where
Grammar schooclass="underline" Nurse’s bathroom. Bathroom is at the end of a hall, away from the nurse’s desk, has a locked door. Downside: it’s the bathroom the principal uses. Upside: no one is ever in the nurse’s office. Not even the nurse.
High schooclass="underline" Nurse’s bathroom. Dodgy at lunch. Second choice: boys’ room next to French class, on the second floor, in the old building. Almost always empty except in the morning before homeroom.
Home: Best is bathroom next to Dad’s den at the end of the house, on the other side of the front living and dining rooms (only when Dad is away). In spring, summer, and fall, during good weather, and when Dad is home: the woods. In winter or bad weather when Dad is home: kids’ bathroom upstairs, but hurry.
F
RIENDS’
H
OUSES
Derek’s: Basement bathroom.
Jenny’s: Behind the horse barn or basement bathroom.
Michael’s: Upstairs bathroom between Michael’s and Lisa’s rooms, above garage. If parents are gone or out in the barns, their bathroom at the far end of the house. If house is full, behind barn.
Adam’s: His father’s church across the street, downstairs bathroom.
Patrick’s: Abandoned bathroom downstairs, in the part of the house that’s been under construction for years.
Kenny’s: THE TOUGHEST HOUSE. Only two bathrooms, both near where people always are. Choose one and pray it’s over quickly.
B
EAR IN
M
IND
1. Try to use first-floor bathrooms (people below can hear you jumping).
2. Place rugs, bath mats, and towels in front of toilet to cushion footfalls.
3. If you have no choice but to use an upstairs bathroom: avoid bathrooms above rooms where people are, use extra towels, bath mats, and rugs.
4. Don’t overuse toilet paper when cleaning up. It clogs the toilet.
5. If there is a wall near the toilet, pee with your back to it.
Another Door
His family moves when he is seven. It is the summer between second and third grade and it is to a house at the end of a long driveway, near the end of a long road, and fifteen long minutes from a town in the hills of Connecticut that doesn’t have a stoplight. The house takes years to renovate, and his parents add bedrooms and porches and a living room and dining room with the most beautiful wood floors that never get used. Money runs out and the upstairs floors, where the bedrooms are, will never be carpeted or finished with proper flooring. They scatter carpet samples and throw rugs over the plywood to keep from getting splinters. From a low, rambling one-story farmhouse, it becomes a large gray Dutch Colonial, and sits at the top of a hill, one of Connecticut’s tallest, his father says, and there are forty acres of woods and field.
There is a new landscape of doors — another nurse’s bathroom at school, woods to disappear into, barns to go behind, different friends’ houses with various pitfalls and out-of-the-way places for jumping and panic and eventual relief.
His third-grade class is small. Twenty or so in the whole grade, ten or so in his class. He is there only a few months when a new kid shows up, a girl. She is small and blond and birdlike and instantly familiar — like a sister or a little mother. She has immediate authority over him, but it is gentle and hard to notice. He understands that she is finer and wiser but also that she is part of him. From the moment she joins his class, he defers to her, looks up to her, and even when he is ignoring her, he worries over her approval. Katherine.
She reads. She is always reading. She asks him what he thinks about the books they read for school. In fourth grade, a book about an immortal family and a girl who falls in love with one of its members after she stumbles upon him in the woods behind her house, drinking from a spring; in fifth grade, a big, sprawling allegorical series of books about a handful of English children who must battle the rise of evil in the world. Later, too soon, she leaves Brontë and Dickens in his cubbyhole. He devours them and worries about the words he doesn’t understand and loves them because she does and often sobs at their endings, because for a while he is away, out of time, somewhere he can’t remember himself, and it is a shock, always a sad shock, to come back. She talks about these books, and each time, with each book, she sees more and better and has words that dazzle him to transcribe what she sees. He will steal all those words and use them. To himself, in his reports for school, talking to adults, teachers. With each word he feels a click into a finer self, one more wrinkle smoothed. Her words have a kind of magic, like the garments that carry storybook characters out of their lives. A dress that changes a chimney-sweeping urchin into a princess, a shoe that returns her to the castle after it’s all been taken away. She uses the word desultory in the eighth grade, and to this very day he works it into conversation the way a swimming champion casually mentions his medals.
They find out their families moved to their small town from towns very close to each other. They find out that they were born in the same hospital, seven days apart. He was born first but he inhaled vomit into his lungs and remained in the nursery for a week longer, so they imagine there was some kind of connection forged in those early, fragile hours when parents didn’t exist, only nurses and other October souls screaming to life.
She agrees to kiss him in the eighth grade. It is the day before his thirteenth birthday, and a group, the same group as always — Kenny, Gwen, Adam, Michael, Jennifer — spend the day at the trampoline behind the health food store. Behind the trampoline are the woods, and a long, dark path where they go to make out. On that day she agrees to kiss him, to go down the path, into the woods. It has been discussed during the week and now it is that day, a Sunday, and they’re all there.
She stalls. Or hesitates. Or something. He can never remember. He is frustrated, and he and Kenny and a few others go over to the Nutmeg Pantry to buy candy and soda. She stays, and he’s worried that even when he gets back she’ll refuse to go down the path with him. The little gang leaves, they cross the shopping center parking lot and then Route 7. They buy whatever they buy and head back. He’s slow to keep up, worried that she’s changed her mind or chosen someone else. That he’ll be the only one who won’t go into the woods that day. Everyone crosses back across Route 7 and he trails behind. He makes it to the other side and then everything goes white.