Sebastian’s face was perfectly white. He looked like he might cry himself. The woman he had been walking with was the only one who stared after my mother. She had been living in the LaPierre house a week or so, and I don’t know if she knew, then, who Joseph was.
“Oh hell,” Nick said, putting his hand on Sebastian’s shoulder. Then, though it was a dumb and obvious thing to say, he said, “She’s just upset.”
Sebastian didn’t move. I went over to him and said, “Hey — it’s okay. I was thinking about him too.” I had been thinking that that night Nick would sleep alone in Joseph’s room.
We continued the walk down the beach. Nick took my arm and we walked a little ahead, and Sebastian and Carolyn Little trailed behind. Nick chattered to me as nervously as he had when he had started to tell me how he loved the woman he lived with, but ended up, instead of telling me anything about his life with Anita, talking about how some noises that cars make can indicate serious trouble. I strained to hear what Sebastian was saying to Carolyn Little, but there was a hollow sound all around us — the whole beach was echoing like a conch shell. It was that constant, almost inaudible noise — background noise — that distracted me. I turned to look at Sebastian. He was holding Carolyn Little’s arm, talking to her, and she was looking at the sand.
I had been thinking about Joseph all day, long before we got to New Hampshire. I had started to think of him when Nick touched my shoulder. Joseph used to do that when I was falling asleep and he still wanted my attention. I could not stay awake long when I went to bed, but once he began his storytelling he would be energized. If I wouldn’t listen to him, he at least wanted me to be awake. “Look at the stars tonight,” he’d say, or he’d show me, in winter, sites for the snow fort we could build in the morning. More than once I fell asleep in the middle of one of his stories, and he nudged me awake.
I don’t know if it took him a long while to die, or if he died suddenly. I don’t know the name of the place he died in, or if it had a name. Although there were many random facts in the letter, the questions I really wanted answered were not answered.
I went back to the house ahead of the others, leaving Sebastian and Nick sitting on the dock after Carolyn Little went home. As I had expected, my mother was there, in the kitchen, drinking coffee. She was hanging her head and I expected her — as she had done in the past — to make me feel worse by apologizing for having made a scene. She did not say anything for a minute, and then she said, “You know what I hope? I hope that when he was over there he spent all his money on dope and laid every whore in Saigon.”
She looked up. It was a challenging look, but she didn’t mean to challenge me. “I didn’t even have the courage to tell him, and you did. I heard you telling him, and I should have told him too—‘Go to Canada.’ ” She said “Canada” with the reverence a minister would use pronouncing the word “heaven.”
“At least I hope he went crazy over there and did whatever the hell he wanted.” This time she just looked at me sadly. We both knew he was not the kind to storm through Vietnam. More likely, he would sit and listen to the radio. When songs by any of the people on the list his friend sent us came on the radio, my day was ruined. All the lyrics took on horrible, ironic meanings.
“And your father’s great grief — all I get are ‘remember when’ letters from Mexico. They weren’t even close. Joseph and I weren’t very close either. You two were.” She looked up again, no real expression on her face, just a person stating facts. “It was mean of me to yell at Sebastian,” she said.
“Don’t stay in here sulking,” I said.
We sat there for a while, and then she pushed the coffee cup away and went out. I imagine she went to the dock. I got up and went to the bookcase and took down the cookbook. The letter from Vietnam was still in it. I already knew it by heart, so I just looked to reassure myself that the letter was where I had put it. It was strange that she had never asked where the letter was. Strange, too, that she cursed when she got a letter from my father (most of the letters, inevitably, maudlin with memories of Joseph) but kept all of them in a basket on her dresser.
When I went outside, Nick and Sebastian were gone, and she was sitting on the dock where I had left them. She was sitting there on the dock just where Joseph and I had sat after our argument about his going to Canada. As we sat there, I was already sure that if he went, he would be killed. In the kitchen, he had argued against going to Canada because it was dishonorable. On the dock, I began to understand the real reason: it wasn’t a matter of principle, but simply that he thought he wouldn’t die; he thought he was indestructible. He really thought that he would always be in control, that he would always be the storyteller. I don’t think I said to him in so many words that I knew he was going to die, or that he actually said he knew he was going to live, but that’s what our conversation was about. He didn’t understand how bad, and how pointless, things were in Vietnam. No matter what I said, his attention didn’t focus on it, and I couldn’t make him understand.
I went out to the dock, where my mother was, and crouched there. A bird flew overhead. There was a nice mossy smell the breeze was blowing in off the water.
“Know where Nick and Sebastian went?” I said.
“Look at his poor boat,” she said.
I looked down. The water was slopping against it, the breeze blowing ripples of water toward shore. The water made a slapping sound: put-put.
“I just can’t snap out of it,” she said.
I leaned over and kissed her cheek. Nick did that most mornings when it was time for me to wake up. Joseph had nudged me awake with his hand, squeezed my shoulder in the dark. It was nicer than any kiss.
• • •
I went to bed early and slept for a little while, then woke up. I put on an old lacy robe that belonged to my mother or grandmother, and went out of the room. The clock in the kitchen said one-thirty. Everyone had gone to bed. Going back to the bedroom, I saw the small lamp on and detoured to the living room. Sebastian hadn’t gone home. He was stretched on the sofa, but not sleeping. There was a bottle and a glass on the table. “Howdy,” he said quietly. My mother was asleep — or at least she was in her room in the dark. Her bedroom opened onto the living room. The door was cracked open a few inches. I waved to Sebastian and went back to my room. I looked at all the books that I couldn’t remember having read, and at the pictures I no longer found attractive: a Picasso poster of a hand holding flowers, a drawing of lobstermen casting their nets, done by a boy who had had a crush on me in high school.
Joseph would have interrupted the silence with a story. I went out of the room and passed by Sebastian in the living room without looking in, and climbed the stairs to the attic.
It smelled the way it always smelled. The two beds were still there. When I moved out, they left that bed in place. Nick was sleeping in the far bed. Without knowing who had slept where, he had chosen Joseph’s bed. Nick had slept upstairs the other time he came to the house, but that time I hadn’t gone upstairs to see where he slept. In fact, I hadn’t been above the first floor in a long time. With the exposed beams and the low, triangle-shaped window, it still looked snug, like some room in a storybook.
“What are you doing here?” Nick whispered.
I went over to his bed. The room seemed to exist in a time warp; I could imagine stepping on one of Joseph’s socks.
“She’ll hear you,” Nick said. He reached out his hand from under the covers. He had been asleep.
I sat there and held his hand. Then I lay on the bed. Finally, I got under the covers.
“We shouldn’t upset her any more today,” he said.