Index of Refraction

Joe Casey

joe_casey_writer-mail@yahoo.com

|now

The trick is knowing how to grab it in just the right place. Put your hand into the stream right where you think it is, you’ll miss it.

—

So I’m slouched down behind the wheel of my own car, at the far end of the parking lot, feeling like I’m in the middle of doing something wrong. I feel like I’m stalking somebody. Maybe I am. Again I consider turning the car around and heading back home. But, no… I have to do this. I have to say goodbye.

Most everyone is already inside; a few late stragglers are being ushered into the chapel. I check the clock on the dashboard and decide that it’s probably safe now.

—

There’s no one in the lobby and I realize that I don’t know where to go. I’m surrounded by fusty, subdued décor at least twenty years out of fashion, and no signs. I start down one hallway. Out of the shadows appears a middle-aged man, dressed in a dark suit as they always are, as I am. He’s thin and handsome enough, with mousy brown hair, glasses, blandly innocuous face, hands clasped demurely behind his back, smiling politely, unctuously. He looks a question at me.

“Uh… Walker? Brian Walker?” I respond.

He smiles and nods. “Yes, sir. They’re right back here, sir.” I follow quietly behind him; the upholstered walls and thick carpet absorb all sound. “I believe they’ve just begun,” he adds. He stands at the doorway and extends one arm to invite me in.

It’s more crowded than I would have expected, but then again, Brian was a popular man. I recognize no one save for a group sitting up front: his parents, Martine, her brother, the children. I don’t know personal friend from client or coworker, and I realize that I know hardly anything about Brian’s life outside of the tight horizon of our friendship.

There are a few seats in the back row. I slip into one; again, I slouch down, not wishing to be recognized. Fortunately, the room is dimly lighted.

There is no casket; all of that business happened earlier, without me. There’s a lectern up front, and next to it are a few easels set up with a collection of pictures I can’t see very well because of the low light. A laptop computer is set up on a small table, and it appears to be cycling through a collection of images, presumably of Brian’s life.

There is a murmur of low conversation in the room that fades when another middle-aged man steps up to the lectern. I don’t realize who it is until something clicks; it’s Brian’s father Bradley, whom I have not seen for at least twenty years. I had forgotten how much of his father Brian had in him: the same graceful height and broad shoulders, the same thick shock of hair parted down the middle, the same long, bony, vaguely Nordic face that manages to be both homely and attractive at the same time. My mind manufactures an image of a much younger man, always smiling, always optimistic, always garrulous and full of life. The man before me looks only beaten and tired. Parents should never have to bury their children.

He looks down at the lectern, then back up. He stares at the crowd for a few seconds.

“I want to—” His voice comes out thick, choked up. He clears his throat, and starts again. “I want to thank you all for coming out this beautiful summer evening. I’m sorry it has to be for an occasion like this, but I do know that if Brian were here, he’d wonder why nobody saw fit to bring the fireworks and the keg.” There is scattered, quiet laughter; Brian’s Fourth of July parties are notorious. Mr. Walker smiles and continues. “I think I speak for all of us—especially Martine—when I say that I want this evening to be a celebration of Brian’s life, not his passing. My son—” He stops again and drops his head. More seconds pass; I can hear people beginning to weep. He lifts his head back up to face the crowd, and his voice quavers only slightly as he continues. “My son touched the lives of so many people—friends, family, clients. I’d like to think that wherever he went, whoever he spoke to, whatever he did, that he did not just well, but good. I’d like to think that my son was a force for good.” Mr. Walker pauses again, but keeps looking up at the crowd. “Really, this evening is for you. We’d like to invite anyone who wants to talk about Brian to come down and let others know what it meant for you to know Brian.”

He sits down. Another man rises to take his place: Martine’s brother Roger, a little heavier, a little older, a little grayer. He smiles at the crowd. “I, uh… I first met Brian when my baby sister brought home this tall, skinny blond kid from Kansas City during winter break in college in her freshman year. I think my parents got worried because they’d cooked only one turkey”—more quiet laughter interrupts him—”and not nearly enough potatoes. I—”

He stops. He squints as he stares into the crowd, and I realize that he’s looking in my direction. I must have unconsciously sat up to hear Mr. Walker speak; has Roger noticed me?

Roger picks back up with his story… something about how Brian kept hitting his head on the door frames of their parents’ Minnesota house. As soon as he sits back down, he leans over and whispers something into the ear of the person sitting next to him. When he finishes, the figure turns around; I can see that it’s Martine. She cranes her neck to peer back into the crowd, but I don’t think she can see me.

I’m tempted to get up to speak. I can almost guarantee that I’ve known Brian the longest of anyone in this room outside of his immediate family. I don’t know what would happen if I did.

Roger’s story impels others to get up and tell how they know Brian. Some are people he’d met in college—frat brothers, fellow law school graduates. Others are neighbors, co-workers, partners in his law firm.

—

After almost an hour, the trickle of people going up to speak slows. Mr. Walker gets back up to the podium.

“We’d like to keep the evening informal. You’re welcome to come up to the front and see the displays; a lot of you donated pictures of Brian for the scrapbook, and we got a lot of them scanned into a kind of slideshow on the computer. There’s refreshments… sorry, no keg and no fireworks. And, please, sign the guestbook if you haven’t already.”

Everyone begins to stand and migrate to the front. I’m tempted to duck out—I’ve seen all that I’ve wanted to see—but I hold back. I don’t want to leave; I didn’t get to go the funeral and I’m not ready to say goodbye to Brian. I don’t care if they get upset with me.

All they can do is ask me to leave. I don’t really think they’re going to call the police.

I move with the crowd up front. Martine and her family are stationed in a group next to the food, greeting guests, so I wander over to the easels and the computer. There are dozens of photographs arranged in a collage on the easels and more of them on the computer. I realize with a start that several of the photographs are ones that I was in, but in them I appear to have undergone a kind of electronic, Stalinistic purge. In some shots I am missing altogether; in others I can see only a vestige of an arm, or the edge of an ear.

I should be angry, but I just shake my head and smile in disbelief. I don’t know what happened in the week since Brian’s death, but somehow I’ve gone from pallbearer to non-person. I stand there for a few more seconds, letting the slideshow unreel before me.

Then, not quite sure how I know, I sense Martine beside me. Maybe it’s her perfume, maybe my peripheral vision is better than I know, maybe I’m psychic. Anyway, it’s her. I can hear her breath hissing quietly in and out of her nose. We stand side by side, not looking at each other.

“Tim,” she murmurs.

“Martine.”

“So, you came anyway. Even though I asked you not to.” A slight edge of anger, of contempt.

Two can play at that, I think. “You didn’t ask me. You had Roger do it. Over the phone.”

“Whatever. Why are you here, exactly?”

She has to be kidding. “To say goodbye to Brian. Why else?”

No response, just more breathing next to me. More images flash by: a shot of all of them in Aspen during winter break, Brian and Martine in Paris during their honeymoon, Martine shoving a piece of wedding cake into Brian’s laughing mouth. A shot of the three of us in my restaurant in Denver; in that one, only my left hand remains. A shot of Brian cradling their firstborn, Amelia, beaming at the camera, proud—and perhaps more than a little frightened—to be a father.

I decide to lob the first volley. I have to know. “Martine—what happened?”

“What do you mean?” An easy backhand return, cool and non-committal.

“You know what I mean. Why did you tell me not to come to the funeral?”

More silence, more breathing—maybe a bit more agitated. “Just a change of plans, Tim. Don’t worry about it.”

“Change of plans? That’s”—and I drop my voice; no sense drawing too much attention to our skirmish—“so much bullshit, and you know it. A change of plans is deciding who’s standing where. This really hurt, Martine. I didn’t know you had it in you. I think you owe me an explanation.”

Martine’s hand reaches out, begins tracing one of the pictures in the collage. Brian, Martine and a year-old Amelia, standing in the living room of a small, nicely decorated bungalow… which happens to be the house that my ex-partner Jasper and I once shared in Atlanta. I am not in the shot; I am the photographer. I wonder if she remembers where it was taken and by whom. Seeing Jasper again—even the Jasper of seven years ago—opens a small flood of memories and regrets.

I go on. “Martine, please… I don’t know what I did to upset you. Whatever it was, I didn’t mean it, but you have to tell me what it was.”

She has begun to cry; I can hear her sniffling. My eyes also begin to sting, but I resist the temptation.

“Martine, please…” I whisper again. “He was my best friend.”

Her sudden, barking, shouted laugh startles me, and I can see heads turning in our direction. I finally turn to look at her, stunned.

“Friend?” she starts. “Friend? Is that what you’re calling it, Tim?” She laughs, and it’s not at all pleasant.

I’m truly confused. “What? What do you—”

But we’re interrupted by Roger, moving up behind her. He looks at me and lays a comforting hand on Martine’s back. “Everything alright, here, sis? You okay?” To me he gives the stink eye. I smile back at him. Roger and I have never quite got along.

Martine rubs a hand over her eyes to wipe away tears, and shrugs away from Roger’s touch. “Yes, Roger. Don’t worry. Tim’s just explaining how much of a friend he was to Brian.”

I can see confusion settling across Roger’s beefy face; apparently, he doesn’t know any more than I do. I’m still trying to parse her last sentence.

“Well, yes, Martine… Brian was my friend. I don’t—”

She’s shaking her head. “Unbelievable. You’re really unbelievable… you know that?”

Roger’s face darkens and he steps between me and Martine. He knows nothing, only that Martine adamantly does not want me here. “I think you need to go now, Tim. Leave us alone. Don’t fuck this up any more than you already have.”

Roger outweighs me by forty, fifty pounds easy, but nobody’s ever accused me of knowing when to back off. We’ve attracted more than our share of attention; Martine’s dad is making his way over, and I can hear snippets of conversation that appear to be about us. I take a deep breath and try to calm down. “Look, Roger—I don’t know what’s going on. If you’re gonna throw me out, at least have the decency to tell me why to my face.”

“I don’t have to tell you anything, ass—”

Martine steps back between us and puts a hand on Roger’s chest, pushing him back a few feet. Surprised, Roger shuts up. Martine looks at me for a few seconds, her eyes narrowing. She’s chewing something over, I can tell; I’ve seen that look before. “You really don’t know what I’m talking about, do you?” I shake my head; Roger snorts his disbelief in the background. She turns slightly. “Please, Roger… just… be quiet a minute.”

I glance to my left; Bradley Walker is nearly on us. I know I have only a few more seconds until he throws me out. “Martine, let’s go outside and talk about it, if you don’t—”

She holds up a hand. “When are you going back to Denver?”

That brings me up short. “What? I, um… Sunday, probably. Why?”

“Can you stay until Monday?”

“Uh, yeah… I think so. Why do you—”

She cuts me off, again. “I need to show you something, but it’s at the house. Be there at ten. It won’t take very long.”

It means I won’t get home until very late on Monday, but we’re closed anyway and the staff can handle Tuesday lunch if I want to sleep in. I sigh. I don’t know why she can’t do this tomorrow or Sunday, but I know I’m not going to win any arguments, not if I ever want to find out what’s going on. “Fine. Ten on Monday.”

“Fine. And now I really think you should leave, Tim. I don’t want to be around you right now.”

On the way out, Jenna—Brian and Martine’s youngest child—catches my eye. She is the most like Martine, with beautiful, glossy brown-black hair, olive skin, dark eyes. She essays a small wave and a slight smile. I can’t remember how old she is. Five, six? It strikes me that I should know that.

I wave back.

—

I leave. I drive back to the hotel. I try to remember all the times I’d spent with Brian, with Martine, with both of them, in Kansas City, in Atlanta, in Denver. What slight, real or perceived, I may have committed to make her hate me so much that she asks me not to come to the funeral of my best friend, someone I’ve known since I was nine years old.

The memories are there, below the placid water, but they’re not where I think they are.

—

I spend Saturday and Sunday driving around Kansas City, reminiscing. I spend the hours downtown, in Westport, on the Plaza, at the museums. A lot has changed, but the city of my youth lies hidden still in the shadows.

I drive past my old schools. I was able to walk to my elementary school from my old house. I did it by myself for two years until one day I was joined by a tall, gawky blond kid a year older than me, gravely polite until you got to know him. He and his family have just moved into the house next to ours. We slip slowly into friendship.

I drive past my old house. Shortly after I left for college, my dad got transferred to Phoenix and my parents are still there now, roasting slowly and happily in the Arizona desert and early retirement. The house is a different color now, different cars sit in a now oil-stained and crumbling driveway, a different name is lettered neatly on the mailbox, the landscaping is more mature, at least where it hasn’t been cut down. Nothing but a stump remains of the sweet gum tree that stood outside my window, but a magnolia my dad planted at my mother’s request—the only reminder she wanted of her life in the South—reigns queen-like over the front yard, easily thirty feet tall.

I drive downtown at night, searching out the more secret places of my youth. I cruise by my old haunts, but they’re all gone, transformed into lofts or expensive restaurants or gone altogether, sacrificed to redevelopment and the seduction of the new. I’m sure there are new places to seek out, to find people like me. I don’t feel like finding them.

I wonder if any of my classmates are still in town. Doubtless there are, but the thought of tracking any of them down fills me only with a strange combination of boredom and dread. I shared nothing in common with them twenty years ago; I share even less now.

—

Monday arrives with its twin promises of revelation and resolution. I phone the restaurant to let them know that they’re on their own until Tuesday evening.

At ten, I present myself to Martine. I almost miss the house; in my absence she and Brian have transformed it from a sprawling, tired mid-century ranch into a weird mash-up of Frank Lloyd Wright and Arts and Crafts bungalow. I backtrack and pull into the empty driveway. Cicadas buzz in the still, hot summer morning. Lawnmowers manned by landscaping crews drone in the distance.

She answers the bell. She doesn’t look good, but I think she’s probably permitted at least that. Despite the heat, she is wrapped in an old cardigan. She stands in the doorway, blocking my entrance, studying me, wondering if she dares admit me to her sanctuary. I say nothing. She appears unsteady on her feet and I wonder if she’s been drinking. Her eyes are still red from crying, and she is barefoot. Her hair is lank and needs washing. “So you came anyway.” Her voice is hoarse and broken.

I stare back at her and smile slightly. “Haven’t we already had this conversation?”

She acquiesces with a strange half-smile and moves aside. I step past her into the cool foyer. The house is silent and I realize then why she wanted to wait until Monday: all of her guests have gone back to their homes and she is now quite alone. She won’t suffer the embarrassment of anyone else finding out this grand, dark secret.

—

The loudest sound is the whispering hiss of the air conditioning. I can dimly hear a television or a radio playing, and I assume that it must be her children somewhere else in this vast, quiet house.

I follow her through the house. I give myself the tour that she’ll probably never give me; everything is new-but-old reproduction: hand-hammered copper, dark leather, quarter-sawn oak. Graceful, jade-colored pottery is sitting on mantels, on shelves; on tables rest bronze, mica-shaded lamps casting a homey orange glow. What must be Brian’s den is a cool, dark wood-paneled retreat lined with law books.

I can smell fresh coffee in the kitchen—black soapstone countertops and Shaker-style cabinets flash briefly in my peripheral vision—and I wish for a cup, but I don’t dare ask.

—

We appear to be going back outside. Martine sails through a pair of French doors and I follow in her wake. The noise of the cicadas and mowers swells and I say goodbye to the cool air. She leads me to a gazebo of intricately carved wood beams and we sit at a heavy glass and iron table, facing each other.

“Well,” I say, looking around. “Nice place.”

She is sitting upright, elbows on the table, interlaced hands supporting her chin, studying me. “Yes. We finished it late last year. We were going to ask you out this summer, but… well… things.” She shrugs with her thumbs, with her eyebrows.

I recall a back yard of nothing more than a vast expanse of brown zoysia grass and a few badly-placed oaks and maples. It has been transformed, in my absence, into a small paradise of roses, rhododendron, wildflowers, prairie grasses, flagstone paths and a koi pond crowned by a bronze statue from whose base issues a steady stream of water. The gazebo overhead offers welcome shade.

“Well,” I say again, trying to prompt her.

She’s biting the inside of her mouth; I can see the corner of it tucking under her canines. She’s struggling to find a way to ask me something she really doesn’t want to ask.  She finally comes to a decision.

“Tim… when was the last time you saw Brian?”

Ah, so there’s a quiz. “Um, let me think… maybe two years ago? When you all came out during winter to ski in Aspen. Why?”

“You haven’t seen him since then? Haven’t called him, or anything?”

The quiz is turning into a cross-examination, apparently. “No, and no. You gonna subpoena my phone records, Martine? Should I be retaining counsel?” I smile to deflect the anger in my words.

“Please, Tim. I… this isn’t easy. There are things—” She stops. Her hands are shaking and she looks close to tears.

I am seized with a desire to be done with all this, to be out of here, away from Martine and the pluperfect house and the dead best friend. I want to be in my car, driving west, driving home, away from whatever small nightmare this is turning into. I suppress my urge to get up out of the chair and run.

I sigh. “Things?” I prompt.

She looks down to the flagstone patio, her canines working the inside of her mouth so much that I start expecting blood to appear. The desire to leave rears up again, stronger, and this time I don’t resist. I stand up, knocking the heavy chair back. She looks up, surprised.

“Martine, I—”

“Where are you going, Tim? I’m not done yet.”

“Well, I am.” I pause, take a deep breath, try to collect myself. I grasp the back of the chair with both hands, in a death grip. “Look, I’m sorry all this has happened, Martine. I know Brian’s gone and I can’t change that. I have no idea what’s been going on with you for the past week, and I don’t really care at this point. You took away my last chance to see my best friend, and you won’t even tell me why. Please understand this: I have no fucking idea what Brian’s been up to for the past two years, and I haven’t seen him since Aspen. If you can ever figure out how to say whatever you’re trying to say, let me know.” I look away as my eyes blur with tears. “God damn it, Martine, Brian is dead.”

As I move past her, she stands up. She reaches out to stop me, laying a hand on my forearm. She is crying harder, now. I stare into her eyes and wonder what happened to this woman, this person I once thought of as a friend. I notice a movement out of the corner of my eye, a flickering something from the house. I turn my head. At the French doors stands another daughter—Amelia—still in her nightgown, staring out at us. Martine follows my turning head with her own.

“Shit…” she whispers.

Yes, ma’am, you’ve got that right, I think. Shit, indeed.

But it seems to goad her into some kind of action. She flicks tears out of her eyes with her fingers and sighs, and now I can smell the sharp, sour scent of wine on her breath. She guides me back into my seat and I yield to her. “Wait here. Please. I’ve got something to show you.”

Before I can protest, she’s gone, bare feet padding on the stone. Her arms are thrust straight out and down at her sides, fists clenched in anger, head turned resolutely towards the ground. Amelia wheels away from the window and disappears into the depths of the silent house before her mother reaches the door.

It would be easy to slip out of the side gate, get in my car and go, but I don’t. I’m curious now to learn the truth, a truth, her truth… any truth that gets me out of here.

Martine comes back with a canvas tote bag slung over one shoulder and, inexplicably, a magnum of wine and a glass in her hands. She dumps the tote onto the table and sets the wine and the glass in front of me. I look up at her with a faint smile of disbelief, and maybe a bit of derision.

“Isn’t it a bit early for—”

“Just wait. You might need it.”

Apparently, so did she; the wine has been opened and is sweating with condensation. She reaches into the tote and pulls out a black vinyl binder, flips it open. I can’t see the contents.

She essays a grim smile. “Nope; this is volume two.” She reaches back in and pulls the second binder out. She drops it in front of me and I reach to open it. She puts her hand out to stop me.

“No. Wait until I’m in the house.” She walks away.

—

I wait; as soon as the French doors close behind her, I open the book.

It’s me. I’m staring back at me. Well, not the me of today. It’s me at the age of nine. I’m smiling, gap-toothed like all my classmates at that age. I run a finger over the photograph, tracing the smooth olive skin, the straight, glossy black hair, the hazel eyes. My name is spelled out in white letters on a black signboard: Timothy Bianco, Miss Lambeth, Fall 1978.

I giggle and look up, but no one is staring back at me from the house. This must be some strange joke on Brian’s part. I press on, thinking that it will resolve itself.

The next page is a group photograph from the same class. Twenty-four of us grouped around Miss Lambeth, whom we all loved more than our own mothers.

I keep going, maturing with each page. More yearbook photos… class plays, clubs, dances. Brian starts showing up in some of the pictures… backyard picnics, birthdays, Boy Scouts. I never got past the first year; Brian, of course, made Eagle Scout.

Here’s a photograph taken at Disney World; Brian’s parents asked me to accompany them. It was one of the best weeks in my life. We’re at the pool, side by side, having just emerged, dripping wet. I’m a skinny kid of twelve with slicked back, oily-looking black hair and dark skin, arms crossed self-consciously across my thin, bony chest. Brian is beside me, a year older and already a head taller, growing into that special grace that would be his for the rest of his life. I trace my finger across the sketch of muscles outlining his broad shoulders and flat belly. He’s got his arms flexed like a bodybuilder and he’s grinning like a madman. Drops of water shine like diamonds in the hollows of his collarbones, on the tip of his nose, from his long, slender fingers. I marvel at his unconscious, adolescent beauty.

I sigh, and reach for the wine.

Oh, Brian… what were you doing? What were you thinking? What is this?

—

I’m amazed at how much material there is; I can’t imagine how he was able to assemble it all. I think he has more than my own parents do. It’s all here: high school annuals, newspaper clippings, family photos, greeting cards, letters, notes we passed each other in high school.

I reach the end of the first binder. In it, I have just graduated from high school.

The second volume picks up in college. I went to the University of Kansas; Brian got a basketball scholarship to Northwestern. Yet, here are clippings from four years’ worth of Jayhawkers, articles from the Daily Kansan… I can’t imagine how he ever could get all this information. Yet here it is.

I go on. Here I am at my first job in a restaurant in Lawrence. Now I’m back in Kansas City, sous-chef at a place on the Plaza, long since closed. Next, a jump halfway across the country; we’re all gathered at a table at my first real restaurant in Atlanta. Martine is pregnant again, and seated beside me is Jasper. We’re all grinning, mugging at the camera… probably drunk, except for Martine. There are restaurant reviews, more greeting cards, the occasional letter, hard copies of digital files attached to e-mails, a photograph of me and Jasper at the christening of another of Brian’s children.

The last image, taken two years ago, is of all of us—Brian, Martine, Amelia, Bryce, Jenna, me—at my restaurant in Denver. Brian is older, his hair graying and thinning, laugh lines etched into his long, handsome face, a hint of sadness or fatigue in his eyes. Martine is radiant; motherhood and marriage suit her. The camera has always loved her large, dark eyes and jet black hair. The children are each a mirror of both parents, in varying degrees, all beautiful, all smiling, all happy.

—

I close the binder. I sit back in my chair, listening to the cicadas knit the summer air with their skirling drone. I take a last sip of the wine.

All desire to leave is now gone. I simply wish to sit here, to think about all of this, about its meaning. I have never been so diligent about anything in my life… not my studies, not my career, certainly not my relationships.

I put the binders back into the tote, gather the now-empty wine bottle and glass and head back into the house. I leave the bottle and glass in the kitchen and go in search of Martine.

I find her in Brian’s darkened study; only a thin stream of light filters through the plantation shutters. Martine is asleep in a chair, shrouded in her black cardigan, feet tucked under her. She awakens when I sit down across from her. I place the tote on a table between us.

Martine sits up, runs her hands across her face and glances at the bag. “You can keep those.”

“They’re not—”

She flashes me a brief, painful smile. “Well, I certainly don’t need them.”

We stare at each other for a few seconds. I venture a question. “How did you find them?”

“I was looking for some papers… I think the insurance company called, or something, asking for something I didn’t know. They were just… sitting there, on the shelf, all these years. I can’t believe I never opened them, or the kids. He didn’t even try to hide them.” She shifts in her chair. “So… what do you think of them?”

What do I think of them? I’m think I’m afraid of them. I shake my head. “They’re… I don’t know.  Martine, I just don’t know. I never knew anything about them, if that’s what you’re asking. I had no idea he was doing any of that.”

I can hear a slight snort of disbelief. She shifts her gaze to stare into a darkened corner, away from my face. “Tim, I… I have to ask this.” She pauses, lets out a tense, nervous breath. “I—when did you and Brian meet?”

I think she knows this; it sounds like she’s working her way up to the obvious question, but doesn’t want to get there too fast.

“Well… I was nine when the Walkers moved next door to us. Brian’s a year older, so…” I trail off, waiting for the next step.

“Do you think you were best friends?”

I pause, thinking. “Yeah, I do… I honestly do.” Before I can stop myself, the next sentence tumbles out. “We pretty much did everything together.” I flush and hope that she can’t see my face in the darkened room.

She barks out a laugh and shuts her eyes. “Everything…?”

“Martine, that’s not what I… the answer is no. I know what you’re going to ask, and the answer is no. We never did anything like that.”

She sits there, silently, her gaze still fixed into the corner. I look at her profile; I don’t know if she believes me or not.

She clears her throat, speaks. “Did you ever tell Brian you were gay? Tell him face-to-face?”

I nod. “Yes, I did. Right before he went off to Northwestern.”

“Not before?”

I shake my head, then realize she still isn’t looking at me. “No.” I imagine her next question. “I don’t know if he ever thought about it before then. We never talked about it.”

She turns back to face me, a slight smile twisting her mouth. She doesn’t believe me. “Really? I thought teenaged boys talked about sex all the time. You never talked about girls, or whatever?”

I start to get angry. “C’mon, Martine—of course we did, sometimes. I suppose I probably lied about a lot of it, but Brian never pressed me about it. Maybe he just assumed I was and didn’t care. I wasn’t exactly the most popular kid in my class, and I’m pretty sure that most of the people who gave it any thought just assumed I was gay. I was in band, choir, drama, art… what did you think of the boys who did all that at your high school?”

She stares at me. I stare back. It feels like she’s running me through some kind of Martine truth-divination machine. She’s chewing the corner of her mouth again. Abruptly, she pulls herself out of the chair. Either I’ve passed the test or she simply wants not to think about it any more. I rise up with her. I look down at the binders in their tote bag. I want to leave them here, but I can’t. I reach out to grab them.

Martine follows my movements, then our eyes meet. She smiles again. “All you, all the time. Right?”

—

I follow her down the hallway. Obviously she wants me to leave. Her hand finds its way into a pocket in her sweater. She stops. “Oh. I forgot this.” She draws out a battered, filthy white envelope. It looks like something you’d put a greeting card in; there’s a name scrawled on the front of it, in what looks to be Brian’s handwriting, but I can’t read it. She hands it to me.

It’s my name on the front. I turn it over. It’s reasonably intact, but it looks like somebody dragged it through a mud puddle. Inexplicably, what looks very much like a tire tread imprints its back, and I suddenly realize where it came from. I look back up at her, my heart thudding, eyes wide with shock.

“They found this, didn’t they? The police. At the, um…”

She nods, silent. She’s staring directly at me, not embarrassed to be obvious at it. She glances down at the mangled envelope. “Aren’t you going to open it?”

Should I? Does she want me to read it aloud to her? Brian and I always sent birthday cards to each other; all the ones I’d sent to him are bound up in the notebooks I’m carrying. His are usually from the whole family; everybody signs it and it’s full of the latest news about all of them. Why Brian never mailed this one is beyond me.

“I… no, I think I’ll wait. I need time to digest all this.” All this is the bag full of my life so far; I shake it to reinforce the point.

She’s disappointed but relieved at the same time. “Suit yourself.”

She turns away, then turns back. I almost run into her, then take a step back. “One more thing, Tim. I wanted to ask you one more thing.”

“Okay.”

“Do you—do you know why Brian would have any business in Manhattan?”

Now I’m lost again. “Manhattan? Manhattan… Kansas?”

She nods.

I’m completely at sea at this point. “I… have no earthly idea. Why?”

“Well, you see, I checked with his office, after… they, um… they said that they had no idea why he was all the way out there. The farthest west they have any clients is Topeka.”

“Martine, I… Manhattan?” Why would I care that Brian was ever in Manhattan?

She stares at me for a few seconds. “Well, that’s where they found the car. His car… that’s where they… where it happened. West of Manhattan.”

I’m stunned. I thought the wreck happened somewhere in Kansas City. Manhattan? And… west of it? My heart starts to pound again. I’m following along the same path that Martine has been walking along for most of a week, and I don’t like where it’s going. I shake my head and shrug my shoulders, unable to speak.

“You didn’t know?” She’s disappointed; whatever last scrap of logical explanation for all of this she might have had has just evaporated.

“No.”

—

She turns away, and I follow dutifully behind her. She stops on the front porch of the house while I walk to the car. I unlock the trunk and place the tote bags on top of my luggage. Before I get behind the wheel, I look back at her. She’s crying again. Fat tears run down her face and she makes no attempt to wipe them away. My eyes start stinging. She looks lost and defeated, and I want simply to hold her and tell her it will be okay.

I can’t do that. I can’t do that simply because I don’t know that. “Martine. What are you going to do now?”

She smiles; it almost seems reassuring. “I don’t know, Tim. I don’t know.”

I turn to go. I can feel her eyes on me. “Tim…”

I turn back to face her. “Yes?”

Across her face runs an amazing coruscation of emotions. “Tim… was it… all of this… Tim—was it a lie?”

I sigh. I don’t know what to say, so I equivocate. “I don’t know—do you think it was?”

She’s not fooled; she smiles and rolls her eyes. I’m caught, lying to a woman whose life has just come unglued and will never, ever be the same again.

I try again. “Martine… I… he did love you. He loved the kids.” He stayed, at least for as long as he could, but I don’t say that. Instead I get behind the wheel, pull the door closed, and start the car. I pull away, and in the rearview mirror I watch her; she stands framed in the door, and goes in only when I pull out onto the road.

I wonder if I’ll ever see her again.

—

From the obituary I know where Brian is buried. It’s at Mount Moriah—not too far away.

I dip my hand under the stream and pull out another memory.

|then

Jasper and I are on the back deck of his Morningside bungalow in Atlanta. It’s evening and we’re drunk on margaritas. Brian has come into town to interview for a possible job offer and is staying with us. Jasper and I moved in together only a year ago and have known each other for less than two years. Brian seems to like him.

Today is some strange, made-up holiday… National Talk-Like-A-Pirate Day, or something like that. Brian has wandered off to find the bathroom; every so often we hear an “argh, matey!” echoing down the hallway, and we laugh.

I pour another drink and turn to Jasper; I’m about to suggest that we find a place to eat before too long or we’re going to pass out in the back yard. I don’t feel like cooking since I do it six days a week; tonight, I want somebody to do it for me.

Jasper is staring back at me with a strange look on his face. I’m learning that look; he wants to ask me something, something personal, and doesn’t know how to do it.

“What?” I ask.

He shakes his head, a little embarrassed. “Nothing.”

“Jasper. What?” I know that I’ll eventually coax it out of him.

He bites. “Brian.” With his accent, it comes out as “Bran.”

“What about Brian?”

“Well, I like him.”

“Well, I do, too.”

Jasper is tall, almost as tall as Brian. I must have a thing for tall men. His shaved head and carrot-red beard lend him a rough, not-in-a-dark-alley kind of appearance, belied completely as soon as he opens his mouth. He sounds like one of those genteel Southern ladies who make up the bulk of his clientele, velvet-rich drawls filled with azalea and magnolia, and more than a touch of whiskey. The investor in the restaurant introduced us, praising his interior design genius, and things progressed from there.

I grin. “Jasper… is there a question in all this?”

He laughs, still a bit ashamed to be so blunt. “Brian’s your best friend, right?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“You say he’s married? Got kids?”

“Uh, yeah… two already and I think Martine’s pregnant again. Why?”

He digests this bit of information, then presses on, unsatisfied. “You and he ever, well… you know… before he got married?” His eyes and face do a mad improv of suggestion and implication.

Suddenly I realize what he’s trying to ask. I laugh. “Are you asking whether Brian and I were ever involved before he got married?”

He nods, blushing furiously.

“No,” I answer, when I stop laughing. “Not that I’ve never thought about it… but, no.”

“Hmm. Okay…”

I frown. “Jasper Collier! What are you trying to say?” I essay a bad Vivien-Leigh-as-Scarlett when I say this. He just shakes his head and laughs. I persist, defending my best friend. “Brian’s not gay, Jasper.”

Another strange smile flickers across his face, and he waggles his eyebrows, as if sharing a secret. “I wouldn’t be so sure of that, Timmy.”

I shake my head in disbelief. “I don’t think so, Jasper. He’s never—”

He interrupts. “All I’m sayin’, babe, is… well, I think that boy’s got a serious crush on you.”

I’m nonplussed. “You’re kidding? Brian?”

He nods. I’m about to speak, but Brian’s back with us. He wanders back across the patio, only slightly unsteady. He throws himself into a chair and holds out his empty glass. “How ‘bout some more grog for the scurvy dog? Yar!”

“Yar!” we shout back.

—

Later, much later, I get up to go to the bathroom. There are only two bedrooms in Jasper’s bungalow; we’re in the back and the front one is Jasper’s studio, so Brian is sacked out on our couch. His lanky frame is wedged in the frame of what is essentially a love seat with delusions, but he’s managed to fall asleep. He’s snoring quietly; a silvery patch of moonlight glistens on his bare back, and I think back on a similar summer night a long time ago.

I’m trying to add up what Jasper is trying to convince me of. Brian has never seemed to be too concerned about me being gay, and he seems to like Jasper… but it’s a long way from that to actually being gay himself. I just don’t see it.

But one thing I’ve already learned about Jasper, in the brief time that we’ve known each other, is that he’s usually right about a lot of things. It’s not just some variation on the innate ability for one gay man to suss out another one; he’s got some unerring instinct for truth. For a man who deals with image and surface all day, he can see easily behind facades and the truths hidden there.

|now

Mt. Moriah Cemetery is an old cemetery in the southern part of Kansas City; it is graced by a white marble mausoleum that looks like an architect’s fantasy of some ancient Egyptian temple. Brian is in there somewhere, but I bypass the building and drive slowly down to a lake in the back part of the park. This is close enough.

I leave the car and walk over to a stone bench overlooking the lake. Some swans and geese are on the lake; they start moving towards me, thinking I might have some food. I sit and look around. Tall hardwoods tower over me, and light filters down between them in golden rays to play upon the hundreds of white and grey headstones arrayed around me. The birds are near enough now that they can see I have no food and turn away, bored.

I let the peace fill me. It is utterly quiet, utterly still. The cicadas have stopped, at least for the moment. There is the faint chiming of birds and the brief rush of a breeze through the locusts and maples.

I pull out the white envelope. One thing that Brian failed at was penmanship. His scrawl is child-like and crabbed; reading a letter handwritten from him was akin to deciphering some lost language. I turn the envelope over and over. I hold it up to the light, but the thick paper is opaque and hides any hint of its contents.

I could toss it away into the lake, and watch it slowly dissolve and sink to the bottom. I could walk back up to the shining, austere mausoleum, find the alabaster niche with Brian’s name picked out on a small bronze plaque and slip the card between the cracks, certain that Martine would find it. I could mail it back to her.

|then

Jasper and I are in bed, his front to my back, spooning. We have just made love and are on the verge of sleep. Sex seems to have become our way of solving arguments; we’ve been having many of those lately. Each one seems to go a little farther than the one preceding it, and it’s becoming more and more difficult to recover from them.

It’s been a month since I told him I wanted to try my luck in Denver. Running a restaurant anywhere is tricky, but Atlanta has been especially difficult. The initial rave reviews and crowds waiting two or three hours for a table have passed as newer, trendier places open. The gourmet crowd is a fickle one. Already I’ve changed the menu and cut back staff, trying to delay the inevitable.

I love this sprawling, green city, so much like a vast, regal garden tumbling across the low hills. I will hate to leave it, will miss it greatly… but Denver is the new place to live, full of life and youth. I want to try my luck again, be the new kid on the block, at least for a while.

The invitation for Jasper to join me is unspoken but present in all of our discussions. I know he’s thinking about it, but deep down I know that he won’t come with me. He has too much invested here, in this city. His family’s history here goes back before the Civil War; the family name is engraved on libraries, college buildings, streets, schools. Everyone he’s ever known is here.

I fear that Jasper is too much like this city’s beloved azaleas. They thrive in this humid hothouse of a town, but take them too much out of their element and they simply wither away.

Jasper stirs behind me. His arm reaches out across my chest and he hugs me to him. “Baby, about Denver…” His voice is a low rumble that I feel as much as hear.

I tense. I know what’s coming. “Yes?”

He sighs. “I… baby… I just can’t…”

I stroke his forearm. “I know. I know.”

I know he wants to ask how it can be so easy for me, to pick up and move away without a care, leaving people and places and a history behind me. We’ve been together for five years, now.

Right after I started talking about Denver—some months ago—about starting over, going on against his stony silence about how great it would be to go out west, see real mountains, experience real winters, Jasper stopped me.

“You know, Tim, I love you. Ever since we first met, I think I loved you. Hell, I’ll probably love you ten years from now. But, you know, babe… there’s this part of you that scares me. I know I probably have too much history here; I’ll probably die in this goddamned city… but you… I don’t think you put roots down anywhere, or with anyone. I guess I thought I’d be the one to win you over, to make you stop wandering and settle down. But there’s this core, this strange, crazy thing inside you, and it never lets you get close enough to things that really matter.”

It stung, but it hit close enough to the mark. It didn’t change my mind.

|now

I open the envelope.

It’s shocking and stupid at the same time. The front of the card sports an image of an over-muscled man in tight, threadbare jeans, his oiled torso bare and glistening, one hand grabbing the outline of a tumescent and prodigious manhood, clearly visible through the thin blue cloth. I open the card up and it says “Now how about some real Kansas City beef for your birthday!” Some part of me wonders if I should be offended at the image, the message… but then I realize I have to trust Brian and our friendship and his sense of humor.

I can’t imagine where he’s bought it, or that he could summon up enough nerve to pay for it. Scrawled beneath it is more of Brian’s handwriting: “Sometimes it’s good to be a carnivore. Ha, ha! Happy Birthday! B.”

There is also a note, a folded-over square of white. I unfold it and start reading.

Hey, dude—

Thought it might be fun to deliver this one in person. Doesn’t look like anything Martine would have bought, does it? [no; Martine’s cards are usually tasteful and arty, inoffensively elegant] I’ve been thinking a lot about you lately and it’s been a while since we got together. I need to get away for a few days and Denver sounded like fun. There’s some things I need to ask you, things that I’ve been thinking about for a long, long time…

The rest I read through blurred tears.

When I’m done I fold the note back, slip it into the card, then put it all back into the envelope. I’m finally crying, something I haven’t done since I got the awful news about Brian’s death two weeks ago.

Martine’s not stupid and I’m pretty sure she’s got it figured out. I don’t know anything about what might have been going on in their marriage over the past couple of years since I last saw them. I don’t know what decisions Brian had to wrestle with, but they were serious enough to make him think about driving non-stop on the spur of the moment six hundred miles to deliver me this adolescent cliché of a birthday card. They were serious enough to make him write a note, one that I can almost imagine him debating over whether to stick in the envelope or not, and finally deciding that it was something that he had to say, wanted to say. I think about the last image in the binders in the trunk of my car. Brian is sitting between me and Martine in the picture, arms around both of us—best friend and wife—and he is smiling, but in his eyes there’s something missing… the smile is not there. I remember the grip of his hand on my shoulder; it was tight and almost desperate in its desire not to let go.

I sit back on the bench and let my weight rest on my arms as I gaze up into the lush green canopy of leaves. My tears dry on my cheeks.

I slip this new stone of memory under the water, ready for an oblique grab in the future to bring it back to the surface. It sinks to rest among other stones, rough-edged quartz to be smoothed and dulled over time to a rounded pebble, like all the others.

—

I’m back in the car, finally heading home. The sun is slipping into the west. I pull on a pair of sunglasses against the glare. I follow the loop of road through the Kansas hills until it links up to the interstate that unspools into the vast prairie, leaving the hot, dusty city behind.

—

Two hours later and I’m already past the town when I remember. I pull off the interstate onto the gravel shoulder, incurring the wrath of a trucker who was following too close behind me anyway, leaving me in a cloud of gritty dust and the angry blast of his air horns.

Again, I’m lost, but it doesn’t matter. I lucked out in this choice of resting place; instead of looking at eye level through an endless maze of cornstalks or wheat, I’m on a slight rise over a small valley that slopes down and away from me. I step out of the car and walk over to small group of rocks under the shade of a lone cottonwood and I sit.

Glints of colored light catch my eye; garnet and amber, diamond and iridescent shards of silver… the ground-up detritus of other victims of automotive misfortune along this road. Here’s half a ballpoint pen, here’s a candy bar wrapper, here’s the head of a doll with blond hair crazed and matted, her face battered and dirty.

The valley is an ordered checkerboard of fields, in various dusty hues. Sage green, wheat gold, brown-black earth, the yellow-green of new growth, all marked and lined by the surveyor and the farmer. Meandering lines of trees and lush undergrowth outline streams and ponds. An orange-tan plume of dust measures the progress of some car or truck along a dirt road. All of this marches inexorably towards the distant horizon, where the hazy grey of land meets the hazy grey of sky. There is a beauty, here… subtle, and one that must be teased out gently by the eye and by the mind.

—

I dip my hand one last time into the stream; this one is harder to judge the angles and it takes a few tries to bring it back up. When I do, when I finally hold the moss-covered stone in my hand, I realize that I’m guilty of a lie, a small one, really, in the grand scheme of things, but it’s a lie, nevertheless.

I’ve lied to Martine, I’ve lied to Brian, I’ve lied to Jasper.

I’ve lied to myself.

|then

It’s summer, again, early August. Brian and I are up on the roof of his parents’ house, having crawled through the dormer window of his bedroom. It is late and the sky is a perfect ultramarine dome over our heads; a few stars brave the glow of street lamps to shine fitfully through the glare and haze. We often come out here; it feels slightly wrong to sit out here on the edge of the house, staring down into the lives of others, unseen.

To our right, to the southwest, is a building bank of dark cloud streaked with lightning. We are too far away to hear the thunder, but we know that a storm is on its way to us up out of Oklahoma or Texas.

A six-pack of beer rests between us, liberated quietly from the refrigerator. Four of them are already empty; the one I’m nursing is lukewarm and I don’t feel like finishing it. I slip it half-drunk back into the box. The beer is strong, stronger than I’m used to, and my face is numb and too hot.

Brian is stretched out on the slope. His shirt is unbuttoned and draped down each side of his body, like the wings of some strange bird or angel. I’m all arms and legs held akimbo, with only the soles of my Nikes and my buttocks resting on the roof, which still retains some of the day’s heat. I don’t know how Brian can stand the heat seeping into him. I shift uncomfortably against the gritty texture of the shingles.

Brian is on his back, with his arms crossed behind his head. I sit slightly upslope from him, which gives me a good view of his wiry torso. The light from the street lamps angles across his body, picking out the play of his muscles. He unlaces one hand from behind him and scratches an armpit, then lets the hand trail slowly down across the hard point of a nipple, the piano-key rhythm of his intercostals, the slow rise and fall of his abdominal muscles. The hand finds its target and scratches his belly below his navel.  His shorts are too big and ride low on his hips. A faint, fuzzy trail of hair starts at his navel and shoots south, diving below his waistband. He is beautiful.

That I notice this beauty and react to it tells me something about myself that I’ve only begun to realize.

I sigh quietly and divert my attention to the street below. It’s reasonably quiet. Some kids are playing a pickup basketball game in the cul-de-sac at the end of the street and their laughter and the rhythmic slap and crash of the game echo off the houses; cars pass by every so often in a dull whine of rubber against asphalt; a small plane drones overhead, red and green lights winking.

Brian has just turned eighteen and has just graduated high school. I’m a year behind him, a rising senior and ready to get through this last year and start on my own path. I pray to God it won’t be here. I decide to break the silence. “So, dude… like, three weeks to go. Right?”

He looks up at me. “Yeah. We might go up early, scope things out. Mom’s never seen Chicago, if you can believe that. Hey, you wanna come with?”

I try to sound nonchalant. “Nah… seems kinda weird, don’t you think?”

He chuckles. “Yeah, maybe it does. No big deal. I’ll be back for Thanksgiving, anyway.”

“Yeah.” I enjoy the silence. “So… Northwestern. Wow.”

“Yeah—you believe that shit? I actually got into fucking Northwestern!”

“Yeah… it’s a moderately adequate school. I heard they take anybody who can sign their names on the entrance application.”

He laughs. “Fuck you, Bianco… hey, you got any idea where you’re gonna end up?”

“Ah, not really. Probably somewhere close and cheap. Maybe Lawrence, maybe Lansing.”

He looks up at me, craning his neck. “Lansing? What the fuck’s in Lansing?”

“State penitentiary, asshole. I mean, c’mon.”

“Yeah, well… aim high, dude.” We laugh together.

We lapse back into silence. The heat must have finally gotten to Brian; he hoists himself back up and sits beside me in the same position as I. He is so close that our elbows touch. I don’t break contact and neither does he. I want nothing more than to relax, to rest my head against his shoulder. What would he do?

I think about going home instead. Brian senses some slight change in my posture. He digs his elbow into my side. “So, hey, Tim… senior year…”

“Yeah. Woo-hoo! Rock on, dude! Go Vikings!” Sarcasm so thick you could cut it with a fork.

“Yeah… you’re top of the shit heap, and then you start all over again at the bottom the year after. Maybe you can set yourself lofty goals in your last year at Shawnee Mission West. I think you should try to get laid, myself.”

What do you think I’ve been trying to do all evening, idiot? I don’t say that, of course… while wondering why he brings that topic up over anything else he might have said.

He persists, elbows me. “C’mon, Tim… cute guy like you? No point in staying a virgin unless you’re gonna become a fuckin’ priest. Hey, what about that Lisa chick? Lisa… uh, what’s her name?”

“Renner?”

He nods his head. “Yeah, Lisa Renner. She’s pretty cute. I think she likes you.”

Yeah, except for the whole vagina thing going on, she’s perfect. Another unvoiced thought. “So… you really think I’m cute?”

He glances at me. “Yeah, well… I mean, for a dwarf, and all. Maybe in a dark room, on a foggy night… bag over your head…”

“Uh, thanks for the vote of confidence, asshole.”

“Might be nice if you had a little more meat on your bones. You’re kinda like real skinny, dude. I guess some gu… girls like that in a man, though.” I look over, wondering about the stutter in the middle of that sentence. He’s looking resolutely ahead, hoping maybe to blame it on the beer. What did he almost say? He stumbles on. “I mean, you don’t want anybody to think that you’re, um, like gay or anything? I mean, um, well… you know…”

Out of the frying pan… “Ha. They already do, in case you haven’t noticed. Be a real bummer to do the deed with Lisa and have her still think I’m gay. And, anyway, so what?”

“So what, what?” He glances over at me. “So what if you’re gay?”

I look away and nod. “Yeah.” I’ve been doing a silent calculus in my head, one that I’ve been working on for months. Brian’s my best friend, we tell each other everything, he’s going away to college in a month, nobody else can hear us out here, I can deny everything, I don’t really think he’ll push me off the edge of the roof…

He stares at me for a few seconds, but says nothing. I go on. “I mean, it’s not like it’s the end of the world or anything, right?”

He’s still staring at me, but it’s not like he’s shocked or anything. I’ve never said anything one way or the other… hell, I wasn’t even sure myself until a few months ago.

“Well, no…” His voice trails off. I can sense him withdrawing, a little.

Now it seems time to go. I hate heights, so I crabwalk back to the dormer and crawl back inside. It takes Brian by surprise.

“Hey! Wait a minute!” He follows me in and grabs me by the shoulder, turning me around.

“Are you?” he demands. I shrug. He grabs me harder. “Are you? C’mon!”

I stare back at him angrily and pull my shoulder away from his grasp. He doesn’t look angry… maybe more confused than anything. I start to nod slowly. Into the fire, I think.

His eyes go wide with shock and surprise. “Holy fuck… oh, shit… are you serious?”

I can’t look him in the eye. “Yeah, maybe… big fucking deal. Who gives a shit, right?”

“How long have you—”

“Fuck, Brian—I don’t know! Two weeks, two months, two years? Since I was born? I don’t know!” I turn to go.

He grabs me and turns me around, again, but gently. He’s got his hands on each of my shoulders, but he’s not hurting me. He staring down at me; in all these years I’ve never gained an inch on him. We’ve been pacing each other all of our lives. I wonder if I’ll stop growing the day he does.

“Tim! Tim, wait.” He’s still holding me, his hands gently kneading my undersized biceps. “Shhh… shhh… it’s okay… I guess I always wondered…”

“Well, now you know.” I break away again. “I should go.”

He turns away from me and moves over to stare out the window. “Why?”

“Well, it’s late, and I—”

“Aw… just stay here. No big deal.”

I’ve done it before; sometimes we would stay up late talking and just crash wherever we happened to be. Maybe it’s just my perception, but I think something’s just changed. Maybe it’s just the beer.

He turns to face me. “Please. Just stay.”

I shrug. No big deal.

Brian turns out the light. Harsh silver light from the street lights pours into the room. A flash of lightning splits the night sky, followed a few seconds later by thunder. It sounds as if the storm is getting nearer.

We undress quietly, down to our undershorts and t-shirts, then crawl to opposite sides of Brian’s king-size bed. We are not strangers to each other’s bodies, but only in the most casual way. Swimming together, showering at the pool or at school, after practice, maybe changing clothes or dressing in front of one another. Seeing but not seeing.

That was before. I can only wonder what Brian’s thinking now, wondering if I think about him from time to time, about how he looks, wondering what it does to me to think about him.

We curl up in the sheets, as far away from each other as possible, facing away from each other.

“Good night, Tim.”

“Night.”

Silence. Lightning flashes again, nearer, and the thunder is louder.

Then…”Good night, John Boy.”

I smile. How many people do this stupid ritual? But it reassures me. “Good night, Mary Ellen.”

Lightning again, and thunder.

—

… and I’m awake, again. The storm has finally arrived, with the rain roaring down, accompanied by a continuous ticking clatter of hail. Thunder must have awakened me, and I realize that I’m uncomfortably hot. The room is stuffy and it takes me a moment to figure out why.

The power is out and the air conditioning has shut down. I throw the covers off of me and fumble for my watch; Brian’s clock radio is, of course, dead. It’s a little after two. I sit up in bed and shrug my shirt off, toss it onto the floor. I lay back down and stare at the ceiling, listening to the tumult outside.

I shift over onto my side, facing Brian. He’s still asleep and still facing away from me, but he’s pulled the covers down to his waist. I watch the muscles in his back rise and fall with his steady breathing.

Brian shifts beside me, onto his belly. I look down at the graceful curves of his back – the downward curve of his torso flaring to the generous curves hidden beneath the translucent white cloth of his shorts. I turn my gaze back up, to his face.

I start. He’s awake, and he’s watching me.

We stare at each other silently. I can see the faint movements of his eyes as his gaze travels up and down my own body.

He extends a hand halfway between us. It sits there, crab-like and still.

I extend my own hand to within a hair’s breadth of his own. Check.

His index finger flexes and begins to trace my own index finger, from tip to knuckle. I’m too conscious, too aware of the sudden tightening in my groin. I fear that if I say anything, he’ll stop.

He shifts back onto his side, facing me, and I can see the taut, hard arc of his erection, straining against the waistband of his shorts.

His head moves towards mine. Our noses bump, and he laughs quietly. He turns his head and his lips graze mine. Our mouths open and find each other’s. His tongue slips past my teeth.

I want nothing more than to pull him onto me, to feel his weight on top of me. I want nothing more than to have him inside me, in my mouth, inside my body. I reach out, trace the path that his hand traced earlier, from the hollow of his armpit to the nipple, to his ribs, across his flat belly. I slip a finger beneath his waistband, and my fingertips barely graze the fleshy tip of his cock. The strength of my desire frightens me.

A firm grip on my arm stops me. He pulls my hand away.

“No,” he whispers. “I can’t… not that, not yet… I’m sorry.” He draws away from me and turns over, facing away from me. I do the same, and somehow fall asleep. His last two words echo in my head.

—

In the morning, I am alone. The place beside me is empty; only the faint imprint of Brian’s body can be discerned in the rumpled sheets. I don’t know if he’s gone to work or simply cannot bear to be around me anymore. I dress quietly in the cold grey dawn and slip out of the house, unobserved.

—

In the days that follow, something settles itself between us, some kind of distance, some kind of tense silence.

I tell myself that what happened that night was nothing more than a dream, one compounded of the alcohol and the heat and the storm’s fury. I tell myself that it simply might have been nothing more than me telling Brian that I was gay. My unconscious took that, ran with it, spun it into something fantastic and unreal.

But Brian seemed okay with my revelation, asked me to stay, to lay beside him, in his bed.

It was a dream, I tell myself again. It could only be that.

—

I don’t see Brian again until the day he departs for Chicago. I can hear them next door, in the driveway. Suitcases are being loaded into the back of their minivan, luggage carriers being lashed to the roof.

It’s early, about six or six-thirty. I get up, get dressed in a shirt and shorts, go downstairs. I can see them through the kitchen window, Brian and his dad arguing quietly, trying to get everything to fit. Brian’s mom comes out with another taped-up box of his stuff.

I go out onto the front porch. The sun is coming up and the day promises to be hot. I unbutton my shirt and let it hang loose on my thin frame. I wonder if Brian will get the significance.

I think he sees me, but he refuses to notice. I can see him glancing over here every so often, casually, thinking I don’t notice. Brian’s mom sees me and waves, but doesn’t ask me over. Certainly he hasn’t told her. Maybe she just thinks we’ve had some stupid guy fight.

I get the paper, unfold it and leaf through it. Presently no more boxes are brought out and everything appears to be stowed away to everyone’s liking. I hear Brian’s mom inside, calling up to his sister Kate, telling her to hurry up, everyone else is ready to go.

Brian’s by himself in the back seat of the minivan. He’s still ignoring me, picking his fingernails, staring down at the floorboard of the van, the tired-of-waiting college kid ready to start the next chapter. His dad is behind the wheel, warming the van up.

Brian’s mom emerges, followed by Kate, who doesn’t see me. She gets into the van behind Brian and he rolls the door shut with a thud and locks it.

Brian’s dad puts the van in drive and they start moving. I stand up.

Brian finally looks over at me. I’m standing on the front steps, hands shoved in my pockets, sweating slightly in the still, humid air. A gust of wind pushes the unbuttoned halves of my shirt away from my body.

Brian raises a hand, waves once.

I pull a hand from my pocket, wave back.

They’re gone.

|now

I’m dragged back into the present by a crunching noise. A highway patrol cruiser has pulled up behind my car, and more jewels are cast onto the darkening prairie as shafts of ruby and sapphire light stab out into the dusk. I can hear a car door opening, closing, and then footsteps.

I stand up. I think I’ve frightened the cop. He stops, and his hand goes unconsciously towards his gun.

“It’s okay, I’m—”

He cuts me off. He’s big—football-player big—but a bit soft, the body type of a big athlete who’s stopped exercising and watching what he eats. He’s still imposing. “Sir?  Are you all right, sir? Do you need assistance of any kind?” He’s talking loudly and slowly.

“I, uh… no, I’m okay. I just needed to stop.”

He relaxes only slightly. “Do you need roadside assistance?”

“No, I just… no, the car’s okay. I just decided to pull off here for a few minutes.” I feel like I’m stuttering, nearly incoherent. He must think I’m drunk or out of my mind, but at least he isn’t asking for my license. Not yet, anyway.

“Rest area a few miles down the road. You might be safer there, sir.”

Sounds like a polite warning to me. I move towards the car. He’s watching me closely.

Before I get in, I realize that he might know something. I turn back. “Sir? Officer? Can I ask you something?”

He’s almost back to his car. He stops and turns. ”Yes?”

“The reason I stopped here is that… well… a friend of mine died in a car wreck somewhere along here last week. Do you know anything about that, where it might have happened?

He considers the question, frowning in thought. “Your friend drive a Porsche?” He pronounces it Porsh.

I don’t know—last time I saw Brian he was in a Lexus—but I nod. “Yeah, I think so.” It sounds like the kind of self-indulgent toy that a man in his forties would buy.

“Tall, blond guy? Kansas license? Maybe out of… Leawood?”

Bingo. “Yeah, that’s him.”

“I didn’t work it, but I think it happened back at 313.” I realize he must mean the mile marker number. “Pretty nasty bit of work. Single-car roll-over. Probably got tired or distracted and lost control. Didn’t see any road kill, so he didn’t hit an animal. Close friend?”

“Yeah… my best friend since grade school.”

He winces. “Sorry about that. Tough to lose ‘em like that.” A radio tethered to his shoulder squawks. He leans over and mutters something into it, and it squawks back. “Look, I gotta go. You sure you’re okay?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

He looks at me one last time. “You really should get to that rest area. It’s not that far up the road.” He starts up his cruiser and pulls out. I wave goodbye.

I doubt I’m going to make Denver tonight, but I’m not too tired, yet. I might press on to Salina, maybe Hays, then get a room.

|then

Brian does come back for Thanksgiving. His parents want all of us to come over Thursday night for supper; we do this every year and take turns. This year is their turn. I don’t really want to go, but I can’t say no.

We dash across in sweaters and shirts, not bothering with coats.

We greet each other; Kate’s a couple years behind me at school, so we’re pretty casual. I see her practically every day, in the halls. I’m wondering exactly how to avoid Brian for the next couple of hours— in his own house—when suddenly he’s there. He seems to have grown another two or three inches. He’s wearing a blue and white sweater that’s a size too small for him. I’ve never seen it before.

I don’t know how to speak to him, don’t know how things stand between us, but then he’s there, in front of me, shaking my hand, smiling, then he draws me towards him in a bear hug, and I relax. Everything seems to be just as it was. And then I hear “… there’s somebody I want you to meet.” She steps out from behind him, extending a hand.

I step back. It’s not quite like looking in a mirror, but close. She’s my height, with the same dark, glossy black hair, the same dark eyes, the same olive skin. She could be my twin sister, or a cousin.

I wonder if Brian knows exactly what he has done. I restrain the urge to laugh; it would probably be misunderstood. Brian is staring at us, gauging our reactions to each other. I understand that I will have to like her if I’m ever to remain Brian’s friend.

Her smile is dazzling. “Tim, hi… I’m Martine. Martine Blanchard. I’ve heard so much about you from Brian.”

|now

I sit there under the cottonwood; the sun sinks into the west in a riotous blaze of orange and magenta. I think about choices, both Brian’s and my own. I wonder exactly what it is that I’ve accomplished so far. I’m almost forty—not a kid anymore—and all I have to show for it is a place with my name on it, reasonably good reviews, and nobody to share it with. I wonder what Brian must have felt on that trip, what he hoped to accomplish in Denver with me. His words from that long-ago night echo in my thoughts.

“Not yet,” he whispered. “Not yet.”

—

I start the car up. Outside, lights are starting to come on in the valley below, small radiant points of white against the onrushing blue. My headlights stab out into the dusk: hard, white lines reflecting off dust and the aleatory wanderings of insects that I must trail behind, gathering them like crumbs until I am back home.

My hand falls to the gearshift; I grip the leather pommel, but my hand remains still.

And then it comes to me, this revelation, this epiphanic jolt that tells me, like a voice whispered into my ear, that I have one more thing to do. I kill the engine, pull my cellphone out of its charging cradle, look down into its screen. I scroll through my contacts, even though I know he’s not in them. It’s been that long.

Think, I command myself. Think.

It comes to me, slowly, dredged up out of ten years’ worth of memories, a number that I once knew as well as I knew anything. I punch in the area code.

And stop.

Why am I doing this? What do I hope to achieve?

He’s not going to want to speak to me, I think. Our ending was not especially rancorous, but it was an ending, with all that that implies.

And yet. And yet.

I switch the car off; the lights die. I step out onto the shoulder of the highway, move down the slope, away from traffic. There is little traffic on the road, this far out of the city, anyway; I am alone with my thoughts.

Wind soughs through the cottonwood, setting its leaves ticking and rustling in the inky blueness of the evening.

He would hate me, I think. He would have to hate me. I would hate me. Even if he didn’t hate me, certainly by now he would have to have found someone else. Part of me hopes that he has. He deserves someone, if not me.

But I think of Brian, of the choice he made—to make a new choice, to throw everything aside and start again. He chose the door behind which lay only pain and anguish and abandonment, for… what, exactly? Me? Was I so sure of that? I have only the note he wrote; promise, there was in that, but only that and nothing more.

I tap the phone against the palm of my other hand, thinking, thinking.

I look to the west, towards home, which waits for me, with its tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

Do it, I command myself. Do it. I key the rest of the number in, wait.

Wait quietly as the packet bounces from tower to tower to tower, making its way across the country, back east and then south. Back to a gracious city filled with magnolia and azalea and butter-soft accents. Back to a small house full of art and light and love and part of a life that I do not choose to forget, not any more.

I wait at the edge of this prairie as a fragile chain of air and magic is woven across the distance. My hand is shaking.

There is a subtle change in the sound as someone picks up, but only silence stretches between me and this unknown other until I hear a voice I have not heard for far too long.

“Tim?” it says. He says. He knows it’s me. There is something in that: he still has my number in his contacts.

“Jasper, I—” start, but get no further. Too much lies unsaid between us, and it will be forever in the undoing. But I know where to start. “Jasper, I need to tell you something.”

I’m crying again. I remind myself of something I realized years ago, with Jasper, and turned my back on. The greatest luxury in life is to love and be loved. I’m tired of running, tired of chasing after evanescent scraps of fame. I collect myself, from the indigo prairie and the aftermath of the sun’s fiery descent and the dusty scrim of road behind me.

“Jasper… I need to tell you about Brian.”

And under the implacable gaze of the night’s stars, I do.

—

The stream deepens with each year’s passing. The stones slip further and further out of reach. Finding them is tricky and you have to think about it. Put your hand in the stream right where you think they are, and you’ll miss them. You have to move your hand ever so slightly away from the stone you want to seize, away from its image. You’ll probably drag up the wrong one; drop it and try again.

You’ll get it eventually.