by Marion Winik
Finished a BA, a master’s, became a teacher. Married the crazy wife, adopted sons. Set kids’ minds on fire in a high school classroom outside DC. This was the ’60s, the ’70s, his classroom full of spider plants and coffee cups and the Tao Te Ching. They called him by his first name. He taught them to think. Fell in love in the faculty lounge with a divorced mother of two boys: my husband and his little brother. Got it right this time. Retired with her to twenty dream acres in Virginia, a farmer at last. Immediately, senselessly, their boys started dying. And were planted near the fields where he grew asparagus, lettuce, and raspberries, rolling down the row in his hand-controlled, three-wheeled cart. When, near seventy, frailty began to overcome will, he went back to New Hampshire for the white pine he climbed as a boy, and built his coffin. Five years later, two sons laid him in it beside their brothers. Watched over now by handmade dry stone walls, gathered, carried, fitted together, piled stone by stone.
The Last Brother
THE COMMON THEME of the speeches at his funeral, which overflowed down the steps of a picture-book church in Maryland without a single blood relative in attendance, was: I cannot believe he lasted this long. His stepmother, who married his adoptive father when the deceased was just a teenager in prison, said, I never thought he’d be a good man. His stepbrother said, When I met him he was an asshole. His best friend recounted arguments that ran for decades.
His wife of sixteen years—my sister-in-law—sat silent in the first pew, still in shock. They rarely spent a night apart, but she’d been fast asleep at her sister’s when his heart clenched up. She could not have done a thing, the doctor said, but that’s what they always tell you. They know it will be hard enough in your little condo full of meticulously organized CDs, movies, baseball caps, and mystery novels shelved to the ceiling, keeping out chaos the way the Hoover Dam holds back the Colorado.
By the time I met him, his chaos days were long over, though his tongue was still sharp as a blade. He was a big bald paleface accountant who was the only other guest invited to his little brother’s 40th birthday party. He brought the steaks, I brought the coconut-tomatillo soup. He took one look at me and said I was The One, which was both embarrassing and impossibly endearing.
Within a few years he had turned from a fat guy into a skeleton, living on Kools and Pepsi and not taking his diabetes medicine. Driving up from Germantown to watch the Redskins with his little brother. Who buried him alone in the rocky ground of their mother’s farm. Three brothers buried the first, two brothers buried the second and also their father, now one brother buries the other and is alone. A dark summer and a terrible season for the Redskins lie ahead. He will dig his hole himself.
The Last Straw
SIX EGGS and a pint of vodka, sure ain’t got much to lose, wailed the singer on the CD downstairs. My husband came into our darkened room and threw himself on the bed, his shoulders shaking, crying so hard he couldn’t speak. As long as I’d known him, I hadn’t seen him shed a tear outside a movie theater. It was a couple of days after Christmas, the first since the last of his brothers died. We’d been down to Germantown to take Jim’s widow out to dinner; afterward, back at the apartment, she had us go through the CDs. Take them all, she said, but there were too many. My husband filled a shopping bag with Stevie Ray Vaughan, Steve Earle, Little Feat, and the female blues singers: Sue Foley, Susan Tedeschi, Lou Ann Barton. Two copies of the only album ever made by the little-known Vala Cupp, a tiny redhead with a big voice who toured with John Lee Hooker for fifteen years.
After he stopped in Damascus for a pint of vodka, he was playing the CDs in the car, reminiscing as he rarely has. Music was what we talked about, he said, the only thing we ever really talked about. At home I went up to bed while he sat by the stereo, looking at Vala Cupp on the front of her jewel case. He got on the Internet to see what she was up to.“Ms. Cupp had suffered for years from bipolar disorder and depression, ” he learned. “Although surrounded by a circle of close friends in Austin and in frequent touch by email and phone with many friends around the nation, she had become increasingly withdrawn.” She answered the phone so rarely, her friends often had to call the police to get the door open. So she’d been dead for five days when they found her hanging in the kitchen, her dogs and cat dazed with grief.
The Bad Influence
YOU DON’T WANT your fifteen-year-old son having friends with apartments, friends who are old enough to buy alcohol legally. You will never meet these friends, as I never met this one. I knew his name, Adam, and that was code for every kind of trouble kids can get into in an unchaperoned apartment in Railroad, Pennsylvania. I pictured a place with black lights and Jimi Hendrix posters and a thousand beers soaked into the orange carpet, as if crash pads hadn’t changed a bit since I was a girl.
If I called Vince’s cell phone and he said, We’re at Adam’s, I said, Come home right now! After a while, they stopped chilling there, I was told, because his roommate was sick of all the high school kids. Probably sick of driving back and forth to the liquor store.
Oh, this was a crazy day, this ninth of July. I had to go out at 11:30 in the morning to stop my husband on the lawn tractor and tell him his last brother had died.
That afternoon Vince got a call. Adam had drowned in Prettyboy Reservoir, a place they all went swimming every day. He had floundered halfway across and another boy jumped in to help him, not knowing the most basic lifesaving rule. A drowning swimmer will take you down with him—you have to keep your distance, throw him a stick.
The young girl on the cliff, Vince’s age, tried to call for help but she had no service. Screaming as she watched them both disappear. We told him to take his jeans off, we told him to leave his sneakers onshore. Did we tell him he had too much to drink, I thought, and I also thought they would not want to swim anymore at Prettyboy. But there is no way in hell that place is dangerous, Vince told me. Don’t worry.
The Burning Man
FOR SOME YEARS there was a saint here in the town of Glen Rock, a young house painter with liver cancer. Just a few years earlier he’d been a badass teenage alcoholic, a two-bit dealer. Then he sold dope to a kid who OD’d. His heart on fire, he turned around and never turned back. Long before he learned of the disease that would kill him at 25, he’d taken an oath: if he could help you, he would.
Though he performed his good deeds in the most unassuming way possible, people said his name with a certain awe. So when my son was just fourteen and getting in deeper trouble every day, I sent a message through a mutual friend, as if calling on the local superhero. He showed up in his tune-blasting Honda Accord and took my son to the sushi restaurant, where they ate Hollywood rolls and talked for a while.
One thing he explained that night, my son told me in the car as we drove home from the funeral, is how you know you are in trouble. It is not when you get caught, not when your parents find out, not when the cops come and things fall apart. It’s when you are going to hang with your friends, and you realize you are looking forward to the high more than the people. Stop right there. You have already begun to sell your soul: to trade good for easy, real for fast, sharp for blurred, a bad deal you will rush to make again and again.
Just before we went to Paris that summer, we visited him on a hospital bed set up in his parents’ living room. He was barely breathing. When he realized who I was, he apologized and said he didn’t think he was going to be able to make the house-sitting gig we had discussed. Although he didn’t rule it out entirely.
The R.A.
AT THE ART SCHOOL where we taught were many members of what I liked to call the BLT community: girls who wanted to be boys, boys who wanted to be girls, girls who liked girls, boys who liked boys, and some who had transcended gender altogether. One was a photographer, a web designer, the resident assistant in her dorm, the kind who would drag her sister and brother artists from their various morbid pursuits to go outside and ride bikes. Though she was a sturdy sort who wore men’s clothes and used a man’s nickname,
because she was my writing student, I could never look at her without seeing the little girl from Massachusetts who kicked a hole in the door when she got locked out of the house one time, who suspected they liked her girlier sister better. In my husband’s class, Logic, which she hated with a passion, she hinted that she just might be able to refute the whole thing.
In her essays, and perhaps in real life, she called her parents by their first names. Old hippies with a messed-up marriage, they got more sympathy from me than they did from the author. It broke my heart when I read those names in her obituary. I imagined Sharon calling Martin in his home halfway across the country in the middle of the night to tell him the universe had thrown their brand-new college graduate from the backseat of a speeding jeep in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where she’d been sleeping peacefully under the starry Western sky. The sister in China, the grandma in Texas, the brother in Concord: their phones were ringing too. I hope one of them found those files on her computer because she had it all written down, and she always turned in two or three more drafts than anyone else in the class.
The Graduate
BECAUSE WE MOVED away from Texas before the teen years came roaring in to sweep my sons and their friends away on waves of testosterone, Red Bull, and cheap beer, here he is at eleven: a pale, reedy blond with glasses, doofy and antsy and unfailingly polite, his toothy, elated smile bigger than the rest of him. His mother was younger than most at our semi-yuppie neighborhood elementary; his teenage sister was raising a baby at home. He was named after his dad, whom he resembled not a bit, a big dark-haired Texas farm boy who played basketball with the kids in the driveway. How fiercely my son loved this friend, not because he was so cool or a sports star or had a swimming pool or anything like that, quite the opposite. You should see how much sunscreen he has to wear, my son marveled after a day at the water park. He is the whitest person in the world.
After we moved, they stayed in touch for a while, visited once or twice. Then those waves of change swept my son off to the locker room and his friend into a bit of trouble. He’s doing okay, I think, my son told me. He changed schools. The night of his high school graduation, his family had a big party for him. On his way out the door, he told his mom it had been the best day of his life. Sometime around four in the morning his friends thought he’d had enough, and insisted on following him home. But he fooled them. As soon as they left, he backed out of the driveway and made it about a hundred yards before he flipped his car. A week later I watched my son’s class line up to get their diplomas on the football field of a Pennsylvania high school. I looked around at the bleachers full of proud, expectant faces. I don’t know how the hell we go on, knowing what we know.
The House
IF YOU VISIT the triangular lot at the intersection of Catina and Mouton Streets, you can still see the oak that shaded the sliver of a yard where its owner once gave a bar mitzvah brunch for the son of our mutual friends—and in New Orleans, even a bar mitzvah brunch may have a certain pagan razzmatazz. In the little galley of a kitchen she mixed mimosas, then carried them through the glass-louvered sunroom to the waiting hands of her guests, and we celebrated our clever children and our general good fortune in the extravagant Louisiana spring. The pink house was no more than a cottage, really, yet it pulsed with housely pride, the accomplishment of a single mother born to a teenaged mother in a world where pink cottages are not handed out by the dealer, where you work your way around the board many times and hoard your cash and count your pot and finally landon the corner of Catina and Mouton, where at last you are home.
It was almost three weeks after the storm when the rescuers made it by in a boat and spray painted their rude crossbones on the roof. They found no people and no animals so they left saving nothing. Beneath the murky waters the pink cottage lay like a shipwrecked galleon, kaleidoscopes and perfume bottles bobbing, straps of handbags twisting like seaweed around the legs of chairs, brightly colored sandals and pumps swimming toward the ceiling of the closet like tropical fish. Books swelled, photos slipped from their mounts, bath beads released their oil into the dark gumbo where salt found pepper and Comet and fertilizer and poison. Weeks would go by before she could come back and see the stained and reeking wreck, before she would discover the brave little Christmas ornaments in their plastic lifeboat, the crystal pitcher peeking out of the sludge, blurred pages from an old address book dried brittle as shells.
The Soldier
AFTER WE WATCHED the towers fall, and the phones started working again, and the lists appeared in the paper, and the weeks went by, I realized that I had lost no one I knew: not family, not friend, not friend of friend; not like my sister in North Jersey whose neighborhood was shot through. I was teaching then at an art school in Baltimore and drove down that afternoon to be with the students. One girl’s parents worked at the World Trade Center; we were frantic for her all day, but they were spared.
Then many more people died, died in Afghanistan, then Iraq. I didn’t know any of them, either. I did not feel lucky, though of course in a way I was.
While my son and I were on our trip visiting colleges, whatever luck this was seemed to run out. We were eating bowls of soup near the Tulane campus when Vince’s cell phone rang. A good friend of his had been killed in Iraq. It was a boy I’d liked ever since we moved to Pennsylvania, who at thirteen had kindly attended Vince’s ninth birthday party. I saw him not that long ago, Vince said, I gave him hell for enlisting.
Our soup froze, the day cracked, we made calls. People did not know yet, were shocked. Then one friend said, No. I was with him this weekend. He’s not in Iraq, and he is not dead.
It turned out that another boy from our high school, a boy with the same last name, had been killed, and someone heard it wrong; this is the rest. Though Vince’s older brother had graduated with the young man who did die when his jeep rolled over a homemade bomb in Baqubah, I never met him. When we got home, I read his short obituary: how he ran as fast as a gazelle, how he had so much energy he used to vault the water fountains in the halls of the school.
One boy is alive, another is taken. What kind of luck is that?
The Family Guy
THE BOY was in a coma for several days before he died. He had taken an overdose of his antidepressants, which caused the seizures he was having when his mother found him in his bedroom. The propensity of Wellbutrin to cause seizures is greatly increased in combination with other drugs, so the psychedelic mushrooms were surely a factor. But whether he took the handful of Wellbutrin to relieve the visions produced by the psilocybin or to relieve himself of consciousness permanently is a matter of disagreement among his sister, his mother, and other survivors. A matter of silent disagreement, since who can possibly talk about this?
His sister, a tall dark Semitic-style beauty, was my stepdaughter’s best friend. They had brothers the same age, former pipsqueaks now on the way to becoming moody, substance-abusing Jewish teenage boys, the kind I went crazy for back in the day. I watched my stepdaughter press her nails into her hand, talk on her cell phone, lay her head on the table. She watched her friend close up like a mollusk. Then open again, raw and slippery and gray.
In clinical studies, my stepdaughter told me, antidepressants increased the risk of suicidal thinking and behavior in adolescents with depression and other psychiatric disorders. Isn’t that like getting pimples from your acne medicine or gaining weight on Slim-fast shakes? He had actually stopped taking the Wellbutrin, though, she mentioned, which makes it even more maddeningly unclear what his intention might have been on that April day, after the mushrooms and the Family Guy and the spaghetti.
The Baby
I WAS twenty-eight years old when my first baby died. It was a few days before his due date. They never could say why. I held him in my arms once, briefly; he weighed less than a dinner plate. He looked like a little Chinese doll: hair black, eyes slits, skin flushed and not at all corpse-like, fingers curled into fists. We dressed him in pale yellow flannel for his cremation
. All the ideas we had about him, even his name, were burned along with his body. The same people came to the memorial as to the shower. My husband started taking sleeping pills in the daytime. I had to wake him up when it was time to try again. The only thing I knew was what I’d learned at my job writing computer manuals: when some mysterious awful thing happens and the whole document disappears, you have to open a new file and start over. That is all you can do. Twenty years later, I don’t have any better ideas.
Twenty years later, I was in my kitchen when the phone rang. It was my son, born shortly after the first one. He was calling from his dorm in DC to ask if I had heard about Virginia Tech. I had not, but soon I knew a great deal. For weeks I read about them. I thought about all the things in their rooms and the dates on their calendars. The bridesmaid dresses, the airplane tickets. Their mothers having to wake up day after day to the colorless, white-hot morning, the insides of their heads roaring like houses on fire. One family was pictured in the newspaper the day they drove to Blacksburg to pick up their daughter’s body. They brought a favorite dress for her to wear. “I just want to touch her hair, ” the mother told a reporter.“Her fingers were so little.” Don’t you see how lucky I was? If I had to lose him, at least it was before I knew him, before all my love poured out of me like milk. At least I could still start over.
