by Alex George
When I got bored of playing on my own, I enlisted the unwitting help of others. Sometimes I was a detective, hot on the trail of a suspected criminal. I would track my quarry for hours. I was an expert in not being spotted. I knew all the good hiding places and could instantly vanish into the crowd. I watched my targets as they stood in line for rides and waited patiently for them while they went up in the Ferris wheel. I was as relentless as a bloodhound. All interesting developments were reported back to HQ via the invisible two-way radio on my wrist.
When I saw a family that I particularly liked, I would pretend that they had adopted me and would follow them around. My talent for invisibility was especially helpful here, but every so often a grown-up would notice that they had an extra kid trailing along with them. They would crouch down next to me, always with the same expression of annoyance and concern on their face, and ask me where my own parents were.
—
IT WAS THE END of October when I first took Nathan to the park. I’m not sure which of us was more excited. I wanted to show the place off to him, eager for his approval, and Nathan had been pestering me for a visit. By then my father was well into his fall maintenance schedule, and the pathways were strewn with parts of disassembled machinery. As we walked through the deserted park, I pointed out the various rides and attractions, relishing my role of tour guide. It was easy for me to conjure up the sights and sounds and smells of a busy day in the middle of the season. I could see the vast swarm of humanity roaming hungrily up and down the paths; I could hear the happy screams of children; I could smell the pungent aroma of fried onions at the back of my nose. Nathan knew none of that—he saw lifeless banks of bulbs, not the kaleidoscope of a thousand brilliant lights—but his eyes were shining with excitement all the same.
We meandered along the paths, chattering constantly, making our way toward the mammoth frame of the roller coaster. The cars had been taken off the track and were lying upside down on the wooden deck where customers waited to climb on board. Nathan walked up to the edge of the platform and peered down at the rails.
“Are those safe to walk on?” he asked.
I shrugged. “I think so.”
“Good,” he said, and hopped down onto the track.
“What are you doing?” I said.
Nathan turned to me. “I’ll be careful, I promise.”
“Careful? What do you mean?”
“I’m going for a walk,” he said. He turned and began to make his way along the roller-coaster track.
“Nathan,” I said. “Don’t be dumb. Come back.”
The initial gradient was gentle enough that Nathan could walk along the rails without any trouble. After a few steps he turned to face me. He was only a few yards away, but the distance between us had never been greater.
I enjoyed riding the roller coaster, but as the cars hurtled along the hairpin bends, shaking my bones and pulling me this way and that, it was the protective harness across my chest that gave me comfort. That reassuring pressure against my thumping heart told me that I was safe.
“Come back,” I said again. “Let me show you the rest of the park.”
“I’ll have a better view of everything from up here.”
“But it’s not safe!”
After a short, straight run, the track made a vicious jackknife to the left and went into its first dip. When Nathan reached the corner, he called out, “I can see the ocean from here!” He stood quite still, looking out toward the coast. Behind him there was nothing but sky. After a moment, he began moving again, out of my line of vision. I sprinted down the steps of the roller coaster and along the asphalt pathway that ran parallel to it. All I could see was the underbelly of the track, so I ran up a hill, away from the ride. When I turned to look back, I could see Nathan again. He had reached the bottom of the first dip and had begun to clamber up to the next peak. This was the highest point of the ride, more than a hundred and fifty feet off the ground. A narrow iron ladder ran alongside the rails to allow access for maintenance, and Nathan was climbing it, pulling himself upward rung by rung. Dwarfed by the massive heft of the roller coaster, his progress toward the summit was barely perceptible, but he never stopped. Not for one second were his limbs frozen by fear or doubt. He kept moving, away from me, away from the ground, away from everything.
Finally, Nathan reached the crest of the ride. The track immediately plunged downward at an even steeper gradient than the one he had just climbed. He looked down and waved at me. He yelled something, but the words were caught by the wind and swept away.
“Nathan!” I yelled. “Come down!”
If he heard me, he pretended not to. He sat down in the middle of the track, his knees tucked up under his chin, and gazed upward at the sky, aloft and alone.
EIGHT
The snow came early that year.
It arrived in one giant, overnight fall, a week before Thanksgiving, a silent ambush from the sky that left us beneath a dazzling blanket of white. I gazed through my bedroom window at the new world outside. Within hours the snow would be plowed up, shoveled aside, trampled down, and driven over. Life went on. You can’t afford to be sentimental about the weather in Maine. This far north, the unrelenting tyranny of cold fronts—icy winds off the Atlantic, snow from the north, and the vast lakes to the west—feels as if it will never, ever end. Days are short, too short for living, it sometimes feels. The sun metes out its miserly hours, a spectral presence in the washed-out sky.
With the snow came the next phase of my father’s seasonal repair schedule. His workshop was full of motors of varying shapes and sizes, and now he spent his days taking each one apart, replacing worn parts, cleaning and oiling them, and then putting them back together again. He was cocooned in his workshop; it was the one time of year when he wasn’t anxious about the weather. Winter had thrown all it had at him and could not touch him now.
Nathan and I often biked to the park after school, our knuckles blue from the cold. (After we had set free all of Mr. Tilly’s kites, there was no reason to spend much time at Sebbanquik Point, except to defrost the mongoose from time to time and play with him. The door to Nathan’s mother’s study remained firmly shut while we were there.) My father was always pleased to see us. He took our arrival to mark the end of his formal workday. He stopped whatever job he had been doing and fetched the block of unvarnished cedar from the back of the workshop—the block that would eventually become the newest horse on the carousel. He chiseled and scraped away at the wood as we talked. As the weeks went by the head and neck appeared, then two prancing forelegs. My father worked by eye alone. He did not consult pictures or even look at the old wooden warriors that still lurked in the corner of the workshop. There was no need. Every contour of that horse was already buried somewhere deep within him. I liked to watch him carve. A contented stillness settled within him—a million miles away from his usual anxious mode of existence.
—
THE ROAD OUT TO Sebbanquik Point was a minor one, and so was sometimes left unplowed for days after a fresh fall of snow, rendering it impassable for most cars. By December the school bus couldn’t make it through the snowdrifts, and Mrs. Tilly’s Impala was no better. After he had missed a few days of school, Nathan and I agreed that he should come and stay with us. There had been a guarded telephone exchange between our mothers. At the end of it, my mother put the receiver back into its cradle.
“Did she say yes?” I asked eagerly.
My mother had an unreadable look on her face. “Until the weather improves or that road is properly cleared, yes.”
I punched the air in delight. My mother wiped her hands on her apron, as if trying to clean something off them. She turned to my father, who was sitting at the kitchen table. “I worry about her, Sam, all alone out there,” she said. “This is her first winter in Maine. She has no idea what she’s in for. Lord knows this isn’t Texas. I wonder if she has enough
food or gas.”
“I could go and check on her from time to time,” said my father. “See if she has what she needs.”
My mother looked out the window at the snow. “I don’t think that woman has the first idea what it is that she needs.”
“How does she get by, now that her husband’s gone?” asked my father.
“Heaven only knows,” said my mother. “Poor woman. Bringing that boy up all on her own.”
“Nathan said his father never made any money with the lobster boat,” I said.
My mother frowned. “So how did they ever pay their bills?”
I shrugged. I didn’t care. I was just excited that Nathan was coming to stay. We put up a cot in my bedroom and cleared a space in my chest of drawers for his clothes. Later that day my father and I drove out to Sebbanquik Point in the station wagon to pick him up. There had been more snow that morning, and the Tillys’ driveway had not been cleared. My father looked at the untouched banks of white that lay between the road and the house. From the trunk of the station wagon he took three shovels and handed one to me. We trudged toward the house. My ears were already aching with the cold. The front door opened on my first knock. Nathan stood there, two shopping bags of clothes at his feet. He looked at us expectantly.
“Go put your snow clothes on, Nathan,” said my father. “We’re not leaving just yet.”
We spent the next hour shoveling a trench so that the Impala could reach the road. I could feel the sting of frostbite through the tips of my gloves, but the steady rhythm of the work soon had me perspiring freely. Every so often I would rest, but never for long—as soon as I stopped moving I could feel the trickles of sweat soak through my T-shirt and chill my skin. During one break I looked up toward the house and saw Mrs. Tilly watching us from an upstairs window. She remained motionless until she raised her hand to her mouth and took a long drag on her cigarette.
When we had dug a path wide enough for Mrs. Tilly’s car to pass through, we went inside. Nathan put the kettle on the stove. A small cloud of steam rose from each of us into the warm air. As we waited for the water to boil, the door opened and Nathan’s mother stepped into the kitchen.
Despite all the time I’d spent at Sebbanquik Point, I’d only ever seen Mrs. Tilly twice before—once when her husband fell off the roof, and once at his funeral—so this was the first time I’d had a chance to get a good look at her. Her blond hair was pulled back from her face in a thick ponytail. From across her husband’s open grave I had thought she exuded a certain foxy mystique, but now, to my disappointment, she looked just like every other mother I knew. The most noticeable thing about her was the overpowering reek of stale cigarette smoke. (My mother always smelled of clean linen and freshly baked bread.)
“You must be Robert,” she said to me.
My father took a step forward. “And I’m Sam Carter,” he said. “Robert’s father. We were at your husband’s funeral service.”
“Yes, of course.” Mrs. Tilly smiled at him, and then her eyes began to skitter about the room. “Thank you for clearing the driveway,” she said.
“You need to get some chains for your car,” said my father. “Otherwise I don’t think you’ll be going very far.”
“We never had to worry about snow in Texas,” said Mrs. Tilly, looking out of the window.
“There are a few tricks you should probably know,” said my father. “Would it help if I explained a few things?”
“Only if it’s not too much trouble,” said Mrs. Tilly.
Nathan turned to me. “Want to go down to the beach?” he said.
I could almost feel the tips of my fingers again. “Not really,” I said. “I’m still freezing.”
“As you can see,” observed my father, “some of the natives cope with the cold better than others.”
Two minutes later I was grumpily trudging through the snow. There was no way I was going to allow my father to mock me like that in front of Mrs. Tilly, and so I’d reluctantly followed Nathan back out the door. When we reached the top of the wooden staircase that led down to the beach, I stopped and stared. The snow below me was impossibly white; the ocean next to it was almost black, and ethereally still. It looked as if the cold had bled all color out of the world. I had never seen the shoreline look more stark, or more beautiful.
Nathan bent down and scooped up a handful of snow. With three deft smacks he formed a tightly packed ball, then threw it at me. I pulled my head back, laughing, as the snowball sailed past me. We scrambled down the stairs onto the pristine expanse of white beach. There I quickly made a snowball of my own and hurled it at Nathan’s head, missing by a mile. After that we ran, shouted, and threw snow at each other. Usually we missed; once or twice one of us scored a direct hit, provoking howls of triumph and despair. Pretty soon I forgot about the cold.
As the battle continued, we made our way down the beach until we were in the midst of Mrs. Tilly’s columns of stone. Sheathed in white, they looked like a village of malnourished snowmen. We weaved in between them, making tactical use of the protection they afforded. Nathan was crouching down behind one of the taller statues when I let fly with a particularly vicious shot. Rather than hitting Nathan, my snowball smacked into the pillar in front of him. The column collapsed beneath the impact, leaving a glistening corona of scattered stones.
Slowly Nathan got to his feet. I was panting heavily. “I’ll get you next time,” I warned him.
Nathan waved at the stones lying on the ground. “We have to rebuild this,” he said.
“What? Why?”
“My mom checks on them every day. She gets mad if they’re not all perfect. Like it’s a sign that something bad is going to happen.”
I wondered if all the columns were intact on the day Mr. Tilly fell off the roof.
The largest stone was still where the base of the column had been. Nathan squatted down and picked up another one. Together we reconstructed the statue as best we could, guessing the order and orientation of the stones. By the time we had finished I was shivering again.
“We should go back in,” I said. Nathan nodded. When I reached the top of the wooden staircase I turned and looked back toward the beach. In the middle of those anonymous pillars of white stood the column we had rebuilt, its stones dark against the surrounding snow.
Back in the kitchen, Mrs. Tilly and my father were sipping their coffee by the stove. I felt a twinge of guilt about my errant snowball. “Are you boys ready to get on the road?” asked my father.
Nathan picked up the shopping bags that he had left at the door. “Ready and waiting,” he announced.
My father turned to Mrs. Tilly. “Thanks for the coffee, Judith,” he said.
Mrs. Tilly walked us to the kitchen door. “Be good,” she told Nathan.
“Of course,” said Nathan.
They didn’t hug.
We made our way down the track we had cleared. As Nathan and I clambered into the station wagon, I looked back toward the house. Mrs. Tilly was watching us from the kitchen window. She had lit another cigarette. As my father put the car in gear and pulled away, she exhaled against the glass and disappeared behind a wall of white smoke.
NINE
Nathan fit right into our family routine. We walked to school when the weather permitted; otherwise my father drove us there on his way to the park. By the time the school bell sounded at the end of each day, it was already dark outside. We did our homework at the kitchen table while my mother cooked. That was the one time of day when we stopped talking. From the moment that we woke up to the last exhausted exchanges across the darkness of my bedroom, the words never stopped. We teased each other, we told each other stories—some true, some not—we joked and bickered and argued. We developed our own code, an opaque shorthand of in-jokes and obscure references that often had us snorting with laughter at the dinner table while my parents and Liam looked on, bemus
ed—which of course simply added to the pleasure of our private lexicon.
Not once in the river of words that flowed between us did Nathan ever talk about his mother. If he ever wondered how she was doing, all alone out at Sebbanquik Point, he never mentioned it to me. She never featured in any of his stories. At first the echo of typewriter keys and the chime of Mrs. Tilly’s carriage return had seemed like an exotic soundtrack to my visits to Nathan’s house, but now I began to understand how lonely he must have been there. I wondered what was so important that his mother couldn’t step away from her desk for two minutes to check on us. One afternoon I cycled to the Haverford public library and asked if they had any books by Judith Tilly. The librarian checked her card catalog and told me that no books had ever been published by anyone of that name.
Every night after dinner Nathan and I sat on Liam’s bed while he played us records. My brother’s bedroom had become a shrine to his musical heroes. Tattered posters of David Johansen and Iggy Pop covered the walls, obscuring the jungle mural that my father had painted for him years before. My brain always felt as if it were being scrambled by Liam’s music, but Nathan seemed to enjoy it. He gazed admiringly at the strange-looking men who glared and pouted from the album sleeves. He would lean over and show me when he found a musician’s name that he particularly liked. In this way we discovered Johnny Thunders, Richard Hell, Sylvain Sylvain, and Rat Scabies. Then of course there were the Ramones—Johnny, Dee Dee, Joey, and the rest, a nightmarish clan if ever there was one. I remember wondering what their parents must have thought of their notorious offspring. For some reason—weirdly, since everyone had such obviously fake names back then—it never occurred to me that the Ramones weren’t actually brothers. When I finally realized the truth, I was too mortified to admit my mistake.
The expansion of Nathan’s musical horizons became Liam’s pet project. I sat on the bed and watched as the two of them bonded over squalling, three-minute blitzkriegs of noise. Nathan was a quick learner. It did not take him long to acquire a basic working knowledge of the New York Lower East Side music scene. His enthusiasm quickly eclipsed my own tepid responses. Sometimes, when they put on a song they especially loved, Nathan jumped up and down on the spot, waving his arms around as if he were in a mosh pit, and Liam rocked back and forth in his wheelchair, playing an imaginary drum kit and doing wheelies. Once he lost his balance and performed a spectacular backward somersault onto the carpet. The ensuing crash brought my mother scuttling in, but Liam was laughing too hard to pay much attention to her scolding.
