His room at home was still similar in that respect, very much the room of the younger JJ but without the presence that had made it, like he’d died in his late teens and his parents had kept it as a shrine. His sister’s room was different, altered in some way or other every time she was home, a room that was still alive, the one too into which guests were put when space was running short, his nearly always left empty, frozen, waiting for him to return.
Jem was rummaging in the bottom of the closet, opening different boxes, standing up then with a large shoe box in her hands. She walked over and sat cross-legged farther up the bed from him, putting the box down between them.
He hadn’t noticed her taking her boots off, but they’d gone, the sight of her feet in blue woolen socks suddenly giving him a feeling of enticing intimacy, a subtle marker to show that things had changed imperceptibly. He’d been with her all morning, but he was in her personal space now, the place where she felt most at ease, sitting together on the bed where she slept, close enough that he could almost feel her presence, his mind subconsciously registering her scent.
She opened the box and then smiled at him before saying, “This is what I wanna show you.” She handed him a photograph, kept smiling as he looked down at it, like she couldn’t wait to see his response.
It was a photograph of two young guys, students, facing the camera with big full-of-life smiles, the pair of them lean and all clean-cut exuberance. The slightly taller of the two had his arm over the other’s shoulder but was pulling it in against his neck as if about to choke him, the smaller guy’s smile even bigger because of the horseplay. It was a good picture, poignant somehow, a moment of pure laughter captured intact.
It looked like it had been taken in the late sixties maybe, the time frame suggesting itself because the smaller guy was David Bostridge, an uncanny prediction of how Jack would look in just a few years.
JJ looked up and said, “Your dad?”
“No,” she said, like he didn’t get it, then qualified her reply, “I mean, yeah, but it’s not just Dad. It’s Dad and Ed, when they were at Dartmouth.” He looked at the picture again, seeing the resemblance now in the bone structure, despite the dark hair, the fresh face.
And more now as he looked at it he could see the closeness between the two of them, a bond apparent even in that snapped moment. It brought home to him, too, the magnitude of the place Holden had finally come to with that friend, the ceremonial sanctioning of his death.
Holden probably found it hard even to look at pictures like that now, the whole sweep of their friendship caught up in those youthful smiles, the knowledge of how it ended seeming hidden somehow in the grain of the photo, in the blurred sunlight. Even as it was, and for all his professionalism, there must undoubtedly have been times when Holden castigated himself for having done so little on Bostridge’s behalf, that he hadn’t tried to tip him off, that he hadn’t questioned Berg’s operation.
Jem began to talk as JJ looked at the picture. “I think my dad was happier there than any other time in his whole life. I mean, he was such a hero and everything, I’m sure nothing else ever lived up to it.” She was right; he had the look on his face of someone who knew it was his time, popularity worn lightly, a life lived easily. Maybe it was the feeling he’d been trying to recapture in Russia, a reminder for himself of who he’d once been.
“There are different kinds of happiness,” JJ said, looking up. “I know what you mean though.” He glanced briefly back at the picture and added, What about Ed? He looks pretty happy too.”
“Ed’s different. I think he’s had more, you know, balance. I’d guess he’s as happy now as when that picture was taken. Well, except for the business over Dad and everything, but then, those things happen, don’t they? It’s just life.” JJ nodded, not saying anything, and Jem took another picture out of the box, swapping it for the one of Holden and Bostridge. “My mom when she was my age.” He looked at it, a posed picture, a portrait maybe or a yearbook photo. Her hair was longer but she didn’t look like Jem, as he’d expected, and looked only vaguely like herself as she was now, a pretty girl but with none of the woman’s poise.
“Oh,” he said, registering his surprise. “I thought the two of you looked alike but Susan doesn’t look like you at all here.”
“She’s prettier,” Jem offered, her tone completely serious.
“Different, not prettier.” She smiled as if dismissing his flattery, a glimpse again of her age, the fact that, in spite of the obvious evidence, in spite of people telling her constantly, she still didn’t have the measure of her own beauty.