“You’re kidding, right?” Gordon said. “I clean it up and the geese just come back and do it again? Is there a point?”
When Fat John didn’t look up, Gordon gathered the wheelbarrow, a shovel, and an empty garbage can and made his way down the long drive. He parked his equipment on the swooping land by the side of the road. At first glance, there didn’t seem to be much goose shit, but the more he looked, the more there was, until it seemed that the stiff grass was dotted with a billion frozen pellets. Five geese eyed him warily.
Soon, his gloveless hands throbbed from shoveling, and his knuckles cracked and ached from the cold. He leaned on the shovel to watch cars entering and leaving. The security guard who had caught him the night of the graffiti slowed his prissy electric car as he passed, and then spoke into a cell phone. Gordon gave him the finger, and didn’t go back to work. He felt conspired against, watched from every branch by his father’s agents. When he stopped to zip his windbreaker against a sudden dampness, he spotted a group of patients his age leaving the low building set back in the trees. They followed a man, straggling alone or in pairs, toward the main building. He knew they’d given in, these kids, they’d given up, and he winced in envy. For some, their thinking was out of their control, and that was okay too. That was real bravery, not this fake bravado of his, his smart-ass-ness.
A girl who had been at the back of the group veered off into the deeper pines unnoticed. She crouched low, then ducked behind trees while the others continued on. When she emerged onto the side of the road, she looked right toward the boulevard and her escape. As if she were unsure what she wanted now that she saw her way out, she peered ahead, maybe hoping to see the bucolic geese and some comforting meaning in the ancient stone walls, maybe to take a deep breath and decide what to do next. She saw Gordon instead. He was shocked to find that they knew each other, not by name, but from the hallways at school. She was perfect, pretty but gaunt now in the dim afternoon light, untouchable by boys like him, and if she recognized him, she wasn’t going to show it. By the way she wiped her implacable eyes with her sleeve, it was as if she’d seen no one at all and nothing but the troubled and frightening minutes ahead. She pivoted and hurried back through the trees to join the frayed end of the group again.
He wanted to tell her that he knew how confusion sometimes felt like the deepest sorrow—and hadn’t she been abandoned too?—but the words my father and femur agitated in his mouth like prisoners clawing to get out and tell their version of the truth. Behind him, the hissing geese advanced, urging him to find her, and he grabbed the shovel, crossed the road, and slipped into the tensely hushed grounds. It was almost dark by then and he’d lost the last glimpse of her red coat. He crept through the rose garden, all thorns and stubs in the cold. The grounds were a maze, each building he passed named for someone—Sawyer, Kane, Lippitt—whose life had been saved or destroyed here. It amazed him to realize that he didn’t know which building his father worked in, and that instead he’d pictured him in all of them, the harsh fluorescent lights in the hallways and rooms his own private and blameless guidance.