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Greer was already waiting in Macopee by the time he arrived. He had flown to LA and then on to New York, and then took a bus up to Springfield, and a taxi to town, which was snowy and cold, reminding him that he had no coat with him. Cory hadn’t brushed his teeth or gotten washed in a full day; he was a stinking, soaking being with a furred face and mouth. He’d cried intermittently on the flight, feeling ill and suspecting that this kind of illness would always be with him, either an acute or a chronic expression, depending on the day. The idea of never seeing Alby again, the two of them never having one of those conversations that flew in different directions like an unstable firework, wasn’t something he could exactly believe.
The taxi pulled up in front of the Pinto house. Various cars were parked out front, blocking the driveway; he recognized Aunt Maria and Uncle Joe’s green Pontiac. Cory entered the house through the unlocked door and his relatives descended upon him, some of them crying, and then they parted, revealing Greer standing there alone. She’d braved the Pinto family scene even without him; she hadn’t just been hiding out in her own parents’ house until he arrived. His relatives left the two of them in the living room.
“Oh, Cory,” she said, which were the right words. “Oh, Cory, come here. I love you. Oh, honey, I love you.”
She had rarely called him honey, and he thought: This is weird. Honey was for a moment of extremeness. She had reached out from their usual vocabulary and into that of some other generation; the words that they usually used wouldn’t do. Honey was weird, but it was a bridge across the terrifying open space between where they had been and where they now were. A honeyed bridge that would take them forward as best it could. They sat together, him smelling so disgusting, even to himself, and Greer so sweet and scared, her eyes a startling red.
He was a young teenager when his brother was born, and what an indignity that had been: a baby in the house, going wah wah wah when you were trying to sleep, or do your homework, or think about sex. For a long time Cory had ignored the boring, explosively gassy baby, but then finally the baby began to crawl, and that was interesting, and then he began to talk, and that was super-interesting. The things he said! The things he asked! At age two, to Duarte: “Tell me about fertilizer.” And at age four, to Benedita, regarding one of the macaroni spirals on his plate: “Do you think it feels tense? It’s all wound up. That’s what Cory says when he feels tense. ‘I’m all wound up.’”
“I can’t believe this,” Cory said to Greer now, his head in his hands. “What can I do?” he asked, looking up at her.
“What do you mean?”
“To make it not be true.”
“I see.” She nodded seriously. “I’ll help you.”
“How will you do that?”
Greer paused, thinking it through. “I don’t know,” she said. “But I will.”
Together they sat on the couch with its slippery plastic, and then Cory lay with his head in Greer’s lap, both of them wordless and crying for so long that after a while they heard the click-click of a gas burner being turned on. Apparently someone had the idea that eating dinner would be appropriate.
“You got off work to come here?” he thought to ask.
“Oh, it wasn’t a big deal. Forget about it.”
“But wait,” he said. He tried to focus, a tremendous task, and then he remembered something. “Wasn’t your thing now? Your Loci thing? With all those people speaking at a conference center? Do I have the dates wrong?”
Greer shrugged, which gave the truth away. The first summit—“Women and Power,” she’d once explained, slightly embarrassed and excited by the sound of it—which she had been working toward since starting at Loci, would start tomorrow morning, and she was needed there. Except she wasn’t there; she would miss it.
“You’re sure it’s okay that you’re not there?” he persisted.
“Of course it is.” She paused. “When are you going to go upstairs and see your mother?”
“I don’t know.”
“Cory, you have to. I’m going to go see her too at some point, if you think she’d want that. But you definitely have to go to her now.”
Somehow he found the ability to go up there. His father was out at a bar with one of the uncles, and had been out for most of the day. His parents’ bedroom was dark, the shades pulled, and he walked right in without knocking and just stood there at the bedside, his hands behind his back like a sentry. His mother lay on her side under the chenille bedspread that Cory and Alby used to sit on and pick at, all the little nubs and knobs offering interest and engagement to their always-moving hands.
She was a mess, of course, able to lift her head only a little. “Why couldn’t you see that he was in the driveway?” he finally burst out cruelly.
She craned her head up at him. “Cory, you’re here.”
“Yes, I’m here.”
“He wasn’t in rearview mirror,” she said.
“Were you actually looking?”
“Yes, I swear! I don’t know what happened,” she said, and she turned away again.
He felt ashamed at the ease of his own cruelty, and said, more calmly, “Well, okay. Okay. Anyway, I’m here.” Then he left the room quickly.
Cory’s father didn’t return all day, and the aunts took care of Benedita, so Cory went to stay with Greer across the street at the Kadetsky house. Both of Greer’s parents hugged him and spoke kindly to him, and then left them alone. He showered for a long time in the upstairs bathroom, and then he and Greer lay in her bed and had effortful but strong sex. It had been months since he’d touched her, and he was as responsive as ever, almost as if, through sex, he could work out the insurmountable problem of death. He bumped up against her with his hipbones in a familiar way, though he noticed that her body seemed sleeker now. This was the New York City version of Greer. The version that lived and breathed a life that wasn’t his.
You would’ve really liked sex, bro, he thought as Greer touched his penis. You would’ve loved it. A girl actually touching you down there, and you touching her! Doing it openly, mutually. On purpose, bro. Alby had been interested in everything; he’d liked to explore. He would have been all over some girl someday, a brilliant girl who would have been his equal.
There was a wake with an open casket—it was just unspeakable to spend the day in the presence of his brother’s small body—and then a funeral mass at the Catholic church. His mother fainted at the grave and his father helped her up, though grudgingly. They were barely speaking, so maybe it wasn’t surprising when, two days after the funeral, Cory’s father appeared on the doorstep of the Kadetsky house, politely asked to see his son, who had set up camp there, and then, alone with him in the kitchen, told Cory that he was going back to Lisbon for a while.
“Now?”
“Yes. I need to get away a little.”
So he left, and there was no word from him for a few days, which was surprising to Cory, who just assumed he would be in touch every day. His mother, in all her distress, now had an additional refrain. “Where is Duarte?” she asked from her bed.
“He went for a short visit to Lisbon,” the aunts and uncles and Cory told her several times.
But there was no word on when he would be back, so using the phone card in the kitchen drawer, Cory called his father to confront him. “What’s the deal?” he said.
“I will stay here for a while longer.”
“What’s ‘a while’?”
“I don’t know.”
“Okay, be straight with me. You’re not coming back, are you?” Cory said, and there was some deflection, and then a sigh, and then the admission that no, he was staying there for the foreseeable future.
“But Mom can’t manage,” Cory said. “She just lies in bed.”
“She has her sisters. And I’ll give her money. Plus, I will leave her the car. Now she can go around killing anyone she wants.”