“But you went through it. Do you remember it? What was it like?”
He sipped his coffee and lowered the cup slowly to the table. Then he folded his newspaper twice and leaned forward to look at his daughter straight-on. His eyes were very large, with pale crescents of fatigue beneath them.
“Do you remember,” he said, “when you were maybe five years old, and you asked me about death? You wanted to know where your mother had gone. You asked if you would die and if I would die, and I told you it was an inevitability, and then we looked up the word inevitability in the dictionary?”
“No,” I said.
“It was one of those conversations you dread having as a parent. For years before it happens, you lose sleep trying to plan for it. But there it was. You wanted to know what it was like where your mommy was.”
He shifted in his seat and cleared his throat. I recognized the symptoms of trying not to tear up. I looked down at my cereal to save him embarrassment.
“Anyway,” he went on, “I told you I didn’t know what it was like. And do you want to know what you said?”
“What? What did I say?”
“You said—very matter-of-fact, as though you were quite positive about it—you said, ‘Wherever it is, it probably has curtains.’”
He laughed. I laughed, too. Though it sounded vaguely familiar, and I wondered if he had told me that story before. And if he had, why hadn’t I remembered it? Sometimes we are mysteries to ourselves.
“And,” he went on, “that’s when I thought, ‘That’s my girl. Whatever comes at her, she’ll be able to handle it.’ My little Lumen.”
He put his open hand on the side of my face, and I leaned my head into it a little bit.
I went to school, and my head was filled with that story all day. It wasn’t until many hours later that I realized something.
He hadn’t actually answered my question.
*
After school that same day, as I was riding my bike home, Peter met me by the side of the road.
“Come on,” he said. The way he said it was not nice at all.
“Where are we going?”
“Just follow me.”
His parents had given him an old Volkswagen on his sixteenth birthday, and it was parked a little way down a side road. He got in, started the engine, and waited for me to join him.
Sometimes people wonder why they do the things they do. I don’t wonder. He was Peter Meechum, whom all the girls love, and I was nobody, whom nobody loved. He had given me a command, and I was particularly good at obeying commands. And I had never been invited into his car before. So I went.
I hid my bike in the trees by the road and got into the car. The interior smelled of rust and oil.
He drove into the woods, then turned off the tarmac onto a dirt road. It was cloudy, and there were no shadows on the ground. Everything looked flat, too close. You could suffocate on the grayness of the world. The road was unmaintained. Weeds grew up between the tire tracks, and deep divots jostled my body about inside the vehicle. A weathered road sign lay in the tall sumac, half buried by hard dirt. It announced that the road was a dead end. But everybody knew it was a dead end. Even I knew where this road led.
I looked at Peter, but his gaze remained sternly forward.
Soon the trees opened up, and the dusty sun shone down on the wide expanse of the quarry. Peter brought the car to a stop and shut off the engine. I wondered if he would force me to walk into the mine just as Rose had forced Hondy Pilt to do the year before. But he said nothing. The only thing to be heard was the wind groaning in the trees.
He opened his door and got out, and I got out, too.
“This way,” he said.
I followed him around the rim of the quarry to a small grove where the streamlet from the mountain above collected into three small pools before continuing down into the mine. There was a grassy clearing in the grove, and when you were in it you felt protected and safe. That day, though, it was cold. A sharp breeze made a whistling sound through the grove. I shrugged myself deeper into my coat and crossed my arms over my chest.
“Now what?” I said.
“Lay down.”
“How come?”
“Because I’m going to have sex with you.”
The expression on his face was determined and dire.
When I didn’t move at all, he took me by the shoulders and led me to the place where he wanted me to lie. Then he exerted a slight pressure with his hands, almost nothing, really, and down my body went as if by mystical coercion. Maybe he had magic-spell words, too, that he used to cast conjurations. You cannot always understand boys, the things they do. They act, sometimes, as though in thrall to severe but natural forces. They can be waterfalls or wind gusts.
I sat down at first, then he gave me another little push, and I lay back. The dry autumn grass tickled my neck. I stared up into the gray sky, circumscribed by the tops of needled evergreens. It felt like the sky was particularly low that day—a ceiling you could almost reach up and brush your fingers across.
Then Peter stood over me, looking down at me as though he were a giant and I was a poor little farmer at the bottom of a bean stalk.
“I’m going to have sex with you,” he said again.
“No,” I said—because that seemed to be the thing I was supposed to say.
“You said I was ugly.”
“No,” I said again. I wanted to reach up and run my fingertips across the sky. I thought it must be silky and lush. Maybe my hand would sink into it. I was no longer cold.
He kneeled down and leaned over me.
“Take off your pants,” he said.