“We can’t be here much longer,” he concluded. “We probably shouldn’t be here at all. It could get bad.”
But he stopped short of insisting that his friends clear out entirely, and he left some drawing supplies under the counter. He could come up with a better plan tomorrow. Maybe that was the night Alex carved his initials on the wall of his booth: to leave an indication of a short time ending too soon, a sign by which generations to come might glean a little of a story they’d never hear.
We can’t know. It’s hard enough to make out the initials among all the other marks that came a little later. But they’re there, in the picture, if you look.
A BEACON IN THE WEST
In his bedroom, atop the dresser, Derrick found a stack of twenty postcards, all with stamps tidily affixed and delivery addresses filled out in his mother’s handwriting. The addressee, of course, was herself.
She’d been thinking for weeks about how to go about it—not obsessively, just idly, but with steady focus. At first she’d considered something fancy; it might seem more like a present than a motherly prod if the envelopes had something Derrick liked on them. Superheroes, or movie stuff. But at the office supplies store, there were only two types of stationery: sets that looked fussy and overdecorated, and kids’ stuff. The superhero stationery, especially, made her feel both sad and a little embarrassed: at one time in his life, Derrick would certainly have loved these envelopes depicting a transparent three-color image of Iron Man in flight. But that time had long since passed. Remembering that children are older than you think they are is one of the most reliable errands of parenthood, and one of the hardest.
So she settled on simple postcards—a set of twenty with California scenes on their faces: mountains, redwoods, the Pacific Ocean. As soon as he saw them Derrick’s throat got tight and he wanted to cry; but he checked the impulse, just in case Mom was already on her way down the hall. He forced himself instead to focus on how few of the scenes in the pictures spoke to the California he was going to miss next year: a place where you could ride your bike downhill past auto repair yards whose rusty corrugated rooftops would probably never be replaced, a place where on the wrong day you could get lost trying to find your oldest friend’s house because every other house on the block looks just the same.
“Got those postcards,” he called through his bedroom door, his smile audible in his voice, a small ache behind it for Alex, and for Seth, too, fellow travelers whose paths he would only be sharing a short while longer, good friends to whom the entirety of this small, sweet moment would have seemed foreign, alien, unknowable.
5.
PROVISIONS FOR THE JOURNEY
“Your mom made breakfast.”
It was Dad’s voice on the other side of the door, speaking in a light, cheerful tone. Derrick was awake but still sleepy, and the sound of Dad calling him to breakfast made him feel like a kid. He waited to reply, luxuriating momentarily in the indulgence of his morning mood. The way our worries seem like they were smaller before we grew up is a universal feeling, or nearly so.
“Let me get a shower first,” Derrick said through a broad smile, stretching his arms over his head.
There was a brief silence. When it broke, his father’s voice had deepened—just a little, just enough—and he spoke more slowly.
“Your mother made breakfast,” he said, and Derrick understood then that he was being called to the table rather than invited.
But if there were some pressing matter, it lay on the other side of some formalities Mom and Dad seemed to feel were essential to what lay ahead. The breakfast small talk seemed to go on forever—Dad asking Mom about work, which he never did, Mom passing along the sort of innocuous coworker gossip that her husband and her son both knew she hated. He waited it out. His last autumn inside the house where he’d grown up was proving full of oddly staged moments like this.
Maybe people in different sorts of families were teasing their parents this year about how awkward they’d become with their nearly grown children; some of his friends talked about their mothers and fathers with a condescension that made him feel a little sad. He understood, because he felt it, too, sometimes; the planet all parents occupied seemed to be growing ever more remote. He’d told a few stories, too. Still, it seemed miserable to fault them for trying. His parents had given him a lot.
“This time next year you’ll be somewhere else,” his father said, finally, and this, to her own considerable surprise, was the thing that caused Diane Hall to burst into tears. She’d rehearsed this breakfast in her mind for days, but when she looked at Derrick and imagined his chair empty in twelve months’ time, a feeling of profound helplessness descended upon her. She lowered her head, focusing on her pancakes, but neither her husband nor her son were fooled.
Dad said then how proud, how very proud, he was to have raised a young man now college-bound; Mom talked vaguely but sternly about the importance of avoiding distractions, of keeping your goal in sight. They went over simple stuff for far too long: punctuality, diligence, time management. They had a short bit about getting enough exercise; out of sight, underneath the table, Derrick had to dig his fingers into his thighs to keep from laughing. He’d been faithful to a daily exercise regimen of push-ups, pull-ups, and sit-ups ever since first seeing those corny Charles Atlas ads in comics back in junior high.
The big reveal was a savings account Dad had opened for Derrick, years ago, without ever telling him about it. He slid the passbook across the table; its cover was worn enough to suggest that Dad had visited the bank many times over the years. Derrick didn’t know whether he was supposed to open it or not. He waited.
“I opened that account when you were very small,” Dad said, clearing his throat, “and I put a little something in it every month except in December, every year, so if it’s not enough, you know—blame Santa Claus.”
Derrick remembered a December morning years ago when he’d gotten up early to find a shiny bicycle under the tree, and a lump formed in his throat, which he chased down with a mouthful of food. Then he discreetly put the savings passbook into his back pocket, nodding at his father as he did so.
“I don’t know what to say,” he said. He raised a too-big final forkful of pancake to his mouth; so many recent occasions had been attended by an unfamiliar but not unwelcome gravity, and it seemed to him that the best way to meet them was to remain in the moment. Be yourself. Plenty of his friends never even got a chance to think about this kind of stuff. “Thank you, Mom. Dad. Seriously. Thanks.”
His parents smiled at each other, each grading themselves a little in their minds: points for poise, points for focus.
He saw his opening in their exchange. “Guess I can go get that shower now,” he said, rising to his feet, clearing his dishes and taking them to the kitchen, wondering as he walked at how serious adult life seemed from the outside: the outside, whose distance from the inside kept growing shorter every day, erasing itself as it went.
PLAGUE SEASON