“Is the yard open tonight? I can start right now.”
“Well, all these announcements, I have to get mine in,” my sister Phoebe said. She was expecting her fourth child, a boy, in just three months. She was so fit, our sister Amelia said with no small amount of rancor, you couldn’t even tell. Everyone cheered. Phoebe was the youngest of the three of us sisters, just about to turn thirty-six. She graduated the Art Institute in Chicago and was actually a very good sculptor, big bold figures in stone like Sylvia Shaw Judson, and an even better photographer, but she only took the rarest commission. Her husband, Walker, was an architect who made plenty of money and their three girls had the full panoply of enrichments. I was shocked by my jealousy. This could have been our life, a lot of sunshine, a little rain, the years of the green corn turning to gold.
Stefan said, “Since we’re all saying this big stuff, can I just say one thing to you, Tia Phoebe? I mean, congratulations, but something else? The photos you sent me were the best thing anybody ever did for me.” What Phoebe mailed to Stefan every month was a lifeline into our lives, the Christmases and picnics and birthdays and baptisms, the chocolatey smiles, bursting golden turkeys and kokkina avga, red Easter eggs, he would never see, in envelopes of four-by-six photos. I thought it would be too painful for him. But Phoebe, like my father a gifted photographer, and also the tenderest of women, insisted, and prevailed.
“We would like you to be our baby’s godfather, Stefan,” Phoebe said then, and Walker nodded, taking Phoebe’s hand.
“Me?” Stefan’s face strobed surprise, puzzlement...and pride. “Really?”
“If you can bring yourself to drive three and a half hours in four and a half months!”
Stefan regarded his splayed hands. “I can’t do that, Aunt Phoebe. I’m so sorry. I can’t go to any other state or anywhere more than fifty miles from here, and then I would have to get special permission from my parole officer and do a check-in every three hours.”
“Oh, Stefan, I’m sorry, too. I didn’t mean to say anything that would hurt your feelings!”
“Of course you didn’t!” my mother said loudly and unhelpfully.
“Mother, do you have to make it worse?” I said to her. “Why are you being a pain?”
“We’ll do it by Skype,” Walker said. “Or we’ll bring the baby here. I’m sure he’ll still be pretty small and portable. A church is a church.”
“You don’t have to do that,” Stefan said. “But it would be great if you want to. I’d really like that. I’ll be a godfather! Then a job, then a college degree, a Sports Illustrated swimsuit model who’s also an orthopedic surgeon and a millionaire...”
He meant to be funny. Just funny.
He was a twenty-year-old guy who had every right to make a comical wish to fall in love with a beautiful girl.
This time, not even Phoebe spoke. Finally, the only sound was my father’s long sigh. My father could sigh for Greece. “That will really take time,” my dad finally said.
I could feel myself begin to combust. Julie quickly marshalled the kids to clear the table, then fired up her espresso machine and began taking orders. “Can you come out here and help me, Thea? This one is new, and it’s got more knobs on it than a nuclear reactor!”
“I’ll help, Jujubees,” Stefan said, attempting to cut the tension with his childhood nickname for her, after the candies she once told him she liked as a child. A few moments later, Stefan emerged. “Another announcement! I have just drawn my first latte art! Mom, this is called the tree of life, but I think it looks more like a blowfish.” Everybody got interested in the hearts and leaves and panda faces he made with successive cups.
A half hour after coffee, we left. As Jep drove, I glanced at my phone, a few student messages and one from a friend who’d moved to Boston but was coming back to town for a conference.
And then there was this: Longing Esme/hair of weeds/eyes of starfish/teeth of seeds. Longing Esme/tears of rain/hands of sea glass/song of pain.
That night I called the number. The phone was no longer in service.
But two hours later, just after I had fallen asleep, I saw my phone light up on the bedside table. I picked up. She was on the line, her breath catching like a crying child. It was a new number.
“Is this...you? So you changed your number?”
“I didn’t want you to find me until I was ready to tell you more.” Then she added, “It has to be this way. Is Stefan okay?”
“Not really,” I said. “Why did you send me Belinda’s poem? Did you know Belinda? If you have something to say, just say it and stop tormenting me and yourself.”
“I can’t,” she said. “It’s too late. I did things. If I said what I did, I would be all alone.”
“It sounds like you’re pretty alone right now,” I said, relenting.
“I am. Don’t ask why.”
“Well, you need some help. Seriously. Professional help. I know you weren’t there. I know exactly who was there. So please stop playing this game.”
She sighed and said, “You don’t know. You think you do, but you don’t. No one can help me now. Please just do what I asked. Just tell Stefan.”
But I still couldn’t tell Stefan about the caller, and I still didn’t. I had wanted all my life to practice restraint, and this seemed like the time. Let each day’s evil be sufficient unto that day. I weighed the caller’s warning against the positivity Stefan was beginning to feel around his return to the ordinary world. The warning felt threatening and absurd, fashioned from dark alarm. The prospect of Stefan settling down felt sunny and sensible, more like normal life.
Stefan started work at the lumberyard a week later. I don’t care what anybody else says, I think almost everyone who can work, wants to work. Everybody wants to feel good and be able to talk about work—to talk at work, to have a place to show up at regularly where you’re expected and at least minimally respected. At the lumberyard, Stefan made friends. As the winter wore on, he joined the basketball league and bowling team, pursuits he once would have considered ludicrously geezer. Stefan talked all the time about his coworkers Cal and Casey, twin brothers just a year older than he was, who’d started working at the mill the weekend after high school graduation and had already earned so much, living at home and living frugally, that they wouldn’t have one cent of college debt. There was a woman named Katie who sewed team sweatshirts for everyone and an old guy everyone called Pearl, who built harps on the side. Especially, he talked about his uncle, Andy, whom Stefan considered the stand-up guy of the universe.
It was Andy who called our home phone from the hospital emergency room that glowering afternoon. I picked up.
“Stefan is in surgery...now wait, he’s not in any danger. He’s not going to die. He’s not hurt like that. But there was an accident, an incident.”
“Tell me, Andy.”
“I’ll meet you here. I’ll explain.” He hung up. Jep was already walking in the door; my sister Amelia had called him.
“No,” I whimpered.
“Let’s just get there, and then we’ll figure everything else out,” Jep said.