He thought how the raccoons must treat this pool like a buffet. They must crouch anxiously on their branches waiting for the sun to go down, then come to sit on the edge of the pool. Dangling their little rodent feet in the imaginary water, they hold corncobs in their claws and suck out the roots of every kernel.
He had managed to keep his road trip a secret, but he wasn’t sure how long he could keep it hidden. His brother and sisters always wanted to hear about school. They were still young, or on the young edge of old, and still nostalgic for their college days. They wanted to live vicariously, and he just wanted to live with them. He wanted to be able to smoke joints with them. He wondered what they’d been like in college, dancing on tables and playing I Never. Gwen, the second oldest, was the only one he had seen do that kind of thing. Plenty of joints had passed between them. But Gwen was like a river, and rivers don’t get old, they just keep going.
And now she was pregnant, barely. But it was already changing her. He could see it in her face. He didn’t want to consider the loss of one more Willoughby, even a proto-Willoughby. He could talk around whatever doubt Gwen had. But it made him nervous, how careful she was being, avoiding terms, looking the other way, slouching. She was not one to swallow words. He knew it was his fault. She looked like a dog who had stolen something out of the trash, because he probably made Gwen feel like she was throwing something away. As if it belonged to him. Like uncle-dom was a valid form of ownership. He felt like a jerk. Who asks their sister to have a baby she doesn’t want?
She had the gift of always knowing what she wanted. All that certainty of hers usually made him envious, but also filled him with admiration. She would not slink away to the Grand Canyon in a leased Subaru. If it were her, she might not have told their siblings she was leaving, but only because she would’ve decided between her house and the gas station, not because she was afraid of what they’d say, afraid that they could convince her not to go. She would’ve just sent postcards: “Oh, by the way, I’ve dropped out of life and I’m riding the rails, sailing around the world with a Rastafarian band, selling handmade dolls at the base of Kilimanjaro.”
Gwen would have liked the Grand Canyon for about five minutes. She would’ve driven right by and blown it a kiss on her way to a motel with cable and a pool. Danny still cared about what he would say to people, people who would suspect him of taking a trip instead of exams and not going to see the Grand Canyon, blowing off the blow off. That is what Libby would think. Danny refused to even consider what Tom would think. Of a whole semester’s tuition down the drain, of incomplete grades on everything, of being a five-year senior, or worse, never making it to senior year at all. Tom would have things to say about all of it. Long, drawn-out things that would be said across a large, empty dining room table as they sat in hard dining room chairs, while Melissa whistled like a fairy tale in the kitchen. Tom would have things to say.
Danny kicked fallen branches into the pool, scraped quilts of moss up with his shoe, kicking them toward the pool’s edge. He wanted to dig down through the pine needles and weeds. He used his heel, chopping at the dirt. He got down on his hands and knees, pulled and scratched. He pushed and dug. Rocks went over his shoulders, sticks flung to the side. I need a shovel, he thought. An osprey flew over, crying and circling, her nest nearby. Danny sat back on his heels; he watched her circle, this mother eager for him to move on. She flew low out over the water, glared at him through the tree trunks.
If his mother had been here she would have understood about school. After their father died, she did what Danny had done; she had run away. Technically, she stayed, and everyone else left. Danny wished he had that luxury. She stayed in the house well into fall, something they’d never done. She never talked about why or what she had done in that time. The others were a gossipy mess over it, clucking over phone lines. Gwen imagined her mother and Remy carrying on a clandestine affair. Libby thought that she must have been writing their father’s biography. Tom believed that whatever she was doing was ridiculous and that she needed to be with her family in a safe, urban environment with central heating. Danny stayed quiet on the subject. Speculating held no interest for him, which only convinced his sisters that he knew something.
Danny knew, without being told, that she was watching the water, watching the light change over it, because in the water there was life and hope and time passing, a union of all things. Because her husband was scattered in that water, and she wanted to watch him slide over the backs of seals and foam at the keels of schooners and dash against rocks that they had walked on together. She spent a month and a half saying good-bye.
Danny’s father had died the summer after his senior year in high school. He had to leave Outward Bound three days early; they dropped him off at this house. His family was on the float waiting for him. They sat there among their bags and cried together.
Danny could see the water winking through the trees. The plastic bag in his hand, empty and twisted, was like a rope. He imagined it was a wet towel. He turned back toward the house. The pool, he thought, could only be restored in his memory, a memory that wasn’t even his own.
Libby’s words started to filter through the trees. She must have been calling for a while.
“Jesus, Dan,” she called from somewhere near the house, “you’re off the hook. Now stop hiding in the woods. We’ve got to go get Melissa.”
FOUR
TOM
July 2
That night Tom found Melissa because she couldn’t stop giggling. Like a child, he thought, she can’t play the game right. The closet was tucked under a balcony in the corner of the great room by a seldom-used side door. A forgotten place. Melissa was sitting at the bottom of the closet full of tennis rackets and foul-weather gear.
After dinner, once the sun went down, they had decided to play Sardines, one of Danny’s favorite games, and Melissa agreed to be It. The goal was to find her and hide with her. The last person still looking had to be It in the next round. This usually ended up with six people standing in a bathtub shushing each other behind a moldy shower curtain. But she had chosen a good spot. He couldn’t even see her when he first opened the door, though he could hear the soft nasal rumblings of suppressed laughter.
“You’re worse than Kerry,” Tom said. “How old are you?” He quietly moved a pile of tennis rackets and some ancient snowshoes. He sat down beside her, cross-legged. She was cursing herself for giving away such an excellent location. He told her in a whisper where the rest had headed—Danny upstairs, the girls down the back hall—it would be a while before they circled back. He was catching her giggles.
“Don’t you start,” Melissa gave him a shove. He pushed her back, and she pulled him close, slung her legs across his lap in an effort to move them both farther into the corner. They were nestled behind a few yellow slickers hanging from pegs, and Melissa lined up boots in front of them to try to hide their feet.