“When you get in you can have the engraved champagne flutes.”
“Thanks, Dad. Smile,” Nathan commanded, leaning backward, inclining his head toward James’s shoulder and extending his arm to take their picture. He seemed pleased with the results, zooming and cropping until it was just the two of them smiling, the burgundy and white VERITAS banner prominent behind them. As they walked on Nathan captured them in various locations: Nathan making bunny ears behind his father outside the freshly painted cream-yellow clapboard of Longfellow’s house. Sipping hot chocolate together outside Peet’s Coffee. Both grinning with shy pride, arm in arm outside the closed gates of Eliot House. James’s children both documented their own lives obsessively. Where did all these photos go? When he asked for copies they laughed at him.
“You know, you guys aren’t little kids, and you and Gwen will both go to college in the next few years,” said James, returning to the subject so he could conclude and move on to more congenial topics. The thought of Nathan leaving—possibly coming here, across the Atlantic—created a strange sad pressure in his chest. “Let’s cross and walk by the river awhile. I don’t think you should have to pretend you’re siblings. But just—flatmates, maybe, all of us. Friends. It might take the pressure off.”
“Yeah, maybe. Look, cool picture of us.”
“Great picture, send it to me. I don’t know why I say that, you never do. Will you make it up with her?”
“I promise. And with Julia, too. But may I just say, in the privacy of this conversation, that I’m not completely gutted about the future lack of giant elderly dog shit in the kitchen.”
“Nathan.”
“Okay, okay.” He grinned at his father, wide-eyed and deliberately, disarmingly, devastatingly winsome. “Should we buy them another dog? What about a Siberian husky?”
8.
It was only ten p.m., but they were all subdued and weary and Gwen, in particular, was longing for the day to end. Mole’s absence was unthinkable, and so she would not think it. In the television’s narcotic company she could stave off the truth, just for tonight, but the fragile membrane of her shield required solitude and so she had refused her mother’s offer to stay with her, dismissing her almost frantically at the door of her hotel room. Until only a few months earlier Julia would not have offered to stay like a polite, concerned acquaintance but would simply have been there, holding her hand while they sat together, absorbed in a flickering, inauthentic reality and safe, warm silence. One being. In this manner they had staved off grief before. Offered, Gwen could not accept. And she did not want James to think her a baby, tempting though it was to separate them and be spared the nauseating and insistent image of their not-quite marital king-size bed.
There was a rap on Gwen’s door and she opened it to see Nathan, bundled up in his coat, a woolen beanie pulled down low over his eyes. She went to close it, and he thrust his foot out to stop her.
“Wait,” he whispered, loudly. “Just wait. One second.”
Her pajama top was an old cotton tank top of her father’s, and was almost certainly see-through. She crossed her arms firmly across her unimpressive chest and stared down at the chipping blue polish on her toenails. She became aware that her pajama bottoms had ridden up, but she could not release her arms to adjust them for fear of exposing a breast. The shorts were puce, printed with a motif of repeating black mustaches and a less regular, overlaid pattern of bright lilac bleach-stains, and were not for public viewing. She hunched, awkwardly, and did not reply. He would not have the satisfaction of seeing her upset.
“I’m sorry. I mean it. I know you think I’m a dick—” Nathan began. Gwen began to speak and he continued hurriedly, “I know, I know, what I should say is I know I was a dick.” He took a step and she began to protest again, but he did not come farther into the room, merely reached for the door handle and began turning it slowly, back and forth, inspecting the mechanism. “We never even had a goldfish or a hamster or anything, because Pamela thinks that animals shouldn’t be enslaved to human needs, not that I’m saying Mole was enslaved; I’m just saying my mother’s a little eccentric, which I’m guessing hasn’t escaped your notice this weekend, but I just didn’t think. Your mom got mad, which I totally deserved, and my dad said that Mole was your father’s dog, and I didn’t know that, either. I’m not making excuses but—I, I just wanted to say that I can’t imagine how sad it must be for you today.”
Gwen nodded, fiercely. She turned aside in order to wipe her face with the back of her hand, noticing as she looked back that Nathan, too, wore an expression of genuine distress. He cleared his throat and repeated, more steadily, “Anyway. I just wanted to notify you that the jury have returned a unanimous verdict of Dickhood, and sentenced me accordingly.”
“It’s okay,” Gwen said, because it was expected. But now that he was here she could not help herself from inviting him to annul the other words that had hurt so much this morning. She wanted them not repented but somehow actually un-said. “Did you really not like him at all?”
Nathan missed this prompt. His sister was rarely angry with him and when she was forgave him in silence and without discussion. Valentina specialized in spectacular tantrums, in canceled or aggressively terminated phone calls, and on the infrequent occasion she knew herself to be in the wrong she would ring repeatedly until he picked up, imperiously demanding his forgiveness. These fights had not equipped him with a sophisticated understanding of how to nurture, or comfort. All he’d learned so far was to reassure women of their beauty and of their value to himself, neither of which seemed useful in this circumstance. In later years, in adulthood, he would have understood that he was meant to declare that Mole had been extraordinary and precious not only to Gwen but to humanity; had been the sweetest-tempered animal, the most intuitive, that there would never be another like him. Grief can be petty and voracious; it craves repeated assurance of the worthiness, the unique value of its subject. He would learn. At seventeen he did not understand the cue, and simply said, “I don’t really know about dogs.”
“He wasn’t like other dogs,” Gwen said, let down, and started to cry again.
“Come and sit on the roof and have a drink, I’ve got whiskey, and they’ve got hot apple cider downstairs at the bar. It’s only ten. If you get dressed, I can get one and make us hot toddies,” Nathan offered, anxious to distract her, reaching into a capacious pocket to produce a hipflask. He wanted her to feel better, and to know that he had been forgiven. He was keen to win back Julia’s approbation in order to deserve his father’s.