Glimmering

They left early the next morning, rush-hour-traffic time, back when there had been traffic. Emma very small behind the wheel of the Range Rover, with all its weird protective encrustations—barbed wire, kryptonite locks, chains. Jule beside her, looking, at last, defeated by drink and fatigue. Jack had gone to bed early the night before, leaving his friend by himself in the living room with a bottle. When Jack had come down for breakfast Jule was there still, planed awkwardly into the couch. His big hand curled, conchlike, several inches above the floor, where one of Keeley’s heavy glass paperweights lay broken in two, a crystal heart revealing splintered chambers. Now Jack watched as Emma started the car. He’d already filled the tank for her, hefting the heavy plastic gas can and spilling some on the drive—one didn’t need television or radio to hear horror stories about people who ran out of gas on the Hutch or Saw Mill or the Cross Bronx Expressway—and then replacing the container in the back of the Range Rover amidst coils of barbed wire and unknown objects covered with tarpaulins.

“Well,” said Emma, cracking her window and speaking from behind a stainless-steel veil. “I guess we’re off.”

Jack nodded and made himself smile. “Yeah. Drive carefully, guys.”

Beside him Keeley sniffed. Instinctively he put his arm around her, looked down and saw her smile, painful as his, her worn blue eyes filled with tears. He wanted to pull her close but her shoulders seemed thin and insubstantial as balsa wood; he might break something.

“You take care of your grandma now, you hear?” bellowed Jule. Jack nodded, assuming Jule spoke to him. But at that moment the blond girl stepped down from the porch where she had been standing with Mrs. Iverson.

“I will. Don’t worry.” Her voice was sweet and high and cold, like a bird’s. “Don’t worry.”

She hugged Keeley tightly to her slender frame, and Keeley smiled, detaching from Jack. Jack stared at them, flushing. Surprised, stunned even, to suddenly realize how physically alike they were: the same fragile build and finely etched bone structure, long fingers and slender wrists, large eyes and thin mouths; the same thin bright hair, Marzana’s corona inclined to sun, Keeley’s to moon.

The car’s engine roared. “Good-bye!” cried Mrs. Iverson from the steps. She blew her nose loudly. “Be careful, don’t stop anywhere!”

“Good-bye!” called Emma, smiling. “We’ll call, call us, Jackie! Take your vitamins!”

“Good-bye!” shouted Jule, and everyone else, watching the car nose up the twisting drive. “Good-bye!”

Jack’s throat tight, hurting now too, and his eyes.

Good-bye, good-bye.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

The Wendameen Responds

It was high summer at Mars Hill. Heat without true warmth, UV rays but no sun splattering the rocky beach; birches and rugosa roses furred with yellow-green, leaves stunted but growing, barely. Lobster boats and trawlers puttering out to fish the Grand Banks, but no fish. Martin tossing awake at night on the couch, suffused with longing, raging with it: love but no lover. Knowing always that the boy was in the next room, in Martin’s own bed, John’s bed, breathing deeply and imperturbably as waves moved upon the shingle. Two things that don’t change, even at the end of the world—sound of the sea and straight boys sleeping soundly in other rooms.

Some nights, Martin could bear it, as he had all the greater sorrows of his life. Breathing through this as he had breathed through John’s death, and others. But now even this was harder, breathing. He had to use his inhalers more often, every three or four hours, gasping as he sucked at first one little plastic tube and then the next, waiting for the steroids to kick in, the permeable walls of mast cells to thicken. He was in danger of coming down with pneumonia—his precarious emotional state made him vulnerable, as it always had, to illness. Arguments with John would within twelve hours escalate into strep throat, a vast secret army hidden within that waited only for such carelessness as this to attack with fevers, blisters, white spots in the mouth.

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for love.

But yes, for love.

This could kill me, thought Martin Dionysos in the night, as he had, oh, perhaps a hundred thousand times before. Watching as some beautiful club kid thrashed around on the dance floor wearing a water bottle taped to his thigh and not much else. Dappled light spilling from mirror balls or lasers, or summer sun or stars. He thought of a song John had loved, dancing to it even at the end; the two of them swaying in bed together and singing along with the tape player.