6. The Boy with the Backward Chakra

TWO WEEKS INTO MY JOB, a little kid named Manny Holloway died on my watch. He was an asthmatic. I was sitting on the lifeguard stand, scanning the pool. It was ninety-five degrees and the pool was packed. We had three lifeguards out there. I was a little hungover, I guess. I'd stayed out too late the night before. I was dreamy. It happens up there on the guard stand, in the heat, the sun, the water gleaming, the sound of kids and the nearly naked bodies of women all around you. You think about things. I can't remember what had my attention at that moment, but all of a sudden, some woman was screaming. I looked over, and there was this pale little kid with white-blond hair and a purple face slumped over the side of the pool. He was wearing one orange water wing. People crowded around yelling, even though a tall, bald man was shouting, "Stand back! Don't panic! Give him air, give him air!"

I had my mom's car that day, so I drove over to the hospital after I talked to the cops and everybody else. It had been a few hours by then, but the boy's mother was still there. She was a young woman, not much older than me, I thought. Later I found out she was thirty-three. She was wearing a black bathing suit and yellow flip-flops and had a hospital blanket wrapped around her. A couple of other women were with her, and some kids were off in the corner of the waiting room, playing. I was wearing my Burton Farms uniform, a too-tight royal blue polo shirt with white shorts. I still had my whistle around my neck. I looked like an idiot, like an extra from some bad 1970s summer-camp film. I sat alone along a wall. I could tell just by looking at the women that the kid was dead. They alternated between bouts of crying and long silences, where they just sat, holding their three heads together, like they were all joined by their skulls.

It didn't seem right that this grieving mother should be sitting there in a bathing suit and blanket. I got up and went to the nurse at the admitting desk. I said, "Can't you get me some scrubs?"

"For what?" she said.

"For that poor woman over there. Her kid is dead."

"I know," she said.

"Well, get her some fucking clothes, please. It's not right."

"Look," said the nurse. But then she didn't say anything else. She just picked up the phone, dialed three numbers, mumbled something, and looked at me. In about three minutes, an orderly brought me some green scrubs.

I walked over to the mother and stood in front of her. The other women were rounding up their kids.

"I'm very sorry," I said. I handed her the scrubs. She stood, dropped her blanket, and slid on the green pants, then pulled the shirt over her head. Then she sat back down and wrapped the blanket around herself again.

"Do you want me to call a priest or something?" I said. I don't know why I said that. I never had been in the immediate aftershock of death before. It seemed like the kind of thing to do. I figured Father Mack, my mother's friend, would come down and talk to her. He was probably at our house right now anyway, whipping up a pasta salad or cleaning out the garage.

"No," she said. "I'm not a Christian."

"A rabbi?"

"No, I'm not religious," she said.

I nodded. It was pretty fucking bold, I thought, not to be religious when your kid has just died. I wanted to say something else, who knows what, but a hospital staff member came through the double doors of the ER and ushered her away.

I sat down where she had been sitting. The two women who had been with her came back over with their kids. They were both blond, and they looked like sisters.

"Are you here for her now?" they asked. "If you are, we'll be going. We're so sorry about everything. We barely know her. We just felt somebody should be here."

"I am here now," I said. "I'll stick around."

They seem relieved to be rid of everything. Clutching their children, they raced out the automatic doors.

I waited for more than an hour at the hospital until the kid's mother came out to the waiting area again. She was still wearing the scrubs and holding the blanket around herself. She seemed surprised to see me.

"Your friends left," I said.

"I don't even know them," she said. "They're just mothers."

"Should we call someone?" I asked.

"Who?" she said.

I hadn't expected her to answer like that.

"I'm sorry," I said.

"It's not your fault. I had my eyes on him the whole time, and then I lost him. He was my responsibility."

She started to cry.

"I was the lifeguard," I said.

She looked down and shook her head vigorously, as if to disagree.

 

I WAS ALMOST twenty-three. I'd spent the year taking more classes at the community college, another journalism course and a literature class. I had written a few more dumb pieces for the student newspaper—TUITION RATES TO INCREASE, STRAY CAT BECOMES BIOLOGY DEPARTMENT MASCOT, BOB SEGER VISITS CAMPUS—and my mother had them up on the fridge along with Kolya's Three-Legged Race Champion certificate from Field Day.

I was still one semester shy of an associate's degree. My record was spotty and I had dropped a lot of classes. Still, although I hadn't told anybody this, a week before I started the lifeguard job, I'd driven to Ann Arbor to meet with somebody in the admissions office. Her name was Janice and she seemed to be about my age. She was dressed in a Michigan T-shirt and a khaki skirt, and had short blond hair cut into a bob. She kept tucking her hair behind her left ear as she talked. She spoke very fast and her legs were very tan. I wondered how she got so tan in that little cubicle. She had just graduated from Michigan herself, and recommended the school highly. I had expected somebody older, somebody in a smart business suit, behind a big desk in a plush office, but Janice was sitting in a small cubicle at a desk piled high with manila folders. For some reason, the casualness of the office made me more nervous than ever. I was wearing my only suit, despite the heat. Janice kept referring to me as a nontraditional student. She assured me that the university could accommodate my needs.

"What do you mean by nontraditional?" I asked.

"Well, you know," she said, "somebody who isn't coming to us straight from high school, somebody whose educational career may have a few gaps. A 'returning student,' we sometimes call them."

"Right," I said. "My grades are pretty strong. There's a C on there from my first semester, but that's because my film class was not exactly fairly graded."

"Will you plan to live on campus?" she asked.

I hadn't really thought of it. Maple Rock was less than an hour away, and I figured I couldn't afford to get my own place. I didn't know what to say. I didn't know what Janice wanted me to say.

"Sure," I said.

Janice put together a neat little packet for me and slid it into a shiny blue folder embossed with a golden block M.

"This packet has everything you need to get started," she said. "And my business card is in there. Feel free to e-mail me if you need anything."

"Right," I said. I didn't have an e-mail address, but I knew that was something I should keep to myself.

"I have a good friend who goes here," I said. "Sonya Stecko."

"I can't say that I know her," she said. "But there are more than forty-thousand students at Michigan."

"Right," I said.

"You do know that we also have a satellite campus in Dearborn?" Janice said. "It's closer to your house. And it also is a little less overwhelming than this place. It's huge here."

"Right," I said.

As I was packing up my backpack, Janice said, "What do you think your concentration will be, Michael?"

"Concentration?" I said. "I think it will be pretty good. I concentrate pretty well."

"No," she said. "That's what we call a major here—a concentration."

"Right," I said. "Philosophy."

"Oh," she said. "Wow. I sub-concentrated in philosophy. Who is your favorite?"

She was killing me.

"Um, I like most of them. It's hard to have a favorite," I said. My mind was blank. I couldn't think of one major philosopher. Finally, I managed to croak out the name Marx.

"Fabulous!" she said.

I pretty much ran out of there to avoid more conversation.

"Best of luck," Janice called after me. "I'll be rooting for you. And remember, we offer campus tours every Wednesday at noon."

I'd noticed, in recent months, a tendency for people to root for me. I wasn't exactly sure if this was because I was somehow charming and endearing or that I had a wimpy patheticness that encouraged people to cheer me on, like some wheezing last place finisher in a marathon.

The reason I had told Janice that I was interested in majoring in philosophy was because that summer I was taking something called Introduction to the Great Philosophers, which was taught by a friend of Father Mack's.

Father Mack was an old high-school friend of my mother's, and he'd been transferred back to a parish just outside Detroit. He came over a lot on Saturdays to do things around the house or take my mother out for pie and coffee. He was the kind of guy who had trouble hearing the word no. If he came over and offered to cook us hamburgers or replace the bathroom sink, there was no turning him down. When he encouraged me to take the Great Philosophers, I knew I had no choice.

It was Father Mack who'd found me the job as a lifeguard at a private swim and tennis club in Livonia, where his brother Stu was on the board of directors. Mack had five brothers, all of them rich, all of whom had followed their father into real estate development and construction, and all of whom, like Stu, served on many boards and committees and could get you just about anything you needed in the tri-county area.

Burton Farms Club was tucked away in a tree-lined neighborhood, far from any main roads. The members were rich, but not wealthy rich, just the kind of people I thought were rich back then—people with two cars, three full baths, four bedrooms. I didn't realize how rich people could really be until later in life.

Nobody paid much attention to me. Some of the young suburban mothers would drink too many wine coolers in the late afternoon and flirt with me, and I liked the attention. Every so often, on weekends, some pale, flabby businessman on the board would tell me that a toilet was busted or that the stripes on the tennis court needed repainting and I had to fix things like that. Still, I couldn't imagine easier work than hanging around with girls in bathing suits or flirting with bored and tipsy young mothers, while I sat in the sun, watching the pool. That is, it was easy work until the kid died.

 

THE MOTHER OF the dead child was named Holly. She asked me to drop her off at the place she worked, Burton Oaks Day Spa and Salon. She was a massage therapist there.

"My mother went there once," I said. "She won a gift certificate at a raffle at church."

Holly nodded. She had big eyes and her shoulder-length red hair, which had been wet from swimming, had dried into a mess of tangles and was sticking up in places, like the hair of a little kid who has been in the pool all day. This made her look younger than me, but when I took a moment to look at her watery eyes—a shiny medley of green and gray—I could see faint lines in her skin. She'd been crying so much that her eyes were puffy and her nose was raw and red. It didn't matter, I suppose, how old she was: she had a kid, a dead kid, and whether she was twenty-three or thirty-three, she knew and felt things I couldn't understand. It was something I should have seen then.

"One of the girls here will take me home," she said.

"Good. I don't think you should be alone."

"I won't be alone."

I almost asked her where the boy's father was, but I stopped myself. If he were around, he'd have been at the hospital. I was glad I stopped myself. It seemed one of the few mature moves I'd made in my life.

"Thanks for the scrubs," she said. She was still wearing them. They made her look a little like an inmate.

"I'm sorry," I said when she opened the door.

She was crying again. She just waved and closed the door.

I didn't go back to work that afternoon, or ever again. I was through with lifeguarding. I got home at six o'clock, a few hours earlier than anybody expected. Kolya was spending the weekend with a friend's family Up North. The living room was empty. I stood in the doorway for a while, trying to process the day. Just then, down the hall, Father Mack emerged from my mother's room in nothing but a white towel. His chest hair was matted and damp.

"Oh, good Lord, Michael," he said.

"What?" my mother said, coming out of the bedroom too. She was wearing a short black robe I'd never seen before. In the hallway's dim light, she looked closer to my age than her own, her face flushed red, her dark hair messed up and hanging straight down the sides of her face.

"Oh, hello," I said. I waved and went into the basement.

Later my mother came downstairs dressed in shorts, a blue Michigan sweatshirt, and sandals. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. She still looked so young. Her face had changed some, but she looked basically like she did when I was very young.

"We were going to tell you," she said.

I exhaled and stared at the ceiling for a while.

"He's leaving the priesthood," she said.

"I'd hope so," I said.

"I didn't plan for this," she said. "But I'm not sorry it happened."

"That's nice for you," I said.

"In fact, Michael, I'm very happy about it."

"A kid died at work today," I said. "While I was on duty."

"Oh, Michael," she said.

 

OUTSIDE EVERYTHING was clouded by the haze and humidity. I stayed inside. We didn't have air-conditioning, but I had moved into the basement after high school and my bedroom was cool. I couldn't get very good reception on the television down there, so I was reading a lot. On the last Monday of every month, the Livonia public library had a book sale to clear out old and damaged books. For four dollars, you could fill a shopping bag. Sometimes I filled two. I didn't know what I was picking up, but I was willing to read anything. Some of it was hard to judge, I mean, if it was any good or not, because the books had those blank library bindings and there were no quotes on the back covers. I stuck to the literature and philosophy sections. At night, I listened to Ernie Harwell call the Tigers games on WJR. I was always awake for the last inning. I didn't sleep or eat too much. I knew exactly how Manny Holloway would have sounded when he was alive. I heard his voice anytime I tried to go to sleep. I dreamed about his mother a lot. I saw her in her bathing suit, wrapped in the blanket in the waiting room, with nobody she really knew around her.

 

FATHER MACK WAS at our house more and more. Or Mack. He asked us to stop calling him Father, but I still did. He'd quit wearing his black shirt and clerical collar. He looked flabby and older in a T-shirt and khaki shorts. He started to go to his family's office in Southfield a few days a week. He would tell us at dinner about some of the construction projects his company was working on, and then sometimes his voice would trail off, as if he had completely lost interest in his own story.

Mack was lucky: his father had made him a partner in the construction business years ago, though Mack had never really done anything, and had never collected any of his profits. His father hadn't been a religious man, and always believed that his son would eventually give up on the Church.

"He's eighty-three years old," Mack said one night when Kolya asked about his father. "And he's happy as hell that before he dies he gets to see my vocation fall apart. He said, 'I finally beat God. I got his Son, but he didn't get mine.' Then he laughed his ass off."

Mack had had a few beers, and he pointed at Kolya with a fork.

"He never believed I could hack the life of a priest," he said. "I guess he was right."

My mother put her hand on Mack's shoulder, as if she was reminding him not to talk too much about his situation. He looked at her, then looked at us, then attacked his pork chop with his knife.

Still, in general, Mack was a pretty happy influence around our house. He didn't have very many possessions and it only took him a couple of hours to move in.

"You're not wasting any time," I said to my mother. "He's just coming right in, huh?"

"Michael, what do you expect? Do you think he can drop out of the priesthood and hang around the rectory until he has a place to stay?"

Mack had started working out, and would always ask me if I wanted to go jogging with him. I never did go, but Kolya, who was fifteen now and taller and faster than me, had started to get interested in sports, and he would run with Father Mack. I was glad Kolya had some older guy as a role model. I wasn't up for it that summer.

One afternoon, after a run, Father Mack came downstairs and tried to talk to me about Manny.

"Michael, you didn't cause that boy's death. You witnessed it. It's not your fault."

"I was the lifeguard," I said.

"It was God's will," he said. "Who knows the mind of God?"

"Oh, knock it the fuck off!" I said. "Come on, Father Mack."

"Mack."

"Whatever."

"What?"

"You heard me," I said. "If God wanted that kid to die, he's nothing but a big fucking bastard!"

"Michael, that's not a very mature response," he said. "But it's an understandable one, I suppose. You know, that is why I suggested you take the philosophy course this summer—"

My mother called down the stairs. "What are you guys talking about down there?"

"We're fine," Father Mack said. He looked wounded.

I reached over to my nightstand and picked up a book. I handed it to Father Mack.

"Nietzsche?" he said.

"Yeah," I said. "Have you read it?"

He smiled and exhaled through his teeth: sheesh, said his breath, sheesh.

"Yeah, I've read it," he said.

 

"I WANT YOU," Professor Donovan said, "to spend the class period freewriting."

Most of the class moaned. It was obvious that a day of freewriting meant that Donovan had nothing to say, but felt too guilty about it to just let us go home.

"I want you," Donovan said, "to consider a moment when you have faced a philosophical crisis in your own life. I want you to write about the philosophical questions that arose, and to discuss the philosophical conclusions that you arrived at, or the lack of a conclusion for that matter."

Most people groaned a little more and got out their "journals," hardbound black notebooks that Donovan had passed out at the beginning of the semester, and started to force themselves to write something. It was easy for me to write something: While I was lifeguarding this summer some little kid died.

I never minded freewriting, and I just did my best to tune out the other students, some of whom were still complaining. Inevitably someone asked, "How long does this have to be?"

"It's finished when it's finished," Donovan said.

"Are we supposed to write something like, 'To be or not to be?'" somebody else asked.

Randy Gardener, who always sat next to me in the class, not because we were friends but simply because he had been a few years behind me at Maple Rock High and knew my name, said, "Bud or Bud Light?" He slapped my arm. I glared at him and he said it louder. "Bud or Bud Light?"

The class started cracking up.

"Shut up and write!" Donovan yelled. Everybody laughed harder. I felt bad for Donovan. When he returned the journals during the next class period, he'd written, "Complex and thoughtful—A. Nice work." I showed the assignment to Father Mack. Not that I cared what he thought or anything, but I also wanted to show him I wasn't a complete fuckup.

"Good work," he said. "I'm impressed. Bob Donovan is a tough teacher."

***

I BORROWED Father Mack's old Buick Skylark one morning—he let me use it whenever I wanted, since he was driving a new company car, a red BMW, his mid-life crisis car, he called it—and drove into Livonia to the strip mall that housed the Burton Oaks Day Spa. I wanted to see Holly. I wanted to see that she was okay, or at least almost okay. I wanted her to see me and forgive everything or see me and blame me for everything and beat me with her fists. I didn't want her to be neutral. That would be too much.

I walked into the salon. A few women in sundresses sat in the waiting room. The receptionist behind the front counter was dressed in a black suit. The place smelled heavily of woodsy soaps and flowery lotions. I thought I heard the sound of water bubbling. A ponytailed woman in black baseball cap, black spandex, and black sports bra walked into the place, drinking from a giant bottle of water. She was so thin her ribs were pretty much right out there. She looked unhappy to see me standing in front of her. She huffed behind me, waiting to talk to the receptionist. The receptionist was about nineteen. Her skin was almost orange and her hair almost white.

"I'm here to see Holly," I said. "If she's available."

"Do you have an appointment?" the orange girl asked.

"No," I said.

"She's not here today," the orange girl said. "Monday is her day off this week."

"Right," I said. "I forgot. It was just a whim."

"I can set you up with an appointment," she said.

The woman in the spandex and sports bra huffed again.

I rolled my eyes and the orange girl smiled.

"How's next Friday?" the orange girl said. "Are you free?"

I laughed at the thought of my not being free. "Yeah, sure," I said.

"One? Two o'clock?"

I nodded.

"Good," she said. She wrote down my appointment on the business card, and handed it to me. The woman behind me slid beside me and said, "I just need to buy some supplements."

I walked out looking at the card in my hand.

 

NICK AND TOM came around a few nights a week. One night, I was going through all of my old baseball cards, which I hadn't looked at in about eight years. I was trying to get them in some kind of order because I'd heard about an old guy at the American Legion hall who would pay cash for them.

"Hey, isn't it weird that the priest from Divine Child is cutting your lawn?" Nick said.

"Nope. That's just the lawn boy," I said.

"Mikey, I already know everything. Our mothers are sisters, you idiot. Father Mack is moving in with you guys."

"He's not a priest anymore," I said.

"Man, I don't know if I would stand for that," Tom said. "It's scandalous."

"Shut up," Nick said.

"What do you guys want?" I said.

"You should come out and get blasted," Tom said. "We were so shit-faced last night, we all had to go to work drunk this morning."

"Scandalous," I said.

"You really should come to Ann Arbor with us," Nick said. "Sunny's got a new house off campus now. She lives with six hot girls."

Sonya was heading into her fourth year of college. She'd taken a year off to travel around Europe and look at art. She had sent me a postcard from Milan, which I imagined was her way of saying, "Breaking up with you was the best thing I ever did."

"Dude," Tom said. "I can't believe how drunk everybody was."

"Are you sorting baseball cards, Mikey?" Nick said.

"I don't know about a party," I said.

I hadn't talked to Sonya much lately, and even though she sometimes invited Nick and Tom and me to her parties and things, I was starting to think that she only invited us because we were funny to her—the pathetic boys of her youth with shitty jobs, shitty clothes, awkward movements, and ungrammatical, profane speech. I pictured her writing poems and essays about us in her women's studies courses or something. I didn't need that.

I told this theory to Nick and Tom, but they ignored it.

"This one chick," Tom said, "she danced around in a bikini all night. She was hot. Dude, if her boyfriend hadn't been there..."

"You're not supposed to call them chicks," Nick said. "They don't like that. It's Ann Arbor."

"Well, they're not fucking here," Tom said. "So what does it matter?"

"Just watch it. You know you really fucking embarrass me whenever we go to Ann Arbor."

"You're just jealous that all those chicks want my twelve-inch hog," Tom said.

"Could you guys leave now?" I said. "This sounds like the kind of conversation that could happen elsewhere."

"Miserable Mikey," Nick said.

"Mikey's got dirt in his pussy," Tom said.

I didn't care about their teasing. I was just glad that they left.

 

HOLLY DIDN'T recognize me at first. She came in and filled out a little chart and asked me a few questions. Name? Date of birth? Did I have any chronic health problems? Allergies? Did I have any specific, recurring aches and pains? Any tenderness? Trouble sleeping? Loss of appetite?

She was scribbling away on the clipboard. Her hands moved quickly, and I couldn't read anything she was writing from where I sat. Then her shoulders gave way to a slight tremble, the hands shook, and she looked up at me.

"Hi," I said.

"I know who you are," she said.

"I'm sorry."

She wanted to know why I was in the office, and when I said, "A massage," she said, "No, really," and so I had to say, "I wanted to see if you were okay. I can't stop thinking about it."

I thought she might cry, but she didn't. She tilted her head back, took a deep breath, and smiled at me again.

"It was his asthma that killed him," she said. "If he hadn't had asthma, it wouldn't have been like that. He didn't drown, really. Don't blame yourself."

I just nodded. What did I have to say? I was twenty-two years old. Why did I always expect myself to act in ways that were tactful and brave? I just sat there.

"Okay," she said. "You can get undressed and get under this sheet here, face-down. It's up to you if you'd like your underwear on or not. However you feel more comfortable."

"Do you still want to do this?" I said.

"It's my job," she said. "You will pay me, right?"

She left the room and shut the door. I left my underwear on and got under the covers. It was not cold in the room, but I had goose bumps and my spine twitched under the sheet. My heart thumped around in my chest, offbeat and clumsy. It seemed like I was there forever under that sheet, waiting for her.

When Holly came back in, it was obvious that she had been crying. She explained a few things about massage, but I wasn't thinking about what she was saying. I was trying to keep from getting a hard-on under that sheet. I was glad to be facedown. I thought about baseball, but that wasn't easy to do once her hands and the apricot-scented oil were on my skin. This made me feel worse about myself. Really, what kind of person was I?

A few minutes into it, she started working on my back. She said, "This is interesting. This is really strange."

"What?" I said.

She didn't answer me for twenty seconds.

"Is there something that is burdening you?" she said.

"What?"

Again, a long pause.

"Are you angry with someone? Did someone you love disappoint you? Have you ever been abandoned?"

"What?" I said again.

"Are you afraid of something? Of success? Or change, maybe?"

"Why?"

"Well, your heart chakra is backward. It's the oddest thing."

She explained to me about chakras, about channels of energy that move in and out of your body, and how blocked chakras, or in my case backward chakras, could cause all sorts of physical and emotional problems.

"You're carrying around a lot of burdens," she said.

Then she didn't say anything for a while, just kept working on my muscles, and I almost fell asleep. When she was done, she said, "You know who else had a backward heart chakra? Manny, my son."

It was almost impossible to sit up. My limbs were heavy with water. I let the sheet drop from my body and I was in my underwear, dazed. I'd never been so relaxed in my life.

"Hold on," she said. "I'll leave so you can get dressed."

When I was ready, I opened the door and took out my wallet. I didn't know if I should tip, but I gave her three twenty-dollar bills, which was everything I had, and said, "I'm all set."

She thanked me. She said it was nice to see me.

Then I said one of the only appropriate, kind, and thoughtful things I had ever said in my life. I said, "I would like to hear more about Manny."

I meant it.

She smiled at me. I saw her eyes get watery again. "That'd be a nice thing," she said.

 

FOR SEVERAL DAYS after the massage, I did nothing but sleep and read. For the first time in my life I came down with a summer cold. I had a fever and woke up sweating, then woke up with chills, shivering and trembling. I stayed in my cool den of a basement, sweating it out. Going up the stairs for a glass of juice seemed to exhaust me. My mother and Mack would come downstairs and I would refuse to let them take my temperature. I refused Popsicles and chicken soup. Nick and Tom called but I didn't come to the phone. My limbs still felt so heavy. My head felt like it was full of water. I skipped my philosophy class on Tuesday morning.

Finally, on Wednesday morning I woke up and felt better. I took my first shower in days, ate a breakfast of three eggs and toast, then got dressed, borrowed Father Mack's new BMW, and drove down Highway 14. The sun was so bright it was hard to drive with both eyes wide open. I squinted into the light. I felt like I had sweat out all of the bad shit in me—the depression, the guilt, the boredom and hopelessness—over the last few days. The car still smelled new. I felt new.

Around noon, I found myself in the lobby of the admissions office at Michigan, waiting to take a campus tour. I had expected to be one of several dozen tourists and prospective students, but as I stood next to the giant maize M that said, GO BLUE! TOURS EVERY WEDNESDAY AT NOON, and the clock shifted both hands toward twelve, I realized that not many people would be joining me. A spry old couple in matching Michigan Windbreakers and baseball caps came walking through the lobby doors just as Janice came down the staircase from her office and said, "Michael!"

I was so shocked that she remembered me that I screamed her name back, doubling the pep and enthusiasm with which she had said mine. "Janice!"

We stood smiling at each other while the elderly couple came at us, the man thrusting his hand at us from several feet away. "Henry 'Hank' Wilson," he said, "Class of '49."

We shook hands, and his wife said, "Edna Fuller, 1951."

"Nice to meet you," Janice and I both said.

"I don't know if I really need a tour," I said. "I know the campus pretty well."

It was a lie, but I had pictured myself being able to blend in on a tour, not stuck in an intimate foursome with two geezers and a university tour guide.

Janice grabbed my arm. "You're not leaving me now," she said.

The tour was the usual rah-rah bullshit, peppered with comments about college life in the good old days from Hank and Edna. The dorms, the student union, the new building projects, the athletic hall of fame, and the state-of-the-art computing center. Toward the end of the tour, Janice led us into the Law Quad, an old Gothic quadrangle that looked as if it had been lifted right out of Oxford or Cambridge. She showed us into the law library's reading room and whispered to us that we should feel free to take a look around. It was like church, with the dark wood, the stained-glass windows, and the high ceiling. I walked up and down the main corridor. Each footstep echoed. A few students studying at the long oak tables stared at me. My mouth was probably hanging open. I peeked into the little alcoves, where small desks were hidden among shelves stacked with law books. Gold lamps were affixed to the top center of each desk.

"Can any student study in here?" I asked.

"Of course," she said. "The UGLI—the Undergraduate Library—is a little more fun. More socializing than studying, though."

When the tour was almost over, I thanked Janice quickly and bailed, sticking her with old Hank and Edna. I found a bookstore on campus and browsed around the textbooks for a while, until I found a summer course called American Dreams: Lost and Found. For three dollars, I bought a copy of The Great Gatsby—a novel I had heard of many times but had never read. I also bought a yellow legal pad and a GO BLUE pen. Then I wandered back to the Law Quad and the reading room of the law library, found a hidden alcove with a desk and chair, flipped on my own gold reading lamp, and read the book straight through, copying down the lines I liked best. I wondered if anybody knew I wasn't a student, and if anybody would ask to see my ID But nobody seemed to care that I was there. I read until the light faded from the stained-glass windows above me. I copied the words, "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." It seemed like I had written them. My palms felt light. I was buzzing.

***

I CAME HOME EXHAUSTED, well after dark. Maple Rock seemed blander and more stagnant then ever to me that night. My mother was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a glass of wine, still in the skirt and blouse she had worn to work. She looked angry. I figured she was mad that I had taken Mack's good car without asking, but I had left him the keys to the Buick. I knew I was pushing Mack's limits, but I was curious. How far would he go to get me to like him?

"Look," I said, hanging his keys on the rack in the kitchen, "I'm sorry I was gone so long. Something came up."

I went to the fridge and got out a can of beer and sat across from my mother at the table.

"We've decided to move," my mother said. She never was good at having difficult conversations, and I knew she was nervous and serious when she came right out and said something.

"Mack's family has money," she said. "And now he does too."

I didn't say anything. I got up and looked in the fridge. I was ravenous; over the weekend, while I'd been sick, I had hardly eaten and I was suddenly so hungry I could barely get the food out of the fridge fast enough. I started planning a sandwich in my head.

"We've picked out a house in Northville. It's beautiful. Five bedrooms, Michael. Can you imagine that? Three baths!"

I took out a loaf of Italian bread Mom had bought at Beirut Bakery that morning. I cut the loaf of bread in half, right down the middle. Then I cut that half down the middle, lengthwise, so that the bread made one giant submarine bun. I got out the mustard and mayonnaise, spread them on the bun.

"It's on two acres of land, at the end of this beautiful gravel road that's completely covered in oak trees. In autumn, my God, it will be breathtaking."

I found some turkey and some bologna and lined each half of the bread with meat. I layered slices of American cheese on top of each half.

"I mean, I never, ever imagined that I would live someplace like that. Kolya will go to one of the best high schools in the state."

My head in the fridge, I found pickles and olives, half of a tomato, a cucumber, and some wilted lettuce that was still edible. I brought them to the counter.

"He's excited. I talked to him this morning. He might be on the swim team and maybe in the jazz band or ROTC or whatever. They don't have any of those things at Maple Rock."

I added some banana peppers, a little salt, and another layer of cheese. When I put the halves of the sandwich together, it stood almost eight inches tall. I garnished the side of my plate with one handful of potato chips, and then a second.

"And Mack and I plan to get married," she said.

I brought the enormous sandwich to my mouth and took the biggest bite I could. My mother stared at me. I flashed her the thumbs-up sign and chewed and chewed.

"Of course, you don't have to come," she said. "I suppose you could stay right here."

I gave her another thumbs-up, took another bite as soon as I had swallowed my first. My mother left the room.

That night the phone rang. I figured it was Nick or Tom, wanting to go out and get drunk.

"Hello," I said.

"You never called me," a woman's voice said.

"Holly?" I said.

"Hello," she said.

 

SUNDAY I WENT TO Holly's house, a small brick ranch in Redford. The yard was neat, with a few abstract, curvy sculptures and some flowers lining the front of the house. A statue of Buddha sat on the front porch, under the mailbox. The welcome mat didn't say WELCOME, it said PEACE. It was hot, and the air smelled like fresh-cut grass and heated asphalt. I remember that, because when Holly opened the door, everything smelled different. A lavender and peppermint scent washed over me, and I almost floated inside.

I might as well say it: I was taken with her beauty so suddenly, I was having a hard time keeping my basic bodily functions in order. She looked different than I remembered—taller. And her red hair seemed darker and deeper, almost auburn, and her gray-green eyes looked pale, almost silver. Even though it was summer, her skin was still very fair, and she had a tiny band of freckles dotting her nose and high cheekbones. When she smiled, her big eyes would get suddenly smaller and brighter, so it looked like two tiny gems of light were hidden under her eyelids. Her body was full of curves, with fuller breasts and hips than I remembered. Talking was hard enough, but walking was almost impossible. My limbs felt heavy one minute, and then I would take a step forward and my bones would turn to dust. My stomach was a swirling pit of water, and I worried that I might have to go straight to the bathroom.

Holly was dressed in a simple gauzy peasant shirt that was sheer enough for me to see the outline of the white camisole underneath. She wore a pair of denim shorts, cut high on her leg, and no shoes. Her toenails were painted purple.

The living room had wooden floors with small oriental rugs placed here and there. There was no television. There was a small stereo playing a tape of chants in a language I imagined was Indian or Chinese or something. A candle—the source of the lavender smell—flickered on a wooden table in the corner. There were some pillows on the floor, and a futon. "This is a nice place," I said.

"We're—I mean, I'm—just renting," she said. "Do you want a drink?"

"Sure, anything is fine," I said.

I sat on the futon while she went into the kitchen.

She came back a few minutes later with a small tea set on a wooden tray.

"I haven't had company in a while," she said. "This is nice."

She knelt on a small bench in front of me and poured the tea.

"It's peppermint," she said, handing me a small cup with no handles. "I think peppermint has a nice cooling effect in the summer."

I'd never been in a room like that in my life. I'd never seen someone kneeling on a bench like that. I'd never drunk peppermint tea.

"Mmm," I said, trying to hide the fact that I burned the shit out of my tongue. "Mmm."

We sipped our tea. I started to feel like it was a mistake to come and see her. What could she possibly have to say to me? And what did I have to say to her? Just as I was imagining a way to leave without hurting her feelings, Holly took the lead.

"How long have you been a lifeguard?" she said.

"Not long," I said. "A few weeks and then I quit."

"Because of Manny?" she said.

I nodded. I tried to look desolate. She leaped up from the bench like she had a great idea. She walked over to a small writing desk in the corner and started to shuffle papers.

"My parents came up here for the funeral," she said. "They're from Florida. My father retired early from Ford. They'd like me to move back down there."

"Would that be good?" I said.

"They drive me crazy," she said. "I grew up around here, you know. I came back here because my friend Annie opened a salon and said I could have a workspace there."

"Yeah, it's nice," I said.

"Michael," she said. "No, it's not nice. It's depressing. I can't think of anything more depressing than the Detroit area."

"I like it," I said.

"Where else have you been?"

"I went to Toronto once," I said. "And Ohio. Around there."

"You need to travel more," she said. "The world starts to feel small if you stay still for a long time."

"Tell me about it," I said.

She finished messing with the papers on the desk and started to stretch in the center of the room, like she was getting ready to run a race. She took deep breaths with each stretch. I could have watched her back arching, the rise and fall of her rib cage, all day long.

"How have you been doing?" I asked.

"Great," she said. "I mean, I think I am handling things remarkably well."

"You look good," I said.

"God, let me tell you the most scary thing, Michael," she said. I noticed she was saying my first name a lot, which gave everything she said an intense and urgent edge. "Some days I wake up and I think, well, I guess now I don't have to work so hard. I guess now I don't have to hold a steady job, have this house to live in, stay in one place, and think about school systems."

I just nodded.

"I hate this music," she said. "I mean, it's fine, but I've been sick of it lately. Chimes and sitars. I've been more into Dylan lately. And Fleetwood Mac. Songs in the Key of Lifeby Stevie Wonder. He's great. Do you know how great he is?"

I said I agreed, though I didn't know exactly which album she was talking about. She went over to the CD player. "Pink Floyd," she said. "I forgot all about Pink Floyd. But it's good shit, really. In college, I listened to R.E.M. and the Smiths all the time. Pink Floyd was mostly for getting stoned."

"Sure," I said.

"God, listen to me," she said. "I've got diarrhea of the mouth or something. I'm thirty-three and I sound like I'm eighteen."

"I like it when people talk a lot," I said. "I never have anything interesting to say."

She smiled and tilted her head, like she was trying to look at me from a different angle.

"It's just, most days I think of Manny and can't move," she said. "Can't get out of bed, I'm so sad. And then some days—I mean, I'm still sad all the time—but I wake up and think, well, there's a lot less I have to do now. I can do whatever I want. I don't have to, for instance, try to get Manny's father to acknowledge his existence anymore, or to send child support. And I don't have to know where my next paycheck is coming from, and I don't even need a house, I can keep all my possessions in the trunk of my car and travel all over the country, or the world, because nobody cares what I do all of a sudden. And then I'm relieved. For just a second. Relieved! And then I hate myself and start crying again, not only for Manny, but for me, because I feel like a weak mother."

She stood and went to the window.

"How old are you?" she asked.

"Twenty-two," I said. "Twenty-three this fall."

"That's so young," she said.

She paced along the window.

"Why don't you come and sit down with me?" I said. "You're moving around too much. It makes me nervous."

She did. "You are a sullen creature for twenty-two," she said.

I agreed with her.

"Are you sick of tea? I am. Do you want a drink?"

"Yes," I said.

"Tequila? It's summer. We should be drinking tequila with a little lime. I can make margaritas."

"Good," I said.

"Good," she said.

I followed her into the kitchen and watched her make the drinks. I had always thought margaritas were slushy drinks served in giant glasses, but she made them with a little ice, a lot of tequila, and a splash of some sort of flavored mix in a plastic bottle. She rimmed the glasses with salt and a wedge of lime. We went out to the back porch with our salty glasses.

I finally worked up the nerve to ask about Manny's father. She told me that Manny's father was never her husband and she had no idea where he was now.

"Somewhere in Spokane," she said. "A drunk to beat all drunks. That's all I know. I don't think he knows Manny is dead. I'll have to find him and send him a letter soon."

She told me that she didn't have many friends at work, other than Annie, the owner of the salon. And even Annie was just her best friend from high school; she had three kids and a husband who golfed, Holly said. All they really had in common was a nostalgic kind of loyalty.

"Most of the women there think I'm strange. They're nice enough, but they cut hair and put on makeup for a living," she said. "And I'm a practitioner of the healing arts and we just don't connect. I believe people come to me because they're spiritually needy and they believe people come to them because of split ends."

"Huh," I said.

"So no more lifeguarding? What now?"

"Finish school," I said.

"Then what?" she said.

I didn't answer right away.

I told her a little about my philosophy class, which made me feel very boring and immature. I told her that I still hadn't bothered to apply for a new job, even though my lifeguarding money was pretty much gone. Still, at least for a while yet, I almost always had access to Mack's old Buick, good free food at my mother's house, and a free place to sleep. I had always felt like I didn't have to know what I planned to do next, but now that my mother and Mack were moving, I knew I had to start thinking.

"God," she said, "I've always hated that question: 'What's next?' Why am I asking that? You don't have to know what's next."

"Well, that's good," I said to Holly, "because I don't have a clue."

We had finished our drinks. Holly went into the kitchen and I followed her. I watched her make another margarita for each of us. She handed me back a glass that smelled like it was pretty much straight tequila with a little salt and lime.

"I have to drive home." I said, taking another drink. "Go easy on me."

"You can spend the night," she said. "It's inevitable."

***

IN THE MORNING, when I came home, I found a FOR SALE BY OWNER sign in the front yard.

I stopped by Kolya's room. His door was shut and I knocked. He came to the door and opened it slowly.

"Oh, it's you," he said. There were three boxes on his bed and another one on the floor. I noticed he had a magazine called Barely Legal in one of the boxes. I remembered my first copy of Barely Legal. I'd stolen it from the Qwik and Cheap in eighth grade. My father had found it and confiscated it. Later I found it with his tools in the basement.

"Why are you packing already?" I asked him.

"We're moving in a few weeks," he said.

"So soon?"

"The house is ready. They're closing the deal in a few weeks. Mom was waiting to tell you last night, but you never came home."

"And you're going to the new house?"

"I can't wait," he said. "You know what my school is like. Full of assholes! A shithole."

"Still?"

"Don't you remember anything about high school?"

"So you want to move?" I asked him.

"Mikey, I hate Maple Rock," he said. "I hate this house and this street. I hate everything I know. I fucking hate Maple Rock."

"Wow."

"You should start packing soon too," he said.

But I had already decided I wasn't going, and I told him.

"Oh, well, that's rich," Kolya said. "That's too much."

I told him he sometimes talked like a fifty-year-old faggot and left the room.

 

THE NEXT NIGHT I drove by Holly's house before it got dark. Just seeing her front door in the twilight got me excited. I had to stop. As hard as I tried to remember it, the previous night was a blur. Skin and sweat, flailing limbs, thrusting in the dark. I wanted more of it. I stood on her porch for a long time, and rang the doorbell again and again. Finally she came to the door in a long blue T-shirt. Her hair was messy and her eyes were squinty. "You're persistent," she said. "I was sleeping. I thought you must be somebody from work coming to check on me. I canceled all my appointments today. That fucking tequila."

"Can I come in?" I said.

"Sure," she said and walked away. I followed her into the kitchen and sat at the table. She disappeared into the bathroom for a minute then came back and kissed me on the cheek with minty breath. She brought me some herbal iced tea, and leaned against me when she set it down. I felt her breasts against my shoulder blades and her breath on the back of my neck, which gave me goose bumps all over. My spine twitched and shivered.

Holly said, "How cliché is this? Thirty-something woman finds a young stud, gets drunk, seduces him, and fucks him over and over. How often has this happened to you?"

"Never," I said, which was the absolute truth. I had a flash of Mrs. Gagliardi, the woman I had lost my virginity to the summer my father disappeared, but that seemed completely different.

"You didn't have to come back here," she said.

"Why? Didn't you want to see me again? Should I leave?"

"Well, I suppose it's what I needed. Look, it's just—no, I don't want you to leave. You're fine. I like you. But don't feel like you have this burden now. I don't want you to wake up in the morning and say, 'Holy shit, I got involved with an old woman who has a dead son.'"

"I won't," I said.

"Do you have a girlfriend?" she said.

"No!"

"Tell me the truth, because I don't want to end up with a screaming nineteen-year-old banging on my door and calling me a whore. I was nineteen once too. I know what can happen."

"I swear. I haven't had a date in months."

"Well, I suppose you better tell me about yourself then," she said.

Holly started to ask me all kinds of questions. I told her about my life in Maple Rock, about Father Mack and my mother, about the new house in Northville. I told her that my father had left for the moon.

She said, "I know. I can sense that in you, your disappeared father."

"I sometimes believe he really is on the moon," I said.

"Of course," she said.

"But, you know," I said, "of course, he's not."

She looked up at the sky, where the moon was now orange and low, the tentative brightness of a harvest moon underneath a flurry of stars.

"I don't doubt it at all," she said. "Of course he is there. Many people are there."

"You think so?"

"Sure. Why not?"

She went into the kitchen and I followed her and sat down at the table.

"But you can't come back from the moon," she said. "Not once you send your soul there."

She sat in the chair across from me and crossed her legs, pulled an orange from the bowl in the center of the table, and started peeling it. I watched her eat a few pieces of orange. Then she held one out to me, and I reached over and took it with my mouth.

"I need a shower," she said.

"Great," I said. "I'll take one too."

Afterward, skin still damp from the long shower, we went out on her back porch and turned all the lights off in the house and sat next to each other in our towels, glad for the faint breezes that stirred the air that night.

We drank herbal iced tea while we sat at an old wooden table next to the frantic flame of a citronella candle. Holly said she liked my company, and it wasn't just the fucking. I confess that I had never heard a woman talk about sex in the blunt and natural way that she talked about it. At twenty-two, it was thrilling as all hell.

***

WHILE MY FAMILY and Mack made plans to move, packed boxes, and picked out window coverings and carpet for the new house, I went to see Holly as often as possible. Some days, I would pick her up from work and we'd drive around in the last light of the evening, stopping to get dinner in one of the many strip-mall Middle Eastern restaurants near her house. Sometimes we'd go to the used bookstore in Farmington and browse through the fiction section while Skip, the owner, softly played banjo in the front of the store. Holly would point out novels she had liked, ones that I had never read—The Stranger, The Immoralist, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I would buy them for myself and read them with a close eye, as if they were maps to her psyche. Sometimes we'd go bowling and Holly would let herself smoke a cigarette— habit she'd quit some time ago. Sometimes we'd smoke a joint in her car and then head over to the bargain theater at Livonia Mall and see any movie that was playing. We saw some terrible movies. High and excited to be in the cool, dark theater, we'd giggle uncontrollably and stuff our faces with popcorn and Sno-Caps. There wasn't much to do where we lived, but we found ways to make the evenings interesting. At the end of the night we would go back to her house and get into bed. My heart still raced while we undressed, and my hands sometimes shook so badly it took me a while to undo my belt.

Some nights Holly and I would go straight back to her house and just sit on the chairs in the backyard. She would put her bare feet on my lap and I would rub them. I had never rubbed a woman's feet before, and the act struck me as so intimate that it occurred to me I would be more embarrassed if my mother saw me at it than if she walked in on me having sex.

I suppose what Holly really wanted me there for was to listen. Though she would often make jokes about how she was using me for my young body and tight ass, she seemed to want me there more than anything in the hours after we'd made love, when we would sit in the dark and she would tell me everything that was hanging around in the shadows of her heart. She would tell me about Manny and how she knew he wasn't long for this world.

"His soul, it was always just straining at the edges of this world," she said. "Maybe all mothers say this, but his spirit was too gentle for this world. His asthma reflected his waning light and energy."

I was not somebody who could come up with any sort of thoughtful responses to these proclamations, but I listened. Sometimes she would stop talking abruptly and leap up to go to the kitchen and make us some drinks. Other nights she brought out photo albums, and she'd show me pictures of Manny at the zoo, Manny with a balloon, Manny petting a kitten.

Once, after such a night, I went to see her at work the next day, hoping she'd have time for a quick lunch. The orange girl at the front desk of the salon told me that Holly had called in sick again and had canceled all of her appointments. She looked annoyed and said, "I hope you didn't have an appointment with her too."

"No," I said. "I'm her boyfriend."

"Oh, really?" the orange girl said, stretching out the word really with her high-pitched voice.

I went to my car and when I turned and looked back at the salon, four women were standing in the window watching me. I waved sheepishly. They burst into hysterics and began slapping each other on the arm.

There was no answer at Holly's house and so, for the first time, I let myself in with my key. I found her sleeping. She opened her eyes when I came into the bedroom and then she shut them again without saying a word.

The room was hot, so I turned on the ceiling fan. I undressed and got into bed next to her. When I woke up a few hours later, I heard the shower running and went into the bathroom.

"I think I need to paint the living room orange," Holly said. "I need a change in the energy here. Everything feels so stagnant."

"Let's do it," I said.

"You don't have to help," she said.

"No, I want to help. It'll be fun."

After our shower we drove to Home Depot and came home with a few gallons of a color called summer honeydew. I had on my good khakis and let them get covered in paint.

We painted together all night. She played some music—Chet Baker, which seemed to me to be the saddest music I'd ever heard. We stopped at midnight and made squash curry. It was too spicy for me, but I got used to it and we sat on the floor amid the drop cloths and paint cans and ate. Her face was sweaty and gleamed in the light of the kitchen. I had thoughts racing around in my head—could I live like this forever, with this woman, cooking curries and painting the walls honeydew? For a minute, I thought I could. I thought we would. The half-painted wall, one-third honeydew and two-thirds beige, seemed ridiculous and beautiful.

 

OUR HOUSE WASN'T the only house in Maple Rock that had gone up for sale that summer. Gradually the neighborhood was shifting. White families were moving out and new ones—blacks and Arabs and Mexicans—were moving in. Sometimes you'd hear racist remarks at the bar or in a grocery store, but to be honest, I don't think these new neighbors were the reason people were moving out of Maple Rock. They—the now-single or the remarried women of my mother's generation, mothers with children grown or almost grown—wanted to leave behind the lives that had fallen apart on them. Some of them were moving to smaller, cheaper houses; some, like my mother, were headed to bigger homes and better neighborhoods. But most of them wanted out. It was hard not to wonder what would happen if one of our fathers returned from the moon to find the locks changed, a new family sitting down to dinner while a stranger tried a key in their lock.

Still, despite the FOR SALE signs here and there, most of my own friends were still in Maple Rock. The Black Lantern was still open for business—Spiros's nephew George was the main bartender now—but I had lost interest in drinking at a bar once it became something I could do legally. Plus I liked being with Holly more than being with my friends. I liked having sex with her more than I liked drinking, loved the feel of waking up sweaty and spent better than the feeling of waking up dizzy and hungover.

One afternoon I saw Nick's rundown pickup truck in the parking lot of the Black Lantern.

"Mikey!" Tom Slowinski yelled. He and Nick were sitting at the bar. There was a half-eaten pizza between them, and an empty pitcher.

Nick put a few bucks on the counter and motioned to the waitress for another pitcher. "Let me get you a beer, pal," he said.

Nick and Tom were working construction. They started at five thirty in the morning at the site of the new mall on the other end of town. They knocked off at three o'clock most days and headed straight for the bar. The mud on their work boots, the sweat stains on their T-shirts, and the dirt under their fingernails made me realize how lazy I had been that summer.

Walker Van Dyke and Pete Stolowitz came over. They, too, looked as if they had just come out of some sort of mud pit. "Where've you been, Mikey?" Walker said.

Nick poured me a glass.

"His mother says he's been spending a lot of nights away," Nick said. "He's neck deep in pussy, I guess."

I shrugged off the comment with a smile. I didn't feel like telling them. I gave them a smile to let them know Nick was on the right track, downed my beer, and left.

"Ah, come on Mikey," Tom said. "Take a night off. Get shit-faced with us!"

I headed over to Holly's, and when I pulled into the driveway in front of her house, I looked in my rearview and saw Nick's big red truck swoop in behind me. Nick and Tom were laughing, waving their middle fingers in the air.

I got out of my car and tried to get them to go away. But then Holly came out from around the side of the house. She was holding a watering can and dressed in her short denim shorts, flip-flops, and black halter top.

Nick and Tom tumbled out of the truck.

"Uh, these are some of my friends. They just happened to drive by when I pulled in," I said.

Nick and Tom made their introductions.

"They're about to leave," I said.

"Can I get you guys a beer?" Holly said. "You look like you just got out of some kind of hellish job."

"We'd love a beer," Nick said, while Tom winked at me.

We went around to the back porch and sat down. I sat in the chair facing the house, and Nick and Tom sat on the opposite side of the table. Holly went inside for the beer.

Nick whispered, "Older woman? Excellent."

"Did you see those tits?" Tom said. "Major league."

He grabbed at the imaginary female flesh and kissed it, making frantic gestures with his tongue.

"Oh, baby," Nick moaned.

Holly reappeared, holding four bottles of beer. "Is that for me gentlemen?" she said.

It was the first time I'd ever seen Nick's face go bright red out of embarrassment rather than anger.

He mumbled some kind of apology.

"They think you're a babe," I said.

"Excellent," Holly said, setting down the four sweating bottles. "Very sophisticated friends."

Nick and Tom could barely look at her until she said, "Aw, come on, boys. I'm just teasing you. I'm flattered."

They smiled sheepishly while they shook hands with Holly. I didn't like it, seeing Nick and Tom so close to Holly. I didn't like the fact that Nick and Tom knew what Holly looked like and where she lived, that they were on her back porch, that they were drinking her beer. It was like buying some beautiful cabin in the woods, on a secluded, pristine lake, and then having some developer building an amusement park right next door. All the stupidity and chaos of my life had followed me to Holly's house, and now she seemed less real than ever.

 

BY AUGUST, I had started to go over to see Holly every day. I had not found another job—not that I was really looking—and if I stayed home, I'd be stuck in the bustle of packing boxes and wrapping china.

Mack was waiting up for me one night.

"It seems like you have a new girlfriend," he said. "You're gone a lot."

"Hey, you've got no right to butt into my life," I said.

"I wasn't," he said. "I think it's great. Love—women, heck, let's be honest, women and their beautiful bodies—are the only thing that makes life worth living."

"What about God or whatever?" I said. "What happened to all that?"

"When you love a woman, when you know her intimately, that's when you know what God is capable of," he said. "That's all the proof you need."

I shook my head. I didn't want to hear that my mother's naked body was proof of a divine being.

What Mack wanted to tell me was this: he didn't need the money from the sale of the house. He was going to take down the FOR SALE sign.

"If you want to go Northville with us, great," he said. "But we shouldn't force you. If you want to stay here, well, welcome to your new home. It's all yours. We'll sign it over to you. We don't need the money, and well, given the fact that your parents bought it twenty years ago, it's got a very low monthly payment. It's almost paid off."

I asked Mack why he was doing this for me. I wasn't used to my mother dating men who had any concern for me at all.

"Because I'm bad with money, I guess," he said. "And because if I learned anything as a priest, it's to try and put myself in somebody else's shoes, and man, when I looked at your shoes, I could tell how hard it would be to move now."

"You don't have to do this," I said.

"Look, Michael, it's not like this place would sell very fast anyway," he said. "People aren't flocking to Maple Rock. Once you're on your feet, you can take over the payments and taxes. You'd be doing us a favor."

"Geez," I said.

"Anyway," he said. "This place is all yours now. And you can keep the Buick."

I managed to say thank you, but I couldn't think of anything else to say, even though the conversation seemed to beg for some closure.

In the morning, over cereal, my mother said, "I heard Mack talked to you last night."

"He did," I said. "Thanks."

She looked at me like I was this little kid who'd just come out of his room after a tantrum. "Don't thank me, thank him."

"I want Kolya to stay here with me," I said.

"Like there's a fucking chance of that!" Kolya hollered, then banged his spoon on the table laughing. "Mikey, you're so fucking miserable."

"Watch your language," I said.

"He learned it from you," my mother said.

The three of us laughed like maniacs. If you walked by our open kitchen windows that morning, we probably sounded insane. But laughing was all we could do right then, and sometimes it still is.

 

LATER THAT DAY, I asked Holly: "Do you believe in God?"

"God is within you," she said. "Within us. Don't you see God in me?"

I shrugged.

"I see God in you," she said.

"Me?"

"Look," she said. She opened her mouth wide and then came at my face. She put her wide-open mouth over each of my eyes. She was crawling up my shoulders, shoving her open mouth in my face. She was laughing so hard she bit my nose by mistake. I hollered.

We started kissing.

I felt out of control. She said she could sense it. She said, "Easy, steady your heart."

I said, "I see Him now."

"Him who?" she said.

"God."

"God is a her," she said.

I agreed. God, if anything, had to be a woman.

 

IN THE MEAN LIGHT of an August afternoon, I sat on the couch and watched my mother and Mack packing boxes. They never asked me to help, and I didn't offer. I wanted there to be some kindness between us, but I didn't know how to offer it. I knew already that their gesture—giving me a house—was vast and generous. Still, I was not ready to be happy for them. I watched them dismantle things I'd known all my life—a floor lamp, a kitchen table, a shelf full of my mother's old books.

It was a Friday, and the moving company was coming in a few days. Kolya came out of his room with a box of toys for the Salvation Army. I volunteered to take them to the drop box—I wanted a good excuse to leave—and I stopped by Holly's on my way.

She fell into me as soon I stepped in the house.

"I'm trying to clean out his room," she said. "And I can't."

She watched helplessly on the floor while I did the work. She said that she'd like to have a yard sale the next morning, and I took all the toys and children's books and old clothes into the garage. The rest of her house was airy and free of clutter that I was surprised by the amount of things Manny had.

"These are just things," she said. "These things aren't Manny. Something just spoke to my spirit and told me so."

Once Manny's room was empty, we started to move other things out of the house too—boxes of books, chairs, futons. Some of the furniture had come with the house when she rented it, but most of the landlord's stuff, she said, was hideous to look at that she'd stowed it in the basement and in the third bedroom.

"Don't you want any of this stuff?" I asked.

"My lease is month to month," she said. "I'm planning on leaving."

"Where are you going?" I said. "When?"

"I don't know. I keep thinking about the desert. I haven't been out that way for a long time."

"Will I see you again?" I said.

"I have a better question: If I send for you once I find a place, will you come?" she said.

"Yes," I said.

We kept packing up boxes and moving furniture. And I believed that she would send for me, that I would actually go and find her wherever she ended up after this. The desert was a distant and beautiful place that I had never seen, but I could picture the two of us there, in a small adobe house, with white linens on a clothesline in the yard, and a dog or two. I could see Holly dressed in a loose-fitting blouse and denim shorts and I could see myself wearing jeans and no shirt, snakeskin boots and a turquoise and silver belt buckle. My skin was a deep bronze color from the sun, and on my head was a dark cowboy hat that shaded my face and made me look older.

 

THE NEXT DAY, we sat in Holly's yard with a giant YARD SALE banner over our heads. The banner was decorated with rainbows and singing birds that Holly had drawn. We hadn't put prices on anything, and half the time when somebody asked Holly what something cost, she'd say, "That? That's free, take it."

"Why are you giving things away?" I asked.

"If I sense somebody has positive energy and really needs something, I don't drag money into it."

"You're a head case," I said.

She kissed me in the garage and we grabbed the cash box and snuck inside for a few minutes, leaving all of the sale stuff unattended. While we were in the bedroom, someone called out for us, and Holly yelled from the bed, "Oh, take anything you want. It's all free!"

By the end of the day, we took the few things that were left, along with the box of Kolya's old toys, to the Salvation Army drop box.

We got back to the house and Holly started to fix something to eat. The air filled with the smells of butter and garlic. I drank a beer and sat in the kitchen, watching her cook.

We ate noodles in tomato sauce, a boring, uninspired dinner for Holly. She looked drained and pale. She walked around the empty house and I suggested we go to sleep.

"It's been a hard day," I said.

"I'd like to be alone tonight," she said.

"Why?"

"I just want to be alone."

"Did I do something wrong?" I asked.

"Michael," she said, "you really have no idea what my world is like right now. I've lost a child. I've been through a dark, dark time."

"I know all that," I said.

"I've given you a lot of my energy and attention," she said. "And I feel drained."

The tone of her voice carried an accusatory undercurrent, and I realized it would be a long time before I saw the desert. That adobe house? Those blowing white linens? That tan image of myself in a cowboy hat and snakeskin boots on the porch of our adobe house? These things were no more real than any other future I had imagined for myself. I felt small and stupid, and I left Holly's house without saying goodbye.

I didn't want to go home that night and watch Mack and my mother continue to pack away my childhood. Part of me knew that I was being immature and melodramatic, but part of me believed that being any other way was too easy a surrender. I would let my mother move on and have her new life, I would let Kolya get a fresh start in a richer suburb. And yes, I would let Mack become part of our family, I would accept his generosity and his attempts at friendship, and my bitterness would turn to affection. But not yet; I wasn't ready.

I drove around Maple Rock until I found Nick and Tom sitting on Nick's front porch smoking cigarettes.

"Clyde Warren is over," Nick said. "We're out here so we don't drown in his sincerity. He bought me a TV-VCR combo for my bedroom. He felt bad because he and my mother are always watching old movies and hogging the TV."

Aunt Maria had started dating Clyde a few months ago. Clyde worked as a librarian at Schoolcraft College and was effeminate and thin. He was one of the nicest men any of us had ever met—considerate, generous, and soft-spoken—and he was intelligent. He loved art museums, classic films, and pottery. We all kind of hated guys like him in Maple Rock. Even my mother and Mack referred to Clyde Warren as Clyde Borin' when my aunt wasn't around.

"We're going to Ann Arbor tonight," Tom said. "Sunny's having another party. Mostly hippie chicks again, but lots of weed."

"Sure," I said. "Sounds good. Let's go."

"Seriously?" Nick said. "Where is your sophisticated lady tonight?"

"I think she's sick of me," I said.

"It was worth the ride, Mikey," Tom said. "Those tits were amazing!"

"He's grieving, asshole," Nick said. "Let the man grieve for lost pussy."

"I wish I had some other friends," I said.

But when we got into the car, and Nick and Tom started singing along to some hip-hop tape, I felt the old excitement of flying down the freeway, looking for trouble or fun or both. I felt glad to be with them. I hadn't outgrown them yet.

The party was visible from several blocks away. It was a hot night and people spilled out onto the big front porch and down the wooden fire escape that ran up the side of the house. I hung around in a tiny third-floor bedroom, smoking weed with two dreadlocked girls, then wandered downstairs for a beer. Blues Traveler was the band of choice that summer, and an endless harmonica solo wailed from the speakers on the wall. In the dining room, which was empty of furniture, dancers swirled and spun on the hardwood floor. Sonya spotted me and came over to kiss my cheek and ask me how I'd been.

"I see a lot of your sidekicks around here," she said, "but you've been a total stranger."

I shrugged. "Been busy."

"Nick tells me you're dating an older woman," she said. She draped her hands on my shoulders and looked up at me, her beery breath in my face. "Does she do things to you that I couldn't do? Older and experienced is always a plus, isn't it?"

She was really drunk and I should have forgiven her for her comments. I think she was attempting to be affectionate toward me, and to make me feel welcome in her home.

"Sonya," I said, "to be honest, I barely remember anything we did."

"Fine, asshole," she said. She was still smiling, but I thought I'd wounded her a little, which felt almost good. She blew some cigarette smoke in my face and said, "Where's Nick? I want to make sure he stays away from my roommates."

I walked out to the front porch to look for some beer, but the giant cooler there was empty. I was about to head out for a walk, maybe go wander around the Law Quad, when I heard someone call my name.

It was Janice. She was dressed like she was dressed at work—khaki miniskirt, blue T-shirt, blue canvas sneakers. She tucked her hair behind her ears. Her tan was even deeper than it had been last month.

"This is so weird," she said. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm friends with Sonya," I said. "She lives here. Some people call her Sunny."

"Oh my god, my friend Monica lives here too!"

"Great," I said. She, like everybody else, was pretty drunk. She'd been drinking beer, she said, but her friend had gotten her started on Jell-0 shots and now she was completely fucked up.

"I'm mad at you," she said and stuck her tongue out at me.

"Why?" I said.

"You left me with that old couple," she said, "and went away without giving me your phone number."

"Did you want it?" I said.

"I'm really drunk, so I'll be honest," she said. "I think you're really-really-really cute."

"Well, I'll see more of you then, I bet."

"Are you leaving?" she said.

"I was going to go for a walk," I said.

She grabbed onto my arm. It looked like she was coming along. I didn't mind. She had wonderful skin. She was closer to my age than Holly. She was drunk and obviously liked me. I figured she had an apartment somewhere and that we might end up in it.

We walked for a few blocks, passing house parties that looked exactly like the one we'd just left. We passed the sculpture of a spinning cube, which Janice had shown me on the tour. The sight of it launched her into a tirade against the campus. She said how sick she was of seeing it and talking about it, how much she hated trying to convince people to come to school there.

"This is not what I want my life to be like," she said.

"Let's not go there tonight," I said. "I'm not into self-pity."

Janice looked deflated. I could tell she wanted to have some deep, meaningful exchange.

It was the kind of invitation I'd accepted many times before, fueled by alcohol or drugs and a little sexual tension, and I knew how it would go. We'd talk about ourselves until we were so sick of talking about ourselves that sex seemed the only escape from the conversation. But I was thinking of Holly again, even though I had vowed not too. I didn't picture Holly as the jealous type. She certainly never called me her boyfriend or partner or anything like that. Still, I didn't want to talk to Janice about her post-college angst. I wished I had brought along a few beers.

"Well, nobody knows what they really want out of life," I said. It sounded terse and nihilistic—a term I only learned a few weeks ago, from Holly, but one that I thought I might struggle to embody from time to time. It seemed aloof and sexy. I was still waiting for the right moment to tell somebody I was a nihilist, but I didn't want to waste the line on Janice. She was sweet and bright-eyed and beautiful and drunk, and a little desperate for some sort of connection. She was holding on to my arm, stopping to look at me when she spoke and to get me to look back. We walked through the Law Quad together. In the dark, with just the faint campus floodlights and sliver of a moon, the place looked even more imposing than it had before. I wanted to lie there on the grass and stare at the gargoyles and the Gothic towers. But it was Holly I wanted to be with, not Janice, tucking her hair behind her ears like crazy and showing me how her eyes even looked almost purple in the dark.

"See?" she said. She was about two inches from my face. "Purple!"

Halfway through one of the tunnels, she stopped walking. I leaned over and kissed her and I felt her tongue push into my mouth like a wave.

It took us less than ten minutes to get to Janice's apartment. I started to take her clothes off in the living room, even though she was laughing and telling me that she had roommates. I didn't care. I undid my pants and we rolled down onto the couch together. I tried to pull off her skirt, but she stopped me. She was too drunk, she said. The room was spinning. I complained that we should at least do something, so she used her hand on me. Nothing about it was at all gentle or tender. Afterward, while she was in the bathroom, maybe getting sick, I zipped up my pants quickly. I was headed for the front door just as a pretty dark-haired girl came into the apartment. She was wearing a strapless black dress and holding a pair of high heels in her hand. I winked at her.

"Who are you?" she said.

"Nobody," I said. "I think Janice is sick."

I went out into the fresh air. Back on the street, I had to stop into a pizza shop and ask directions back to the corner of Fifth and Jefferson, where Sonya lived.

As soon as I felt sober enough to drive, I got in my car and headed down M-14. I had a feeling that I would never get into school at Ann Arbor, that the whole world of that campus and those students were a world I would never get myself into, and that I was okay with that.

I didn't care how Nick and Tom got home. They were fools, I thought, going to Ann Arbor all the time, just to find a party. I wanted to convince myself that I was better than them, that I liked quiet evenings alone with Holly and that was all that I wanted. I tried not to think about Janice, but every time I thought about Holly, I'd see Janice's face, too. I pictured Holly in that rundown apartment, sitting in the corner watching me get a drunken hand job from a girl I didn't really know anything about. I made a vow that I would never go to a party in Ann Arbor again. I never wanted to run into Janice again. Besides, weren't there any parties in Maple Rock?

 

I SPENT MOST OF the weekend in my basement bedroom, trying not to listen to Mack and my mother packing up the house. They kept having this kind of exchange:

"Should we keep this?" Mack would ask.

"No reason," my mother would say. "Pitch it."

"Sentimental reasons?" Mack would say.

"It's junk!" my mother would say.

I stayed down in the basement and wondered what my mother was calling junk. One of my first-grade art projects? Kolya's old soccer uniforms? My father's rusty pocketknife?

On Sunday night, Holly called and asked me to come over. She told me to pack an overnight bag. She wanted to take me somewhere before she left.

"I don't know," I said.

"Michael, " she said. "Don't play games."

When I got to her house, she was sitting on the floor in the living room, watching T.V.

"Where did you get that television?" I said.

"It's part of the landlord's stuff," she said.

Across the room, about ten small boxes and two large suitcases were packed neatly in the corner. There was also a guitar case, a small duffel bag, and two backpacks.

"I'm glad you answered the phone," said Holly.

"You never try to call me," I said.

"I want you to come somewhere with me," she said.

Friends of hers who owned a B&B near Lake Michigan had called to offer her a suite for a few days. They'd had a last-minute cancelation. Holly wanted me to go with her.

"It's about three hours away," she said. We can leave first thing tomorrow."

"Don't you have to work?"

"I quit," she said. "I'm leaving town, remember?"

"You never said it was official."

"I'm saying it now," she said. "Remember, I am going to send for you? From the desert?"

"Sure," I said.

In the bedroom, the closet, the dresser drawers, and the top of the nightstand were empty. The room was swept clean. I went to the bathroom. The clutter of lotions and candles and herbal oils was gone. I pissed and went back to the bed. I fell asleep in about thirty seconds, listening to Holly let out a series of long, slow sighs.

When she woke me up the next morning with a mug of hot coffee, her hair was wet and she was wearing a skimpy, clingy black sundress with thin straps, and black, high-heeled sandals that sculpted her calves. I'd never seen her in anything so shamelessly sexy, and it made the day feel full of promise. "Get up, brush your teeth, put some pants on, and let's get out of here."

She wanted to drop off my car in Maple Rock. She said the landlord was showing her place and didn't like prospective tenants to see old cars in the driveway.

"The sooner he rents it," she said, "the sooner I get out of my lease and get my security deposit back."

I parked the car in front of my house but didn't go inside. I figured it was pretty empty by then, and I didn't want to see.

Holly drove us west on I-94, and though she seemed a little happier, she didn't talk much. I would've talked, but I couldn't think of anything to say. I had never stood at the end of a relationship without hate and anger and hurt swimming around it. She rolled down all the windows and her little Toyota was like a wind tunnel. Holly didn't seem to mind. She listened to NPR and read the occasional billboard aloud. She woke me up when we left the freeway so I could help her read the map.

"You can quit pretending to be asleep now," she said. "We're almost there."

I had not even so much as checked into a motel with a woman before, and had never set foot inside a B&B. At first I felt like I was trying to pull off some sort of scam. But Holly's friends, Joe and Mary Carpenter, ran a nice place and mostly stayed out of our way. Joe, who wore his gray hair back in a ponytail, gave us a lot of guides to canoeing, biking, and fishing opportunities in the area. He kept talking to me about Hope College, which was nearby, I think because he wanted me to tell him whether or not I was still in college, but I didn't take the bait. Besides, I would be in college for at least a few more years, so my answer wouldn't help him figure out my age anyway.

Joe said to Holly, "I don't know if you still enjoy the occasional taste of the herb, but we have a little shed out back that is the appropriate place to partake of the peace pipe."

He looked at me and winked. "Purely for medicinal purposes."

"Hahahaha," I said. It sounded obnoxious and Holly looked at me with a twisted-up face that meant "Shut up."

Our room was called the Forest Room, and everything was made of wood. It had a bathroom the size of my bedroom at home, with a Jacuzzi. The first thing I did that afternoon was fire up the Jacuzzi. I kept waiting for Holly to take off her clothes and come in with me, but she got on the bed and fell asleep. When I finally got out of the water, my skin was wrinkled and steam was coming out of my pores. I toweled off slowly near the bed, half hoping that Holly would roll over and smile, grab my towel and pull me into bed, but she didn't. We went into town and had an overpriced dinner at an Italian restaurant packed with rich people from Chicago in their weekend getups—designer Windbreakers, pleated Dockers, and long, loose dresses. Back in the room, I could tell Holly just wanted the night to be over. She undid my zipper, had me sit down on the bed, and took me in her mouth. She got up, brushed her teeth, and came back to bed in her pajamas. The whole affair took about three minutes, and she fell asleep right after we were done.

The next morning Mary, gray-haired and willowy, made us a wonderfully big breakfast while Joe highlighted some of the things we could do. Despite several cups of strong coffee, however, Holly and I went back to bed after breakfast. I woke up later, went for a walk along Lake Michigan, then came back to the room and hit the Jacuzzi again. After I was dressed, I woke up Holly and we went into town and ate fish sandwiches and fries by the water. We drank some beer and then watched the sunset on the beach. The wind pushed our hair back, and gulls circled and called above us. We were silent and tender with each other when we got back to the room. We moved in slow motion, and sometimes Holly stopped moving altogether and just stared at me, pushing my hair out of my face.

The next morning, we left the B&B after breakfast and spent the car ride home talking about Joe and Mary Carpenter. Holly told me their whole story—how they had been high-powered ad execs in Detroit for a decade before Joe had a breakdown, how Mary had miscarried twice and never conceived again, how Joe used to have long periods of time where he would go up north and live in the woods by himself, not contacting Mary for weeks at a time.

"And now I guess they've got things pretty well figured out," she said. "Don't they seem happy?"

"Totally," I said.

"It's a beautiful little place," she said. "It just proves to me that you can be happy no matter what, as long as you can carve out a quiet niche for yourself."

Near Detroit, we got silent again. As we drove through the streets of Maple Rock, every block seemed to give me some bittersweet memory, but to Holly they were just names—Mansfield, Whitlock, Sheehan, Elm. My stomach got that watery feeling again, the same feeling I had gotten the first time I had visited her.

My house was dark, and the FOR SALE SIGN was gone. Holly hopped out and opened the trunk. She handed me the duffel bag. She shut the trunk and threw her arms around me, then gave me a long, slow kiss on the mouth.

"Is this the last time I'll ever see you?" I said.

"Maybe," she said. "But I will send for you."

"This is my house now," I said. "We could live here."

"I suppose we could," she said.

We stopped and looked at the small, dark ranch as if we were really contemplating settling down there and living together forever.

"We could get married," I said, and suddenly it sounded like the perfect idea. "We could totally do that!"

"You're a sweet, sweet man," she said.

"I'm serious," I said.

"I'll miss you," she said. "A lot."

"Marry me," I said.

We kissed and she got into the car.

I was tapping on the window when she drove away.

***

I WENT INTO THE HOUSE alone and turned on all the lights. The moving company had done their work. The living room was pretty much how I remembered it. Mack and my mother had left me the couch, the two armchairs, the television and VCR. They were buying brand-new things for their house. Still, some things were missing: there were no pictures on the wall, and my mother's bookshelf was empty. In the kitchen, the cupboards were pretty much empty, though my mother had left behind some dishes and a few pots and pans. Her cheap silverware was in a drawer near the sink. There was a note on the table with their phone number. Where are you? We'd love for you to see the new house. Please call us.

I went down the hallway. Kolya's bedroom, the one I used to share with him before I'd moved down to the basement, was empty. There was no trace of him except for an old Tigers pennant sticking out of a garbage bag in the middle of the floor. My mother's bedroom was empty too, the hardwood floor freshly mopped and shining. When my father had lived with us, there was a deep blue carpet in that room, and the walls were a periwinkle color that my father used to complain about. It gave him headaches, he said, and made it hard to sleep at night. I could picture the two heavy oak dressers, wedding presents from my father's long-dead parents, and I could picture my mother and father and their matching white bathrobes hanging on hooks next to the door. I could smell not just my mother's fragrances—soft, lilac-scented perfumes and baby powder—but my father's Old Spice too, his stale coffee and cigarettes, his scotch.

I stretched out on the floor. My head was spinning amid a rush of dreamy memories. Did I hear my father's voice in the empty room, or did I feel my mother's cool hand touch my cheek? I did. Did I hear Kolya running down the hall, calling out for a Popsicle? I did.

Did I think of Holly? Did I miss her? Did I want her to appear, too, in that tormenting parade of ghosts? I did.

But it was just the floor and me. I thought about sitting up, but stayed there, flat on my back, until much later, until the light had come back to the windows, until the room was bright with morning, until I swore I could feel my heart chakra filling my rib cage with heat and flame. I felt it turning, burning, struggling to turn around and go forward.