Jason M. Jones

Part Three

Evening

This is Just to Say

I have eaten

the plums

that were in

the icebox

and which

you were probably

saving

for breakfast

Forgive me

they were delicious

so sweet

and so cold

• William Carlos Williams, “This Is Just to Say”

i.

I let myself into the house, grab the car keys off the hook in the kitchen, and head out back. I open the garage and pull the car toward the street. Beech Street bisects Elmwood Lane at the end of our driveway. I check the street to the right and left, glance in the rearview mirror at Beech. There’s a stop sign there, obscured by a branch of fir tree. Few drivers observe it, and I can’t assume the cars coming from that direction will let me go. It’s one of the things I dislike about this house, how difficult backing out can be. This is made worse by the tension I feel—nerves strained, foot restless on the break. It takes some effort to keep myself from hurtling into the intersection, forcing them to stop for me. I’ve never enjoyed driving. I hate cars, which is why I didn’t get my license until I was twenty-eight.

I bring the car to a halt at the spot where, this morning, someone shit on our lawn. The front fender is aligned with the bushes. It’s only been ten hours, but it seems long ago. The post office is in full swing, the white postal trucks moving through the back lot, pulling in and out, but the noise isn’t as noticeable this time of day. It blends with other sounds: traffic from Lansdowne Road, someone running a leaf blower down the block.

I watch a woman in white Lexus SUV come to the corner, slow down, then blow the stop sign. A red dump truck passes behind me, rumbling, and finally, a gray Toyota sedan stops. I take the opportunity to wedge myself into the road. I lift a hand and wave at the driver, which is what it comes to—thanking people for doing things they’re supposed to.

In the flow of traffic, I’m a shouter. Someone inches into my lane, I’ll call out, curse. I try to muffle this impulse with Sadie in the car. I grumble, mutter, bite my lower lip, catch myself mid-profanity. I worry she’ll pick it up. She doesn’t understand the words, but she gets the tone, and I don’t want her thinking driving’s a constant state of attack and evasion, even though it is. A large part of this has to do with being alert, avoiding other people’s errors. But even if you’re alert, there are still eventualities you can’t plan for.

This past weekend, we were coming home from the grocery store, and two deer leapt a fence and darted into the street. A car the next lane over swerved, but struck one head-on. Both the deer’s body and the hood of the car crumpled, and the deer fell into the road. I was in the passenger seat. Justine was driving. We’d seen it happen, and the sight of this majestic, agile creature, getting hit like that, rattled me. I clutched the dashboard. My body drained of strength, and I slumped against the seat and reached back and took Sadie’s hand. She hadn’t seen it. She’d been facing backward in her seat, but she wrapped her small fingers around the edge of my palm.

I don’t like thinking of death any more than I have to, and I didn’t want to think of it on a trip to the grocery store. When we reached home and exited the car, my legs were shaking. I was sick to my stomach. I took Sadie out of her seat and carried her into the house and told Justine I had to lay down. I went to the sofa, leaned back into the pillows and placed an arm over my eyes. There’d been a wet thud as the deer’s body folded. Its hind legs bent back and buckled, but the worst part was how its torso rose and fell with its last few breaths. It had all happened so quickly that even if you scanned the street as you drove, you couldn’t have avoided it. The fence was right next to the road. They’d been hidden behind it. One leap. The deer were so fast and strong that I wouldn’t have had the presence of mind to avoid them either.

I scan the street to make sure it’s clear, then pop the clutch, shift from reverse to first. As I gain speed, I shift to second but have to stop at the light on the corner. I wait, watch the traffic pass. Lansdowne’s a busy road, and I usually favor heading the other direction, toward side streets. I can’t say why I didn’t now. I just didn’t. I keep my hand on the stick as I wait, ready to shift and go.

Sadie’s got a fever, I think. They need one of us to come pick her up.

Only I’m not going to the daycare now. I’m heading to my parents’. My parents’, then the doctor’s.

I hadn’t apologized. Not like I’d meant to. I’d been diverted again. I’d seen the message, and my concern shifted to Sadie. I told Justine I’d take care of it and called my mom to ask if she could pick her up. My mom could get there more quickly than me. It’s one advantage of living close to her. I didn’t want to use sick time when I’d already worked most of the day. So, I emailed Monica and told her I’d like to leave early, closer to three. I told her Sadie was sick, and I needed to pick her up. Monica said it shouldn’t be a problem. I wrote back to Justine and said, “My mom’s getting her. I’m heading out at three.”

She replied, “Do you think she needs a doctor’s appointment?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“She had a cough this morning. It sounded pretty bad.”

I’d noticed too, but it sounded like a normal cough. Then again, Justine had been with her longer. She’d dropped her off. Maybe it had gotten worse. Maybe Sadie was hacking by the time they’d arrived.

“Do you think it’s bronchitis?” I asked.                                                                    

This is one of those conundrums—the times Sadie seems sicker than usual, but maybe not sick enough to justify the cost of a copay. It’s forty-five dollars for primary care visits. You always want to take care of your child. You never want to delay because of money. But my gut’s telling me she doesn’t need it, and I don’t want to drop forty-five dollars for the doctor tell me it’s a cold. Still, if I gamble and lose, and it turns out to be pneumonia, I’ll never forgive myself. So I wrote, “I’ll give them a call, see if they can fit her in around five.”

I’d made an appointment, then jogged to Monica’s desk.

“It looks like I need to leave now. Is that okay?”

Now here I am, driving to get her. It’s almost four. I haven’t saved much time.

Across the way, Elmwood Lane streams into the Produce Junction parking lot. The Junction sits at the end of a strip with a laundromat and dollar store. I sit at the corner and look across at the strip and wait. Three cars are lined up, waiting to come out. The first doesn’t have a turn signal on, so the driver might be heading straight, but he might be going left or right. People don’t use their signals coming out of the lot, and I wait before I turn to make sure we won’t collide. The driver turns left, and I grit my teeth. I could have gone sooner if he’d signaled. But it doesn’t matter.

Patience, she’ll be okay.

I have to think this. I can’t work myself up, anticipating problems. Lots of kids run low-grade fevers. 102.3° isn’t necessarily something to get worked up about. It’s high in adults, but kids burn brighter. There’s no reason to think Sadie’s in danger. She’s with her grandmom, watching TV, nestled at her side. I’m making too much of it. But the fear of losing her is never far from my mind. Most children grow up safe and sound. I have to remind myself of this whenever my thoughts take a dark turn. More do than don’t. Yet, the possibility that something bad might happen to her scares me more than anything. She’s small, slight, fragile. She doesn’t sense the dangers around her.

One time, when we’d returned from daycare, I’d given her my keys to play with. She usually just shakes them around, but this time, she walked across the room, pulled a cord from its outlet, and tried to put them in the socket. I saw it happening, but I was ten feet away and couldn’t stop her. Instead, I roared in a loud, fierce voice, “Sadie, no!” 

For a moment, she stood there, staring. Then she dropped the keys and started to cry. Her cry was long and loud. A high piercing wail, with drawn-out, convulsive breaths. She cried without reserve, in a way I’d never heard before, because she’d never heard me shout that way. I picked her up. “It’s okay,” I said. “It’s okay.” But what if it hadn’t been? What if I hadn’t noticed? What if I’d turned away long enough for her to get those keys in? Would the force have thrown her? I sat there, adrenaline coursing through me, and rubbed her back. “Daddy’s sorry,” I told her. “But you could have hurt yourself.” I pointed to the socket, “Ouch!” She was eighteen months old, and she stared. I said it again. “Ouch!” Whenever I’m cooking, I point to the stove and do this, “Ouch! Hot!” and she avoids the stove. She repeats, “Ouch, hot.” But right then, she shook with the aftershocks of her fit, the heaving breaths children give when they’re finished crying but still upset.

Sometimes I worry about the extremity of my reactions; like this, like shouting at her; does it do any good? Or the way, when Sadie gets a cough and fever, I go straight to assuming it’s pneumonia. Or how, whenever Justine turns a cold shoulder to me, I become angry and sad and confused and start to worry we’ll get divorced. And whenever it becomes too much, the childrearing and trying to be a good husband and dreaming of being a writer and not finding time to do it, I want to give up. I think of dying, not in an active way like suicide, but giving up. Like maybe I’ll get cancer and decide not to fight. Or pretend to fight while letting the inevitable happen. But who am I kidding? I get low sometimes, but I fight my way back. And when Sadie gets sick, I take care of her, and if she’s going to hurt herself, I yell because she needs to be stopped. And as for Justine, we work it out, don’t we?

A lot of this has to do with mood. I’m moody, and my moods affect my thinking, and my thinking swings between polarities. I need to make sure I’m not making any major decisions when the foul moods strike. Rather, I have to proceed slowly, cautiously. There are times, even with writing, where I get to feel so bad about what I’m doing, that I become distraught in other aspects of life. I’ll be working, and it doesn’t feel like anything I’m writing is good. I’ll struggle, delete passages, add new ones, try different directions, but nothing seems to work, and I know if I keep going I’ll destroy anything I’ve set down that might be usable. So, I’ve learned it’s best to stop, to go away, to wait until my mood is better. I’ve found when I do this, the stuff I’ve put down isn’t as bad as I thought. It can be reworked, shaped by editing.

The problem is that during the first few days when it isn’t going well, I become irritable. I want to snap at Justine or Sadie, and even if I don’t speak, I carry around that gloom. I enter such a dark place that I think nothing will ever go right again. I’m fooling myself to believe I have talent, and I’ll start to wish I never dreamed of doing this in the first place. I torture myself to such an extent that I vow I’m giving up for good. I’ll become a family man, devote my energies to them. I’ll never write another story, put the pen to page. But then a week will pass. I’ll get an idea, and it seems workable, and I’ll get back to it. All goes well again, for a little while. I’ll take a break, recover, and things will start to look up. I’ll cook meals while humming, listening to music. I’ll grab Justine as she walks past, embrace her. I’ll cheerfully color with Sadie in the evenings, and I think I’ll always be on top, this will never happen again. Then it happens again.

My body goes in cycles, and this affects my mind, which also works in cycles. I fool myself into thinking that if I find the right alchemy, exercise, diet, I’ll never suffer lows. But it doesn’t matter how much I run, how many salads I eat, how many vitamins I take, how much sleep I get. They’re waiting. And my reactions during the lowest lows are extreme. I have to be careful not to do any permanent damage. Is this what’s happening now? Today? With Justine? The trouble is I don’t always recognize it coming over me. And I haven’t had a chance to write today, and this is another stressor, another day wasted, going nowhere, getting no closer to wherever it is I think I’m supposed to go.

Tonight, after you get Sadie down.

But this is a gamble. The longer I put it off, the less likely I am to get something good. But I have to take the moments available.

I turn onto Lansdowne. The traffic’s bumper-to-bumper, which isn’t unusual this time of day. I only have to go a hundred feet before turning off. What’s the name of the street? I’ve driven it a million times and can’t remember. I look for the sign. Toxony. How could I not remember that? What a terrible name for a street. Where does it come from? Is it even a word? Someone’s name? A bastardization of toxic? Is this a place where they’d brought waste early on, back when the city was founded?

On the northern corner is a used car lot and across from this is a gutted building that used to be a Rite Aid. Behind the used car place is a red brick building that gets rented out to college students from the nearby university, followed by a sequence of ranch houses. It’ll take another minute to get there. A long stretch of cars snakes its way down to the intersection of Lansdowne and Yardley, and more are inching in from lots on the side: Dunkin Donuts, the beer distributor, 7-Eleven. A few come out from a second entrance to Produce Junction farther down, and I let one of them go while a second wedges in front of me.

“I was letting her out, not you!”

I return the driver’s wave.

“Go fuck yourself,” I mutter beneath my breath.

I toggle the stick. Bumper-to-bumper is worse with stick for the same reasons driving stick is fun. You have to engage, pay attention, or you’ll stall out. Get in gear and go, balance clutch and gas, then half-a-second later, stop again. Sometimes I play a game to see if I have to brake or can keep going slow, cruising along at two miles-an-hour, but this works better on highways.

By the time I get within fifty yards of Toxony, my patience has worn thin. I pull into the parking lane, which is illegal, but since there are no parked cars, it’s a clear path to my destination. I could probably be ticketed for this, but there aren’t any cops around. This is something I hate to see other drivers doing and then do because I’m impatient and then hate myself for doing because I never hate myself more than when I do things I criticize others for, when I have to rationalize my own hypocrisies and fail because rationalizing hypocrisies is worse than admitting you’re a hypocrite.

As I cut the wheel and turn onto Toxony, a car approaching from the opposite direction stops. We sit at the corner facing each other. The other car is a silver Audi, half in its own lane, half in mine. There’s parking on the northern side of the street with no yellow lines to define the lanes, so cars often take up the wider part of the road, as this one had until I turned. I look at the driver, a young white guy in designer sunglasses. They’re dark, hiding his eyes, obscuring his face. I wait for him to pull to the side, but he sits there. I reach up, rub by eyes. I know what this is, the big swinging dick contest. Who’s got the biggest balls, the most clout, the right to be here. He isn’t planning to pull over and let me through. The backside of my car is hanging out on Lansdowne Road. He thinks the street is his, and let’s say fine, it is, but I’m not sure what he expects me to do. I have a narrow portion in which to squeeze by, and I can only do this at risk of scraping his car. If I scrape his car, he’ll get out, start shouting about lawyers and lawsuits. I see the situation for what it was. I know how men like this behave. I should have expected this, and still, a flood of rage clouds my system.

“Fucking move,” I want to yell, but I bite it back. Even without Sadie in the car, I need to keep cool. Cursing is one thing. Elevating a situation like this is different. I’ve read about road rage incidents, shootings. I want to get out, pull him from his car, beat the living shit out of him, but confrontation in cases like these is best handled by backing off. You just need to get to your daughter, take her to the doctor. “My daughter, my daughter, my daughter,” I’m repeating. I have nothing to prove. “Nothing to prove, nothing to prove…” I ease my foot off the gas, drive up over the curb. The car lurches. I have to cut the wheel to avoid hitting a telephone pole. I bump down into the street and hit the brake to stop myself from dinging him. The guy sits and waits as I struggle, and there’s that thought in my mind, what if I plow him? His car is well-designed, German-engineered. I’m sure it would hold up under assault. But oh, how I want to fuck up his day. I’d be coming at him from the side rather than the front. I could dent his little shit box, do some damage. The front bumper on my car is halfway up the side of his door. I could trap him, crush the door, make it so he can’t get out.

I have these interactions all the time. I suspect everyone does. There are just as many ways to deal with them as there are incidents. I forget them as soon as I drive away. It’s a marvelous thing, this forgetting. Otherwise, it would gnaw at me all evening, consume me, flatten me, keep me from doing anything else. I’d like to handle this as I’ve seen my father handling such incidents, cool, collected. Nothing upsets him. But every time it happens to me, I want to crush, maim, kill. Right now, this man isn’t human. He’s an obstacle. But I have to get to my parents’ house. I have to get Sadie. So, even as these impulses flood through me, I absorb them, push them aside. When I’m almost past, the end of the lane opens, and he decides to pull forward.

“Oh, now you go!” I shout. “Now, when I’m on the fucking curb, you decide to help out and pull a little to your side! Way to go, fuckface!”

For the next few minutes, I entertain the fantasy of following him home. What would I do? Flatten his tires? Break his kneecaps with a baseball bat? I’m not going to do anything of the sort. I don’t even have a baseball bat in the car. I don’t want to be violent, but these impulses are in me. I might have handled it better this morning, but the problem is all the stressors that have accumulated inside me like a bucket of toxic sludge ready to spill: the guy who shit on my lawn; the fight with Justine; the email from Jules Horton; Sadie sick with a fever. There are other variables, too: the slight soreness in my arm from the flu shot—a feeling, hardly registered, that provides a thin stimulus of irritation; all the thoughts swirling in my brain about the world and my place in it. Am I stuck where I am? Will I ever become a writer? Even when I’m not thinking these things, they affect my disposition, my ability to cope with adverse situations.

By the time I reach the end of Toxony and turn down Bromley Road, the incident’s fading from my mind, even if the tense rigidity in my manner—from the way I hold the steering wheel to the set of my shoulders—remains. I reach down, shift into first, then second, then coast down the gradual incline of the hill. At the corner of Bromley, I stop and wait for a school bus to pass. This is part of the route I used to take home from high school with my best friend Lex. We used to walk this way to go to 7-Eleven from my parents’ house, too. Not just me and Lex but a whole bunch of us. There’s a house on the corner, a low ranch home with a hedge surrounding the lawn, and on that corner, where one section of hedge meets the other, there’s a wide pillar with a circular stone on top.

As kids, both the hedge and pillar had fascinated us. Sometimes when we reached it, one of us would scale the pillar and stand on it, and the others would try to knock him off. Whenever we walked to 7-Eleven, we had to be careful here, because another game was to sneak up and throw each other through the hedges. Of course, you wanted to make sure you didn’t get thrown, and this was achieved by walking slightly ahead of or behind the others, angling your body so they couldn’t get a grip on you. Sonny Ford was good at this, at throwing us through the hedge, because he had fifty pounds on the rest of us and he was strong. Even if you angled your body so the others couldn’t push you, he could still get a grip and change your position and hurl you through. And it stung. The bush had small thin branches that were grayish brown with tiny teardrop-shaped leaves, and in the winter these leaves fell off and the twigs were tiny claws. The best bet, especially if Sonny was with you, was to take to the street. But you could only do this if there weren’t any cars coming, you couldn’t cross completely.

On the opposite corner stands another tiny house with black siding and a hedged-in yard, and behind that hedge, there’s fencing where the owners keep two full-grown Rottweilers. They had some then and have some still, even now, though I have to imagine the dogs now are new Rottweilers and not the ones that had terrified me in my youth. If you forgot yourself and walked on that side, the dogs lay in wait, and as soon as you reached the fence they shot forward and leapt up, barking and slobbering wildly, madly, knocking into it, rebounding. It was startling at first, then frightening. My reaction any time the dogs came up was to stop and stand still, full of terror. I’d angle myself to face them—never directly, I’d never make eye contact—but I’d watch them from the side and hope they didn’t see me through the hedges.

They sensed me, of course, which was why they charged. I knew they could smell me, hear me. But I wondered, if I kept still and crouched low, could they see me? The fence behind the hedges was picket, painted green and reinforced with wire mesh, and the dogs, when standing on hind legs, were taller than it, but a second set of hedges, more like trees, stood along the edge of the property at the sidewalk, and I’d conceal myself behind these. The dogs would lean their heads over the fence and slaver, and I’d stand, gazing at their wide black and brown heads, their muscular barrel bodies. I’d observe the way they pushed at the fence, and it leaned but never gave. What would I do if it did? They’d kill me in an instant—so powerful, so fierce. I’d stand and gaze for a moment, hypnotized, but eventually I’d get my legs back and move away.

As I watch the yellow school bus come to a halt and open its doors, I smile. Even the bus pulls forward far enough to let the kids off across the street, cattycorner, so they won’t have to exit in front of the Rottweiler house. It feels like the first time I’ve smiled in hours. I look at the Rottweiler house. It’s still black, but the owners have cleaned it up. The leaning picket fence is gone, replaced by what looks like a sturdier one, coated with finish. The low bushes are gone, too. They’ve been pulled. But I spot the Rottweilers. They’re out in the yard. This is the neighborhood where Sadie will grow up. She’ll have a life here, a childhood. She’ll have memories like these, similar but different, her own. She’s sick, but she’ll be all right, she’ll grow and have friends too, and I like to think of this. It’s a good thought, and my body eases into the seat, and I watch the bus’s stop sign fold down and turn onto Yardley, heading toward Cheswick.

Cheswick is my street, the street on which I lived most of my life, my parents’ street. At the corner, is the library where I discovered books, novels, the stacks where I sat one summer finding out that life wasn’t all happy endings. I stop and look out. It hasn’t changed—the large maroon brick building at the end of a dead-end street. I make a left-hand turn toward Brookside Memorial Hall. A building of red brick too, though this is a deeper red—richer, more conventional. Out front is a large pine tree and a headstone, encircled by small American flags, listing the names of soldiers from Brookside who’d died in combat in World War I. Next to the hall is the public pool where I spent my summers until I turned twelve and lost interest. There’s a green cyclone fence, and another red brick building where the entrance is. This is where the lifeguards hang out, waiting for their next shifts. The baby pool is closer to the street, the regular pool, further back on a hill above Frankfort creek.

Along the opposite side of the street are the houses where my friends Will and Drew lived when we were kids, doors I’d knocked on, rooms I’ve been in, and while Will’s mother still lives there, Drew’s family had moved and another has taken its place. The houses are small. Twins, like the one I’d grown up in. Will’s is two-story with green siding. Drew’s, red brick. I remember how I’d rush out weekend mornings and run along the street and knock on those doors. It was so exciting to cross the street and see if my friends were home, what adventures we’d have that day.

Across the way from Will’s and Drew’s is the baseball field where we played little league—the soft diamond dirt infield, the large silver canopy of a chain-link fence batting cage, a monument to all the kids who’d come through here with hopes of becoming professional baseball players. The field is famous locally because Reggie Jackson, a star for the Yankees who’d hit three consecutive home runs in the ’77 World Series, had played here as a kid. Word had it he’d hit homers here too, launching them over the fence of the pool. Center and right fields border the pool, and out in left, the field runs up against the basketball courts where we spent our summer days playing pickup games. This is the space I’m more familiar with than any other space in the world, so familiar I hardly see it, yet I know every inch of it. It’s the same as it’s always been, at least on the surface, but the connection I have with it, the sense of place as it related to me, has changed.

Not long after we’d moved into our house, I went out looking for the town I used to know. It was night, almost eleven, and I was lonely. My wife was asleep, but it wouldn’t do to wake her, since she wasn’t in the same state as me. I was wired—wired in the way you get when you’re drinking and want to talk but don’t have anyone to talk to. I looked out my window toward Lansdowne Road, the town’s main thoroughfare, and there wasn’t anyone around. I could see the neon “closed” sign flashing in the dollar store window across the way. The light at the crosswalk turned from green to yellow to red, casting a faint glow on the street. The post office beside our house was shuttered. Even the gas stations—one to each side of the post office—were silent.

Maybe I’ll go out, I thought. And though I didn’t like leaving the house this late without telling Justine, I couldn’t resist. In the city, all my friends lived within a five-block radius and they were night owls, so if I got bored or lonely, all I had to do was stumble out my door and turn a corner. The streets in the suburbs were quiet, houses dark. People turned in early, even on weekends. I should have known this, but I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten a lot of things. I’d lived in the city eight years and put much of my youth behind me. Yet, during my youth, I’d walked these streets often enough after dark—wandering past rows of shuttered houses, keeping to the middle of the street for fear something might leap from the bushes and grab me, listening to the sounds of crickets and cicadas emanating from the lawns and bushes around me—to know that people here went to bed around nine.

It was Friday or Saturday night. My parents lived a half-mile away and sometimes hosted one or both my sisters on weekends. In the summer, if they called, I’d stop by and we’d sit around the table in their backyard, telling stories. No one had called, but I figured I’d stop anyway. If they were there, I’d approach through the driveway, past the hydrangea bushes, hear the sounds of their chatter until one of them noticed me and quipped, “Look who decided to show up.”

I’d walked the same route I was driving now. Along Elmwood to Lansdowne, Lansdowne to Toxony, Toxony to Bromley, and Bromley via Yardley to Cheswick.

Justine and I had moved here in May. It was August now, and as I made my way down the side streets that led to my parents’ house, I passed the public pool. Its blue waters shimmered in the moonlight. Its gentle undulations were peaceful, serene in the hot air, but this didn’t quell my yearning for someone to talk to. I let my thoughts drift to the youth I’d nearly forgotten. We used to hop that pool’s fence after dark, and my friends would go swimming. I refrained because I was scared of getting caught, of coming home smelling like chlorine, but I’d leap the fence and hang out, and sometimes the cops came and shined a light on us, and we ran and it was exhilarating.

A point of pride for each of us was how quickly we could scale the fence, and we compared methods until we settled on the best. This consisted of gripping the top post, planting a foot against the wire mesh, and using your upper body strength to swing over without having to make additional contact. It required a deft leap and decent reflexes, since there was only a small lip of grass on the other side before a steep hill descended to the field. The first few times we tried, we landed on the lip, but then, the more agile among us—Drew Schiff and Sonny Ford and me—discovered we could slide straight down the hill, tucking our right legs beneath our left and using the evening dew to propel us like baseball players stealing a base.

As I watched at a distance, I wondered if kids still did this, and thought, they must, they have to. But I didn’t see any. Just the placid pool, the white wooden lifeguard stands, the aqua blue diving boards sticking out over the deep end, the large plastic mushroom that rained water out over the children in the kiddie pool.

We always got away. We knew the woods behind the basketball courts better than any adult. We spent our days exploring, learning the hollows and trails, which trees we could scale, how to move between them, keep out of sight. We tried getting them to chase us, but all they ever did was exit their cars and shout. Thinking about it, we escaped because they let us. They were tasked with chasing us away, not pursuit. But we liked believing we were slick, rebellious.

It was humid, each stride like swimming through the night. I thought of Will as I walked. I was coming close to his mother’s house, the house where he’d lived as a boy. It hadn’t been a year since Will was shot in Old City, the result of either a botched burglary or a drug deal gone bad. They hadn’t found his killer, and it didn’t look like they would. Will hadn’t been good at hopping the fence. He’d been the least coordinated of us. His name was Winner, but he couldn’t catch a ball. His name was Winner, but he tripped over his own feet. His name was Winner, but people all over the neighborhood made fun of him, and we did, too. And though I’d like to think our ribbing was more affectionate, it wasn’t. Will couldn’t hop that fence. It was five feet high, but he couldn’t do it. Not like we could, not with the same acrobatics as Drew Schiff or the cat-like grace of Sonny Ford, who, though overweight, understood how to use his weight for balance. Will couldn’t plant one foot and propel himself over but needed to use the links to climb slowly, and even this, he wasn’t good at.

One night, he got the lace of his left shoe caught on top. He’d managed to get his right foot down the opposite side, onto the lip, but he stood, spread-eagled, with one foot planted on the ground and the other high in the air, waving back and forth against the springy give of the links. We could have helped him down, but instead, we hopped back inside and threw ourselves against the fence where he stood. The fence gave slightly with each bound, and Will was pushed out over the hill. “Stop, guys!” he shouted. “I’m gonna fall!” But this delighted and encouraged us. Eventually, Drew took pity and helped him down. But the image of Will standing like that was etched in memory, one of the clearest I retain of him.

I crossed the street to walk past his house. The light was on in his mother’s bedroom upstairs, but the rest of the house was dark. The house was a twin with olive-green siding. A set of crumbling brick stairs with a wobbly wrought-iron railing led to the front door, a door by which I’d come and gone countless times. We’d assembled here to play video games and watch movies on HBO we weren’t allowed to see at home—Die Hard, Revenge of the Nerds. His mother didn’t worry about age-appropriate content. She was friends with my mom, but I don’t think she shared what we watched. I certainly didn’t talk about it when I got home, though my friends and I, when we were alone, quoted endlessly from Die Hard, the way John McClane responded to Hans Gruber’s question: “What are you? Some kind of a cowboy?” with “Yippee-ki-yay, motherfucker.”

I touched the brick steps. I hadn’t much liked Will, which made my regrets about how we’d treated him complicated. He was all right when we were kids, when we’d played video games and watched Die Hard. But as we headed into adulthood, this wasn’t enough. I paused and wondered why I was standing here. I imagined his mother spotting me out the window, throwing it open. “Jason, is that you?” I’d have to run away or admit it was me. Would she come down and want to talk? I might as well have woke my wife up. But I wanted another drinker, another drink.

I could hear the hum of window-unit air conditioners in the houses around me. They were shut up, the blue light flares of flickering TVs emanating around the window shades. Not a car passed. Here and there, a porch light shined, and I watched the insects congregate. A mosquito touched down on my arm, and I smacked it. Across the street, running parallel to the baseball field and ending in a small gravel lot was the town’s skid row, Parkview Lane. This was a side street of rowhomes with a dirt driveway behind them, and behind that, some ramshackle garages. Next to the houses was a short stretch of grassland with trees, and in one of those trees, we’d built a fort one summer using planks Drew Schiff and I had stolen from a construction site. Our plan had been to build a platform stretching between two adjacent branches. The tree, a yellow birch, was easy to scale, but once we got up, we tried to hammer the boards in a way that wasn’t resulting in the structure we envisioned. The tree was out in the open, twenty feet from the sidewalk, and one of the Parkview kids, a teen we called Joe Mama, came over to see what we were doing.

“You’ll never get it built like that,” he said. “You have to put the two longer boards across the branches at an even distance, then lay the shorter ones across those. Here, let me show you.”

Together, we scavenged more lumber. We built the fort as high as it could go—to the top, or near top, creating multiple rooms, several stories. But it only lasted that summer. The tree bled sap from around the nails. We would come down with our hands sticky, and one of the Parkview residents told us the tree was dying. I was overcome with guilt. We’d killed it, us. I worried about what my parents would think of me: tree killer. And while Joe Mama and Drew and Will used the fort, I drifted away. By the end of the summer, the lot on which it stood had sold. They built a house there, and whoever bought it tore the fort down. The tree itself had still been there last I’d checked, but that had been what? Twelve years ago? I couldn’t see it from where I stood. It was too dark. I considered crossing to check, but kept going. I stayed to my side, though if my parents and sisters were out back, I’d have to cross eventually.

Half-a-block down, I passed a brick building, shaped like a rigid “C” with two wings jutting toward the street on both sides, creating an alcove where, when the business closed for the day, my friends and I would come play Suicide. This was Jay Bee Machine Works. The name was stenciled across the brick façade, and although it had been sold and was now owned by someone else, I’d always call it Jay Bee. Hemmed in on three sides, we’d bring a tennis ball and hurl it at the wall as hard as we could. The sound of it striking brick resounded with a loud suction-like pop as the ball came back, and we caught it and tossed it again. If you caught it on a bounce, you hurled it back, and pop, it went like that until someone dropped the ball. Then we’d all dash madly for it while the player who’d fumbled it ran and tried to touch the wall before we could peg him. The ultimate penalties happened if someone threw it and you caught it before the rebound hit the ground. The person who threw it would have to line up, as if before a firing squad, and you had an open shot.

Most of the time, it was better to avoid the ball unless you knew you’d catch it clean, and for this reason, the game began at a leisurely pace. Drew would throw the ball, and I couldn’t quite get an angle, so I’d let it hit the opposite wall before I scooped it up. It would go like this until one of us decided to pick up the pace, and the others followed suit. We’d start taking chances on balls we should have let pass, one player’s energy infecting the others, and eventually, someone would catch it in the air and someone else would have to line up for a free shot. It was always a risk when Sonny played. He and I had the best throwing arms because we were tall and our arms acted as fulcrums, but Sonny had better aim, and his throws stung your back, even with a tennis ball. So, we’d try to angle low and make sure the ball hit ground right away, but even with his bulk, Sonny had the reflexes to pick off low-lying throws, and he’d catch them and we’d laugh at the person who got pegged and go on until someone ran too fast and jammed their wrist or smacked their faces on the brick and started to cry but pretended they weren’t. The person who got hurt wandered off and maybe went home while the rest stayed and the game went back to being leisurely, offhand.

At one end of the “C,” the end closest to my parents’ house, was a short drive and a delivery garage with a row of bushes beside it. It was here where Will had gone once with one of the neighborhood girls at eight or nine years old and showed her his penis. He’d waved her in, and she’d come out screaming, “It’s green!” and we all laughed and made fun of him for having a green penis. I even laugh now as an adult, thinking of this. It was probably due to the shade of the light coming through the bushes, but we implied he never washed, didn’t take showers, and it had grown mold. How much time had we spent here, summers, days after school? What had drawn us to these places? The way our days had proceeded lackadaisically, I couldn’t imagine it now—there was always something to do, some responsibility, something on the agenda, and when there wasn’t, it was night, and I was tired and wanted to sleep or drink.

I stopped in front of the used car dealership, across from my parents’ house. My whole world had once been encompassed within that house. I’d spent seventeen of my thirty-some years living in it. But no one was there now, not out back. No siblings, no parents. It was late. I should have expected this. They would have called. The house was two stories. It had a small patch of front lawn, a gray wooden porch with a white awning. The porch furniture had improved over the years from white plastic Adirondack chairs to wicker seats with floral-patterned cushions. There were two windows to the side of the front door. Before my parents had upgraded to central air, a hulking window unit had hung from the second, and we all slept in the living room on hot summer nights like this. My mother hung blankets in the archway between the living and dining rooms to trap the cool air.

I’d had a room upstairs that wasn’t mine anymore. It had stopped being mine when I left. My brother Stan had painted the wood paneling cream. He’d taken up the blue area rug and replaced it with tiles, spread his stuff out. He’d been waiting years for this. The room, to my mind, had been mine. He was accepted. He could spend time there, watching what I wanted to watch on TV, listening to my music, but I decided what went on.

Mostly, I’d lay in bed and look out my window. I listened to the sounds of night, people talking, passing by, cicadas. Most nights, as I waited for sleep, I’d stare at the stars, thinking. It’s easy to forget that in our youth, we absorb information without context and invent the rest. This was the tail end of the Cold War, and I’d learned, through movies and snippets of news reports and my parents’ conversations, about the atomic bomb. They told me not to worry, to avoid getting myself worked up over it, but I realized that our cities and country could be disintegrated at any time. I’d hear planes from the nearby air force base flying overhead and wonder if any of them had bombs and if those bombs would ever drop.

I learned about death around this time, too. I’d had a fourth grade choir concert the night it happened. We were singing selections from The Music Man, and I had a part to act out. The song was “Pick-a-Little, Talk-a-Little.” During an interlude in the singing, a group of girls was going to gossip next to me and mention dirty books. I was supposed to say with shock and bemusement, “Dirty books!” I hadn’t told my parents about it, since I was embarrassed. Landing the part was a fluke. Our music teacher, Mr. Acker, had needed a boy to do it. A few auditioned, but they weren’t getting it right. They lacked enthusiasm. So, when he said it again to demonstrate the inflection he desired, I called out the line from my seat and swung an arm, trying to get the other kids to laugh. They laughed, but so did Mr. Acker, and he picked me, which both pleased me and didn’t. I wanted to act, but wasn’t sure I cared to endure my parents’ cooing afterward. But it didn’t matter. I never got to deliver the line.

Right before we left for the show, my dad took our dog Gypsy for a walk. We had a cat named Max—a friendly, gray, outdoor cat, who, whenever he saw us would rub against our legs. And that’s what happened that night. Max had been walking the same stretch of road I was walking now and he spotted my dad. Max decided to cross and greet them but hadn’t looked and a car was coming. The car hit Max as my dad watched. My dad turned around and let Gypsy loose inside. He grabbed a blanket from the couch. “Max got hit,” he said to my mom, and he ran across to the opposite sidewalk, where Max had been thrown. Max was still breathing, and my dad picked him up in the blanket and rushed for the car to take him to the vet and save him.

We waited, my mother and siblings and I, what must have been a short time, but it seemed interminable. I was racked with sobs, a muscle memory that even now my body retains, convulsing, helpless.

He can’t die, I thought. He won’t. But he did. That morning he was there; that night, he wasn’t. And that’s what death was. I stood outside my parents’ house, remembering this, standing in the place where it happened. The porch light was on. There were nine square windows in the door, divided by slim wooden joints, and together these formed a single block of yellow light through which I could see my mom’s silhouette on the sofa, watching late-night TV. I could have gone over, knocked. She would have let me in. My parents would never turn me away. But I didn’t need them right now, lonely as I was. I hadn’t needed them for a long time. I’d returned here, expecting a homecoming that didn’t happen, and my loneliness wouldn’t be squelched by conversation. It was a loneliness borne of knowledge that time flows in one direction only, that the past has escaped us and can’t return. I’d been transient since I left here, moving to a new apartment every year, but I’d put down roots again, and these roots, though less than a mile away, meant that I didn’t have a claim here anymore. I had a new home with my new wife, and this was a reason to celebrate. But I didn’t feel like celebrating. I’d moved on without knowing it, as I always had. When I’d moved to the city, I’d seen it as a step forward. I was meeting new people, experiencing new things. Yet, I’d been operating under the belief that what I’d left behind had stood still, that it was waiting for me to come back. When I left the house that night, my house now, the one I share with my wife, I thought I’d go find it, but I didn’t, and this felt like defeat.