The Grief of Others (6 page)

“The Hook,” she said, and arched her back and stuck out both arms in such a way that Gordie’s dad’s wet lumberjack shirt slid to the floor. Her father picked it up and spread it on top of the radiator, and then took a big fleece jacket (from the look of it, his) from the coatrack beside them and wrapped it around her, rubbing her back and arms as Gordie detailed more plainly the course of recent events.

“I’m grateful you were there,” said the father, when Gordie had more or less summed things up.

“Oh, no,” Gordie demurred, and tried to clarify that if he and his dog hadn’t been there in the first place the girl would have needed no rescue. But then she spoke up, for the first time in Gordie’s presence betraying a hint of garrulity, insisting that she hadn’t needed a rescue in
any
case, since she’d known how to swim since she was four.

Nevertheless, the father looked at Gordie with heavy gratitude. “John Ryrie,” he said, extending his hand.

“Gordie Joiner.”

The man’s grip was fantastic.

“Well: I’m indebted. This one”—he looked at the girl—“has been something of a concern to us lately.” His voice seemed tinged with private rue, something like self-reproach. The father laid a broad hand on top of his daughter’s head. She caught Gordie’s eye then with a look of insolent amusement, and he was taken aback. It seemed to imply a connection, a complicity between them. Had they shared something, he and this child who had snubbed his attempts at conversation in the car? If so, what? An adventure? A secret? He felt hopelessly slow.

“Um, Mr. Ryrie,” he said, and cleared his throat. He decided he would, he must, mention what he’d seen this Biscuit-Elizabeth-girl doing just prior to her plunge. By intervening in the first place, by delivering her home, he’d incurred a responsibility.

“John,” the father corrected him.

“John. I don’t know whether I should say . . . I asked in the car, but . . .” He cleared his throat again. “I just wondered if you knew—”

But he broke off in mortification at the sudden arrival of Ebie, who came nosing-and-shouldering her massive way through the open front door. She circled the front hall rapidly, the ungainly sway of her hips and damp thwack of her tail making the space seem very cramped, and threaded among the humans, blithely disseminating her gamy perfume.

Gordie tried to grasp her collar. “Ebie!—sorry—
come,
girl. Sorry. I don’t know why she’s—Ebie, no!” She ended up by Biscuit-Elizabeth, on whose foot she trod once before inserting herself decorously between girl and coatrack. There she sat, giving the distinct impression of hoping to go unnoticed.

The girl’s hand floated to the dog’s neck, fingers twining deep into the fur.

Gordie shrugged, let his hands fall to his sides. “She apparently likes your daughter.”

“I see that.” John rubbed his cheek with two fingers. He looked at the dog. Ebie, apparently conscious of being under scrutiny, did not make eye contact with her observer but thrust her face slightly in his direction and thumped her tail. John laughed. “Well. Gordie, right? And Biscuit.You’re both soaked.” He gestured ironically, as if to acknowledge he’d stated the obvious. “Bis, go up and put on dry things. And if you”—he turned to Gordie—“could possibly spare the time, I’d like to offer you tea or . . . coffee, cocoa? A dry sweatshirt? And to hear what you were starting to say.”

It was unsettling how glad the invitation made Gordie, how almost relieved he was to receive it.

Before he could respond, however, the girl spoke up. “Who’s she?” Pointing a finger toward the doorway that led from the hall.

A young woman leaned against the frame. She had short dark hair and wore a dark turtleneck and faded jeans. Her feet were bare, her arms folded across her chest. She was observing them all with a half-smile, a look of loosely reined amusement. Gordie had no idea how long she’d been there. She alone in the room appeared wholly unconcerned, comfortable in her skin. He found himself interested in this, if slightly unsettled by it.

P
aul and Baptiste sat at the counter of the Skylark polishing off an order of fries, their backpacks slumped soggily at their feet. They’d known each other since Baptiste moved to Nyack in third grade, but had not formed a friendship until last year, when both happened to join cross-country, the only team that didn’t make cuts. They’d become at that time not so much best friends as each other’s only friend. What had begun as a vague affinity (based on their finding themselves, practice after practice, bringing up the rear together) developed into something more when they discovered they shared an appetite for comics and a talent for drawing. But what cemented their friendship was death. Paul had had to miss a few days of practice last spring while his mother was in the hospital. When he came back and told Baptiste why he’d been out, it became the occasion for Baptiste’s disclosure that he had lost a sibling, too. His little sister. Also his father. Back in Haiti. Last year.

“Dude. At the same time?”

Baptiste made the slightest movement with his shoulders; the shrug would have been seismographically undetectable. “Their bus,” he said, and took one hand out of his back pocket to show how it had tipped on its side.

The boys had clocked many hours together last summer sprawled on the floor of Paul’s bedroom or out on the Ryries’ front porch, working on what was at first going to be a comic book and then morphed into a graphic novel, the heroes of which were kind of alter egos, the one a lean and princely boy who could change at will into a black panther; the other a hulking, trench-coated private eye who could make himself invisible. By the time they’d begun seventh grade, they’d completed sixtythree pages and had more or less woven together the two story lines in a mixture of pencil, blue ballpoint, and black India ink.

The clock behind the cash register said three-fifty. The rain had stopped and the sun come out, its brisk light slicing sideways through the air.Through the plate glass they saw things snapping in a freshly risen wind.

Baptiste could now head home. He was not allowed to go straight home from school because his grandmother, with whom he lived, worked as an aide at the hospital and didn’t get home until four, and she had a fear of someone with a knife breaking into the apartment when Baptiste was home alone.This was the explanation Baptiste had given when he and Paul were first beginning to confide little things in each other, and although Paul found both the rule and the specificity of the concern bizarre, he had never voiced that opinion. In truth, he was a little awed by the dignity with which his friend honored his grandmother’s wishes. Paul had met Mrs. Lecompte only a handful of times, and his impression was of wearily maintained formality. She spoke little in Paul’s presence, although Baptiste said her English was good. She had an imposingly straight back and a heavy, mineral countenance.

Ever since Paul first learned of Mrs. Lecompte’s prohibition on Baptiste’s arriving home before four o’clock, he’d fallen into the habit of keeping Baptiste company after school on days they didn’t have practice. Baptiste had at first seemed leery of such omnipresent companionship, then tolerant, and eventually content with it.The boys would walk down the hill from the middle school together, cutting through the old apple orchard and across the thruway overpass into town. Some afternoons Baptiste came over to the Ryries’ house; some days they walked down to the public library and got their homework done; some days they kicked around the shops and wound up by the river, chucking rocks into the water. Lately they’d begun frequenting the Skylark, at least whenever they had enough cash between them to order a piece of pie or plate of fries. They were thirteen, and the experience of patronizing a restaurant without an adult was novel enough to constitute a small thrill in itself.

“How much you got?” asked Paul. “I got one-eighty.” He was thinking maybe they could split a plate of scrambled eggs, the fries being nearly gone, but when Baptiste counted up his money they were short. “Oh well. I guess we better be going, anyway.”

“Yeah.”

Baptiste, whose aptitude for math was understood by both to exceed Paul’s, figured the tip. They deposited a small pile of bills and coins and left, slinging their backpacks over their shoulders as they stepped out into the brisk and newly sunstruck afternoon. Puddles glimmered everywhere. Leftover drops shook and sprayed from the Skylark’s awning, the scalloped edge of which was flapping madly in the wind.

“Want to come over?” Paul issued the invitation halfheartedly, not because it was insincere, but because he knew what Baptiste’s answer would be.

“Can’t. My Grann.”

“A’ight. See you.”

“See you.”

They went their opposite ways on Main Street, Paul downhill, Baptiste up. Baptiste and his Grann lived in four rooms on the first floor of a house on Elysian Avenue. The apartment was north-facing, spartan and dim. Paul got asked in only rarely. He’d been surprised the first time he saw Baptiste’s room, two full walls of which were papered with pictures cut from newspapers (a lot from sports, but a fair number from the travel section, too: a Kyoto temple ringed by mist, a Thai beach at sunset, an okapi eating leaves off a tree in Zaire). Not only which pictures had been selected, but also the way the images had been arranged, what their art teacher would call the composition, had been arresting. From across the room, the whole thing made a colorful abstract, a work of art in itself, apart from what the individual pictures showed as you moved in and examined them more closely. There was a sense of exuberance in the project that had surprised Paul, a capacity for investment that was nowhere evident in the Baptiste he knew at school.

The air was astringent after the rain and thin-feeling, as if it had just been pruned. Paul’s jacket was still wet from the downpour; he and Baptiste had been caught smack in the middle of it as they walked to the Skylark. He felt a bit penitent now about having eaten all those fries (just yesterday a girl in his class had called him “Chub” to his face), and at the same time wistful about the eggs. He would have put ketchup on them, and salt on the hash browns that would have come alongside.

Baptiste, though equally slow in track events, was not hampered by extra girth. Although he could hold up his end just fine when it came to scarfing a plate of fries, he was pretty much a pipe cleaner. Paul didn’t quite get how Baptiste could be so slow—the thought had once come into his head that what weighed his friend down was something along the lines of sorrow, but immediately he’d chided himself, embarrassed at what seemed to him the girlishness of this speculation.

The walk home from the Skylark was only four blocks, but it seemed long to Paul, today and every day. The straps of his backpack dug into his shoulders through his wet jacket and the wind brought tears to his eyes. His feet slapped heavily in their Doc Martens. He did not like his body or the way it felt to move it: like drudgery, like a slightly disgraceful chore.

He hadn’t passed more than a few shops when he heard his name belted out: “Ryrie!”

He shouldn’t turn his head. He turned his head. It was Stephen Boyd, hanging out in front of Turiello’s, his jeans hanging eight inches off his waist, his jacket on the sidewalk. He gave a laugh that meant nothing to Paul and jerked his head in greeting. “How’s it hanging?”

“Hey,” said Paul, nodding back. He’d stopped, a mistake; it would look as though he expected more conversation. He should have said hi and kept walking.

But Stephen, ruddy-cheeked and scruffy-haired, smiled as if to commend him, as though he’d said something incomparably witty. It was true—that was the thing of it—asshole that he was, that Paul knew him to be, Stephen had an irresistible smile, mischievous and oddly flattering; it seemed to convey that anyone who could elicit such a smile must be of special worth. It confused Paul for a moment, made him think the bluff greeting had been in earnest. Maybe it was. Who was to say his time of social hell wasn’t coming to an end, a natural conclusion as unpredictable as its inception had been, back at the start of sixth grade?

“Where’d your friend go?” asked Stephen, a not unreasonable question. Paul figured he must have noticed him and Baptiste parting ways up the block.Yet he hesitated.

Stephen raised his brows encouragingly. Remnants of smile lingered on. He had ridiculous amounts of charm—even teachers seemed uncertain, at times, about whether Stephen was cracking wise or speaking in earnest. His boxers—the exposed two-inch swath of them—were striped blue and green. Some of the boys hanging out by the door of the pizza place sauntered over; Paul hadn’t noticed they were with Stephen. Two were eighth-graders.

“
Where
is he?” he repeated, amiably enough, as though Paul had already replied but Stephen hadn’t quite caught his answer.

When Paul went to speak his voice rattled phlegmatically; he should have cleared his throat first. “Home.” He wanted to stab himself for that—for answering, obeying. He could not help it; there was no clever retort, or if there was, he couldn’t think of it. Anyway, it was a simple fact, hardly incriminating; why not answer directly? Only the way they all stood around, clumped and grinning, made it into something else.

“That’s too bad,” Stephen said. Again, low chuckles, from his cronies this time. Not overtly nasty. Almost, those chuckles could be read as affectionate, sympathetic. Then, “Dude, he’s blushing,” one of the older boys said, and the laughter turned grosser, and the tone of the whole preceding exchange turned unambiguous. Paul hurried away, having the guts to give them the finger, but holding it tucked against his chest so they couldn’t quite see. The worst of it was that he really could feel the blush.

“You see him checking out Boyd’s shorts, man?” one of them rasped behind him, and there were hoots.

It had been this way, more or less, for almost the past two years. He had no idea why. He’d been liked well enough in elementary school. Of course, it hadn’t helped that his best friend, Alexi, had moved to Florida at the end of fifth grade. But it wasn’t as if Alexi had been his only friend. In fifth grade, fifteen kids had attended his birthday party, brought him gifts in colored paper, played capture the flag with his mother’s dish towels, sung to him. By the following autumn most of these same kids, if they did not actually abuse him outright, would greet him in the hallways abstractedly if at all. And not one rose to his defense when other kids, those who had never been his friends, targeted him with their teasing.