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  It would have been around seven in the morning on a morning at the end of August, perhaps the last day of the month. Peter had planned his death for two years. In letters sent to his friends, he talked of how he had tried to kill himself for the first time when he was eleven. He had failed and in such a way that no one suspected he had even tried. He resolved then to keep it a secret, and to plan well for the next time. He threw a Dungeons & Dragons game that lasted until late and then we left to go home, as it was the first school night of the summer. He stopped me to take a picture of us together, a Polaroid. Here, he said, and gave it to me, and then laughed. I said, It’s not as much fun to play anymore, is it. And he said, Yeah. It’s not.

  At the end of the night he went to bed for a few hours, waking up in the early morning to go and buy the gasoline he would use to burn himself to death.

  I remember Melinda, the choir director’s daughter, going away for a season and not knowing why, and how, when she returned, the curiosity I’d always seen in her eyes was gone. Mildly retarded, with glasses as thick as a bottle, it seemed like her glasses let you see more of what was going on inside her rather than showing her anything at all.

  When she returns, I see her first again at church. She has grown over the winter, and her eyes no longer meet mine; she no longer seems like she is pressing up against her glasses to escape, like before. She seems like she hides now. As if she feels someone blames her for seeing the burning boy, and so now, she has no particular interest in seeing something else that will get her sent away again.

  I wonder, if it would be like being with him forever, to see him like that. I think it is. I want to ask him what it was he thought he was going to burn when he set his fire. And if what burned, if that is what is really gone now. In the picture, he is a white glare, his face there the shape of a fist, his hair a gold outline. His blue eyes alight with what looks like real cheer. That is what burned, I tell myself. Not the thing he hated. Because that is with me.

  At Peter’s funeral service, his mother approaches me. Fee, she says. Come by after for the wake. We’ll drive you home if your mom can drop you off. It’ll just be some family, mostly, but you were a good friend to Peter. We’d like to see you.

  During the service I had stared at the dark brown mound, pale flowers in a pile where the head should be, some six feet below. No one said, I wish he was still here. No one seemed to rage that he was gone. For all that we were surprised, I saw, as I looked around at the mourners, we also accepted it. Boys and girls from the private school he attended filed past me in twos and threes. This whole time Peter’s mother hadn’t asked to see the letter I had received from Peter. I’d not offered to show it. And until then, it didn’t occur to me, that it might belong, in a way, to her. But then she breathed, hugged me to her and moved on.

  I stayed until everyone was gone. I think I was waiting to cry. I think I was waiting to fall apart, and to find him standing there at the center of the pieces of me, alive again.

  In his room after the ceremony the sunlight, the last of the day, makes a bright patch on the carpet and I watch it as it moves, slowly, across the floor, which I later realize means I have been there for over an hour. I throw myself onto his bed, briefly, to smell cigarette ash and tobacco, old beer, the salty carnation smell of him underneath that.

  I pass by his father downstairs, who nods at me, saying nothing. He shakes the ice in his glass gently, as if he is thinking about pouring the Scotch on the floor. His mother moves about the kitchen as she always did, except she is dressed in widows black. I go out the door to find his blue-haired sister, Elizabeth, outside. She had braided her mohawk for the ceremony, tucked it under a hat, and the whole effect had been, actually, quite elegant. It’s the end of the summer, and the heat is just bearable. She smokes, her right arm holding the cigarette with the support of her left, crossed under her, holding herself.

  Do you want one, she asks, and holds out a pack of Marlboros. Peter’s brand. And then I notice his handwriting on the pack. POH.

  She sees me read it. He always did that, she says. You never saw it before? He always did it so I wouldn’t take his cigarettes. I always did, though.

  I take one, light it. There’s a half carton upstairs, she adds. Go take some before you leave.

  Peter’s dog slips through the hedge, back from a hunt at the yard’s edge. Odd, she says, exhaling as she spoke. To buy a carton before your suicide.

  For a few weeks after, I keep seeing her around town. Elizabeth everywhere, it seems. She smiles, nods, chewing gum and smoking or talking and smoking, seven safety pins now in her left ear and her boot buckles rattling every time she steps forward. I think, when I see her, about his initials tucked somewhere in her clothes. From the attention I give her I know she thinks I’m strange, but I also know I’m on her list of boys people think are gay, because we don’t go skinhead. Peter told me about the list, because she had showed him. In order to show him our names together on the list. I see her with a new boyfriend. I see her smoke Marlboros, and then not, and then I know, when I see the white filter in her fingers instead of the yellow, the carton is gone. I think of the initialed packs, tossed out in different cans wherever she was, a Dumpster here, a riverbank there. Of how I wanted to follow her, and pick up every one.

  2

  HERE WE GO a car-oling among the leaves so green, Here we . . .

  Christmas Eve. On the street where I live, we carol to our neighbors regularly every year. At the end, one family has everyone inside for eggnog. This year is suddenly cold, where before it had been mild, and snow upon snow arrives on the days before Christmas. Cape Elizabeth is going from being one kind of town to another, everyone says. And when they say it they mean there is nothing good to this, and they say it always to the new arrivals, who accept this as a kind of hazing, even as they assume it doesn’t mean them. Here in the Masrichs’ house, on a kidney-shaped downturn off our street, Brentwood, these pronouncements are meaningless at the party. We are all new on this street. All our houses are not quite ten years old. During the caroling I had finally put together what another child from down the road had said, about how he could find the bathroom in my house even if he had never been there, because it was just the same as his. There were, I could see now, four or five different plans, used in rotation, so that no matches were visible each to the other. At the Masrichs’, also a Frontier Colonial, like ours, I sat on the stairs to the side as adults trooped up and down past me, glow-bright cups of eggnog in their hands. Let me give you the tour, Mrs. Masrich said to each newcomer to the house, and so they would go, up and down and around. This is the sewing room, and the bathroom is over here, I hear from the upstairs hall. You can put your coats there.

  I have grown two inches in the last year. I have big legs. I look at them a fair amount, amazed at them. My thighs are as big as heads. I think of when I was on vacation last summer with my Grandfather Zhe, to the man who wanted to massage them for me. I’m a soccer coach back home, you know, he said. You look like a nice husky boy. The hotel where we were staying had a faux-desert landscape, around the pool area, and so we were hidden by a peach-brown dune of cement from the view of my dozing grandfather and siblings. I told him, I don’t think so. But thanks. He told me his room number, just in case I felt “sore.” Later that night, in my hotel room, I thought of how I could kill him.

  My mother appears in front of me at the bottom of the stairs. She has dressed in a foam-green crew-neck sweater under a loden coat she wears on her shoulders, her blond hair arranged there, pulled back with one barrette to her nape, making her look much younger than most of the other mothers. Why are you here on the stairs, she asks. She settles a hand on my leg.

  She asks me something I don’t hear over my own thoughts. I’m sorry, Mom? I ask.

  You were looking right at me, I’d swear, she says, and she grabs my ear, bending it a little toward her. I said, Are you feeling well?

  Sure, I say. All this Christmas stuff just depresses me. I re
ally only like the music.

  You’re not very convincing. You’re so angry these days.

  I’m not. I’m not angry. I stand up and walk down the stairs to the foyer. See, I say, heading to the main room. See how happy I am?

  There’s no call for sarcasm. She crosses an arm over her stomach and props up her elbow, her drink resting up near her face.

  Hey Nora, come in here. Aphias, come here. My dad comes from around the corner. His face flushed, he takes my mom by the hand. C’mon.

  On the television was some footage from the Spirit of Christmas Concert, taken from two years before. The chorus had sung with an adult choir, the Portland Symphony, and a few guest stars from the Biddeford Opera production of Carmen. My father had seen my face on the screen and looked for it again. You were right there, he said, indicating the corner of the screen in which my face had appeared. Right there.

  3

  ENDLESS JANUARY INTO endless February. Sunny days hit the snow and make me hate light, cold that snaps my nose numb and then burns me once I’m inside. I spend the days reading.

  I had been doing an English paper on the pantoum, a literary form, originally Sri Lankan, that came to Italy in pages wrapped in silks. The same silks that perhaps had arrived with the infected fleas of the Plague. I think of the elegant horses, stung as they ride, carrying the death of nations.

  I take a break from studying and find my grandfather reading through the paper in the gray winter light shading the kitchen. It’s the afternoon, just before dinner. He favors our kitchen as a place to hide from my grandmother. She favors her kitchen as a place to hide from him. Anyung haseo, I say, sitting down. I’ve been practicing some Korean, because it makes my grandparents smile.

  He chuckles, almost to tears. Pretty good, round-eyes, he says. He learned a lot of his English from G.I.s, and says things like this, or, I take leak. But he’s salty in his own right. He didn’t learn English from them by accident. He sets the paper down. Hows my smart grandson?

  Good, I say. And I pick up the paper to look at the classifieds, because I’ve decided I want to work a job and have some extra money. And so I see this:

  Wanted: student researcher, for book project. Please be energetic, bright, a fast learner, and extremely quiet, with an interest in history, in particular the 14th century in Europe. Please call Edward Speck, at . . .

  When I call the number listed, the man I speak to is good-natured and reserved, and tells me to come by to see him. He gives me an address in South Portland, nearby, in a part I don’t ever go to, though not for any particular reason I can think of, and the next afternoon I drive over and find myself ringing the doorbell of a large brownstone house that looks out of place, surrounded as it is by new houses. As if this house had been here for a very long time, alone, and suddenly been joined by neighbors just beyond the boxwood shoulders of its lawns.

  Edward Speck is a tiny man. His white hair drifts above a cheerful face. He lets me into the house on this afternoon looking like he’s decided, seeing me through the door, to hire me. He tells a brief history of himself (study at Oxford, Ph.D. from Columbia) and that he lives here because it was his grandmother’s house and he had always wanted it. The furniture was all hers and is original. He asks me no questions. I’ve added nothing, he says.

  I admire in particular, in the mudroom, a bench attached to a mirror and hung down the sides with bronze fixtures resembling moose antlers.

  I’m only here, he says, for the cold months. We sit in the parlor, on matching giant leather club chairs. His has an enormous hassock in front of it. A Persian rug, the color of several wines, muffles us.

  Why’s that, I ask.

  Because cold air concentrates oxygen powerfully. It’s wonderful for the brain. And also, no one likes to be here in this time of year, so no one visits me, and I am left alone.

  I see. And, I do.

  We agree on payment (he decides for more than I’d thought) and he outlines some responsibilities: opening and filing all his mail for him to go through, returning books placed to the right of the desk to his library, returning books placed by the door to either the Portland library or the library of the university (check inside flyleaf). Occasionally, he says, I will ask you to look things up for me, and then photocopy what you find, along with related articles, or to take out the book. You won’t have to do any writing or household work, although sometimes I may ask to be driven. I will need you for ten to twelve hours a week.

  He stands. Now, for the tour.

  The ceilings of the dark house accommodate people much taller than him or I. The library I remember and envy. When I first enter it, I realize I would work without pay to be able to come here. For some genius thought to make a room like this: three stories tall, shelves on all sides, brass ledges to them connected by ladders made of iron. And all the books shelved and stored behind glass doors crisscrossed with iron. Windows edge only at the top, so that light glows into the room instead of falling, and then the ceiling with a fresco of a dark city, a mountain in the center of it.

  What is that city, I ask.

  Edinburgh, he replies.

  The mountain? I say.

  Arthur’s Seat, he says. A hill.

  On my way out, he looks at me and asks, What is your parentage?

  I am used to the question. I know the look: people searching my features for matches, finding few that correspond. It is confusing to some people to look at me. Watching me takes longer than most.

  Half Korean, I say, and half Scottish-English.

  You look like a Russian, he says. A young Cossack, really.

  I think of Mongolia. Lady Tammamo. A little Mongolian too, I say.

  An ancient race. He pauses, lit from within inside his doorway. Excellent, he says. We’ll see you soon. And oh, by the way, call me Speck, please. Everyone does. And with that he closes his giant door.

  4

  THE LIBRARIANS LAUGH as I carry my piles of books out of the library. My mother is incredulous as I bring them in from the car.

  I don’t pretend I understand, my mother says, surveying the piles of books in my room. But if this is what you want.

  It’s really interesting, I say. It created a great deal of what we know as culture today.

  Uh huh, she says. I can’t wait until you and your father go over this one.

  This is just something I want to do, Ma, I say. And she pulls the door shut, saying, Come down for dinner in an hour. One hour.

  I look over the books before closing the door to go downstairs. A job, I understand now, is a purpose. I feel a sense of mission. My hours with Speck leave me feeling protected. I walk through the quiet house attending to my duties. Under his instructions, I am to speak with him when I arrive, after school at four, and when I leave, at six. At no other time, unless, of course, he comes to find me. But these restrictions leave me feeling free inside the silence, which, inside his house, is as thick as the drapes that protect his dark house from the light that would bleach the color from the chairs and yellow all the books. Even in their pristine cases. The relief of nothing to say. I’d always prized silence for being the absence of other noises. In this house I come to see how one can prize silence for being articulate, as well.

  5

  PUBLIC HIGH SCHOOL seems to me to be a barbarian ritual of four years that leaves me with no ability to mark its beginning or end except through shame and occasional violence, from which I hide in a series of classes for the precollegiate, and the thirty of us who fall into this category come by senior year to seem a race apart from the hundred others in the class. One girl in the year ahead is ridiculed for having her picture taken with her baby, for the yearbook. The father had died. I look at the picture and they seem to me unbearably beautiful. Her hair carefully folded back by a curling iron, his baby hair tied atop his head with a ribbon. She had always been, I recalled, a fiercely silent girl, pretty and small. Now she seems a giant. I see her in the school, nonchalant. Widowed, a mother, a high school senior. Our
lives, I decide, watching her, are tiny beside hers.

  I watch my grandparents as well. They fascinate me. Their ears seem tuned to some signal not quite in range of hearing. And their quiet, a readiness. My grandfather rises to do Tai Chi in the mornings on the back lawn, facing the sun as it rises. My grandmother meditates, and then cooks for him. When she smiles, her smile has the force of a joy as old as her and as unbroken.

  Zach and I continue. What we continue, we don’t know. We don’t ever talk about what we do, directly. We say, I’ll be over. Or, Are you coming over? As if one or the other of us had decided to visit, and hadn’t yet informed the other. I don’t love him. He doesn’t love me. Now we tear at each other more, for wanting not to want this. And afterward, as I look at his white thighs and brown arms, there’s real tenderness in knowing, whatever it is we want from each other, it seems always to be the same. No one asks about how we spend our time. His parents, often not home, would have no way of knowing. That I had been there.

  In my bed I keep Peter’s letter to me. The one that arrived after he was dead. I keep it with a picture I have of him, in its envelope. My mother doesn’t move it when she changes my bedding. Ever.

  6

  SPECK’S OTHER HOME is in New York City, and he promises to me to take me there sometime. There’s nothing like New York, he says. I feel young there. Everything there is much older than me.

  On an afternoon when the sun is starting to come and stay longer, and the snow melts enough to show all the dead grass, Speck interrupts both our silences. I am in a pile of his bills, marking the ones to be paid. Subscriptions, utilities. Doctors. Ugh, he says. So, would you like to see this?