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  It was the desk drawers that woke me, slamming open and closed. I opened my eyes to thick darkness, the middle of the night still, though it felt like I’d been sleeping for days. My head pounded like a drum; swallowing felt impossible, my mouth dry and pasty, tasting like garbage. My ribs hurt. It took a moment to place the noise, the heavy footsteps and slamming drawers, the grunting. From nearby.

  From Danny’s room.

  I jumped out of bed, far more quickly than I thought possible, and ran into the hall, nearly tripping over Olivia, who was sniffing the air in Danny’s doorway. The furious motion, the stooped figure—it was not Danny. It was my father, moving through the room like a pre–Homo sapiens, his back bent, his head and arms dangling intently as he pawed through the desk drawers, throwing pens and blank pads of paper and crumpled receipts on the floor, banging impotently on the keyboard of the computer. The trash had been strewn from the plastic can, the trophies knocked from the bookshelf, the mattress pulled off its axis, now drooping crookedly on the floor, large sections of box spring exposed.

  I throbbed. My whole body was throbbing.

  “Daddy?” I said, and he looked at me wildly, his chest heaving. For a moment he said nothing, his face doing a bizarre curdle, and I feared he could smell my drunkenness or he was seeing the alcohol rising off me in misty, vaporous plumes. I wondered if he would chastise me, an idea that both horrified and thrilled me. But the sound out of his mouth was like nothing I’d heard from him be-fore, not even after that first night Danny did not return and the next morning and then the night again, when it was clear something had gone terribly wrong. It was a throaty hum of a noise, high-pitched and childish-sounding. No, dog-sounding. He was whimpering. He looked around the room as if he’d just arrived to find it this way, staring disbelievingly at the posters that now hung askew, the blankets torn from the bed, the garbage littering the floor. His eyes pooled with moisture.

  I steadied myself against the doorframe. I felt like I could fall over.

  For a long time we stayed frozen like that, my father staring at me, me clutching the doorway to stabilize myself. For years I would replay the moment in my mind, one of my father’s cheeks still bearing the red imprint of his pillowcase, his hair mussed into a sparse crown, an undone button of his pajamas exposing his curly white stomach hair. He blinked at me, as if he would never look away. It had been so long since he’d looked at me. It seemed like years since he’d softly pinched my ear and called me Chicken for my skinny legs. Since he’d asked what you got when you crossed a cheetah and a hamburger.

  “What is this?” my father said, the words crackling, his expression naked and pleading, as if I were someone who knew the answer and, dear god, could I please just stop holding out on him. I opened my mouth to speak. The pull cord on Danny’s blinds swung back and forth. The other dogs made their way up the stairs, the cockroach-like skittering of their nails on the wood growing louder and louder. My mother had to be awake now too, maybe lying in her bed, studying the dark ceiling.

  I made a noise, a dizzy, drunken, wordless sound. It was all I had, a low sort of growl. And that was the moment I really knew—the sick, sudden, ugly moment—how incapable we were, how impotent and inconsolable, how limited our reach. Grief had already, in a few short months, mined an impassable trench between us. We were—like a boy buried in a ditch or bloated in salty ocean water or starved in some sadist’s basement—beyond rescue.

  Winter came early. The first big snow fell in the second week of October, then a huge storm hit days before Thanksgiving, three and a half feet covering the town with an eerie blankness and adding an extra two snow days to vacation, which seemed to make everyone giddy to the point of feverish, though the effect on our household more resembled a quarantine. Drifts blockaded our front door for days, until I finally chiseled away at the hard-packed, icy barricade. The search was canceled that Saturday and never really started up again in earnest. By December only the hardiest volunteers still showed up, and even those petered out over the holidays and the freezing January rains. Kirk Donovan stopped coming over. The librarian took down the wall-sized card from the school library; the administration dismantled the shrine in the hallway. I expected at least a brief outrage, cheerleaders tearing at their clothing or orchestrating a few well-positioned bawling fits; there was nothing.

  David Nelson and I halfway reconciled by the time winter semester started, our interactions characterized by his refusal to use a contraction—“I could have called you earlier but I did not want to bother you.” “I do not think that it is a good idea to study together in your room anymore.” “I am glad that we are talking again. It is nice to be talking with you”—which made him seem even more bookish and robotic than usual. There was something both comforting and homesicky about being with him, a same-but-different quality that made me sometimes miss him even when he was right in front of me. He’d taken up with one of the Dungeons and Dragons freaks, Adam Deselets, and his speech was now peppered with references to feats and spells and foes. He was a first-level paladin. I nodded when he told me such things, asking, “Is that good or bad?” to which he’d answer that he was base class but with XPs he would be able to get to prestige. It was like listening to a small child who had made-up words for everything.

  There were times I caught him staring at me and I would wonder, is this different from before? Was the look in his eyes—a look that seemed altogether more wistful and more probing—new, or was I just imagining things? We’d be in the middle of a discussion about whether or not Mr. Hollingham had false teeth or about the presidential election in Haiti, and I would see him, cloudy-eyed but intent, his Adam’s apple bobbing earnestly, staring as if he were seeing me for the first time—or maybe the last—and things between us would tilt uncomfortably. I’d find myself going cold inside, brittle and impatient and wanting to say, “You’re an idiot.” I was unforgiving in the way I would later be unforgiving of boyfriends who talked to me in baby voices or seemed too easy with their gifts or praise. Starting with David Nelson, any visible display of longing stopped me cold. Such displays always felt deceptively insistent, cloaking a desire to split me open and see inside. I didn’t want to be split open. I didn’t want my insides seen.

  And so it was that Lola Pepper became my closest approximation to a best friend, though it was a relationship predicated on a mutual agreement to pretend our differences didn’t exist or at least didn’t bother us. Never did we have the sort of relationship where things could be taken for granted or sentences could be finished for each other or we could entirely relax. To her credit, she was unfailingly persistent (it was hard to be lonely with Lola Pepper around) and largely good company, as she was almost always in a light, fluffy mood. Her house had an otherworldly quality to it, mainly due to her walk-in closet full of toys she’d never relinquished from childhood: Cabbage Patch dolls, Chutes and Ladders, Candyland. She would ask, “Have you ever played Hungry Hungry Hippos? It’s hilarious” as she unearthed the box from the bottom of a stack. She didn’t much seem to care about winning or losing, happy to bash the lever that controlled the mouth of her purple hippo as the marbles spun around the board. I would do the same with my green hippo, and such was the way we’d let minutes slide easily between us.

  When she first started coming over, I was irritated by the reverent way she insisted on tiptoeing through Danny’s room (Please, can I just peek in there for a minute?), gingerly touching old swim goggles or his pillowcase. She’d never been in there when Danny was still around; now she treated it like the end of a long pilgrimage. “Come on,” I’d say, standing in the doorway. “Let’s see if there’s ice cream downstairs.” Or “I have something to show you” (I didn’t). Or “Let’s watch something stupid on TV.” It was always easy to find something stupid on TV. Lola was as beguiled by talk shows where hosts harangued lovesick guests as she was by infomercials selling get-rich real estate schemes as by cartoons where buildings morphed into cars, cars into superheroes.


  It was mostly nice having her around, for the sake of the noise and the way she obliviously shook things up, especially with my parents. Noticing my dad watching golf, she fired off a whole round of inquiries about Greg Norman versus Steve Elkington and if John Daly was ever going to be consistent. Which did he think had been a more competitive course this year, the Ryder or the U.S. Open? With my mom, Lola acted as if a vet tech were akin to a rare form of celebrity. Did you ever treat a gecko? Have you ever seen a tumor removed from a guinea pig? How do you get a gerbil unstuck from its Habitrail?

  Sometimes my father just stared sleepily as she rat-a-tatted away, as if she were a human alarm clock he did not know how to silence. Often her conversations with my mother were frenetic and garbled, each of them interrupting the other, nobody listening. But other times I’d be surprised. My mother, it turned out, had in fact used a makeshift concoction of tongue depressors and Vaseline to loosen a gerbil from its Habitrail. My father favored Greg Norman over nearly everyone else.

  One night my mom came into my room after Lola had left, coming behind my desk chair and grabbing both of my shoulders. The unexpectedness of the contact made me flinch a little beneath her. She didn’t seem to notice. “Such a nice girl,” she said. “That’s really something, the flag team. A flag girl.”

  I had no idea how to respond. I didn’t find it something at all, Lola’s flag-girl status. I found it one of the many in spite ofs of our friendship. But I knew what my mom meant. She meant I’d finally arrived, finally friends with someone involved in an extracurricular not centrally concerned with world history or geopolitics. And her enthusiasm was so irritating, it was almost enough for me to stop inviting Lola over. Except watching Lola flitting around my parents, undaunted—not even seeming to realize she should be daunted—and creating such easy, effortless access points with them felt very familiar to me, very much like Danny was back, or at least a part of him was, the part that softened things between everyone and made it, for all his failings, that much more livable here.

  But of course he wasn’t back. Danny stayed gone. Through the freeze and the snow and the whitewashed weeks of winter, there was still no sign of him. In the first days after my dad tore his room apart, I went in and tried to put everything back together, though the room took on a strange, artificial quality after that. The bed was made too neatly, the papers and pencils centered too squarely on the desk. When I tried to mess them up, setting magazines and notepads at odd angles on top of each other, that too felt wrong. Even the garbage, placed piece by piece back into the receptacle next to his desk, seemed somehow showy and fake now.

  His toothbrush still sat in the holder in the upstairs bathroom. Sometimes I pressed my fingers to the hardened bristles, sometimes my whole palm; one time I brushed with it, out of curiosity and antsiness, though it quickly felt like a betrayal and I stood whispering Sorry, sorry to no one as I rinsed out the paste and hurried it back to its metal rung. One of his tube socks ended up in a dryer full of my clothing. When I found it in my basket, the toes a dingy gray, the stripes along the cuff a faded green, I took it to be some sort of sign and spent the next couple days in high-alert mode, anxious each time the phone rang, hotly anticipating the arrival of the mail. It turned out not to be a sign, of course, just a stray sock that had been wedged in the deep recesses of the washing machine, pulled free finally by a zipper of my jeans or a collar of my shirt.

  A new set of unspoken rules solidified around our household, like eating solitary dinners over our laps on the couch; or choosing silence over the stilted chitchat about how was your day, some weather we’re having, that’s quite a sandwich; or building stack after stack of magazines in the front hall, the ones that kept coming in his name—Sports Illustrated, Maxim, Hot Rod—as if preparing the bounty that would greet him when he finally came back through the front door.

  I still lay awake for hours most nights. I fell asleep and woke with the same dull stomachache. There were days I easily mixed up the republics of Malawi and Burundi, or forgot the name of the South African president before Mandela, or grew convinced that Uruguay was spelled with one less u and an additional a. There were other days, though, when the empty room next to mine felt just that, empty, rather than lacking someone, or when the ashtrays got dumped out and the air would smell of something temporary and new like the bananas on the kitchen counter or the pulpy pages of the newspaper, or when an offhand moment on television—a home video clip of a cat with its head inside a yogurt container, a newscaster flubbing the name of a nearby town (he twice called Farmington Heights Harmington Fights)—caused more than one of us to chuckle aloud together.

  And those days were okay. Just fine, really.

  I still saw Chuck. Our sessions had taken on the tinge of White House press briefings, his goal to goad me with questions, my goal to reveal as little as possible while giving the appearance I was saying something. We talked ploddingly about school, my parents, David Nelson, Danny.

  “So you went to a basketball game?” he said during one session, an eyebrow raised. He liked to turn everything into something. “That doesn’t seem like something you would have done a few months ago. Do you see your interest in sports now as a way to stay connected to Danny?”

  “I was never connected to Danny,” I said, which was an exaggeration, the sort I was prone to in here. Talking in absolutes seemed the best way to subvert the conversation into nothingness.

  “Did you go with Lola?” Chuck had a way of elongating the o in Lola’s name, as if deriving sensual pleasure from the word. It was creepy.

  “Lola’s on the flag team. She can’t go to games. She’s performing. ” I thought of their elaborate turquoise-sequined costumes, which, without exception, clung to all of them in the least flattering of places, the girls looking wide-hipped and pregnant, Bay ard’s pantsuit version making him look like an iridescent string bean. I pictured the way they all tried to manipulate the unwieldy flags, and the horselike dance steps that one or more were always stomping slightly offbeat. Lola looked so proud when she was performing, her smile huge and toothy, her freckles glowing. And it made me love/hate her, the way she had no clue of what idiots they were making of themselves, her natural capacity for oblivious happiness.

  “Then who did you go with?” Chuck said. The half-open venetian blinds showed white stripes of sky, the snow having long bleached out all the blue.

  “Whom?” I said.

  Chuck gave a little laugh. He always did that when I corrected him.

  “Okay, with whom did you go?” he said, making a production out of the word.

  “Tip and those guys,” I said, trying to sound casual.

  “You don’t say?” Again with the raised eyebrow. “So Danny’s friends.” Chuck swiveled in his chair. It made a low, squealing sound like it needed to be oiled. Wickee, wickee, wickee.

  “They’re just guys,” I said.

  “Do you see any significance to your association with these particular guys?”

  Association made it sound like we were some sort of crime syndicate. For someone who talked all day, Chuck often seemed careless with his words.

  I told him no. I told him it was nice to get out of the house but didn’t mention that these particular guys had an ingenious system of smuggling in Pepsi bottles half filled with rum, which they passed around during the first half. Or that they talked of ridiculous things, like shoot-’em-up video games or hockey teams or race car drivers—topics that I had no entrée into, and therefore nothing was expected of me. I could just watch the monotony on the court that had everyone else so worked up, which I found almost meditatively lulling, the ball bouncing down the court and back, and down the court and back again, with the predictability of a metronome. These particular guys were so big, so physically big, sometimes I found them comical and clownish, like a completely different species. Tip’s arms were thicker than my thighs, Lyle Walker’s neck was like a fire hydrant, and I had a sense of such smallness, sitting amid them in the bleachers
, especially after the rum started to seep in, a sense that was soothing rather than intimidating.

  And yes, I saw significance in the fact that these were friends of my brother’s. But not in the nostalgic way Chuck hoped; I didn’t have a tender, soft-bellied story to tell about any remembrance or connection that these boys offered me. These were the same boys who six months earlier had snorted loudly when Danny said Hot as I walked past them in my kitchen, who might add, Is that a stylish new pair of jeans? for the easiest of laughs from my brother. Now these boys were apt to nod when I walked through the doors of the gym, to scoot aside to make a space for me as I climbed up the bleachers toward them, to pat me on the shoulder as I sat, calling me Pasternak, the same name they used to—and still did, in absentia—call Danny. How quick they’d been to accept me after just a couple more parties with Lola and a feigned interest in winter varsity sports.

  “I used to think you were boring,” Dale Myerson told me. It was a typical comment, delivered entirely without irony as I wordlessly drank from the spiked pop bottle and stared glassily at the sweaty, grunting basketball players, whose shoes squeaked loudly against the gym floor like a series of alarms.

  It was not particularly edifying being with them. It was numbing and hazy and more than a little tedious. But still, I felt like wagging my finger at the Danny of my imagination, the Danny who hovered above these scenes, vaporous and smirky. See there, I wanted to say to him. See me now? It was as if I were suddenly ahead in the game, the one that’d been playing out between us for years, whose rules I’d never really understood, whose in-bounds and out-of-bounds had constantly shifted and blurred, the one that my brother had always been so handily, so effortlessly winning.

  It seemed we could go on like that all winter, in more or less a holding pattern, until one day the doorbell rang and Melissa Anne appeared on our doorstep. I didn’t realize it was Melissa Anne immediately. In fact, she never formally introduced herself. But as soon as I opened the door—my father still at work, my mother asleep or otherwise spaced out in their room—I knew something was not right. The woman didn’t have a hat, and her jacket looked like a slicker you’d wear in the more mundane months of April or September. Now the late January snow swirled behind her in white mini-tornados. Her ears were such a bright red, they looked as if they might snap off the sides of her head, and her lips were deeply chapped. She had a bad dye job, her hair a strange bluish black hue. It was hard to tell how old she was; she had a round face, so round, in fact, it gave her a babylike appearance, except for the deep lines beside her eyes and from her nose to her mouth.