And Sons (12 page)

A
rap-rap-rap
on the minivan’s window.

Jamie startled, then smiled. It was Myron.

“You almost scared me to death.”

“Just trying to drum up business,” Myron said. “Me late?”

“Not really.”

“I feel late.” Myron slid into the passenger seat and proceeded to
remove his gloves, his hat, his left shoe, his left sock, his hands enclosing his left foot, his toes like a nest of deformed baby mice. “Once you get frostbite you always got frostbite,” he said.

“When did you get frostbite?”

“Shit, I don’t have frostbite, thank Christ, but you gotta stay on top of it.” Myron Doty was a twice-divorced, thrice-incarcerated father of three who carried a certain nobility of failure that seemed passed down from a long line of disreputable Doty men, probably all the way back to the
Mayflower
.

“How’re things?” Jamie asked.

“Fine, as in fine print, as in always read the.”

“What happened?”

“I’m not privy to all the details yet.”

“Good winter though?”

“Winter is winter. You been running through the high grasses?”

Jamie handed over his half-smoked joint.

Myron cleared a path in his beard. “I will tell you I’m ready for the living to return to the dead. Don’t need to see another fucking skier, with his hollering and his whooping. It’s like I’m stuck on an assembly line manufacturing kick-ass fun.” Myron took five quick hits, pinkie splayed like he was sipping hot tea, then he put his sock and shoe back on. “You think your project worked?”

“Hope so. Reminds me.” Jamie handed over an envelope, the other half of the agreed-upon sum, which Myron counted, smiling like the cash was a real lifesaver, though his eyes twinkled with the opposite impulse. “You ready?” Jamie asked.

“Yup.”

Back outside, into air made material by breath, they crossed the road and stopped by Myron’s truck, where Myron handed Jamie a flashlight and a shovel and grabbed for himself a bigger flashlight and a better shovel. They started up the unplowed road, aptly named Cemetery Road. The earth seemed lit by the television moon and tonight’s episode was a doozy about the wackiest kind of grave robbers. Every footfall broke through a crust of melt and freeze. Only the taller headstones poked through the snow like something forgotten, and Jamie had the
sensation of apocalyptic doom, of backyard archeology below his feet, tricycles and soccer balls, Frisbees lost, a place where everybody was once a child.

“That strong pot?” Myron asked.

Jamie nodded.

“Guess I’m really fucking stoned then.”

Jamie gave vapory shape to an uncertain sigh. Then he heard the opening riff of “Whole Lotta Love”—one of his all-time favorites—and after a pause where Robert Plant seemed to whisper in his ear
You need coolin’, baby, I’m not foolin’
Jamie snapped back and recognized his ringtone. “Just my phone,” he confirmed out loud, in case Myron was in danger of floating away. It was Richard, and he was on a tear. “Like you said he called and asked me to come home, like my home isn’t my home, like I’m living a make-believe life or something. Come home. What an asshole. I should have hung up right then. Why do I have to be the better person? I know, I know, it’s not about him, right, it’s about me, about what’s healthy for me in the long run, but to make that kind of phone call when he’s an old man and it’s too late for anything, you know, too late for me to scream at him, to be functionally pissed, it doesn’t seem fair.”

Jamie was accustomed to these rants. His brother was most comfortable when angry, preferring those depths where the world squeezed. God forbid if you were stuck in line with him; then again, he moved things along nicely. Jamie only half-listened as he trudged through the snow and admired the stars above. A random line of poetry dropped into his head—
The stars are mansions built by nature’s hand
—its origin unknown. Regardless of these distractions, he could hear the hurt his brother could never hide. Sometimes Jamie wondered whether his own happy childhood was partly to blame.

“Why are you breathing so hard?” Richard asked. “Where the hell are you?”

“In Vermont.”

“Where in Vermont?”

“Outside, walking through snow.”

“At two in the morning?”

It was typical of his brother not to notice his side of the offense. “Yes,” Jamie said, “at two in the morning, thank you, and it’s cold, and I’m tired, and I’m in a graveyard visiting Sylvia Weston.”

“Sylvia Weston?”

“Yes.”

“Sexy Sylph died?”

“Yes.”

“Jesus, how?”

“Breast cancer,” Jamie said, the shovel and flashlight awkward in his other hand. “I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”

“I always liked her. She was my favorite of all your girlfriends.”

“Mine too.”

“Fucking terrible,” Richard muttered. “Between Sylvia Weston and Charlie Topping. Anyway, I’m calling to tell you that I am going to go to New York, arriving late Monday, with the whole family. The kids will miss some school but I figure they can finally meet their grandfather. He didn’t sound good on the phone, out of it, you know, not all there. Sounded kind of desperate. It was weird. Certainly not the dad I remember. You need to come home, he kept on saying, like he had swallowed someone else’s voice. But I was hoping, I don’t know, I was hoping we might catch up as well. I know Candy and Chloe and Emmett would love to see you. But we can talk details later. How many years did you and Sylph date?”

“What?” Jamie asked, struggling over a snowdrift.

“How long did you date Sylvia?”

“Almost three years,” he said, though the truth was a little over two.

“Can’t believe she died.”

“I know.”

“She was so sweet. Dad had such a crush on her. We all did.”

While Jamie was always considered to be the more sensitive of the Dyer boys, Richard the rougher, mainly because of his teenage years of fighting and bullying, his general troublemaking, in truth Richard was the one who teared up easily, who consistently found the world unfair, who, especially after having children, flashed almost daily on images of Emmett and Chloe’s demise, terrified and helpless, seeing them in
planes falling, in bird-flu epidemics, in futile moments of save-me-Dad-please, Richard doing the eggshell walk across fate, while Jamie, forever half-stoned and fortunate, poked his fingers into the sores, like a scientist more curious about the symptoms than the cure.

“Give my condolences to the family,” Richard said.

“What? Oh yeah sure.” And with that the brothers hung up.

Up ahead Myron planted his shovel into the snow. “Here we are.”

“Positive?”

“As positive as a poorly educated guess.”

The two of them started digging through a winter’s worth of weather, like airy dirt, Jamie mused, descendant of clouds. Yes indeed, I’m stoned, he thought. After shoveling up great wedges of this non-earth earth, they scraped against something hard. A headstone.
SYLVIA CARNE · MOTHER · WIFE · SISTER · DAUGHTER
. Jamie knew her primarily as
Girlfriend
. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl he had ever known, Sylvia Weston, blond but not obviously blond, with permanently chapped lips and a flinty nose, her smile the smile of someone who has found you first in a game of sardines. Sylph, as she was known in those days, was a bit of a hippie. She ate all her food using a single wooden spoon and laughed at herself for doing so, a raspy laugh, a great-grandmother’s laugh, Oma of some sturdy Nordic stock, Jamie would tease, as they smoked pot in those surrounding New Hampshire woods. Even then Jamie understood that her face was a face he should remember, kissing her forehead, her neck, tossing all those details forward like Hansel with his bread crumbs, so that decades later he might find his way back to her Finesse-scented hair and her love-bead necklace and her peasant skirt exposing a single black freckle on a sea of inner amber. Jamie and Sylvia dated until the summer after graduation. They loved each other yet were realistic and put their relationship on hold for college (she was heading to Middlebury), which soon became permanent except for a few brief but never very happy returns.

Many of my Exeter classmates still shake their heads at the mention of Sylvia Weston. She’s like an old high school injury that flares up during semi-erotic play. Back then we all knew she was having intercourse, more than intercourse, every kind of course with Jamie, from
sophomore spring until graduation, sex and more sex, Jamie and Sylvia holding hands in the quad, yet we knew, the sweaty undercurrents of those public displays. They were magical in that way, adults among us children, the hopeful examples of what we might achieve if we ever fell in love.

Myron hit the coffin earth.

It was last July when she tracked Jamie down. He was in Caracas, in its outlying child-infested slums, when a mutual friend managed to get in touch with him. Sylvia Weston needs to talk, that was the message, and Jamie’s first reaction was, Oh shit, she’s pregnant. “I swear that’s what I thought,” he told her when he finally reached her by phone, “like my sperm was lying in wait all these years, a sleeper cell suddenly activated.”

“Funny.”

“I was a teenager again.”

“If only.”

“Well, yeah,” Jamie said, unsure of the subtext.

“It’s amazing I never did get pregnant,” Sylvia said. “We were hardly careful.”

“Totally.”

“You realize most of our fooling around happened outside the comfort of bed.”

“We made due.”

“Yeah, all over the place.”

“The Latin room,” he said.

“Oh jeez, the Latin room. And upstairs in the library.”

“Don’t think I’ve ever been more scared. You realize next May is our—”

She—“I know”—interrupted before Jamie could say “twenty-fifth reunion.”

“I don’t think I can go,” he told her.

“Yeah, me neither.”

“Really? I would have thought—”

And that’s when she told him. She spoke in unflinching terms, well versed in the broader conversation, its grimmer meaning, to the point
of annoying Jamie, as if she owed him some shudder and tears, as if he were still the first instead of the hundredth, the thousandth, the old boyfriend in the far back row of her life. He offered her words of support, which sounded hollow, then he offered her a few battlefield sentiments, which she brushed away with a single statement of fact: “I’m going to die soon.”

“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.”

“Me too,” she said, hinting at the strain behind all this restraint.

“So so sorry. If there’s anything I can do …”

“Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I need help with something.”

“Of course, anything.”

“I have this idea for a video project that maybe only you would appreciate.” She went on to explain how she wanted to document herself answering the question, How are you? every day at exactly 12:01
P.M
. right up until the very end. “I know it sounds ridiculous but it’s something I want to do. Just answer that question with complete honesty.”

“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Jamie said.

“And I want you to direct it.”

“Me?”

“It won’t take up too much time,” she said with sobering common sense.

“It’s not that, it’s just that you don’t need me. It’s basic stuff. Any video—”

“Please.”

“I’ll just be in the way, Sylph.”

Silence on the other end.

“Sylph?”

“I just really want you to do this,” she said.

“I’m in Venezuela.”

“We can catch up.”

“Did my mother put you up to this?” he said, hearing his narcissism too late.

“Jamie, I’m dying, okay, and I just want you to help me, that’s all.”

And of course he said yes—how could he not—and within thirty-six hours had gotten himself back to New York and in another twelve
hours found himself in Stowe, Vermont. He took a room at a local motel and for the most part stayed away from the family and spent his days hiking and swimming and sleeping, and more sleeping, and reading, rereading a few of his father’s books, even
Eloise and Tom
, which had always been his least favorite though this time he quite enjoyed it, what with its bitter takedown tour of Tuscany by Sebastian and Louise, the non-eponymous main characters, who by the end confess a longstanding hatred of their best friends. All in all, an aspect of vacation settled into those strife-free days, except for the late mornings when Jamie would rendezvous with Sylvia and at the predestined, God-knows-the-reason time would push
RECORD
and feed her the line, “How are you?”

Sylvia: “I’m all right.”

Sylvia: “I’m fine.”

Sylvia: “Okay.”

Sylvia: “Hanging in there.”

Sylvia: “Good, thanks, and you?”

Day in and day out, she gave these standard answers to that most banal of questions, and Jamie began to get annoyed. Because he had expected something more, a philosophy, a struggle toward the profound. Was this her version of irony? He didn’t think so. That wasn’t in Sylvia’s nature. Plus she was sincerely dying—her face, long ago his lodestar, was collapsing under its own diminishing weight, her eyes growing denser yet brighter, white dwarves of luminous demise. It seemed Jamie was stuck watching from the lowly earth, wondering what any of this meant. Why did she bring him here? Did she still love him? What was she really saying?

“I’m good.”

“All right, thanks.”

“Good, and you?”

He tried to steep the question—“How”—with as much significance—“are”—as possible—“you?”

“Pretty decent.”

“Getting by, you know.”

A month passed and he considered going off script and blindsiding
her with “Are you scared?” or “Do you believe in God?” or “Can I kiss you?” but come 12:01
P.M
. he’d lose his nerve and stay on message.

“Super, thanks.”

“No complaints.”

That’s what Sylvia said a few days before she took that nasty turn. The whole family was at the Trapp Family Lodge, the Green Mountains standing in for the Alps. It was a special event where a few of the original cast members from
The Sound of Music
had gathered for a weekend with the relatives of their factual counterparts. There was Heather Menzies (Louisa) and Charmian Carr (Liesl) and Duane Chase (Kurt), even Daniel Truhitte (Rolf), who took Charmian’s hand, to the delight of everyone. These former child stars seemed swollen with age, as if stung by a very large bee, and Jamie found the whole thing pleasantly meta. After filming Sylvia, he wandered about, and when he saw little Gretl (Kym Karath) signing autographs, he lingered for a moment and tried to find in her eyes the memory of sitting in his living room during the holidays and watching
The Sound of Music
, a true story, his mother always stressed. “They escaped Austria during the war and now live in Vermont, in a Tyrolean-style lodge,” she told him and his brother, amazed by the tale, and of course by the songs too, which she knew by heart. Jamie was around six when he first saw Maria open her arms and spin in those hills, and he remembered thinking, These people are real, this all happened, a hundred percent true, even as he recognized Brigitta as Penny from
Lost in Space
. Was Mom disappointed that Dad never surprised the crowd by sweetly warbling that famous, age-old Austrian folk song? Oh, the days when families fled the Nazis together. Before Jamie knew it, he found himself in the front of the line, and Gretl (Kym) looked up and smiled, a black marker perched over a picture of her younger dirndled self. “How are you?” she said, and Jamie froze, the question snapping around his ankle, forever ensnaring him.