No Book but the World: A Novel (30 page)

The sections I have called DENNIS and KITTY and FRED: all mine. I started with what I knew and, keeping faith with that, imagined outward, not in order to rewrite or overwrite anyone’s truth, but in order to understand all that I can, as well as I can. In the case of Dennis and Kitty, I had the great luxury of asking questions, and of showing them what I had written, asking them to make corrections, and then revising according to what they offered. In the case of Fred, no such luxury. I researched what I could and imagined the rest. It is the best I can do.

Eleven weeks after Fred died a package came to the house from the Criterion County Correctional Facility. His personal effects. It contained some familiar objects: his orange knapsack, June’s map, Neel’s pocketknife,
The Little Prince
. His wallet, empty of cash, but with his driver’s license, old library card, and business cards from diners all over New England. The package contained unfamiliar objects as well: a black satin sleeping mask, a pineapple-scented candle, a woolen jacket stinking of cigarettes.

Mrs. Tremblay, of all people, filled me in a little about James Ferebee’s mother, how she’d been a starter on the high school girls’ basketball team until she got pregnant. How she’d lived at home with her baby and worked at the paper mill until it closed. How people said her parents kicked her out of the house for doing drugs. How after she left they had taken over the job of raising their grandson, for better or worse (“mostly worse, people say”), themselves.

I tried finding Loreen Ferebee. There were two public listings for Ferebee in Perdu, New York: Ferebee, Ronald and Ferebee Auto Salvage. The phone numbers were identical. Hands shaking, I dialed and got a recorded message, the voice that of an older man, gruff, terse. I left a message, said I was trying to reach Loreen. I was as much relieved as disappointed that it was never returned.

I did find Thor Anderson. It took me some time to remember his last name, and even then I wasn’t sure I’d gotten it right until he actually came on the line and he said yes, he was the son of a Roger Anderson who’d once attended Batter Hollow School. He was very nice when I told him who I was. I reached him in his dorm in Cambridge; he was a sophomore at MIT. He remembered a lot about the summer in the Magdalens when he was twelve, the long days of exploring the islands with Fred, the fact that the trip had to end early when he shattered his kneecap. I asked him if it had healed okay. Good as new, he said. “I run now. Not marathons or anything, but still. I have a five-K coming up in two weeks.”

When I told him Fred had died, he offered his condolences and asked how.

“He took his own life.”

There was a long pause. “I really liked your brother,” said Thor. “He was a special person. He was really nice to me at a time when I wasn’t incredibly happy. I wish we’d . . .” but his voice trailed off. “Well,” he said, and I liked him for what he said next, the honesty of it. “I guess we wouldn’t have kept in touch.”

I tried learning more from Dave Alsop. I called his number on the Cape over and over but no one ever picked up. When spring came, Dennis and I drove out there. We found his address across the street from a trailer park. The bungalow was more broken-down and grimmer even than the old Batter Hollow cottages had been before being razed. Tires and hubcaps on the lawn. Cracked concrete foundation. Faded plastic awning over the door. There was a car in the driveway. It was two in the afternoon. The bell was missing—an empty socket gaped where it had been pulled out of its mount—but we knocked until someone came and peered through the screen. “Dave?” I asked.

“Yuh?” Bleary-eyed, scratching his bare chest, holding a cotton blanket around his waist. He welcomed us in, offered us beer. We declined. He popped the top off a can for himself and settled onto a gray couch. I had the strangest feeling looking at it. It was so threadbare that in many places, stuffing poked through the fibers.

“Who’s there?” called a woman’s voice from the other room.

“Just some old friends!” he yelled back. He smiled sheepishly at us. “Yvette,” he confided, like this explained everything.

We told him Fred had died, and how, and where, and he said he was real,
real
sorry to hear it, but I had the distinct sense he hadn’t actually taken it in.

“Dave, is there anything you can tell us about what happened?”

“No!” His eyes grew wide. He was all earnest affability. “No
idea
, man. I mean, offing yourself?”—he gave an amazed laugh—“In jail? That’s pretty out there.”

“I meant can you tell us anything about what came before? How he wound up in Perdu, even?”

“Oh!” Dave grinned hugely, like he knew we’d get a kick out of the story. “Met a girl. Yeah. We go on this road trip, right? And this
girl
we meet up in Perdu likes him. And your
brother
, he takes a shine to her. I guess he must of, because when it’s time to split, you know, he’s like, No way, I’m staying.”

“Did you know her?”

He puffed dismissively. “Not really.”

“When are they leaving?” the woman called from the other room.

“I don’t know!” Dave yelled over his shoulder, then turned back and gave us a conspiratorial shrug.

“What?”

“Soon, baby!” He winked and did silent fake laughter, like the three of us were all in on some joke.

“My mother,” I said, “made arrangements for you to get funds deposited in your account every month.”

He looked amazed. Then he tipped his head back and studied the line where the wall met the ceiling, straining in an effort to retrieve the memory. “Oh,
yeah
,” he said finally, beaming. “That’s right. I guess that kept up for a few months after he split.”

“Until his death,” I said. Dennis and I had sat down with another lawyer in Freyburg, gone through the bank statements, the terms of the will and the trust. June had arranged for Dave to receive five hundred dollars a month. If Fred had come to Perdu in late August, as seemed to be the case, Dave had received five months of automatic payments after Fred stopped living with him. “That’s twenty-five hundred dollars.”

“Yeah, uh . . . I’ll have to write you a check. For that amount. Yeah. I’ll have to mail you that.”

I peered a little closer at the couch. It was still giving me the strangest feeling. Now I noticed, and it activated the hairs on the back of my neck, a shape woven into the fabric on part of the back cushion that wasn’t torn, a large petaled flower so faded you could barely tell what color the threads had been. “Where’d you get that couch?” I asked.

“The
couch
?” He looked around himself in disbelief. “Dude, this
couch
? I don’t know. It’s been here, man.” He laughed. “It came with the
house
.”

Later in the car, heading back to Freyburg, Dennis said he’d thought at that moment Dave had been seriously about to faint.

Dave never mailed us a check, as we had known he would not.

Any thought I had of trying harder to get in touch with Loreen Ferebee, I scuttled after that visit.

Instead, I took what I already knew, lined up all the additional pieces of possible evidence, opened the composition book Kitty had given me, and willed myself to conceive of what I could never know for sure, from multiple angles and with partially conjured ingredients.

Does that make this account dishonest? Would it have been more truthful if I’d remained within the confines of my own perspective? I don’t know. Which is more wholesome: to subscribe to the limits of what we have experienced or seek with one’s empathic imagination something more?

The story is not done, of course. What began as disconnected scribbling in the book Kitty first placed in my hands more than a year ago has continued to grow unevenly and untidily—no bakery box done up too squarely, this. I will continue the work of correcting the mistakes and filling in the gaps, returning to the places where my imagination and compassion have so far fallen short, for the rest of my life.

Neel would say
bosh
. Allow only experience, resist interpretation.

But is that natural? Is it human? Don’t we all do this—make story—whether we intend to or not? Or have it another way: Isn’t the extent to which we engage in this practice the measure of our humanity?

Neel and June believed people are free. Neel, a fundamentalist, believed this absolutely. June, agnostic, gave it the benefit of her doubt. But it remained in the end their creed, their faith. I give them credit for this. No one can say they didn’t follow through. They believed they were giving Fred freedom from the label of a diagnosis. They believed they were giving me freedom from Fred.

I see now they were mistaken. We are none of us free. We are tethered by our connections to other people, those we know as well as those we will never meet. What tethers us is our ability—our responsibility—to imagine them, to fathom their lives, their circumstances, what we have in common, what sets us apart.

I have faulted myself for being too fond of stories, but now I believe the only crime is telling ourselves the story is done, the task accomplished. So long as we keep at it, mending and amending, being open to revision, there is no call for blame.

Almost daily now I find myself chancing upon new tendrils of story, new ways of thinking about Neel and June and Fred and myself and everyone I’ve ever known and everyone I’ll never know. I try to discern between those tendrils that extend understanding and those that obscure, choke off the view. I try to cultivate the former and weed out the latter, remaining mindful that any certainty I have now might later wither or change course. I don’t worry about this. I will work forever and gladly to better fathom my own husband, and also my old, vexing, beloved best friend, and my parents and brother who are gone from me, and Don and Meg and Tariq and little Dilly, who I am just getting to know, and the children I grew up with and the children with whom I make music now at schools and libraries around Freyburg, and their caregivers, too, the ones who manipulate their little hands for them, teach them to clap and cry
Hooray! Here comes the Singalong Lady
, and also James Ferebee, and his poor, damaging, damaged mother, and his grandparents, hidden behind the walls of their dark green house, and Dave Alsop and the woman Yvette, who called to him from the darkened bedroom at two in the afternoon, and his friend Umberto—if Umberto, or someone like him, even exists.

Umberto. Yes. Let me make one final confession. Umberto is completely made up, a fabrication, the only character I have invented entirely from whole cloth. Despite this, or because of it, I find myself particularly intrigued by him.

Funny—I have just thought of this now:

All my life I have wished others could better see my brother. If only they understood him more fully, how much closer to loving him they might be!

What then am I to think of Umberto, minor character that he is, crudely drawn figment of my imagination? I have portrayed him as simply cruel. Suppose I were to imagine him more complicatedly, more messily—suppose I were to undo the red-and-white bakery string? What if I willed myself to fathom more of his story, extend toward him the tendrils of my own sympathy exactly as I have ached, still ache, for others to do with Fred? I have no control over others, but I can practice in good faith what I wish all of us might do.

Umberto, yes. Umberto: you are my hope, my hypothesis. My Émile. Tonight I will go to sleep thinking of you.

Several people kindly helped me navigate a few matters of law, law enforcement and the corrections system in upstate New York, chief among them Wes McDermott; also Darrin Bartolotta, Matt Brief, Paul Casteleiro, Mike Dorf, Jonathan Gradess, Cathy Miklitsch, John Peck, Ellen Schell and Ray Schlather. I was fortunate to be able to draw upon knowledge and experiences gained from the teachers, students and families of the Rockland Project School, formerly of Rockland Lake, New York, and the May Center, formerly of Arlington, Massachusetts. And I owe a happy debt to my parents for exposing me in childhood to several books about Summerhill, A. S. Neill’s famous school in England, and his philosophy of “freedom not license.” I spent many hours of my youth in rapt study of the photographs and stories they contained illustrating life at that school.

I feel ridiculously lucky to be the beneficiary of the talents and dedication of Cathy Jaque, Marc Jaffee, Sarah Stein, Geoff Kloske, Elizabeth Hohenadel, Allison Hargraves, Tabatha Paterni, John Burdeaux, and all those who care so much about books and do so much to champion them, both at the Karpfinger Agency and at Riverhead.

Barney Karpfinger and Sarah McGrath offered an abundance of inexhaustible, insightful, challenging, loving energies to this project and to me. Without them this would be a far lesser book, and to them I am most grateful.