What We Lost in the Dark (26 page)

The priest put a hand over his eyes and seemed to gather his strength. “Rob Dorn might have gone on living comfortably at least for a short time longer. But he laid down his life for a friend.” The priest paused and seemed to summon strength. “We all know evil exists in the world. Rob faced evil to save his friend, Juliet Sirocco, from a torment that was
like the trials of the biblical Job. But the Bible says, in Luke, ‘Fear not them who can kill the body,’ because that is all that they can do. Even the evil can kill the body, but they cannot kill the spirit. So Rob’s spirit lives on, in everyone whose life he touched and renewed, in the good he did, because that can never die.”

People sang then. Someone had picked a song that everyone knew, a song that Mrs. Dorn sang to Rob when he was a baby, “You Are My Sunshine,” which was awful, because someone had taken her sunshine away.

The last person who stood and spoke was Juliet’s dad, Tommy Sirocco. “Dennis and Elizabeth,” he said. “Dennis. And Elizabeth.” Tommy coughed and began again. “I want to tell you, Dennis. And Elizabeth.”

Then, he just bent forward with his hands on the podium, his big shoulders shaking as though he were nodding his head in the rhythm of a song only he could hear. He had to sit back down without saying anything. What he wanted to say, we already knew. He wanted to thank the Dorns for raising a hero.

There were only two things left, one more piece of ritual: the quiet finality of the cemetery. I thought, as I got ready to walk outside, how could I leave my Rob, whose body I had known and loved, alone in the cold? It was just a place, after all, and it wasn’t really going to be Rob. Still, everything I ever knew of Rob on this Earth was going to be there. The line of cars made its way up the steep road. In the black mourner’s car, I sat with my mother, my sister, and Gina, as well as Juliet and her parents.

The funeral director had set up a line of small torches along the road, each enclosed in a glass globe. At the grave site, there were four big torches, muted lights set well away
from the place that had been cleared of snow, where there was a rough piece of canvas and several rows of folding chairs, each with a blanket on the seat.

In the car, Juliet and I put on our dark wool coats and white gloves. Unlike military pallbearers, we had been taught at Bergey’s Funeral Services to carry the casket three on each side, each using one hand, walking straight forward. At military funerals, Rob’s cousin had told us, the soldiers carried the fallen one with the coffin at shoulder height. Victor had that same frightening, flushed look of responsibility and grim excitement that was on Mr. Dorn’s own face.
This isn’t real to him quite yet
, I realized.

Bonnie appeared at my elbow with a smile that combined pity and encouragement. Just a few more steps, she seemed to say, pulling on her own gloves.

I straightened up and waited for Mr. Bergey to open the back of the hearse.

There, just a little farther up the hill, was the grave of my friend, Nicola Burns. Next to her tombstone were those of Nicola’s mother, and Mr. Ackerman, our favorite tutor, who had XP and committed suicide two years before. And Nicola had died just … a year ago and a little bit. A spring and a fall and a winter, and now another winter. A year, and change. It wasn’t possible that all this could have fit into such a slender space of time, a few leaves of a calendar, just two of my little moleskin journals.

“We’re ready now,” said Mr. Bergey.

The six of us grasped the brass handles.

I thought,
I am carrying you, my dearest love
.

After we set the casket down on a kind of metal gurney, Mr. Bergey turned one of the lights up slightly. The soft pine of the box glowed against the fresh snow, on a big woolen
blanket of dark blue with stars embroidered on it, which Ginny Sirocco had sewn to replace the usual roll of fake grass. The priest nodded to me.

For the second time in three months I’d been asked to read a poem to commemorate my best friend. How does that happen in such a short space in one’s life? But now the body of my friend, my playmate, the only man I would ever love, was here, truly here, in this box. And instead, Juliet—my other best friend, my playmate, my confidante, the girl I’d believed lost to me forever—stood so close to me I could hear the soft, repeated catch in her breathing. Although she was still terribly thin, her cheeks had filled out; the sores that roughened the corners of her mouth had closed; and her short hair curled clean and soft.

She stood Juliet-straight, the abrupt bones of her spine nearly like the wings of the angel zombie. She stood at my back.

I could hear her crying. I realized that I could count on one hand the times I’d heard Juliet cry. Her mother Ginny leaned forward and handed Juliet one of Tommy’s big handkerchiefs. At that moment, I saw something else: Juliet’s immense joy and wonder at being here, despite everything. Once again she was under her mother and her father’s wing, and with me. She was the living embodiment of survivor guilt at its piercing pinnacle. Juliet was tough, but not tough enough for this.

Jackie had helped me find the poem. She remembered hearing it read at a funeral in a favorite movie. Jackie thought that the poet, A. E. Housman, must have known a boy like that, a boy who never gave less than his best, like Rob, and then there was a war, and Housman had written “To an Athlete Dying Young.” I began to read it.

I thought of big, boisterous Rob bouldering like an oversized marsupial from handle to handle along the walls and ceilings in his home gym. Rob, ripped in every muscle group, balanced shirtless at the pier on a summer night, in the handstand he could hold forever. Rob, a forward sinking three-pointers for hours before no cheering crowd on the dark half-court in his backyard, the mountaineer who never got to dance his triumph in the sunlight.

The flat bronze marker already set against a young birch tree had no dates. It read only:

I folded the paper.

Mr. Dorn kissed my cheek. I hugged him. I didn’t dare
go near Mrs. Dorn; it was as natural to shy from the white-hot power of a mother’s grief as it was to shun a wild horse. Turning away, I stood beside Juliet while the priest said his last words. He invited the group to join the Dorn’s for a small dinner in a private room at the Timbers Restaurant at Torch Mountain. The other restaurant Rob loved was closed. Passing the marquee at Gitchee, we noticed that where it usually read, 2
LGE
, 2
TOPPINGS
, $5, tonight read:
MISS U ROB
. Gid’s wife stood in the small crowd, hugely pregnant. Maybe Gid would have his son.

At the last moment, Mrs. Dorn laid the blue blanket over the casket and tucked in the edges, in a way I recognized from the hundreds of times I’d seen my mother do that at Angela’s bedside … and my own.

Everyone walked away, except for two people who stayed behind.

We were the
tres compadres
.

Juliet knew I might want to spend a few moments there alone, so, being Juliet, she stayed. If I could feel even a flicker of amusement, it was to recognize that Juliet’s concept of personal space always included her in it.

She would drive me home. Halfway down the hill, her own car was parked on Methodist Avenue. Torch Mountain Home Cemetery had a quaint way of making sure birds of a feather slept together on the same branch.

Juliet said, “How are you?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“It’s cold, but not as cold as it was yesterday. That’s good. The wind has stopped,” Juliet said. “The stars are out.”

“You sound like someone in an old play.” She took my arm and I glanced up, thinking, as a crescent moon appeared, of the gigantic star-spattered window above Rob’s bed.

In five days, he would have been eighteen years old.

Then, out of the corner of my eye, some distance away, I suddenly caught a glimpse of something unexplainable.

There was old Dr. Simon Tabor standing next to Dr. Andrew.

Dr. Andrew was holding the old man’s arm as Dr. Simon Tabor used an evergreen bough to dust the fine frosting of snow away from identical polished marble bricks. Two matching headstones, etched in silver, and one smaller, black marble.

It was not just unexplainable, but impossible. Perhaps they’d stood, unnoticed, at the back of the crowd, to pay their respects to Rob. Now they were tending their own family graves. The new one was Garrett Tabor’s. For a moment, I wanted to cry out: How dare fate let him lie so close to my beloved? I had to remind myself again. Neither one of them, small and evil or great and good, was really there. But I wouldn’t let the doctor walk away without paying their respects—to me. And to Juliet. If they would mourn Garrett Tabor, they had to acknowledge what he was.

On impulse, with Juliet keeping pace, I walked over to where the two men stood. Then I stopped.

I could see Dr. Andrew’s face. Always handsome, he was now haggard. He was a good man, and you could see how grief—over Rob and Dr. Stephen, over his nephew, and, probably, his own reputation, on the eve of his greatest advance in battling XP—had carved deep grooves in his skin. No longer did he look younger than most guys his age. He looked tired and beaten-up, as though something had been punched out of him.

I nearly turned away, but he had seen me.

“Oh, Allie. Dear Allie. Oh, Juliet,” said Dr. Andrew. “I don’t know what to say. Juliet, you’re the one star in all this blackness. There’s nothing I can say that can express how I feel. The shame is overpowering. The fear of what might prove to be true.”

“It’s not what might be true,” Juliet said softly. “It’s all true, Dr. Andrew. There’s no doubt.”

“I know,” he said miserably.

Glancing at Juliet, I said, “Hello, Dr. Simon.”

“Our family is so sorry for this loss, Allie,” Dr. Simon said. “We’re sorry for the role someone in our family played in this loss.”

Dr. Andrew followed Dr. Simon’s sweeping hand down to the two identical silver headstones. Dr. Andrew cleared his throat. “This is my sister-in-law, Stephen’s wife, Merry Whitcomb Green, and their daughter, Rachel. Rachel died at just three years old. They died in an automobile crash. Garrett and Grant and their sister Rebecca survived, and we often wonder … it was twenty years ago now. There was no cell phone capability up here. It was Christmas Eve. Remember, Pop? Stephen knew Merry was gone the moment he looked at her. Her head was so badly injured from the roof column of the car. No one could have survived that.”

Dr. Simon nodded. His eyes were rheumy. “Such a steadfast woman. That was how I thought of her. Steadfast. She was very pretty, and a very good dancer, but she never lost sight of the fact that her first mission was to those children. A wonderful mother. Stephen was lost without her.”

“So Stephen hitchhiked. He carried Rebecca, and Grant and he hitched a ride with a logger,” Dr. Andrew continued, nodding at us. “He got Grant and Rebecca to the emergency room. Then he turned back. Rachel was crying, but she was in the proper restraints. Stephen told … his son … my nephew, Garrett, not to move her …”

“He got back and she was dead,” Simon Tabor said. “Not a mark on her anywhere. They never determined the cause of death.”

“Stephen was haunted by that. He thought he should have known. I think it was one of the reasons that he became a coroner.” Dr. Andrew shrugged, and seemed to shrink in his dark coat. He said, “Allie. Stephen. My brother …”

I nodded, moved aside as old Simon Tabor pulled away from Andrew and began to march toward their car. For some reason, the night felt colder. The wind was finally bucking up. Simon walked straight and did not flinch from the gusts, his level shoulders a testament to a life of mental puzzling and physical exertion. Then, as if to himself, the old man said, “She wouldn’t have lived very long, in any case. Those children didn’t have a chance back then, not even as much as these young ladies here.”

Dr. Andrew said, “Who do you mean, Pop?”

“You know, the kids we treat.”

“What do you mean?”

“Xeroderma Pigmentosum, Andrew. Stephen’s girl had XP. Rachel. The only one of the four who did.”

“Little Rachel. Stephen’s younger daughter. You’re saying she had XP.” You see people do this in movies, but Dr. Andrew literally took a step back and seemed to stagger in his sensible, waffle-soled, black dress boots. He whispered, “What are you saying?”

“Andrew, this was why I changed my research focus from cystic fibrosis. I had grown up with a boy, our next-door neighbor in Chicago, a truly brave lad. On spring nights, I would hear him coughing, his parents percussing his back. That horrible, wet sound. Danny … Danny Angstrom. That’s right. The parents had three healthy children, just the way that Stephen and Merry did. Then came Danny. Just like this little girl …”

“Rachel was a normal, healthy baby, Pop. I watched her grow. After they came up here, I saw her all the time.”

“You were in London. You saw her a few times.”

“Right, yes. Of course.”

“Stephen knew, of course.

“But Father, you told us that the reason that you changed your focus to XP was the complexities of the disease and its genetic variation …”

“Well that goes without saying, that it was compelling,” Dr. Simon Tabor said, seeming to lose interest. Touching the brim of his wool hat to us, he motioned to Andrew to open the car doors. Andrew pressed the button and the Mercedes’ big lights blinked. The horn gave a muted bleat.