“Here,” Simon says.
I look down.
Candace Pauline MontClair
2002–2020
Our beloved angel, taken too soon
“Who lives, who dies, who tells your story?”
There’s a lump in my throat. I wish we hadn’t come now. I haven’t dreamed of Candy in a while and I don’t want to start again. That’s part of why I took the Vicodin after seeing Joey at Wolf Creek. Being back there, I felt her in a way I haven’t in a while, and I just wanted to make sure that that night, of all nights, I did not have to see her.
“It’s from Hamilton,” Simon tells me. “A song Eliza sings at the end. Candy had a lovely voice.”
Simon points across the cemetery. “Shannon Roe is over there, and Wilder Wicks, he’s down that little incline. I have a lot of students here. Too many. But I try to visit them often because even though they’re gone, they remind me.”
“Of what?” I ask.
“To appreciate what I have, in the here and now. To not miss it. Because it might be gone, at any moment. And we can’t control that, no matter how hard we try. Whatever the universe is, it’s always got the upper hand and we only have this one chance.”
He pauses. “What are you going to do with your one wild and precious life?”
“What?”
“It’s a line from a poem by Mary Oliver. One of my favorites. I chose New York and shiny lights and rice and heartbreak and then I chose here, and teaching. I made those choices for myself. The thing about adults is, we’re always trying to keep kids safe. That’s our job. We want you to have a good life and get a good education and be a good person and do good things and sometimes, frankly, we fuck it up. Your childhood is like one long rehearsal, performing a script we wrote for you in the middle of the night that makes no sense to you but seems perfectly coherent to us.”
Simon turns to me. “I’m sorry, I get very long-winded sometimes. I just want to say, Emory, that you can’t give up. This is life. It’s basic. It’s struggle and joy. Sometimes you have one and not the other. My life here was awful. I went away and had joy. And then I came back and had struggle, but I also had some joy from the past to sustain me.”
“I don’t really understand what you’re trying to tell me,” I say slowly. “We’re surrounded by dead people and I’ve just heard your life story. It was really cool, don’t get me wrong, but I’m kind of feeling empty and alone now and I’m not sure what any of this means.”
“Emory Ward, look around you. This is it. This is what everything is going to come to, for everyone, in the end. Do you really want to sit in that bed for the rest of your life doing nothing, only to end up here?”
“No,” I say. “I guess not.”
“Struggle and joy, Emory,” he says. “The most important thing is never to give up. And you’re giving up before you’ve even had a chance to begin. I don’t care if you come back to school. Do what you want. Spend the rest of your life reading books and working in a doughnut shop, I don’t care. But don’t give up on yourself. And don’t give up on your brother. He’s the struggle. He will be for a long time. But somewhere, too, you are going to find joy. And it’s not going to happen if you keep hiding under your fifteen-hundred-dollar duvet cover.”
46
LIZA SHAKES ME AWAKE roughly.
“Hey,” she says loudly. “Up. Now.”
I roll over, rubbing my eyes. “What? Why are you here?”
“Are you, just, like, ever coming back to school?”
“Did Simon Stanley send you here?”
“No, but he did tell me he gave you a very inspirational speech. He’s pretty proud of it, and yet here you still are,” she says. “You kind of look like a zombie. When was the last time you showered?”
I shrug. Everything just…aches inside me. Like I’ve been stripped clean.
“Well, was it all bull?” she asks.
“Was what all bull?”
“What you said in your poem. Remember? Walking down Main Street naked to get Joey back. All that. That stuff that broke my heart.”
“It should have. You wrote most of it.”
She sighs. “Yes, but you felt it. I could tell when you read it. You really feel it. I’m sorry about the woods. Daniel told me.”
“He’s gone,” I say. “He doesn’t want to come back.”
“But he might. Sometime. When he’s ready. You can’t stop hoping.”
I put a pillow over my head, but Liza pulls it off.
“Get dressed,” she says. “And shower. I’ll be waiting outside.”
* * *
—
“What if they have guns?” Liza whispers from the backseat.
“I feel like I’ve been down this road before,” Daniel says. He drums his fingers on the steering wheel. “And I still don’t like it.”
“Sorry,” I say.
“This isn’t quite as exciting as the Great Jewelry Heist, Emory, but it might get close,” he answers, smiling nervously.
We stare at the house, half hidden by evergreen branches. A dirty pink sneaker dangles from a low branch, swaying in the wind.
“I don’t have a good feeling about this,” Jeremy says. He’s huddled in the backseat with Liza.
We’re silent.
Then I get out of the car. Because if I don’t do this, I am full of bull, like Liza said. And if I don’t do this, who will? Joey is me, and I’m Joey. I have to fit us back together somehow. Daniel follows me.
“Do you have a plan,” he whispers. “Maybe we should have had a plan.”
My heart is beating in my ears. “My plan is to ask where my brother is. That’s it. That’s all I’ve got in my toolbox, Daniel.”
Really, it looks like any other house you might find set off in the woods. A tricycle half buried in the snow. A rusted swing set off to the side of the house. Smoke puffing from the chimney.
I knock on the door.
“Oh, god,” Daniel says. “We’re going to die. A tattooed man named Mick is going to open this door and force us into a life of drug servitude and defilement and I didn’t survive cancer for this—”
A middle-aged woman opens the door.
“Can I help you?” she says. Her voice is pleasant. Her hair is gray. She’s plump and wearing a green robe.
I pull out the folded flyer from my pocket. “I’m looking for my brother. This is him. Have you seen him? Maybe he comes here sometimes?”
She looks at me, then Daniel, then around us to the car. “Who said?”
“A boy. Luther Leonard.” The lie rolls easily from my mouth.
She’s studying my face.
“That little shit cost me a lot of money back in the summer,” she says finally. “You know where he is?”
“No,” I say nervously. “I sure don’t.”
“Let me see.” She slips the flyer with Joey’s face from my hand. I can smell the remnants of cooked bacon in the house.
“I know him. Nice kid. Not like some.”
“Has he been around recently?”
“A few weeks ago, maybe. I get a lot of traffic. I can’t really help more than that. People are in and out.”