“Do you remember that summer ten years ago when we took that tumbledown house in the Pines, Peter, and how one morning you went downstairs and there was that deer standing in the middle of the living room, eating the nectarines that Christopher had left on the counter?”
“I’ve always felt bad about that time we fought—you know what I’m talking about. I’ve always regretted it; I always wanted to take it back. I’m so sorry, Peter. Please tell me you forgive me.”
“Peter, I don’t know how I’m going to do this—all this—without you. I know it wasn’t always easy between us, but I’m going to miss you. You taught me so much—I just want to thank you.”
He had come to realize that it was when you were dying that people most wanted things from you—they wanted you to remember, they wanted reassurance, they wanted forgiveness. They wanted acknowledgment and redemption; they wanted you to make them feel better—about the fact that you were leaving while they remained; about the fact that they hated you for leaving them and dreaded it, too; about the fact that your death was reminding them of their own inevitable one; about the fact that they were so uncomfortable that they didn’t know what to say. Dying meant repeating the same things again and again, much as Peter was doing now: Yes, I remember. No, I’ll be fine. No, you’ll be fine. Yes, of course I forgive you. No, you shouldn’t feel guilty. No, I’m not in any pain. No, I know what you’re trying to say. Yes, I love you, too, I love you, too, I love you, too.
He listened to all of this, still pressed against Charles’s side, Charles’s left arm around him, his right arm around Peter’s shoulders. He had burrowed his face into Charles’s rib cage, like a child, so he could listen to Charles’s slow, steady breaths, so he could feel the heat of his body against his cheek. Charles’s left hand was tucked beneath his left arm, and now David reached up his hand and laced his fingers through Charles’s. The two of them were unnecessary to this part of the evening, but if you were observing them from above, the three of them would have appeared to be a single organism, a twelve-limbed, three-headed creature, one head nodding and listening, the other two silent and immobile, the three of them kept alive by a single, enormous heart, one that steadily, uncomplainingly beat in Charles’s chest, sending bright, clean blood through the yards of arteries that connected all three of their forms, filling them with life.
* * *
It was still early, but people were already preparing to leave. “He’s tired,” they said of Peter to one another, and, to him, “Are you tired?,” to which Peter replied, time after time, “Yes, a little,” until a certain weariness entered his voice, one that could have been from his patience finally depleting or from genuine fatigue. He spent most of his days sleeping, he had told Charles, and in the evenings he would doze until midnight and then wake and “take care of things.”
Like what? he had asked at a lunch about six months ago, shortly after Peter had decided on his Switzerland plan.
“Gathering my papers. Burning letters I don’t want getting into the wrong hands. Finalizing the gift list appended to my will—deciding who gets what. Making a list of people I want to say goodbye to. Making a list of people I don’t want invited to my funeral. I had no idea how much of dying involves list-making: You make lists of people you like and people you hate. You make lists of people you want to say thanks to, and people you want to ask forgiveness from. You make lists of people you want to see and people you don’t. You make lists of songs you want played at your memorial service, and poems you might want read, and who you might want to invite.
“Of course, this is if you’ve been lucky enough to keep your mind. Though lately I’ve been wondering if it’s so lucky at all, being so conscious, being so aware that, from now on, you’ll never progress. You’ll never become more educated or learned or interesting than you are right now—everything you do, and experience, from the moment you begin actively dying is useless, a futile attempt to change the end of the story. And yet you keep trying to do it anyway—read what you haven’t read and see what you haven’t seen. But it isn’t for anything, you see. You just do it out of practice—because that’s what a human does.”
But does it have to be for anything? he had asked, tentatively. He was always nervous about addressing Peter directly, but he hadn’t been able to stop himself—he had been thinking about his father.
“No, of course not. But we’ve been taught that it must, that experience, that learning, is a pathway to salvation; that it’s the point of life. But it isn’t. The ignorant person dies the same way as the educated one. It makes no difference in the end.”
“Well, but what about pleasure?” Charles had asked. “That’s a reason to do it.”
“Certainly, pleasure. But pleasure doesn’t change anything, really. Not that one should do or not do things because they make no difference in the end.”
Are you scared? he had asked.
Peter had been quiet, and David had worried he had been rude. But then Peter spoke. “I’m not scared because I’m worried it’s going to hurt,” he said, slowly, and when he looked up, his large, light eyes looked even larger and lighter than usual. “I’m scared because I know my last thoughts are going to be about how much time I wasted—how much life I wasted. I’m scared because I’m going to die not being proud of how I lived.”
There had been a silence after that, and then the conversation had somehow changed. He wondered if Peter still felt that way; he wondered if he was thinking even now that he had wasted his life. He wondered if that was why Peter had tried chemotherapy after all, if he had decided he was going to try once more, if he was hoping he could change his mind, hoping he could feel differently. David hoped he did feel differently; he hoped Peter didn’t still feel as he had. It was an impossible thing to ask—Do you still feel you’ve wasted your life?—and so he didn’t, though later he would wish he had been able to find a way to do so. He thought, as he always did, of his father, of how he had willed his life away—or was it that he had willed himself away from it? It was his sole act of disobedience, and David hated him for it.
In the living room, the Three Sisters were putting on their coats, winding scarves around their throats, kissing Peter and then Charles goodbye. “You’ll be okay?” he heard Charles ask Percival. “I’ll see you next week, all right?” And Percival’s response: “Yes, I’m fine. Thanks, Charlie—for everything.” David was always moved by this side of Charles: his motherliness, his care. He had a sudden vision of one of the mothers in the picture books he and his father used to read together, babushkaed and aproned and pleasantly fat and living in a stone house in some unnamed village in some unnamed European country, slipping into her children’s pockets pebbles that she had heated in the oven so their fingers would stay warm on their walk to school.
He knew Charles had asked Adams to instruct the caterers to pack up all the leftover food so any of their guests could take some, though he knew Charles meant for the majority of it to go to John and Timothy. In the kitchen, he found some of the waitstaff placing the last of the cookies and cakes into cardboard containers, and the containers into paper bags, and others hefting large crates of dirty dishes out to their van, which was parked behind the house, in the courtyard that had once separated the main building from the carriage house, which was now a garage. James, he was disappointed and relieved to discover, was nowhere in sight, and for a moment he watched, mesmerized, at the tenderness with which one young woman lowered the remaining quarter of the cheesecake into a plastic tub, settling it as if it were a baby she was tucking into its cradle.