We called him Thomas, never Tommy, because Tommy Guns were the weapons of gangsters and no amount of yearning on our parts could make a Red Ryder air rifle so cool.
Thomas used no gunpowder, and his metal BBs only penetrated human skin when fired at point-blank range. But he did have a lever action and a beautiful hardwood stock, and these things, taken together, seemed capable of convincing the untrained eye to mistake him for a real cowboy-style firearm, which was one thing I liked about him.
Before he belonged to me, Thomas belonged to Eric, the son of my father’s favorite squash rival. Eric and his dad lived alone in a mansion overlooking a spear-shaped bay on the Long Island Sound. His mom had killed herself when he was eight, and shortly after that Eric’s dad stripped all her photos and belongings from the house — an act that my father called grief and my mother called spite and Eric and I, being normal American boys, didn’t know how to talk about.
Not that we knew how to talk about much. Our friendship was erected on the foundation of our fathers’ friendship rather than some compatibility of our own — though it didn’t hurt that we only lived two bike-safe miles apart. Eric was a bored and compulsive kid, neither an athlete nor a nerd, too ADD to nurture any skills or interests, and too enthralled by his father’s smirking worldliness to draw or sing or otherwise turn the shapes in his wandering mind into art. My role in our partnership was to suggest activities that might keep him entertained — the more brazen and foolish the better.
One day, having read The Count of Monte Cristo, I had us don lacrosse pads and conduct ferocious, welt-raising sword fights with branches from the woods behind his house. Another time, having watched Indiana Jones, I had us dig (in vain) for cursed arrowheads in what Eric’s father said might just be a Siwanoy midden behind the garage. Later on, I would be disintermediated in my role as instigator by Eric’s realization that girls found him handsome, a fact that lent him a lasting if tumultuous purpose in life. But when we were only ten and eleven and twelve, girls and looks were still mostly off our radar, and my attempts to find novel ways to keep Eric busy eventually grew desperate and escalatory.
One stifling summer day about seven months before Thomas entered our lives, I suggested we steal Eric’s neighbor’s Sunfish and set off up the coast toward Maine or Canada — lands with tall pines and free air where there was space for us to hunt and fish and hide from the suit-and-tie lives our fathers lived. Never mind that we carried just a twenty-ounce Poland Spring apiece, no food, no warm clothes, no maps or matches or sleeping bags or bug nets. We tacked bravely past Noroton, Eric at the helm. Outside Norwalk, we were nearly swamped by some older kids in a Boston Whaler, but we kept at it. When we got hot, we jumped into the ocean. When we ran out of drinking water, we beached ourselves at a private club and Eric, with a cocky flourish, revealed that he’d stolen $280 from his father’s closet for our trip — a soggy, tearing mass of bills that bought us the hot dogs and SoBe Energies we consumed under a flapping blue umbrella.
By early evening we were sailing again, our faces angled toward the lavender sky. For many hours, as the wind died and the temperature fell and airplanes blinked overhead on their long approach to LaGuardia, we refused to acknowledge to ourselves or each other that we both wished we were back at Eric’s house drinking Cherry Coke and arguing over which action movie to watch — because Eric and I both believed that identifying something we were afraid to do and then doing it anyway was what manliness was all about. We didn’t call it quits until nearly 10 p.m., and it was me, not Eric, who finally admitted to being cold and thirsty and kinda maybe wondering if we ought to turn around. Eric shrugged, as if he didn’t care, and then brought us into a little marina and called his father collect.
“Was it you who stole Molly Stover’s sailboat?” said his father when he heard Eric’s voice.
“Technically, yes,” replied Eric, “but it wasn’t my idea.”
I’d expected Eric’s dad to be worried, expected him to have long since passed news of my absence to my parents, expected them to be grieving at the knowledge that I had escaped forever. But Eric’s dad just laughed.
“Well,” he said, “how far did you make it?”
When Eric turned twelve, his dad gave him Thomas and delivered a perfunctory lecture on gun safety. Rule number one: carry Thomas with the muzzle pointed either up or down. Rule number two: never leave Thomas loaded. Rule number three: don’t aim Thomas at anything you don’t intend to kill. Then he presented us with yellow-tinted glasses to protect against ricochets and showed us how to put gravel into our Coke cans so they wouldn’t fall over when shot.
For a weekend or two these cans entertained us just fine: we sat around, chatting, plinking, feeling very grown up. But eventually this grew dull for Eric, as everything tended to, so I set up a SWAT-like obstacle course in the woods behind his house, stringing G.I. Joes from branches and scoring our runs through the course based on shots taken, hits made, and overall time. The G.I. Joes were interesting to shoot because their bodies responded differently to Thomas’s bronze BBs depending on where you hit them, the distance from which you’d fired, and some other variable we couldn’t ever quite pin down: fate perhaps, or invisible variations in manufacturing quality. Most of the time, the Joes would simply sway on their strings, their bodies unscathed. But sometimes the plastic seemed to heat and mold itself around the BB, swallowing it whole. And once or twice a head or arm cleaved right off. As an aspiring lacrosse star, I moved faster through the courses than Eric, but he, for reasons that to me felt undeserved, was a steadier shot. Our competitions were fierce, full of adrenaline and excuses, and kept Eric happily occupied for a time.
We shot the pigeon on a soggy spring day when thousands of new leaves gave a green blush to the oak in the yard. The pigeon, which we did not name, sat alone on a high branch, staring at the tame strip of estuary across the road. Shooting it was Eric’s idea, not mine. He’d grown proud of Thomas and their prowess together, and for days now I’d sensed him yearning to see what the two of them were capable of, so I wasn’t entirely surprised when he nodded at the pigeon, said, “Sayonara motherfucker,” and then proceeded eagerly toward the final logic of his father’s third rule.
Maybe we both assumed that the passing whiz of the BB would alert the pigeon to its danger — that or the snapping report that Thomas’s barrel made. But the bird, which against the sky seemed less a bird than the paper silhouette of a bird, didn’t move. So after Eric took a few ineffectual shots, he handed the rifle to me.
Having slayed men and beasts in my mind for as long as I could remember, I had no last-minute doubts or qualms. I may have hesitated, may have paused to look down at Thomas in my hand or up at the pigeon on its branch, but if so, the pause betrayed only my surprise at the sudden arrival of this much anticipated moment. Once I fitted Thomas’s butt against my shoulder, everything else was mechanical. I found the pigeon behind Thomas’s sights. I let its body go blurry as my eye focused on aligning the post and notch. I held my breath. I squeezed the trigger as slowly as I could.
A great rush of feeling — something warm and ancient and very close to joy — poured into me when Thomas fired and the little copper pellet went spinning away.
The pigeon just stood there.
“I thought I had it,” I gasped.
“What a dumb bird,” Eric said.
I took a few deep breaths to steady my arms and did it all again. On my third shot, I hit the branch. There was a thwacking sound and the pigeon raised its wings slightly, as if steadying itself against some minor turbulence. Then it looked around, stretched its wings full, and glided to another branch on the same tree.
In hindsight, this was our chance, our excuse to embrace some other task. We’d subtly changed the pigeon’s position in the world. Great. Let’s go play floor hockey. But Eric instead interpreted this as evidence that neither we nor Thomas were out of our league, that all we had to do was correct our aim. So we kept at it, taking turns, firing at least fifteen shots, each of which diminished the significance of the next. Gradually the poor pigeon lost its differentiating essence, melded with the branches and the sea and our long history of Coke cans and G.I. Joes. And gradually Eric, rather than growing bored by the monotony of failure, forgot the branch and transformed our poor aim into some dire fault of Thomas’s.
“What the hell is wrong with you,” he sputtered.
Holding Thomas by the barrel, Eric took a baseball swing toward the bumper of his father’s Porsche. If we’d been standing beside a tree, I think he might have actually smashed Thomas to pieces, which would have changed everything. But he pulled Thomas up short. So I told Eric to relax and give it one more try.
“Sit with your elbows on your knees,” I said. “Shoot from a solid stance.”
This time, after Thomas fired, the pigeon flinched and leapt from the branch. But instead of taking flight, it spiraled down to the ground, one wing trailing, the other flapping vigorously, a B-17 spinning in flames toward the earth.
Eric and I looked at each other. For a brief moment, we felt delight, triumph, a sense of having stepped at last onto some gleaming summit above the clouds. Then we ran around the garden and found the pigeon lying in the lawn between two whalebacks of polished gray bedrock. The grass shouldn’t have been brown in early May, but that’s how I remember it: raspy and dead, as if blanched by an old septic tank.
The pigeon was rainbow-hued, as many pigeons are: a rippling oil slick on its back and wings, a wide cravat of white feathers around its throat. It was trying to run from us, legs frantic, a prehistoric terror in its tiny marble eyes. But lying on its side, it could only turn in circles. I now take it as a sign of my denial that, as I watched it struggle, I wondered how a wild animal could keep itself so clean.
We were hardly unaware of death. Eric, after all, still slept every night clutching his mother’s Brown University sweatshirt. But we’d had the very modern privilege of never having witnessed anything die. Perhaps this is why I was astonished, as I’m sure Eric was, to discover that what had been to us essentially a game or simulation was for the pigeon the exact opposite. There was a single trembling bead of blood on its neck or upper shoulder, and I briefly suspected — or just hoped — that the poor creature, far from being well on its way toward death, was in fact faking the severity of its wounds, waiting for us to leave it alone so it could recover its poise and fly away.
“Shit,” Eric said. “What do we do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Let’s leave it.”
“To suffer?”
“Maybe it’ll get better.”
“It’s not going to get better.”
I wasn’t sure this was true until I said it, but then I believed it absolutely. Eric nudged the pigeon with Thomas’s barrel. The pigeon opened its mouth as if to hiss at us.
“Look at its eyes,” I said. “It’s in pain.”
Though he got as far as cocking Thomas and holding the barrel to the pigeon’s tiny flinching head, Eric couldn’t bring himself to pull the trigger, not so close up, not with his own bright reflection burning in the pigeon’s eyes.
“I can’t do it.”
“What do you mean? You already did it.”
He handed me Thomas, whose stock was sticky with sweat. Not wanting to be seen as a hypocrite, I didn’t wait. I held Thomas in one hand, the tip of the barrel just inches from the bird’s chest, and fired. Up close you could see feathers tremble in the BB’s airwave. The pigeon made a cooing sound and paused, looking up at us or at the gray spring sky hanging over the Long Island Sound. Then it began running its circles again, flapping wildly.
“Just die,” choked Eric.
He knelt and ran a finger down the pigeon’s back. To my surprise the creature seemed to calm down.
“We’re trying to help you,” said Eric.
Thomas and I shot it four more times.
Up until that moment I had understood death as a threshold — an almost invisible finish line over which certain people, Eric’s mother for instance, eventually leapt. After the pigeon, I understood that, at least for most of us, dying is a corridor of torment, doored on either end, and as you walk down it, you might at first make an effort to turn around and lurch for the door behind you, but as time goes on, as the torment fails to yield and the corridor fails to end, you eventually begin pushing hard toward the door ahead.
The pigeon would not pass on, could not fall still, no matter how desperately it might now have wanted to. Eric was crying openly, and I, too, felt a hot wet grief rising through my cheeks.
“Your fucking bullshit gun’s not strong enough,” I said.
“Just leave it,” moaned Eric. “Let’s just let it live.”
This might have been an option before I’d decided we had to put the pigeon out of its misery. But now the pigeon’s chest was a patchwork of broken feathers, and it was panting, or at least breathing with its beak open, pulling air over its trembling pink tongue. Our choices, as I saw them, were to either abandon the pigeon, knowing full well that the process we’d started would go on working its agonizing course in our absence, or abandon Thomas and do something old and drastic, like wringing the pigeon’s neck or crushing its head with a rock.
But we were not those kinds of kids. We were suburban boys. Cowards. So Eric got a snow shovel from the garage, scooped the pigeon up, and carried it, one wing still beating faintly, to a thin lane of woods that separated his home from that of his neighbor. Then, wielding the shovel like a lacrosse stick, Eric flung the pigeon as hard as he could into the neighbor’s garden. It spun fast, barrel-rolling, and tumbled down into the pachysandra next to their screen porch. Maybe the throw killed it. Maybe the neighbor’s dog, when it was let outside, joyfully finished what we’d joyfully begun.
That night, as we ate takeout with Eric’s dad and watched the Mets, Eric turned to me and said, “I’m going to tell him.”
“No,” I said.
“Sammy shot a pigeon,” Eric said. “With Thomas.”
I stood up, feeling my usual tight-chested urge to flee, but when Eric’s dad looked at me, his eyes were bright with mirth.
“Did it die?”
“Hell yeah it did,” said Eric.
“You’re lucky I’m not my old man,” said Eric’s dad. “He would have made you eat it.”
That was how Eric’s dad settled everything — at least for me, and at least for a time. Here we were, in a chain of history, conducting a murder that Eric’s dad and granddad and on down the line had also conducted, a murder justified even in present-day Connecticut by the fact that for our pre-moral ancestors such actions were driven by necessity.
But the next morning, just minutes before my nanny, Monica, arrived to pick me up, Eric asked me if I wanted Thomas.
“He’s yours,” I protested.
“I don’t use it much.”
“But your dad gave him to you.”
When Eric looked at Thomas, I saw something strange in his eyes. A look I’d seen on his face only once before, when my mother gave him a framed picture of his mother for his birthday, an attempt to undo his dad’s erasure of her memory. The picture was taken in New York City back in 1988, and in it Eric’s mother, visibly pregnant, is sandwiched between his father and my parents, all four of them smiling happily.
“Just promise,” Eric said to me, “you’ll give it back if I ever ask.”
And so, feeling a little anxious but very grateful, I said, “I promise,” slid Thomas into my lacrosse bag’s stick compartment, and brought him home.
Home, for me, was a five-bedroom saltbox erected in 1739 and renovated several times through the centuries, most drastically by my parents. Before we moved there in 1995, my mother, who’d double majored in art history and studio art at Smith, tore out the interior walls in favor of sunny open-plan living, which meant I had to seek privacy outside. The house sat on three gardened acres that also held a cement pool, a thickety former pasture, and a dilapidated barn that in the old days had stabled working horses. While I played in the yard or hid in the woods, my father spent his free moments in the barn, building things that it would have been cheaper for him to buy and that my mother considered “aesthetically unfit” for our house. For a few years, the barn slowly filled with beds, rocking chairs, book shelves, and even several canoes. But by the time Thomas arrived at my house, my father’s real job was keeping him in the city many weekends, which I didn’t realize until later meant that he was more or less openly having affairs. In retaliation, my mother began threatening — she never actually went — to attend some three-month sculpture fellowship at a villa on Lake Como. She’d long wanted to study with a certain modern Italian master, she said, and since we now had the money, she didn’t see any reason why she shouldn’t finally go.
“What about Sam?” said my father, who was out of the house each day at 5:30 a.m. and rarely home by dinner. “You going to bring him with you?”
My mom smiled. “You can sort out a system with Monica,” she said.
That night my father sat on the edge of my bed and informed me that the second I followed my sister to boarding school, he planned on divorcing “your insane fucking mother.” He put emphasis on “your,” and I remember, perhaps too generously, that his voice crackled with neediness as he spoke, as if he were trying to create some camaraderie with his son. But I was twelve. And precisely because my mother was my mother, my understanding at the time was that my father had placed the responsibility for his unhappiness on me.
My mother was a pacifist who’d wielded a megaphone at anti-nuclear demonstrations while pregnant with me, and, perhaps to assuage a lingering unease about having brought another potentially murderous man into this world, she vigorously discouraged my obsession with war stories and Nerf guns and shoot-em-up N64 games like GoldenEye. Instead, she urged my father to help her deflect my energies toward safer Americana such as trading cards or the Grateful Dead. But my father, having himself once identified as a normal American boy, took great pleasure in specifically supporting those of my pursuits my mother took issue with.
It was thanks to my father, for instance, that I came to prefer the cheap and rigid plastic soldiers over the glitzy G.I. Joes favored by boys like Eric. Instead of being impressed by the G.I. Joes’ articulated joints, their personalized backstories and their unrealistic superweapons, my father, who as a banker was perfectly comfortable substituting numbers for lives, taught me to appreciate the fixed anonymity of plastic figurines, with their unchangeable postures and simple green or gray coloring. He bought me several hundred men, plus tanks and trucks and artillery pieces. By the time I was eight or nine I was submitting my brave troops to vast, multi-stage battles within which individual differences were comfortably swept away by forces of history far beyond any one soldier’s control. Whenever the season allowed it, I played outside, carving shell craters in the dirt and building pillboxes from sticks and bark, orchestrating battles that often took weeks or months to resolve.
I managed to keep Thomas hidden from my mother until a hot Sunday in early July — a day unusual only because both my parents were home. There was already tension in our house. We’d tried to have a family dinner the night before, but Italy had come up again, and my mother stormed out during cocktails. I ended up eating my flank steak while watching a World War II documentary alone. The next morning, my father rose early and went for a long run. My mother rose late and did yoga. Monica made me breakfast even though it was her day off, then went to church. For two hours, I played lacrosse with my bounce back, dutifully practicing my left hand and testing out the new Pita Pocket I’d laboriously strung on my spare stick. Sometime before lunch I slunk off into the woods behind the barn to run a few laps through the fire and movement course I’d designed since bringing Thomas home.
As I had with Eric, I timed my runs through the course with my watch, sprinting from firing station to firing station, trying to steady my breath long enough to shoot my required allotment of plastic men. As my aim and fitness improved over the weeks — I couldn’t wait to show off to Eric — I’d moved the men back or put them behind obstacles so only small portions of their bodies were available to my sight.
I expected to be caught with the gun eventually, and I had mixed feelings about it. Part of me thought the whole enterprise was pretty benign; we’d watched the Olympic biathlon at Nagano on TV two winters earlier, and what I was doing was the same except, instead of racing around on skis, I was crouched and weaving like a soldier, attempting to avoid the bullets those plastic targets might send back my way. But another part of me felt embedded in some ascendant fairy tale, a reincarnated warrior in his youthful montage scenes, destined for Delta Force or the Navy Seals and the great and secret violence that such men lived by. So the idea of losing Thomas felt linked, somehow, with losing my life’s destiny.
I didn’t hear her coming, possibly because I was pretending to have encountered an opponent in hand-to-hand combat, kicking him, bayonetting him, slamming him with Thomas’s butt end. But I did hear when my mother yelled, “Is that a fucking gun?”
She was pushing toward me through the densest section of woods, in baggy drawstring pants and cheap rubber sandals, tearing at the saplings and the bittersweet vines.
“He’s not real,” I said, as she pulled Thomas from my unresisting hands and clicked the safety on while keeping his barrel angled toward the ground. If I’d been thinking clearly, I would have asked where and how and why she had learned to safely wield a firearm, but I was twelve years old, and my mother was livid. She grabbed my T-shirt between the shoulder blades and, instead of adhering to the careful path I’d cut through the poison ivy, marched me straight through it toward the house, something that made the next few days even less pleasant for her than they needed to be. (I was wearing shoes.)
We found my father stretching on the patio, one sneaker up on a teak chair, head folded over his shin. It was not yet noon but already very hot. He wore a red headband, and he’d removed his T-shirt and tucked part of it into the waist of his shorts so that it dangled like a flag football flag. He was listening to a Walkman and the curly hair on his back lay flat with sweat.
“What the fuck is this?” my mother said.
Ours was a big yard, and my father had watched us voyage across it, watched us tack around the stone-benched gardens and lacrosse nets, but he nonetheless feigned innocence, lifting a headphone from one ear while maintaining his stretch.
“What’s that, honey?”
“We had an agreement,” my mother said, brandishing me in her right hand and Thomas in her left.
“We sure did,” said my father.
“Then what do I have here?”
He pulled his foot back to stretch his quad, resting a single finger on the tabletop for balance. I could hear The Highwaymen crooning faintly in his earphones.
“That looks like a Red Ryder air rifle.” He thrust his chin at me. “You got anything to say, bud?”
I knew from the amused glint in my father’s eyes that it was my duty to hide Eric, to hide Eric’s father, to bravely bear all interrogation and torture and keep my comrades’ anonymity alive.
“I found him,” I said.
“Where?” asked my father.
I didn’t answer.
“Well, come on, son. Speak the words. Was it in Monica’s bedroom?”
“Jesus Christ,” said my mother.
“Or was it at Eric’s house?” my father said.
I must have made a face — terror, surprise, dismay — because my father began to laugh. I shouldn’t have been surprised: Jim and my father were basically best friends; they’d probably laughed about the murdered pigeon over beers.
“Jimbo got this for Eric for his birthday,” my father said to my mother. He lowered his leg, lifted his other leg onto the chair, and bent himself smoothly over it, clasping his pale fingers behind his shoe. “Eric must have lent it to him.”
I opened my mouth to deny this, but my mother whispered, “You’re grounded. Go to your room.”
As I walked around my father toward the kitchen, he patted my shoulder and said, “Let’s work on that left hand together after lunch, bud.”
My bedroom was directly above the kitchen, and my bed was beneath a row of windows that overlooked the patio. Because it was summer — each night a furious symphony of tree frogs and crickets — one of those windows was open. So when I went upstairs, I found that I had not been banished as far as I might have wished. My parents were now arguing immediately below me.
“Jim bought his son a fucking gun, and you didn’t consider it necessary to tell me?”
“It’s an air rifle, honey. A BB gun.”
“Do you have any idea how frightened Monica would be to see him with this?”
“Honey, it’s a toy. The label on the box says it’s fit for kids eight to sixteen.”
“You saw the goddamn box?”
“I was there when Jim bought it. I wanted to buy Sammy one, but I didn’t out of respect for your ridiculous fucking rules.”
Their voices had changed — the irony and control they’d maintained in my presence replaced by spitting whispers.
“What was he doing with it, anyway?” my father said. “Shooting targets?”
“What he was shooting isn’t the point.”
“Well, I fail to see your point then. It’s a BB gun. My brothers and I used to hunt each other with these things. We used them like paintball guns.”
And to prove the point, he took Thomas from my mother, cocked the barrel, and shot himself through the tongue of his shoe.
“Ow, fuck,” he said.
Through my bedroom window, I watched him hop around on one sneaker for a few seconds, wincing.
Then he began to laugh.
“See? It’s like a bad bee sting. Whoop-de-doo. No blood. No broken bones. Want to try it?”
He cocked Thomas again.
“Try it,” he said, flipping Thomas around and presenting the trigger. “Maybe you should figure out what you’re criticizing before you criticize it.”
“I’m criticizing you, Russ,” said my mother.
I slammed my window shut. It was a triple-pane Marvin window, and closing it was like submerging my ears in a pool: I could still hear my father’s harsh laughter and my mother’s crisp snappy rebuttals, but everything was elongated and blended together, rendered into background music by the more immediate clicks and hush of our old house. I had hoped, of course, that the sound of the window slamming above their heads would remind them that I was near, which would in turn help them see how absurd they had let this situation become. But they didn’t notice. Or if they did, it merely gave them the liberty to raise their voices yet further. My mother, red-faced, wide-eyed, furious, reached out and wrapped her fingers around Thomas’s grip. But my father, in a cinematic flourish probably meant to remind my mother of his superior strength, held onto the barrel, refusing to relinquish the object he’d until that second been trying to get her to take.
“You gonna do it?” he said.
She yanked at Thomas again. My father smiled, still holding the barrel.
And then, through the window, I heard a muffled pop.
My father leapt backward, grasping his throat just above the sternum. He coughed once. When he pulled his hand away, a thin snake of blood slithered nimbly down his wet chest and blossomed in the sweatband of his shorts.
“Russ. Oh my god. Russ?” my mother said.
Holding a hand up to keep her away, my father bent forward like a runner trying to stave off dizziness. When it was clear that he could breathe all right, he pulled his T-shirt from his shorts and held it to his wound, which was bleeding far more than the pigeon’s had. He coughed again, as if trying to clear a feather from his throat.
“What the fuck, Sharon,” he croaked. “The neck?”
My mother put Thomas on the table. “Let me see,” she said.
He turned his head and let her remove the shirt. A neat puddle of blood had inked outward through the fabric.
“Where’s the BB?” my father said.
“I think it’s in there.”
“In where?”
My mother ran her fingers over his sternum, below the hole.
“It’s just a fucking BB gun,” my father said.
This statement provoked a sudden round of coughing. He bent over again. The blood ran a little quicker each time he inhaled and dime-sized splashes began accumulating on the non-native limestone patio. My mother tried to hold the shirt to the wound, but he again warded her away.
“Russ, is it in your lungs?”
“How the hell would it get in my lungs?”
“I don’t know. Penetrate the windpipe. Get inhaled.”
Silence.
“Pinch your nose and exhale,” said my mother.
My father did as he was told. Then he coughed again, a dry and violent hack.
“I was looking for an air bubble or something,” said my mother.
“Any luck?”
“I don’t know…. I think maybe we should go to the hospital.”
“Not a fucking chance,” my father said.
But he followed her inside. Below me the screen door whined open and slapped shut. I heard my mother patter upstairs in search of keys, shoes, a fresh polo for my father. According to family lore, while she was digging through several pairs of dirty pants looking for my father’s wallet, he was in front of the mirror in the downstairs bathroom, gouging at his neck with a pair of tweezers, enlarging his wound in search of its source.
After my mother went downstairs again, not hurrying as much as I’d have expected, I heard her say, “Do I need to shoot you again or are you coming?”
My father laughed, and then coughed, and then I was alone, kneeling on my bed, listening to the birds alive on the other side of the glass.
The rest of the day is fuzzy to me, probably because very little happened that couldn’t have happened the day before. I played catch with the bounceback. I ate a tuna melt. I considered hiding Thomas in my room, or in the attic, but I was afraid of being in further trouble, so I left him on the patio table. At some point my mother called, and I stood by the kitchen phone listening to her leave a message. “Your dumbass father is fine,” she said. “It’s not your fault,” she said. “We’ll be back in an hour to talk,” she said.
When I heard this, I left a note on the kitchen counter and biked over to Eric’s.
I can’t think about biking to Eric’s house without thinking of the time, a year after all this happened, when I pushed up that steep final curve and came upon Eric’s dad arranging a pair of tennis bags in the trunk of his zippy silver Porsche. He was wearing white — only white — white shorts and white wristbands, white shoes and a white visor, as was the woman standing beside him.
“Just the man I wanted to see,” Eric’s dad said — though by then Eric and I were growing apart and his dad knew it. He turned to the woman. “Sally, this is Russ Chapman’s kid. Sam.”
Sally smiled. “The lacrosse player,” she said.
“That’s right,” said Eric’s dad.
“Russell tells me you make Eric look like a beautiful spaz on the field,” Sally said.
“False,” said Eric’s dad. “Handsome, yes. Beautiful, maybe. But spaz is the wrong word. It’s borderline calumny. Eric’s decent. Isn’t he Sam?”
Sally winked at me. She didn’t wear makeup, but she had very shiny lips and looked several years younger than Eric’s mother had been in that photo from 1988.
“Avert your eyes, Sammy,” said Eric’s dad.
When I did, mortified, they laughed.
“We’re gonna go whack a few balls around,” said Eric’s dad, slamming the Porsche’s trunk shut. “But do me a favor and go work your magic. Eric’s in a funk.”
I found Eric playing Age of Empires in his room. He barely glanced at me when I entered. On the screen, his villagers were hacking at a tree.
“I just met your dad’s new chick,” I said.
“She’s not new,” he replied.
Of course, that was later, on one of my last trips to Eric’s, if not the very last. When I arrived at his house on the day my mother shot my father, we were still in the placid twilight of our boyhoods, and whatever we did that afternoon has almost entirely disappeared into the afternoons stretching out on either side. We might have gone swimming or fished for crabs off Mrs. Stover’s pier. We might have taken our bikes for ice cream or played foosball in the basement as a thunderstorm rolled through. All I truly remember is wanting Eric to intuit from my terse demeanor that something momentous had occurred — wanting him to ask about it, so I could shrug and say, “It was nothing, really,” before promptly telling all. But it didn’t come up. And it was actually Eric’s dad who, finally, a week before Halloween, told Eric what had happened after proposing that he dress up as my father. “Just put on running shorts and wrap a bloody T-shirt around your throat,” he said. And then, when Eric looked perplexed: “Wait, Sammy, you never told him that story?”
Another thing I remember is Monica waiting for me when I got home. My parents, she said, had gone out for sushi — an impromptu date that I interpreted as hesitance to confront what they had done and I had seen. While Monica was heating up dinner, I noticed that Thomas was no longer on the patio table. Suddenly I began to cry, something that Monica, unaware of Thomas, didn’t know how to interpret. She held her wrist to my forehead. I shrugged her away. She gave me a plate of leftover flank steak and green beans, which I ate while finishing my documentary. Afterward, when I went up to my room, I found Thomas lying where my parents had left him: on the foot of my bed.
