55

He awoke with the birds before the sun could breast the water. The low clouds made the dawn all the more beautiful, catching and spreading the soft colors across the sky. He watched it dumbly, his body shaking. Sometime in elementary school his class had read Anne Frank’s diary, and Henry, terribly alarmed, asked why Anne hadn’t simply pretended not to be Jewish. The way Peter escaped from the Romans by pretending not to be Christian. Peter got in trouble for that in the Bible, but if you put it in the context of poor Anne, who was not only real but also a kid, didn’t it make sense? What difference did it make what religion you were if you were dead? So said a very alarmed Henry, in what remained the most passionate and probably the longest speech of his academic career.

His teacher said that St. Peter was a real person, first of all, and in any case being Jewish wasn’t something you could put on and take off like a sweater. This ended the discussion, but it didn’t satisfy Henry. He didn’t see how a religion, which was a freely chosen thing, could mark people so irreparably.

It wasn’t clear why he’d woken up thinking about that—the remnant of some bad dream, no doubt. If it meant anything, it seemed to mean that he was who he was and there was nowhere to go but back to Phumber Hall. The bus would be leaving for Coshwale soon. He could go to his room, take the phone off the hook, and sleep. Coach Cox would suspend him from the team, but that didn’t matter because Schwartzy was going to kill him, and that didn’t matter either because Henry was tired and he deserved it.

Now that it was nearly light he could see that during his swim he’d drifted a hundred yards south of the lighthouse. He bent down, scooped up a handful of greenish water, tasted it, spat it out. Then he trudged back to the lighthouse, collected his bag, and departed. The two miles to campus seemed like twenty. He was barefoot, having lost his plastic sandals in the lake. Every rock or root that forced him to lift his heels felt like a hardship. He hadn’t eaten since Thursday, not that he wanted to eat.

When he got home, he unplugged the blinking answering machine, poured himself a glass of water, and went to sleep.

He was awakened in full daylight by a frantic drumming on the door. He pulled the covers over his head—This too shall pass—but the drumming didn’t stop, and a female voice yelled his name as an angry question. He stumbled to the door in his boxer shorts, fumbled with the knob. There stood Pella Affenlight. “Henry,” she said. “You look terrible.”

You don’t look so good yourself, Henry thought, and she did look bleary, like she’d been up all night, but that wasn’t the sort of thing you said to people.

“Sorry, I didn’t mean it like that. Mike’s furious, you know. He’s been calling me every ten minutes, not to talk to me, of course, but hey… let’s see. What am I supposed to tell you? His keys are in his car and his car’s at the VAC. Pump the gas if the engine won’t turn over. What else? Oh yeah. Directions to wherever you’re supposed to be right now, on the front seat.”

Henry nodded. “Thanks.”

“Oh, many welcomes. What else would I do with my Sunday morning? Messenger to the stars.” She looked down at Henry’s feet, which were still pruned and past white. “Sorry about the game. That was rough luck.”

“Luck,” Henry repeated.

“I guess luck’s the wrong word. Anyway, I just… if you ever want to talk, I’m around.”

“Thanks.”

“You’re fairly monosyllabic, you know that?”

“Sorry.”

“That’s better.”

Henry expected her to leave, but instead she just stood there fooling with her sweatshirt strings, alternately looking down at his feet and past him into the room. He tried to come up with something polite and polysyllabic to say. “Would you like some tea?”

Pella shrugged. “You’re probably in a hurry. Directions on the seat and all that.”

“I’m not going anywhere.”

“Oh. Well. In that case. Sure. I’ll have tea.”

Henry had never made tea before; that was Owen’s department. He tried to arrest the electric kettle at the proper gurgle, and he tried to add the right amount of English Breakfast to the porcelain pot, not that he knew what the right amount would be. Pella stood in the middle of the rug and looked around. “This place is pretty nice,” she said. “For a dorm room.”

“It’s mostly Owen’s stuff.”

“Did Owen paint this?” She pointed to the green-and-white painting that hung over Henry’s bed, the one Henry liked because it resembled a smeary baseball diamond.

“When I first moved in I asked Owen that same question, and he said, ‘Sort of, but I stole it from Rothko.’ I thought Rothko was like Shopko—that he’d really stolen it, from a store. I was amazed, because it’s so big. How would you steal it? Then I took Art 105.”

Pella laughed. Henry regretted the anecdote, which made him seem dumb. The effort required to speak was immense, like hauling stones up out of a well, but he’d decided to try his best. At least she seemed cheered up a little.

“You really like it here,” she said, “don’t you?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, all of you guys—you, Mike, my dad. Maybe Owen too, though I don’t really know Owen. You all just seem to love it here. Like you never want to leave. Part of me suspects that Mike didn’t want to get into law school, that he sabotaged himself in some subconscious way, so that he has no reason to leave this place, the only place he ever felt happy. I mean, why’d he only apply to six schools? The six best schools in the country? It makes no sense.”

“He’s graduating either way,” Henry pointed out. “He can’t stay here.”

“He can’t stay but he can’t leave, not without a destination. And, well, maybe it’s the same for you. Maybe you’re just not ready.”

Henry looked at her.

“Sorry,” Pella said.

“Everybody else thinks I wanted to go pro too much. You think I didn’t want it at all.”

“What do you think?”

“I think you should all go fuck yourselves.”

Pella grinned. “That’s the first step to recovery.” She walked over to the mantel, where a baseball, Owen’s lone bottle of scotch, and a slim, leather-bound navy book Henry didn’t recognize sat in close proximity. “There’s not even any dust in this place,” she said. She unsheathed the amber bottle from its cardboard cylinder. “May I?”

Henry nodded. Pella poured some into a tumbler, took a sip, rolled it in her mouth appraisingly. “Mm. Not bad.” She held it out toward Henry.

Henry took the glass and sipped the light-shot fluid, which perfectly matched the color of Schwartzy’s eyes. The taste overwhelmed his sleep-deprived senses; he coughed and spit it out on the rug.

“Hey, don’t waste that.” Pella arranged herself cross-legged on Owen’s bed. She pulled down the navy book—it looked like an old register—and opened it. After a moment she looked up at Henry, her eyes inscrutable. “My dad and Owen are sleeping together.”

“Your dad?” Henry said. “President Affenlight?”

Pella handed him the open book. “Top left.” It looked like a youthful shot of some now-famous poet or playwright, the kind of thing Owen might frame to fill one of the few empty spots on their walls. Then Henry noticed that the pair of maple trees in the midground looked familiar; and the building behind the tree, if you ignored the pale shade of paint on the front door, could easily be Phumber Hall. And then the facial features of the tall man walking the bicycle coalesced into something familiar too. A torn strip of purple Post-it marked the page.

“Your dad went to school here?”

“Class of seventy-one. So be cheery, my lads and all that jazz.”

Henry thought of the time he’d come upstairs carrying two glasses of milk, and President Affenlight was in their room.

“What’s that look?” Pella said. “You knew about this?”

“No… no.”

“But.”

“But… your dad’s been at a lot of our games this year.”

Pella nodded. “I told myself it was all in my head. But here’s this yearbook, right on cue. And look at you—you’re not even surprised. How much proof do I need?”

She took the register from Henry’s hands and flopped down on the bed, her head on Owen’s pillow. She looked at the photograph for a long time, saying nothing. Beneath the window the quad lay in the soundless trough of a late Sunday morning. No birds, no crickets, no rustle of breeze in the mitt-sized leaves of the maples. When Henry’s throw hit Owen in the face, his teammates, the fans, the umps, even the Milford players, fell totally silent, as if their silence might help Owen or undo his injuries. And then again yesterday, when he handed Starblind the ball and walked back to the dugout, there wasn’t a sound in the park, not even a You suck, Henry! from the Coshwale fans. His teammates couldn’t even look at him, pretended to be engrossed in the smashed paper cups and sunflower-seed shells on the dugout floor. Why not say something, something rude or obtuse or irrelevant? If the silence was for his benefit, it wasn’t helping. He wanted to scream and wail his way through these false silences, wanted to put an end to them forever. Yet here he was, trapped in another such silence, a tiny two-person silence, and he couldn’t even put an end to that.

One stray strand of Pella’s wine-colored hair stretched out across the pale-green pillow, like a flattened sine curve or a trail that ants might follow. He reached out and touched it with his fingers, a weird thing to do.

Pella’s whole body tensed, then relaxed.

“It’s a great photograph,” she said. “I’d like a copy for myself.”

Henry could see, beneath the loose waist of her jeans, a thin shiny sliver of snow-blue fabric. His fingers wavered a little as they left her hair and traced the soft line of her cheek. She tilted back her chin to see him from the tops of her eyes. “Nervous?”

“No.”

“Don’t be.” She grasped his wrist and guided his hand down the front of her body, toward the icy blue. “Tell me what it felt like, when you were walking off the field.”