As they reached the crest at the front of the mansion, Susan had turned around with an impish smile on her face. “We used to scoot down hills on trash-can lids. It’s how I lost my first tooth.”
The twins had gazed over the steep edge recklessly, with unshakable faith in their snowsuits. Their mother planted herself on the orange sled and took Sebastian on her lap, curling up her little legs so he could sit between them. Al had done the same for Viola on the purple sled, only his legs were less containable and he’d had to dig his feet into the snow.It’ll give us a better kickoff.
“Three, two, one!” Sebastian shouted, and off they’d gone, careening. It was a perfect sensation. Looking down the hill now, Al recalls the almost unbearable joy of racing forward, bouncing against his daughter and the purple plastic, his wife and son a blaze of orange meters ahead. It was the kind of joy that is so in pursuit of itself, that arrives at you with such speed and concentration that it cannot but bring with it a deep dread of the moment where it will inevitably end, where you will have to ask yourself whether joy like that will ever be possible again. That end might have arrived with a sudden scream, the orange sled in the air, flying away from the ground—a jump! someone built a jump! Al banked left to avoid the danger, but somehow, the orange sled landed, its riders squealing and hooting at how high they had gone, how fast.They pulled to a stop and collapsed at the bottom of the big hill, flopped into the snow, Sebastian a heap in Susan’s arms.
“I think we all need to do that again,” she said.
His heart had thudded in his ears, and here it thudded now, terrified even in certainty.
That was the only mother they ever needed.
The backside of the hill drops away sharply, a rocky face falling for forty feet into dead leaves and ice. Al toes over to the darkened precipice, clutching the box.
It’s the quiet histories that get forgotten, silenced by the roar of spectacular drama. Their love was a quiet, steady thing. Somehow, he has become its sole keeper. Its greatest threat is in his arms. Why shouldn’t he be—just once—reckless with the archive?
Blood throbs back into his cold hands. For so long now, life has just happened to him. Decisions removed from his control. No longer.
A small shelf of snow slips away under his foot.
Now.
NOW.
The box tumbles clumsily over the drop, cassettes plunging into the snow, a smattering of grave plots.
Now you’ve done it, says the Susan in his mind.
But it’s over now, and for the best, yes? Yes—he can feel it lifting, her separate life, so many happy memories making their way back into the light. His fault or her fault, the whole fault-finding mission be damned. Quickly he treks back to the car, their faces flooding his mind, remembering the party spinning on at his house.
Wonder if they’ve noticed by now. Wonder if they’ll ever notice.
Raucous bodies pile into the room, squeezing out the older people, the fire snapping and music playing, everyone knows the words. Sebastian is passed around like party dip, waving his hands, wiggling his hips, and feeling for all the world that his mother is there.
The music dissipates the terrible splash of her body, conjures herthe way she was before. His mother (the most beautiful woman in the world), hair sprawling, holding their hands on the first day of kindergarten, kissing him on the cheek, baking muffins on a Sunday morning, driving them to the beach on a summer’s afternoon. Digging an enormous hole in the sand, burying all but his head. His mother, glorious in sunglasses, glorious in the summer sun.Isn’t that her!—there in the corner, bending and laughing and gone again.
Sadie, the mistress of ceremonies, switches in Blondie, switches in Madonna. “Now this is more like it,” she says, her eyes leaking black tracks into her dimples. A conspiracy is shared between them. Together they have revived her, shook life back into a dead room. “Don’t forget her,” Sadie says, insistent against the bouncy guitar.Don’t forget that she was like this.Sebastian nods as the imperative lights inside him.
He feels Viola enter the room before he sees her, holding the hand of a strange man, shimmying along, spellbound. They find each other in the pulse of bodies, and a circle clears around them as they link hands and swing, hanging against each other’s gravity.Faster, faster!Everyone dizzy and delighted, the innocence of them! The necessary weight of her, the counterbalance. He pulls back, she pulls against him, and together as the music gives way, they let go, their love unraveled across the room.
A hush descends. His father, framed in the door, radiating a new firmness.
“Time to go, Sadie,” he says.
“Don’t be an ass,” she hisses. Without another word, she stomps out of the house. The room is a deflated balloon. One, two at a time, the others make their excuses and depart.
“Do you want to play something?” Sebastian asks when his eyes have stopped staring at the door that his aunt left through. “Or watch TV?”
But Lola is gone too.
Outside, the driveway is roaring with engines of cars warming up, ice leaking away from the windshields, the more intrepid mourners attacking the situation with shovels and scrapers.
“Orson!”
His legs are dangling out of the passenger seat of a red car, and he is brushing snow off his bare feet, shaking them like they are electric. She doesn’t know what she planned to say to him, but couldn’t handle the thought of him disappearing into the night. Her imaginings have already been painted in Disney pastels; she knows a prince when she meets one.
“Well, hello. Are you coming with me?”
Everything feels possible.Yes, she wants to say.Yes, I’m coming with you.
