Prologue
If you’ve never seen a dead person, here is one of the things you might not know. Dead people look different from living ones. This remains true even if they didn’t get run over by a truck or die as a result of some long illness that caused their body to waste away. Just the fact that their heart no longer beats, their lungs don’t take in air, their brain has ceased to register any emotion—just that—is enough to transform the look of them.
For this reason, even to someone who knows the dead person well death may have rendered her almost unrecognizable.
I was not quite fifteen years old the first and only time I saw a dead person. She had probably only been dead a few minutes. Thin as she was—a condition that had nothing to do with lingering physical illness—she had no need to accentuate her cheekbones further, but she’d evidently applied blush. She had changed from the outfit I’d seen her wearing an hour or two earlier into a silk nightgown. Knowing her as I did, I imagine it was chosen with great care for its particularly flattering shade of peach and the way the folds fell over her nearly skeletal body. Every rib visible.
She was a person who cared a lot about this kind of thing. Her hair lay arranged across her silk pillowcase in a manner that made you wonder if she’d actually fanned it out that way before she set her head down that last time.
You might say she looked beautiful, as she always did. But she didn’t look like herself.
One thing about the sight surprised me, other than the fact that she was dead. She had applied her lipstick perfectly—as always. Her lips were slightly open, almost as if she were about to offer up one of her discourses to us on something we didn’t do that we should have, or something we did that we should not have done, or simply a way in which we might improve ourselves. Until the moment of her death, she invariably had something to say, and it was seldom affirming.
No words came out of her now, of course. But here came the most shocking aspect of what I saw that night: At one corner of her mouth, just barely visible—some people would have missed this, in fact—I could spot a trace of what I recognized as the smallest residual crumb of Boston cream pie. Until that night, I doubted she had let anything of the kind touch her lips in decades, if ever. This, more than any of the rest of it, served as indication that an event of huge and unprecedented proportions had taken place that night: A woman who counted every calorie that entered her body had eaten dessert.
I’ve pointed out already that up until the moment of her death, she was a person who liked to have the last word. She insisted on that. In fact, it could be said that even now she was delivering a final message to those who survived her. Dead as she was, she had somehow managed to point her long bony finger directly at the object of her greatest love and her greatest contempt. She might as well have been aiming a gun.
I was fourteen years old the night I found her body. It took me thirty years to recognize that it wasn’t all my fault—not only her death, but everything that had happened over the three short months I think of as my Wonderland summer.
1
Bad Moon on the Rise
June 1986
The drive from my family’s apartment in New Jersey to the Emersons’ summer place in Maine took seven and a half hours, but I wouldn’t have cared if it lasted a month. I got to sit in the front seat next to Forrest. What else mattered?
It was a little after one o’clock when Forrest pulled up in front of our building, meaning he must have left Lake Catherine before sunrise. I could hear the music blasting from the Porsche a block away—Creedence Clearwater, music I knew from listening to my father’s old vinyl. Never mind that it was drizzling. Forrest always had the top down.
He and my father had been friends since they were eleven years old. That summer, when everything changed, I was fourteen going on fifteen—stuck in a box called Hubbard, New Jersey, the only child of two parents so occupied with waging war against each other they seemed to have forgotten I existed. Then Forrest Emerson showed up to take me to Maine, and it felt like my life was finally going to get interesting.
I wasn’t wrong about that.
Back when Forrest and my father were growing up in the neighborhood, he went by his original name—Howie. My father, Henry, went by Hank.
My dad had filled me in on the basics. His family lived in the apartment one floor above where Forrest grew up—three kids to a room, rice and beans the staple for dinner, a belt on the behind when they got out of line and when they didn’t. Nobody had any money, and they had even less in the way of prospects for the future.
“When you grow up in the projects like I did,” my father said, “it’s hard to picture getting out of there. That’s all you know.”
The two of them, Hank and Howie, had been like brothers, my father said. They got into lots of trouble together but had fun doing it. Then there was the other part. Howie could barely read or write. He struggled so badly in school, he never would have graduated if not for my father, who sat next to him when they took tests so Howie could copy off his paper.
“He isn’t stupid,” my father said. “There’s just something about Howie’s brain. Words on paper don’t make sense to him. When he tries to write, it looks like what you’d expect from a very young kid.”
Still, Howie was the one who got out of Hubbard. He changed his name to Forrest when he married Regina. Except for visits with my father, he did not look back.
My dad was still Hank. Still living within five blocks of where he started out. Also still drinking. These days he and Forrest only saw each other once a year, when my parents and I made our annual visit to Forrest and Regina’s house in Maine, Wonderland. As differently as their lives had played out, though, Forrest still called my father his best friend. Now here he was, back in the old neighborhood.
He got out of the car like Erik Estrada, my first crush, on the show that used to be my favorite when I was younger,CHiPs—hopping over the driver’s-side door of the convertible instead of opening it like a normal person. He looked like a movie star.
We were only three days into June but already Forrest had a tan. He was wearing shorts and a Ramones T-shirt that said “Too Tough to Die.” He kissed me on the cheek, then opened the trunk and tossed in my suitcase—an old red Samsonite bag that my mother had bought for her honeymoon, to Florida, with my dad.
“This all you got?”
I nodded. I was ready to become a whole new person. Hard to accomplish that in your same old clothes.
The offer to spend the summer in Maine had come out of the blue on the last day of ninth grade, just four days earlier. (They’d had to cancel the last two weeks of classes on account of a broken water line that flooded the whole first floor of our school, causing a giant mold problem. That was my neighborhood for you.)
Sometime that year my parents had stopped speaking to each other. The two of them moved through the small, dark rooms of our apartment as if there were some kind of radioactive field around the other person’s body—careful not to brush up against each other. I huddled in the corner, trying to keep out of range of the hate waves. When one of them needed to get a piece of information across to the other, they used me as the message bearer.
