And Sons. David Gilbert
walking through snow.”
“At two in the morning?”
It was typical of his brother not to notice his side of the offense. “Yes,” Jamie said, “at two in the morning, thank you, and it’s cold, and I’m tired, and I’m in a graveyard visiting Sylvia Weston.”
“Sylvia Weston?”
“Yes.”
“Sexy Sylph died?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus, how?”
“Breast cancer,” Jamie said, the shovel and flashlight awkward in his other hand. “I don’t really want to talk about it right now.”
“I always liked her. She was my favorite of all your girlfriends.”
“Mine too.”
“Fucking terrible,” Richard muttered. “Between Sylvia Weston and Charlie Topping. Anyway, I’m calling to tell you that I am going to go to New York, arriving late Monday, with the whole family. The kids will miss some school but I figure they can finally meet their grandfather. He didn’t sound good on the phone, out of it, you know, not all there. Sounded kind of desperate. It was weird. Certainly not the dad I remember. You need to come home, he kept on saying, like he had swallowed someone else’s voice. But I was hoping, I don’t know, I was hoping we might catch up as well. I know Candy and Chloe and Emmett would love to see you. But we can talk details later. How many years did you and Sylph date?”
“What?” Jamie asked, struggling over a snowdrift.
“How long did you date Sylvia?”
“Almost three years,” he said, though the truth was a little over two.
“Can’t believe she died.”
“I know.”
“She was so sweet. Dad had such a crush on her. We all did.”
While Jamie was always considered to be the more sensitive of the Dyer boys, Richard the rougher, mainly because of his teenage years of fighting and bullying, his general troublemaking, in truth Richard was the one who teared up easily, who consistently found the world unfair, who, especially after having children, flashed almost daily on images of Emmett and Chloe’s demise, terrified and helpless, seeing them in planes falling, in bird-flu epidemics, in futile moments of save-me-Dad-please, Richard doing the eggshell walk across fate, while Jamie, forever half-stoned and fortunate, poked his fingers into the sores, like a scientist more curious about the symptoms than the cure.
“Give my condolences to the family,” Richard said.
“What? Oh yeah sure.” And with that the brothers hung up.
Up ahead Myron planted his shovel into the snow. “Here we are.”
“Positive?”
“As positive as a poorly educated guess.”
The two of them started digging through a winter’s worth of weather, like airy dirt, Jamie mused, descendant of clouds. Yes indeed, I’m stoned, he thought. After shoveling up great wedges of this non-earth earth, they scraped against something hard. A headstone. SYLVIA CARNE · MOTHER · WIFE · SISTER · DAUGHTER. Jamie knew her primarily as Girlfriend. She was perhaps the most beautiful girl he had ever known, Sylvia Weston, blond but not obviously blond, with permanently chapped lips and a flinty nose, her smile the smile of someone who has found you first in a game of sardines. Sylph, as she was known in those days, was a bit of a hippie. She ate all her food using a single wooden spoon and laughed at herself for doing so, a raspy laugh, a great-grandmother’s laugh, Oma of some sturdy Nordic stock, Jamie would tease, as they smoked pot in those surrounding New Hampshire woods. Even then Jamie understood that her face was a face he should remember, kissing her forehead, her neck, tossing all those details forward like Hansel with his bread crumbs, so that decades later he might find his way back to her Finesse-scented hair and her love-bead necklace and her peasant skirt exposing a single black freckle on a sea of inner amber. Jamie and Sylvia dated until the summer after graduation. They loved each other yet were realistic and put their relationship on hold for college (she was heading to Middlebury), which soon became permanent except for a few brief but never very happy returns.
Many of my Exeter classmates still shake their heads at the mention of Sylvia Weston. She’s like an old high school injury that flares up during semi-erotic play. Back then we all knew she was having intercourse, more than intercourse, every kind of course with Jamie, from sophomore spring until graduation, sex and more sex, Jamie and Sylvia holding hands in the quad, yet we knew, the sweaty undercurrents of those public displays. They were magical in that way, adults among us children, the hopeful examples of what we might achieve if we ever fell in love.
Myron hit the coffin earth.
It was last July when she tracked Jamie down. He was in Caracas, in its outlying child-infested slums, when a mutual friend managed to get in touch with him. Sylvia Weston needs to talk, that was the message, and Jamie’s first reaction was, Oh shit, she’s pregnant. “I swear that’s what I thought,” he told her when he finally reached her by phone, “like my sperm was lying in wait all these years, a sleeper cell suddenly activated.”
“Funny.”
“I was a teenager again.”
“If only.”
“Well, yeah,” Jamie said, unsure of the subtext.
“It’s amazing I never did get pregnant,” Sylvia said. “We were hardly careful.”
“Totally.”
“You realize most of our fooling around happened outside the comfort of bed.”
“We made due.”
“Yeah, all over the place.”
“The Latin room,” he said.
“Oh jeez, the Latin room. And upstairs in the library.”
“Don’t think I’ve ever been more scared. You realize next May is our—”
She—“I know”—interrupted before Jamie could say “twenty-fifth reunion.”
“I don’t think I can go,” he told her.
“Yeah, me neither.”
“Really? I would have thought—”
And that’s when she told him. She spoke in unflinching terms, well versed in the broader conversation, its grimmer meaning, to the point of annoying Jamie, as if she owed him some shudder and tears, as if he were still the first instead of the hundredth, the thousandth, the old boyfriend in the far back row of her life. He offered her words of support, which sounded hollow, then he offered her a few battlefield sentiments, which she brushed away with a single statement of fact: “I’m going to die soon.”
“Oh, baby, I’m sorry.”
“Me too,” she said, hinting at the strain behind all this restraint.
“So so sorry. If there’s anything I can do …”
“Actually, that’s why I’m calling. I need help with something.”
“Of course, anything.”
“I have this idea for a video project that maybe only you would appreciate.” She went on to explain how she wanted to document herself answering the question, How are you? every day at exactly 12:01 P.M. right up until the very end. “I know it sounds ridiculous but it’s something I want to do. Just answer that question with complete honesty.”
“It’s not ridiculous at all,” Jamie said.
“And I want you to direct it.”
“Me?”
“It won’t take up too much time,” she said with sobering common sense.
“It’s