I’ve been thinking of a minivan. The Dodge of my youth—a great, tan whale. I was listening to Oliver Twist, the assigned summer reading for tenth-grade English, on headphones plugged into a cassette player. Dad was driving, and Mom, draped in a map of the American Southeast, sat in the front.

Mark, fourteen, had a Bible in his lap. He was memorizing Philippians. Amos, twelve, in what we called the way-back, leaned forward to touch Mark’s head, and Mark swatted him away, then turned around to pound him in the chest. Jonathan, eleven, with his eyelids flipped out to eclipse his eyeballs with a wet, demonic red, slid his hand under Amos’s butt to give it a squeeze.

“Juicy.”

Mark slammed the Bible. “Mom, Amos won’t stop bothering me.”

“Amos.”

“Jonathan’s touching my butt.”

“Both of you quit it.”

A woman’s voice was playing in my ears: “… imprinted her cold white lips … chafed her breast …” I turned up the volume, closed my eyes, and pictured the girl I loved.

 

There were dips in the interstate like puddles disappearing as we neared them. Dad pulled off the exit into a Cracker Barrel somewhere in Georgia. June heat shimmered off the pavement as we walked, thawing the hours of recycled air. I wore flip-flops, shorts, a T-shirt with the sleeves cut off. Mark, Amos, and Jonathan wore the same, with sleeves, and when Dad gave us a look, we all tucked in our shirts.

Dad carried two identical three-ring binders full of schemes and stratagems—one for the varsity basketball team, the other for our family. He had fashioned a Family Plan with daily, weekly, and yearly activities, one of which was a camp for Christian coaches and their families in the mountains of North Carolina. I had been there every summer of my life. Fifty-one weeks a year were subject to flux, the tedious whims of mere temporality, but that one week, threading the years, carried the scent of permanence.

 

I smell it now in the stack of photos my parents keep in a drawer in their living room, where my father wheezes in his hospice bed. A humidifier shoots a plume of cloud that cloaks the sloping ridges of his shoulders, while his head, a bald summit, juts out.

“Remote,” he whispers.

“Babe,” my mother says. She has forbidden—is trying to forbid—March Madness. “It upsets you.”

“Kentucky,” he wheezes.

She checks her phone. “Trust me, you don’t want to see it.”

“Sweetie.”

Mom rocks forward to stand. “I don’t want your last days tainted. I want you peaceful. Comfortable.” She hands him the remote.

“Truth,” he says, “above comfort.”

But once he sees the score, he turns it off. I return to the photos, hold them up for him. Each one taken on the last day of camp at the wide stone steps of Eureka Hall. The same man came every year with his antique Cirkut camera, and a group of boys—troublemakers whom Dad encouraged us to avoid—starting on the right, would run, ducking down, outpacing the panning camera, to appear on the left like a rival gang of identical twins.

Beforehand would be baptisms in the chapel, and the newly dunked could be spotted in the photo by their bright white sopping robes. Dad, because he was ordained, had been allowed to baptize me, Mark, and Amos, each around seven years old—the age of reason, when we could be trusted to have made the eternal decision for ourselves. Jonathan was the holdout. Every year, he stood off to the side trying to manufacture the certainty that he was saved, but never could.

“Jesus is in your heart,” Mom assured him. “I’m not worried.”

“Just take the plunge,” Dad would say. “When you’re ready.”

Waiting for a table, we wandered the shop. An animatronic parrot repeated our witty barbs.

“Amos is dumb,” Mark said.

“Amos is dumb.”

“Mark likes boys,” Amos said.

“Mark likes boys.”

An old woman materialized from behind some Wooly Willies, and we turned away with embarrassed grins.

“Where y’all from?”

Mom said Orlando.

“Fine-looking boys,” the woman said. “Just need to grow up and give Momma some daughter-in-laws.”

I ordered root beer and chicken fried chicken. Mimicking Dad’s method, I warmed a packet of butter between my palms, mixed it with honey, and spread the famous mixture over a biscuit. Mark asked if we could play checkers until the food came, and we sat by the unlit fireplace moving our pieces. Jonathan came over to pet my arm.

“Muscle man,” he said. “I believe in you.”

“Stop.”

“Oh, muscle man. It’s so like you to say a little thing like that.” Among his peers, Jonathan was macho enough, athletic enough, to get away with this twee persona. I ignored him.

“King me,” I said.

“Grrrrrr,” Jonathan growled. “Do you think you’ll ever king little old me?”

When the waitress had set down every plate, we took our seats and Dad said the prayer. “Father, we thank you…” I heard a slap—Mark, across the table, had his hand on Amos’s cheek, and Amos had three fingers on Mark’s head. With eyes still closed, they were vigorously rubbing to assert their advantage. They grinned and scowled by turns, as though unsure whether this were a game or warfare in earnest.

“Amen.”

“Bow your head,” Amos said. “Bow your smooching head.”

“Turn the other cheek,” Mark said, advancing to the far side of Amos’s face. “Come on, you smooching smoocher!”

“Smooch” was our versatile substitute for obscenities of all kinds.

“My lands,” Dad said. “I will spank the living daylights out of both of you.”

I took from beside the salt the wooden triangle with golf tees. According to the game, I was an “eg-no-ra-moose.” Once, I had made it down to a single tee, which made me “genius,” but never could find my way back to such distinction.

There’s a gesture people make to mean so-so, mediocre—one hand, palm-down, rocking back and forth. Dad used it with reference to men he thought effeminate, men like Mister Rogers on TV, whose show we did not watch. “He’s a little…” Dad would say, rocking his hand, raising his eyebrows. He made the gesture now, nodding toward a man in a vest. We all grinned, fellow initiates in an inside joke, while Mom ignored us.

“These all yours?” the waitress said. “One more and you got a basketball team.”

“Daddy makes five,” Mom said.

“I was gonna say! And Momma’s the coach, huh?”

“That’s right,” Dad said, with a shade of a Southern drawl. He had a way of veering toward the accent of whoever he spoke to. At the bakery where, Saturday mornings, a Korean woman served bear claws and eclairs, Dad would pause and stutter as though he’d forgotten English syntax, and maybe—such were his powers of empathy—he had.

Hotel rooms had a four-person limit, so we entered in waves. Mom and Dad took one bed, me and Mark the other. Jonathan protested, and to silence him I offered up my spot. Mom arranged pillows and blankets for Amos by the window and me between the beds. Dad found ESPN.

As dinner digested, farts flew around the room like the mating calls of exotic birds. “…blameless and pure,” Mark said, repeating the day’s verse, “children of God without fault in a warped and crooked generation. So that you may become blameless and—”

“Pure,” Amos chimed in.

“Children of God without—”

“Butts,” Jonathan said.

Mom already had a pillow on her head. Dad flipped through the channels—Shawshank Redemption, Seinfeld, a local car dealer. Suddenly, he flinched, grimaced, and groaned. Only on occasion, back then, would you see two men kissing on TV, and each time, Dad made plain his disgust—a helpless, visceral revulsion he didn’t show for other sins like theft or cussing.

Once recovered, he continued through the uncharted upper channels and hit on an image that stamped my brain: a pale-skinned Goth girl standing at a mirror, smirking, in her charcoal bra.

“Whoops,” Dad said.

He settled on Rocky, which put him to sleep like a lullaby, and the snoring began. Mark inserted his earplugs, turned off the lamp, and donned his silk mask. Jonathan pried the remote from Dad’s hand, and we continued the movie we’d been watching all our lives.

“Mrs. Sowerberry,” said the woman in my ears, “emerged from a little room behind the shop, and presented the form of a short, thin, squeezed-up woman, with a vixenish countenance.” I wondered about that word, vixenish. It sounded like her, the woman in the mirror, with her smirk, dangerous and knowing.

By the time the movie ended, Jonathan was out. I checked on Amos—also a goner—and taking the remote, I lowered the volume all the way.

The first time around, when a redhead appeared in fishnet stockings, I kept going. My heart was taking off. My thumb slid sweaty on the rubber buttons. The second time, I lingered. There was the Goth girl, getting in bed, and the red-haired woman joining her.

“Gentle,” Mom said.

I just about threw the remote, but changing the channel I composed myself, recalling how she mumbled in sleep. Enough, I thought. I pressed Power, and the room went black.

Even through a comforter, the carpet floor was hard. I tried praying, digging fingernails into my thighs. I was a man stranded in a desert, attempting to run from an oasis of cold, flowing springs. I pressed Power.

This time, the oasis proved more than I’d ever thought possible. The world had pulled out all the stops, and here, at last, the great symphony of nakedness. At first I watched alertly, glancing left and right, as the grating waves of Dad’s snoring poured through the room. Then relaxed. Lay back. I was released into the comforter. In the great haze of a satisfaction tinged but not overwhelmed by guilt, I flipped back to ESPN, pressed Power again, and slept.

 

“Stud,” Dad said, sipping McDonald’s coffee, “you’ll be driving soon.”

“Yes, sir.”

I sat up front while Mom played Would You Rather in the back. Dad’s coffee steamed—he asked for it “scalding.” To keep from spilling at bumps he lifted the cup, so that he always seemed to be making silent toasts to invisible causes.

He grabbed a toothpick and asked if I’d given any thought to college visits. The truth was I had grown up in a short-lived and therefore urgent universe, which had commenced a few thousand years ago and was on the verge of ending. College seemed absurd; every career path was laughable.

“Maybe Oxford,” I said.

“Oxford town. You mean Ole Miss.”

“No, sir. The C.S. Lewis one.”

            The toothpick pressed into his gums. He had long, coffee-stained canines faintly suggestive of a wolf.

“Would you rather drown or fall from a tower?” Mom said. She had a dark streak you might easily miss as it peeked through her Touched by an Angel demeanor.

“Drown,” Jonathan said.

Mark observed that splattering on concrete would be quick.

“Yes,” Jonathan said. “And you only die once.”

“Gotta savor it,” Amos agreed.

“I would want time to pray,” said Jonathan.

“Oh,” Mark said, “you’re so holy, master.”

“And I’d want to be naked.”

“Oh, make way for the holy nudist.”

“Shut the smooch up.”

           Dad ignored the hullabaloo. “I’d put your potential colleges in four categories,” he said. “You’ve got Ivy types, Christian schools, state schools—hold on. Babe? Sweetie. Is this the exit?”

Mom leaned forward. “What?”

“Do I exit here?”

Someone in the back, just then, was filling the van with inhuman screeching.

“Mark—Mark!”

“That’s Jonathan.”

“Jonathan!”

“What do you need, sweetie?”

“I missed it,” Dad said. “Forget it.”

“It’s the next exit,” Mom said.

Dad pressed the toothpick until blood dripped down his fang. “Then you’ve got your liberal arts colleges.”

I pressed the knob to turn on the CD that Katie Lee Mason, the year before, had burned me. I had dreamed the year away, and woke with fists balled up, thinking of her. I shut my eyes and let the first track wash over me with its dense purple barrage of dreampop longing.

She was a year below me. She wore black nail polish, T-shirts of secular bands. At morning and evening worship, she didn’t sing. She didn’t think Jesus liked the songs, and wanted to give him some peace and quiet. Since kindergarten I’d attended the K–12 Christian school where Dad coached, and Katie Lee, who went to public school in Greer, South Carolina, was the first person I met who said she believed in evolution. She asked me questions I didn’t know I’d been waiting all my life to be asked.

Suddenly, Dad shut off the music. I looked at him.

“It was between stations,” he said, removing the toothpick, holding it like the baton of some tiny conductor. “That was static, wasn’t it?”

“That was my favorite song.”

He laughed. We both laughed.

“Sorry, bud,” he said. But he didn’t turn it back on.

We stopped at a restaurant called Hager Farm, and in the ravenous hour of waiting I stood by a wood fence and watched horses. Hips and shoulders gleaming in the evening light. I was struck by their beauty. My mouth hung slightly open, lost in wonder, until I remembered myself and snapped it shut. My brothers were throwing a football. Mom and Dad were looking at a map, laughing, teasing each other. How lucky to fit, by nature, into the shapes demanded of them, to thrive in the assigned containers.

Beyond the fence, lightning bugs made their starry appearance in the dusk, and I wondered: was this encounter, this experience, special? I suspected myself of imposing on the moment out of a wish to feel important, to feel deep, like a poet. Later I would learn it’s all right, natural, to be moved by horses, but I didn’t know that yet.

 

Hidden on Katie Lee’s wrist I had found, the previous year, a tattoo of an equation. We were on rocking chairs at Eureka Hall facing mountains in dusky hues of slate blue and lavender. I wanted to ask her on a hike to the summit, just as Mark—to our family’s long-standing amusement—had asked his crush when he was only seven. I held her wrist and read: e^πi+1=0. She couldn’t get over the i, she said—that you could raise something to the power of an imaginary number and still get a value that was real.

I had kept the CD in my underwear drawer in the room I shared with Amos. When he was gone I would take it out, watch the light it cast on the walls, study the inscription—“sehnsucht mix”—and the drawing in green Sharpie: a dented watering can spilling onto a flamingo. Probably, I realize now, she had dashed it off without a thought, but to me the dented can became an icon in which my dreams were contained and hidden, and the flamingo stood for the quiet, off-kilter poetry filling the world if you looked for it. This year, no wussing out. I would ask her on the hike.

As we walked into a gas station, my brothers’ buzz cuts glimmered in the sun. I had recently ditched our communal haircut, growing out a wave I spiked in the front. Jonathan called it the Tsunami. Periodically, he checked in with my forehead to make sure the coastal people, represented by pimples, were prepared for catastrophe.

I asked Mom if I could get a chocolate milk.

“We’re eating soon, Mar—Jona—what’s your name? Cooper. Can you wait?”

Jonathan kept touching my arms, saying, “Squeezy squeezy. Get yourself some Muscle Milk.” Really what he touched—and he seemed to know it—was my shame. Making an effort to be attractive was a shameful thing to me, a public admission that I myself, as I was, was not enough. Jonathan was constantly shining a light on this fact and making me look at it. While I peed, he pinched my butt.

“Fresh and firm. The squats are working, brother.”

“Stop.”

As I washed my hands, he tested my hair.

“Stop it.”

“Just checking in, brother. I bet the ladies will love our Tsunami. I bet Katie—”

He didn’t finish, because I slapped him across the face. The water from my hand gleamed on his red cheek. He looked shocked. He’d been playing at the boundary of normal engagement, and I had sprinted clear across.

With a victim’s dignity, he fell silent till lunch. He wanted me to tell on myself, to explain his icy silence, but I refused. Nobody noticed until he broke down in the Cracker Barrel.

“He wouldn’t stop,” I said.

“You,” he sobbed, “are a mean person.”

I took a big, swaggering bite of grits.

“I saw what you were watching,” he said. “On TV.”

The grits stuck to the roof of my mouth like a ball of sand.

“I thought you were punching up under the blanket to cheer for Rocky. But I looked and there were just—privates.”

“Privates?” said Dad.

“Ladies’ privates,” Jonathan said, his tearful eyes triumphant. “And Cooper pointing the remote, slobbering.”

Mom looked embarrassed.

“What were you watching?” Dad said.

“I was half-asleep.”

“Your eyes were so wide-open! You went to that channel on purpose.”

I spit my grits into a napkin and retreated to the porch where rocking chairs creaked in the wind. Lightning glimmered on the gray horizon.

“Let him die,” I prayed.

Amos and I were shooting guards, Mark played small forward, but Jonathan—he was Dad’s point guard, a prodigy in ball-handling, seeing the court, leading the team. He had the wolf in him. Lately he had taken to walking with his legs spread strangely apart as if to make way for a massive package. He adjusted himself constantly, flaunting his supposed stuff, yet curiously refused to change clothes in front of teammates or even family, which seemed to me not shy, not modest, but pompously aloof.

“Please let him die.”

My God, of all the prayers…

After a minute, Dad came outside.

“Come here,” he said, and led me to the van.

He opened the trunk and three bags toppled out, one of which he began unzipping. Going for his belt, I thought. It had been years since I’d felt its cracking leather. Instead, he handed me a book.

“It’s like a drug,” he said. “It is a drug. It’s everywhere now.”

The book was called Every Young Man’s Battle.

“Satan is a cunning head coach,” he said. “He’s got to be outsmarted, son. Out-strategized.”

A sob pushed through my chest, and Dad held me, and he let me cry on his shoulder until I’d wrung my body, like a towel, of every drop.

 

I sat in the way-back with Jonathan. He was staring out the window. Dad was driving, Mom singing hymns, Mark and Amos on the verge of bloodshed, when everything went quiet. By a certain incline, by a particular flickering of sunlight through hickory woods, we felt it. We’d arrived. Winding upward, we looked out at the great rhododendrons, the sloping fields where we had played and would again play ultimate frisbee, tug-of-war. We wondered if the Cornetts were here, the Locklears, and who the new families would be, and the sunlight, which was to follow us flickering through our lives, touched our faces.

Touched his face. I clutched and held the memory still, six years later. If I kept one image, I wanted this one—Jonathan looking out that window. My rage melting away. He seemed to be nodding at the sunlight, saying yes to the trees. He seemed to lean outside the edge of time, I remember.

 

The main lobby had leather sofas, a hearth, an old piano. Boys were banging on the keys until a girl barged in with the Auburn fight song. We collected our themed Bibles, T-shirts, lanyards with our nametags. “Whatever Is Noble” was that year’s theme—Philippians 4:8. I saw some boys I knew and greeted them absently, glancing around.

Katie Lee didn’t own a computer, so we’d written letters. She liked reading about my life in Orlando, how my family scorned California’s Disneyland and avoided Daytona Beach with its swarms of tourists. I had tried to write calmly. I’d kept a picture of Hemingway over my desk to restrain me, but as summer neared I couldn’t help myself—I tore him down, tacked up Fitzgerald and Salinger, and let the adverbs fly.

She came in laughing, with her luggage and her brothers. In the year of her absence I’d sculpted her. To find her in the flesh, having changed in ways that contradicted my imagining, was a shock. Her nails were pink, her smile untroubled, her shirt an empty canvas. I had the impression my Katie Lee had gone into hiding, and I wanted to find her.

“Hey Cooper,” she said, extending one arm for a side hug.

“I remember you,” I said.

The afternoon passed in a blur of pangs and elations as she watched me play dodgeball, as she hid in clusters of girls or spoke with Rowan Birch, a slight boy who made her laugh relentlessly. I thought it was shyness, or a game. Her letters had been eager.

At evening worship, she not only sang but lifted her hands. She sat by Rowan. “Now see,” the preacher said, “if you put new wine in old wineskins—or as us Baptists prefer it, new grape juice in old grape juice skins—those suckers gonna pop wide-open.” Jonathan nudged me, nodded toward Rowan, and made Dad’s gesture with his hand. I shrugged. I couldn’t be bothered with anything, not God, not Jonathan’s appeasements, nothing but the uncharted depths of Katie Lee Mason.

 

I didn’t know how to flirt. As she waited in line for breakfast, I came up behind her and whispered a line from her mixtape: “Desperate desires and unadmirable plans.”

She threw a hand on her chest.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t do that!”

We didn’t talk, really, until the next day. Our feet were in the creek growing numb as sunlight glittered on the stones. I handed her a flower. “It’s a love-in-a-mist,” I said.

Katie Lee was quiet. She gazed at the water looking hypnotized. I took her left wrist, turned it over, turned it back.

Blank.

I thought I was in a dream.

“It was henna,” she said. “Temporary.”

I repeated the word, picturing Gehenna from the gospels, the trash heap, hellfire. I had been standing on that tattoo like a trap door that fell away.

“I missed you,” I said.

“I missed you.”

“Why are you always talking to that kid?”

“Rowan? He was telling me about a horse he rode. Just some brown horse. He said it shined like shooken up tinfoil or something. Like riding the utterance ‘Let there be light.’ I never heard anyone talk like that.”

“What is he?” I said. “A fag?”

I don’t know where the word came from. I had never said it before. I’d barely heard it.

Katie Lee squinted. “No. He’s a poet.” She tossed the flower and reached for her flip-flops.

I grabbed her ankle.

She kicked my hand away.

“All year,” I said, “I wondered about that last track. ‘Turning to you is like falling in love when you’re ten.’ Did you mean that about me?”

“Good lord! I didn’t make that CD for you or anyone. It’s just some songs.”

She turned her back and walked down the hill, down the nights and days, down into the deflated future. I sat there skipping stones till I couldn’t feel my feet at all.

 

Come evening I played happy, self-fulfilled, and didn’t look when she passed me at dinner. I dominated late-night basketball, but she didn’t notice. She was on the sideline talking with Rowan, little thirteen-year-old Rowan, whose hillbilly ears protruded from his head like moth wings poised for takeoff.

The next day, I barely existed. I wanted to sit alone and listen to ballads of devastation, but I didn’t know any that weren’t from her. Almost against my will I took out her letters, hunting for words like “forever.” Over time I had absorbed, by some Protestant osmosis, an epistemology of the page. People talked and their words disappeared in air, but here, under my finger, fixed in ink, was a solid utterance. Then again, Katie Lee wrote in pencil. The graphite taunted me.

Dad came into the cottage shaking his head, and Jonathan with him, giggling, his eyes red and puffy, sharing some joke.

“Unbelievable,” Dad said, and seeing me he asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

“Tired.”

He tossed me my lanyard, and we walked down the sloping street to the main building, Jonathan lagging behind with his labored swagger, which looked more like an elaborate limp. He was still giggling, rubbing his puffy eyes.

At lunch, Rowan’s dad—a giant, shaggy beast who coached football in Macon, Georgia—stopped at our table. “Gotta be careful with your hands,” he said, “when these Hawks boys is eating. Might lose a finger.”

“Coach Birch,” Dad laughed, “they’re like piranhas on a pork chop.”

Rowan, holding a tray behind his father, forced a grin. As he squeezed by, I saw on the collar of his oxford shirt a smudge of red that was neither blood nor ketchup. Katie Lee followed, looking directly through me, as though my body were an optical illusion.

I skipped chapel. Mom stopped by the cottage, and I said I was sick with altitude. She sat on my twin bed, and the old springs moaned. She looked vaguely sad, preoccupied, as she told me I needed to be in the annual photo.

I am holding that photo now. The mischievous boys, like human bookends, appear on the left side and, in reverse order, on the right, one young straggler looking blurry. Katie Lee sits with her family looking permanently happy. Mom and Dad hold hands, and on the step beneath them, in matching “Whatever Is Noble” T-shirts, I sulk, Mark beams, Amos blurs with a sneeze, and Jonathan sits tall with a serious expression. I point him out to my wheezing father, who shuts his eyes.

“Gonna see him,” he says. “Soon.”

My three-year-old son points to the photo. “He died?”

“Uncle Jonathan died,” I say. “In an accident.”

“In a boat?”

“A boating accident.”

“Why he died?”

“People die sometimes, buddy.”

He points to my young face. “Why you din’t smile?”

I stare at that face, full of pain and longing. You will have a beautiful wife, young man, you will have a beautiful son. And you will still carry that pain and longing. I am still you. I am still on the steps…

 

I hurried back to the cottage and lay for hours in a darkening solitude. I skipped dinner, youth group, basketball. I wanted a graveyard to walk through. I wanted to make some irrevocable gesture that would vent my pain and certify it was real, it mattered.

I hiked with a flashlight up the two-mile path crowded with flowering dogwoods and stood at the summit overlooking black shapes in the wind. How could it be that you wanted someone so intensely, and the universe didn’t just tear in two, and she appeared? I untucked my shirt, took out the CD, and hurled the disc like a frisbee into the dark.

“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck your imaginary i.”

As the wind relented, I heard a distant twittering, which bloomed into laughter. Twigs began to snap. I flashed my light into a pale, startled face.

“Rowan?”

“Who are you?” he said.

Someone behind him started running, so I ran, too, instinctively, already knowing who it was. The beam of my flashlight danced on the back of a blue hoodie as we sprinted downhill. I closed the gap, and we both slowed down, panting on the narrow path. Finally, I raised my light. The suspicion in my stomach flopped and squirmed like a caught fish. It was Jonathan. His face sweaty and red.

“Smooch-a-doodle-doo,” he said, flipping his eyelids. “We got you. You were scared.” He was trying to laugh it off.

“Why’d you run?”

His lips were glossy. Bright scarlet.

“What were you doing?” I said.

He lurched toward me, and dodging him I tripped on an exposed root.

“I just want to hug you,” he said.

I sprang up from the dirt rubbing my arm where his lips had grazed my skin. A guttural noise came out of me.

“Please,” he said. “You sound like Dad when he saw those—on TV.”

He charged again, and I stiff-armed his chest.

“Please.”

“What were you doing?”

A creek hummed rushing near us. The night, opening out through a glade, had turned misty.

“I guess,” he said, “I love him? Not like a friend. Like Adrian loves Rocky. I thought of him all year and I can’t take it.”

“Well that is sweet.” Rowan had crept down the trail unnoticed. “You got a sweet kid brother here, Cooper.” He shielded his eyes, ducked under some leaves, and putting an arm around my brother, he asked if I would mind.

“Mind?”

“I feel like I’m looking God in the face.”

I dropped the beam down into the dirt.

Rowan lowered his voice. “Figured I’d tell you at the peak, but I may as well now. We ain’t going to make it, friend. My folks got me in that therapy thing and—well, aren’t I too old for you? I didn’t know you were in love.”

Jonathan whispered, “Let’s talk up there.”

“No, no. No need. It’s a phase, you know? Best nip it in the bud.” He kissed Jonathan’s head and started downhill, but after a couple of steps he turned around. “My daddy asked me today, he says, ‘Rowan, why define yourself by a thing that tempts you? It’s like if I was to say I’m angry, I’m part of the short-tempered community, come to our parade.’ And isn’t he right? Every year, on the last night of camp, I feel like all things are possible. Jesus healed lepers and the lame. Anyway.”

He turned to walk.

I shone my light along the footpath.

“Much obliged,” Rowan said, turning half around. “Eyes will adjust.”

I turned the light back on Jonathan, who jerked away. I turned it off. A quarter moon cast pale contours on the treetops like nets of silver. Jonathan walked, and I followed, into the glade, which opened on a creek, a wooden footbridge, and the Dogwood Knob.

Families came here for pictures. Two overhangs jutted out—the Fangs, they called them. The photographer would stand on one while the family, on the other, posed, a bit of rock beneath them, then the air.

Jonathan walked along the farther Fang and sat at the edge, legs dangling. I sat on a boulder behind him and looked out at the mist and the moonlight.

“Your hair is down,” he said.

“Katie Lee dumped me.”

“I know. She told Rowan something changed and she didn’t know what.”

I asked if she told Rowan everything.

“Pretty much. Calls herself his hag.”

“What’s that?”

“I guess there’s a special word for when boys like us have a friend.” Jonathan’s voice was hard, dammed up. “I’m done with basketball. Dad wants me to be John Stockton. I want to be Iverson. I want to be Steve Nash.”

“You can’t quit.”

“Dad says my follow-through should look like a swan, but I’m always afraid my wrist will look soft and people will know.”

“People don’t want to know,” I said. “There’s nothing to smooching know.”

“There smooching is.”

“You’re eleven.”

“I’m done.”

He leaned forward, looked down. I held my breath. I braced myself to move quickly.

“I won’t tell,” I said.

He chucked something into the dark, and I asked what it was.

“Lip gloss,” he said. “Mom never used it.”

A faint howling carried over the creek—coyote, most likely, though I pictured a rare red wolf, a stray that wandered in from distant woods.

“I saw when you were crying on Dad’s shoulder,” he said. “At that Cracker Barrel. I watched through a window. I was so jealous. Then this morning, I blurted it out.”

“Blurted what out?”

“Just like—‘I love Rowan.’ Dad’s coffee breath was puffing in my nostrils. The louder I talked the lower his voice got, like he was far away. He said, ‘Stud—son—I failed you.’ He was about to start crying on my shoulder. My shoulder. So I said sorry, Dad, I’m sorry, it’s just a prank.”

“What’d he say?”

“Never do that again.”

And you didn’t. When you died on July 4, 2009, at seventeen, no one knew. You were straight for all the world, a point guard, Kentucky-bound. I clutched and held still the image of you in the minivan, by the window, in sunlight, pushing away the question: was it an accident? I left the question aside, I left you straight. It wasn’t my secret to tell. And now, as Dad is dying—what would be the point?

 

Wind swept over the mountain, pushing wide the curtains of mist so that stars, lucid and fine, appeared in fleeting gaps. I stood up. “We should be like Paul,” I said. “Like John the Baptist. We should live and breathe whatever is noble, excellent, whatever’s pure and praiseworthy.”

“You missed one,” Jonathan said. “Whatever is true.”

I remembered his eyes, puffy and red, when he’d waltzed giggling into the cottage with Dad. I thought he’d laughed himself to tears. I sat on the ground and scooted slowly until my legs dangled with his.

He leaned forward, staring into the dark. “What if I fell?”

I grabbed his elbow, and he swatted my hand away.

“Jonathan.”

He held up his hand and pointed to his wrist. “None of you noticed. Only Rowan.”

“I don’t see anything,” I said. But then I saw them. Faint marks. A blue crosshatch in the moonlight. I rubbed my thumb over the scratches.

“At first I thought—if I make a cut each time I think of boys, I won’t think of boys. But the cuts felt—good.”

He leaned farther, then farther, and panicking I lunged and tackled him and pinned him to the rocky ground.

“Idiot! I wasn’t going to jump, I’d rather drown.”

Flush with adrenaline, on an impulse to snap at him or to lighten the mood I said, “Well, there’s the creek.”

“Okay,” he said.

“Okay what.”

He slipped away and took off. I turned on the flashlight to find him booking it toward the footbridge, veering down, past the steps, to a flat stretch of rushing water.

“Dude, what are you doing?”

He removed his shoes, socks, hoodie, his shirt and his shorts and underwear, and scattered them on the grass. He stepped into the creek, which reached his knee, and at once—as if it weren’t ice-cold—he lay on his back, fully submerged, his feet downstream from his head.

I ran, splashed, fell, and jammed my knees on the stones of the streambed. I shone the light on his face—his eyes closed underwater—and with the other hand I hoisted him up.

“Do it,” he said, shaking with cold.

The light caught his legs, and I gasped.

“Jonathan—”

His inner thighs were scarred and scratched, his groin cut up. The cuts gleaming raw. His scrotum dotted with punctures. His penis—my flashlight dropped into the creek—like something hardly salvaged.

“Jonathan.”

He squirmed and slipped from my hand, his back crashing on the stones. I clamped both arms around his body, and he punched me hard in the jaw.

“Cooper, do it!”

Without plan or intention, yielding to the rush of his will, I lowered him gently, planted my knee in the creek, and placed my hand on his throat. He patted my arm as if to say yes, this is the way. I couldn’t see, but felt him shaking, praying his final prayers, and I wanted to remove him from pain. I wanted him out of the dark, lonely, lacerated world. I wanted Moses drowned in the Nile and Jonah in the whale, this world wasn’t worth it, everything mercilessly veiled, unknowable.

But he squeezed my arm three times. I realized what he meant. As the katydids trilled, as crickets chirped and the leaves like clouds of witnesses whispered in rippling tongues, I released his neck, stooped down, and from the wounded angry hungry underground of my emptiness I screamed the baptismal formula, and I pulled him up and up, so that he stood beside me, dripping, shaking.

“Why did we—Dad will be—so mad.”

We walked to the grass, and delicately I dressed him.

“I think there’s Neosporin in the van,” I said, guiding his arm through a sleeve.

 

It isn’t my secret to tell. But when they meet in the next life, I want them to meet on honest terms. “Truth above comfort.” I want my father to know Jonathan was baptized. I want you, Dad, to run, like the father in the parable, to embrace your son.

Or will it be my brother running? I see you galloping, Jonathan, hear you saying, “Dad, Dad…” and the perfect words I can’t yet hear, the words I’m still learning.

I’ll tell him. It won’t kill him, and if it does, he’s dying anyway. I want him to see you as I did, shivering wildly on the mountain. I want him to hold you as I held you, making you warm. To tie your shoes in double knots, to tuck in your shirt and pull the hoodie over your head. I want him to see the two of us, trembling, as dawn is breaking red—how we walk slowly down the switchbacks, terrified, broken wide-open, and you walk a little ahead of me, in the light, and you walk like the son of God.