We can’t do anything.
One of us writes, and one of us reads.
We can’t do anything but me tell it, and you see it.
We hit it, like this, for the now.
As we watch them both walk toward it—The Surrounds, the very last time—the past tucks close inside me. So much of that time would lead them there: to each approaching footsteps.
There was Zone and then the Regionals.
Anniversary and State.
There was Tommy’s quadruple animals.
As New Year passed into February, there was Clay and the nuisance of injury (a boy with broken-glass feet), and the promise, or more like a warning:
“I win State and we’ll go and get him, okay?”
He was referring, of course, to Achilles.
* * *
—
I could go in all sorts of orders here, in many kinds of ways, but it just feels right to start there, and thread the rest toward it:
How it was on the anniversary.
A year since Penelope’s death.
In the morning that day in March, all of us woke up early. No work that day, and no school, and by seven we’d been to the cemetery; we’d climbed up over the graves. We put daisies down in front of her, and Tommy looked out for our dad. I told him he should forget it.
By eight we started cleaning; the house was filthy, we had to be ruthless. We threw out clothes and sheets. We stamped out knickknacks and other crap, but preserved her books and bookshelves. The books, we knew, were sacred.
There was a moment when all of us stopped, though, and sat on the bed, on the edges. I was holding The Odyssey and The Iliad.
“Go on,” said Henry, “read some.”
The Odyssey, book twelve:
“From the flowing waters of the River of Ocean my ship hit the open sea…where ever-fresh Dawn has her dancing lawns, and the sun would soon be rising….”
Even Rory was silent, and stayed.
The words plowed on and the pages turned; and us, in the house, and drifting.
That bedroom went floating down Archer Street.
* * *
—
In the meantime, Clay stopped competing barefoot, but hadn’t been wearing shoes.
In the training, we’d kept it simple.
We ran the early mornings.