We were buried down deep in the back.
* * *
—
For a long time, he couldn’t face it.
He would never go back to the bridge.
What he did was feign alrightness:
He came to work with me.
When our father called, he talked to him.
He was the perfect teenage charlatan.
In the night, he watched the house diagonally across the street, and the shadows moving within. He wondered where the lighter was. Had she left it under her bed? Was it still in the old wooden box down there, with the letter folded within?
There was no sitting on the roof, not anymore—only the front porch, and not sitting, but standing, leaning forward.
* * *
—
One evening he walked to Hennessey, the grandstands gaping casually.
A small crowd was by the stables.
They gathered at the fence.
Grooms and apprentice jockeys all bent down, and for twenty minutes, he watched them, and when they’d dispersed he came to realize; they were trying to free her bike.
Despite every internal talking-to, and the desolate void in his stomach, he found himself gently crouching, and touching the four-digit gauge—and he knew the number instantly. She’d have gone right back to the start of things, and the horse and the Cox Plate without him:
Out of thirty-five races, The Spaniard won twenty-seven.
It was 3527.
The lock came out so easily.
He pushed it back in and muddled it.
The grandstands felt much closer then; both open in the darkness.
In many ways it feels ridiculous, almost trivial—to come back to 18 Archer Street, in the time before her arrival. If there’s one thing I’ve come to learn, though, it’s that if life goes on in our aftermaths, it goes on in our worlds before it.
It was a period when all was changing.
A kind of preparation.
His before the beginning of Carey.
It starts, as it must, with Achilles.
* * *
—