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“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”
“Well, hers either,” I said.
“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes, of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
After a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”
He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”
I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so good at something.”
He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah. You’re right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled out his mostly empty fifth of whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door. “Good-bye, Hazel.”
“Take it easy, Van Houten.”
He sat down on the curb behind the car. As I watched him shrink in the rearview mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it looked like he would leave it on the curb. And then he took a swig.
It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a cloud. It was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air when the walk from his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the doorbell, and Gus’s mom answered.
“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.
She made me eat some eggplant lasagna—I guess a lot of people had brought them food or whatever—with her and Gus’s dad. “How are you?”
“I miss him.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t really know what to say. I just wanted to go downstairs and find whatever he’d written for me. Plus, the silence in the room really bothered me. I wanted them to be talking to each other, comforting or holding hands or whatever. But they just sat there eating very small amounts of lasagna, not even looking at each other. “Heaven needed an angel,” his dad said after a while.
“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and piled into the kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and then watched the kids run around the kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and movement, excited molecules bouncing against each other and shouting, “You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I tagged you you didn’t tag me you missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s a time-out DANIEL DO NOT CALL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not allowed to use that word how come you just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then, chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s parents were now holding hands, which made me feel better.
“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The kids were still singing their dumb-butt song.
“We can check his computer,” his mom said.
“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.
“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the basement, Mark?”
“No idea.”
“Well,” I said, “can I . . .” I nodded toward the basement door.
“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you can.”
I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the TV. His computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it up and then searched for his most recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most recent thing was a response paper to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves, looking for a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through his copy of An Imperial Affliction. He hadn’t left a single mark in it.
