DIED 2005
YOU DON’T WANT YOUR fifteen-year-old son having friends with apartments, friends who are old enough to buy alcohol legally. You will never meet these friends, as I never met this one. I knew his name, Adam, and that was code for every kind of trouble kids can get into in an unchaperoned apartment in Railroad, Pennsylvania. I pictured a place with black lights and Jimi Hendrix posters and a thousand beers soaked into the orange carpet, as if crash pads hadn’t changed a bit since I was a girl.
If I called Vince’s cell phone and he said, We’re at Adam’s, I said, Come home right now! After a while, they stopped chilling there, I was told, because his roommate was sick of all the high school kids. Probably sick of driving back and forth to the liquor store.
Oh, this was a crazy day, this ninth of July. I had to go out at 11:30 in the morning to stop my husband on the lawn tractor and tell him his last brother had died. That afternoon Vince got a call. Adam had drowned in Prettyboy Reservoir, a place they all went swimming every day. He had floundered halfway across and another boy jumped in to help him, not knowing the most basic lifesaving rule. A drowning swimmer will take you down with him—you have to keep your distance, throw him a stick.
The young girl on the cliff, Vince’s age, tried to call for help but she had no service. Screaming as she watched them both disappear. We told him to take his jeans off, we told him to leave his sneakers onshore. Did we tell him he had too much to drink, I thought, and I also thought they would not want to swim anymore at Prettyboy. But there is no way in hell that place is dangerous, Vince told me. Don’t worry.