Harry Salinger sits at the workbench in the basement of his house. He looks at a shard of glass through his jeweler’s lens; he holds it delicately between his right thumb and forefinger and turns it around until he is pleased with what he sees.
In a corner the fruit of his hard work has taken shape: the base was easy to fix, considering he had to keep it light and portable, but he knows it will be the metal bars that will make or break his masterpiece. He stands up and slips on his welding goggles.
Lynne Salinger was thirty-nine years old when she found out she was expecting a child. She cried for hours: the precarious routine of her life was about to be shattered, and within her rigid Catholic background an abortion was out of the question.
Her husband, Richard Salinger, forty-one, a uniformed officer with the Seattle Police Department, bought a few rounds of drinks in the bar and at the end of the evening was driven home by his partner.
It was widely known within his precinct that his bullying temperament had cost Richard Salinger a promotion many times over. He had never hit his wife because he did not need to: he did his manhandling out on the street but kept his darkest moods for the home.
Lynne Salinger gave birth to twin boys, Michael and Harry, and immediately sank into three years of undiagnosed postpartum depression; the week after their third birthday she took her life with an overdose of sleeping pills and died as she had lived, with very little fuss.
Her passing became an adverse reaction to prescribed medication, and if anyone at the station wanted to check her death certificate, Richard Salinger would just have to set them straight. It was something Richard did a lot, putting people straight—it was the job and his life and his particular place in the order of things.
Ten years later. Michael and Harry Salinger are riding their bicycles at full speed on the curb, flying toward their house in time for their afternoon curfew. They are tall for their age and blond, their eyes almost colorless. They take after their mother, whom they don’t remember at all: soon they will be taller than Richard Salinger, not that it will do them any good.
They hear it as they are locking the gate behind them: the telephone ringing in the kitchen.
It is an acknowledged fact between them that Michael runs faster.
“Go!” Harry yells.
Michael throws his bike to the ground and legs it to the back door. He grabs the key from the pocket of his jeans, shoves it into the lock, and turns it. He pushes into the kitchen and gets to the phone in one stride. His hand is slick as he picks up the receiver.
“Hello,” he gasps. “It’s Michael. Okay. Yes, sir. Here he is.”
Harry takes the phone from his brother.
“Hello, sir. Yes. Okay. We will.”
He puts the receiver down, and for a moment they stand in the dark room. Then Michael opens the fridge door and starts to make them both peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.
Richard Salinger kept his promise to himself: he brought up the boys alone, in the same house they were born in. A local woman in her fifties, Etta Greene, looked after them and did a little housework while he was out; the rest of the time it was just the Salinger men, as he used to call them.
He knew the boys were afraid of him and enjoyed telling them what he had done at work, especially if any violence had come to pass.
One afternoon when the boys were five, during their playtime, Etta Greene asked Harry to name a color with the letter b. Without hesitation Harry said, “Red.” Etta looked a little disappointed, and Harry didn’t understand why.
As far back as he could remember, the letter b had always been red—it felt red, and it brought a sense of red to any word it was a part of. Even though they sometimes disagreed on what color went with which letter, Michael knew exactly what he meant. It was their mother’s gift, undiagnosed and unacknowledged.
She had considered it a kind of madness, but Lynne Salinger was neither crazy nor cursed, and the only issue with synesthesia is that it is statistically rare and deeply misunderstood. It frightened her that most sounds carried a sense of color, vibrant and beyond her control. She did not cherish nor begin to understand the experience: she endured it and every day tried to suppress it. Then she would think of her husband, and his name would come to her unbidden, in shades of charcoal and red.
Etta Greene assumed that Harry was confused and left it at that.
By the time the boys started school, they knew enough of the world never to mention the hidden colors, not to anyone, especially their father.
When Richard Salinger was shot in the line of duty by an armed robber, he took a bullet in the right knee. Once he left the hospital, he had a limp and a disability pension, both guaranteed as long as he lived.
The stream of visitors and well-wishers who had come by in the early days of his injury became a dribble and then stopped altogether. Six months later, they were completely alone.
One morning, while the boys were at school, Richard Salinger went through their room and found a soiled sheet in a bundle in a corner. When they came home, he was waiting for them in the living room. He was stone-cold sober, and his face was set hard.
“I’m going to ask you one question,” he said. “Be straight with me, and it ends there. Lie to me, and I’ll know it.”
From a plastic bag he pulled out the bundled sheet. Harry’s insides filled with icy water.
“Who did this?”
Salinger knew and didn’t need to ask. He could have washed the sheet and let it go, but he was not that kind of man. He waited. Michael stepped forward. Harry’s eyes grew wide.
“I did, sir,” Michael said. “I’m sorry.”
Richard Salinger’s eyes did not move from Harry’s face. “What have you got to say, boy?”
At ten years of age, Harry knew exactly who he was: a skinny runt with neither guts nor smarts. He knew that, because he had been told enough times. Still, he’d rather get a hiding than let his brother take the rap.
“I—I did it,” he stammered.
“I know,” Richard Salinger said as he stood up. “This is how it’s going to work from now on: when one of you fucks up, the other will be punished. Michael, you’re up.”
Harry Salinger, thirty-seven, crouches in his basement. Sparks from the torch flare across his goggles. It’s not his best work, but he can see the beauty of the idea beyond the faults of his own workmanship, and it pleases him. Salinger peels off his gloves and throws them onto the workbench. Time to go.
In the Olympic National Park, a three-hour drive from Seattle, there is a stretch of ground blessed by old-growth trees and ferns, trunks thick with moss, and twisting paths that tourists travel days to see and take pictures of with their cell phones.
Harry Salinger does not take pictures, and he hardly looks up from the slippery, rocky path. In the depths of winter there are no visitors, and in the gloom of the early evening he takes in every detail of the trail. It is in all likelihood the last time he will have the opportunity to do this.
He bends to check that the laces are properly tied on his walking boots, and then he waits, making sure the last little bit of daylight is extinguished. When the time is right, he’s off. He runs, trusting his memory of the trail, weaving among the trees because a straight run could get him killed; his boots cut and rustle through the greenery, not too fast and not too slow.
In his mind the earth rises to meet his feet and steady his purpose—the forest is on his side. It is the thirty-eighth time he runs the trail, the twenty-first in darkness.