Strange details stuck with me. Time: 11:40 p.m. A knock at the door like a stick on a trash can. Jack Song stood there with Terence. Jack Song was jeans and a T-shirt in the cold, and Terence was plaid bathrobe and matching slippers. Jack’s big hand, white on Terence’s dark neck.
Jack’s sentences were words like “Excuse me,” “terrible,” and “asked to speak with you.”
Something in me was ringing, like that tin can hit by a stick.
“Come in,” I said. My robe thin in the cold of them passing, and Jack Song’s hand on Terence.
They bent down at the same rate, both the same way, to sit.
Terence looked straight ahead, not at me, at nothing. His eyes were wide open, like windows without curtains.
“We didn’t know. My friend. Flies. How we knew. Dead. We ran.” Each word was flat like he had to discover each word before he said it, and what he discovered was the shell of the word. The ringing in me had a hole in the center; the sound was circular and echoed.
Jack Song kept his hand on Terence. Jack Song affectionate.
“And Tommy, he froze. On the corner, went stiff, slammed the wall. We kept running.” Terence looked up into Jack’s eyes, then turned to look at mine. Terence’s eyes were windows with no light getting through.
Next to Terence, Jack was gone. His face was the image of a face, not the thing itself. The ringing in me turned to clicking, the stick on the can, now a clapper on a broken bell, the sound dry.
11:50 p.m.: Jack Song left Terence with me. Terence quit talking altogether. His eyes were windows with no light.
12:10 a.m.: The headmaster called.
“Is it true?” I said to Mr. White.
“Regrettably. Alex Jeffers went with Kyle in the ambulance. The family’s on the way.” White’s voice sounded like a radio announcer at a sporting event. His voice was wrong.
“Is Kyle okay?”
“Don’t know. In the meantime, please keep Terence with you.”
“Anything else?”
“Yes, you must watch for contagion.”
Bumps on skin? Quarantines? I had no idea.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
12:15 a.m.: A glass of milk. Terence swallowed hard, looked down after each gulp. He moved off the couch long enough for me to unfold it into a bed, put sheets and blankets on. The covers up to his neck made his head small, and his fingers curled around the ends. He looked up at the ceiling. The tight curls on his forehead were soft.
Terence staring at the ceiling, me sitting on the edge of the fold-out couch, the world was my refrigerator turning off, the click of the clock flipping numbers, and a Canada goose flying over. A lone goose, one cry, two tones, one breaking into the other, over and over, long and raw in the night quiet.