Now that I’ve told this story, now that the boy isn’t hanging in the dorm any more, and the way he built a city to destroy it and named the sparks between fur and amber, and the way he wanted to protect Carla and me and his mother, will that boy come to mind when the geese take flight, when one call from a lone goose breaks the sky?
After Crisco came that Saturday in December, I packed my things in the dorm with stone blocks this way and stone blocks that way, the dorm made for farm boys to learn more than revenge plays and Newton, and drove through the lawns on the driveway lined by maples where once a kite stuck, a kite made by a boy who brought an ancient art of kite flying to a school built by Du Ponts. Out the gate and through the flat, frozen cornfields of Delaware, to the fields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, I kept driving west and north until I came to this lake, one in the middle of a city, one where I row each morning, and the geese come in low.
Crisco came, too, and she trains for the Olympics, the ones after the ones that didn’t happen in 1980. On Lake Washington she rows in an eight that aims for Mount Rainier, the cox’n calling tens for each rower, each rower giving more than she knows she can endure.
Will the girl who knew bugs and origami, the girl whose wants couldn’t fly or molt or swim, will she take her own shape one day?
Will the Korean American man who could fold just about anything, given enough paper and time, who tried to trade his blood for his sister’s, whose honor turned a school into a parent, will he keep teaching young people to measure the forces acting on them, name the types of resistance to their motion?
I didn’t want to tell all this, the story of how cruel boys can be, the way loneliness tastes sweet and makes you think it’s love. I wish desire hurt like a hangover. I want adults to see past their want and loss. But all I can do is tend a crack I still carry around, a crack that will never fill.
When autumn arrives in Seattle, I take out a single scull on Green Lake. Sometimes when a flock of geese comes in low in the morning, I slow the shell to stopping, hold the blade handles together to keep steady, and I lie down. Under my back, the lake rises and falls. Above me, the gray sky is line after line of geese. In all the sky gray, a boy I remember is a lone goose flying home.