I didn’t see her the night it happened in 1987. She couldn’t call. And everyone had their hands full, driving all the girls home, taking Caroline to the hospital, talking to the police. And arguing. Arguing over who did what, who had been where. And of course, they wouldn’t think to call me, of all people. We’d tried our damnedest to hide from them. I wasn’t sure they even knew my name back then, this townie friend of her brother’s. But I should have known that I couldn’t keep anything from Alice and Tripp Warner. She told me everything, afterward.
No. It couldn’t have been Connor. Tom saw him walking to the party.
From his window, yes. Under the streetlight.
Could you be mistaken?
Well, perhaps you were dreaming.
You’ve always been a sleepwalker, darling.
We would have heard something, surely.
She has a boyfriend, yes. Matt Whitaker.
I don’t know if they’ve been sexually active or not, but it’s a distinct possibility.
Yes, that would explain it. Of course it would.
But we hadn’t. I’d thought about it, thought about it night and day, as boys do, but she wasn’t ready. We’d done just about everything else, but she was younger than I was, and I was willing to wait. I would have waited a lifetime for her. But they didn’t know that, and they used it against her.
And me? Well, I made a mistake too. Instead of telling her I would take my father’s hunting rifle and shoot them all—which is what I considered later that day and every day for weeks—I did the stupidest thing ever. I said the most wrong, dunderheaded, selfish thing I could have said. Her family, me, the police, we all screwed up, and she never forgave us. It ended that day for her, but never for me.
I wanted to be your first, I said, tears stinging my eyes.
Everything I’ve done since, for her, for her family, was to erase those words. I buff them out, year after year, and still, like a tattoo, they remain.
So I fixed their house in August, the roof, the gaping holes, the ripped gutters, the bent porch railing. The neighboring houses were full of children and houseguests; the Brownsteins had their daughter’s wedding on their lawn and rented a whole row of houses for their family. God only knows how much that cost, renting four houses in August. But I didn’t care. I didn’t even see them around me.
I sawed and nail-gunned and hammered away from dusk to dawn, not caring if I was waking up everyone at 7:00 a.m. I hired out the rest of my caretaking work to other guys, delegated all the stupid calls to replace an outdoor umbrella that had blown away or to drain a pool after a kid shit in it. No, the Warners needed me. The house needed me.
I didn’t want their roof to start leaking before the widow’s walk could be sorted out, to ruin the third floor, everyone’s favorite, with the best light and the faraway views. Couldn’t have that. As terrible as it was, Tripp’s fall gave me a chance to upgrade their gutters and redo the pitch of the porch railing. Things they’d never bother to pay for, things I’d always wanted to do, I did. In many ways, the house had never looked better.
I went to the board meeting with the Warners’ lawyer from the Cape, and he asked for the widow’s walk to be rebuilt at the same height, to be grandfathered in. It was built before they changed the height restriction—or so we said. We didn’t really know, and Old Bobby couldn’t remember. As if a ghost had built it, as if it had simply risen one day through the roof. It was taken under advisement. We’ll see what they say and try to rebuild in the autumn. And everything will be like new come next July.
And when the lawyer said those words, a chill went down my spine. Grandfathered. God help me, what a phrase that is to me now. I couldn’t bear to tell Alice on the phone, couldn’t say it. She said the autopsy had indicated Tripp had had a brain tumor. The cancer spread. Making him behave like someone we did and didn’t know. Probably had been there for year, hiding, and no one knew. The signs were all there, she said, as if I didn’t know that. As if she was finally admitting it to herself.
Grandfathered. I don’t think I’ll ever say that word again. Or widow’s walk.
We all need to watch what we say, and what we mean, and how we behave. And be careful, very careful, what we wish for when we reach for the heights. Whether it’s a girl who’s out of your league, or a job, or a deck built on top of a house just a little too high.
Because it can be a long, very long way down. And an even longer climb back up.
The tradition of taking a Warner family photo has ended for good, I suppose. But I can imagine what the next one would look like, the burdens lifted for some. Alice looking lighter, maybe Caroline and Tom too. Who knows?
But portrait or not, they’ll be here next July. So will their house. Alice will come first, stay the summer. The others will come for as long as they can stand to be around each other. I bought them a new ladder and a new axe for their firewood. The wood on them is still blond, fresh.
And me? Well, I’m not going anywhere.
I smile as I say this. Because wasn’t that precisely the problem?