Where any story begins is arbitrary, threads pulled and worried till a mat of events untangles (or does not), but the end of any story is fixed: and then he died, and then she died, and then they all died.
My own death will come in Greece, on the island of Naxos, where, in the waters on the west side, I have discovered a sunken ruin. This will happen in the summer of 2001, two months before the World Trade Center falls from the sky. My German shepherd rescue dog—I’ve named her Sweetie—will stay with Estelle while I rent a cottage on Naxos for the month of July. Each day on Naxos, I put on fins and a mask and stumble across a rocky beach to stare down in wonderment at an expanse of paving stones fitted tightly together more than two thousand years ago. The sea is scattered with ruins like this—shoes and ships and sealing wax—but this lost pavement, this fragment of what was once a town square, enthralls me.
I discovered Naxos near the end of my relationship with Meg. When we first arrived on the ferry, the sight of the enormous stone lintel set atop tall marble columns at the entrance to the harbor transfixed my attention. The building it would have belonged to was never completed, so all that remained was an empty frame. After Meg left me, I kept returning to Naxos because the sight of the empty frame comforted me.
I don’t know whether individual stories can still matter, but I do know that if Ruby had not appeared on television claiming that her children had been kidnapped, if I had not recognized her immediately and thrown myself headlong into her life, if I had not searched for my brother and found him, I would never have attempted to write this account. Words that matter must be fitted hard against each other like these stones, made into a surface that can hold weight and power, and the result cannot simply be an empty frame. I hope this frame is not empty. I hope the story of what happened in my family matters, because, after my death, the rise and organization of the white supremacists will continue.
I still don’t know whether my brother was evil or damaged or simply a twig floating on a river of historical events. But I do know that when he was a boy he killed a man in self-defense and did not know how to inherit that violence. And neither of us knew how to inherit our white skin after the civil rights movement made that whiteness visible. In this narrative, I have tried to claim my skin in a way that disavows its supremacy, but I cannot untangle every knot or illuminate all opacities, even in my own character. I know, however, that my brother died because of my actions and that I became, like him, someone who could spend the lives of others for my beliefs.
All stories may end the same, but before this one reaches its inevitable conclusions, other important things must happen.
Claudia must publish her book, God Loves the Children of Nod, in which she attacks me fiercely for arrogance and racism. Her book will be a financial and critical success, but Claudia will end up nearly a suicide like her mother, and another treatment center and a halfway house will be necessary before she can embrace her own survival. At first, I will blame myself for the loss of her sobriety, until someone in AA gently points out that once again my ego is trying to take responsibility for someone else’s choices.
My mother will shrivel and die, and I will finally come to understand that she was neither her mind or her body, because the one she inhabited for eighty years shrank and emptied itself, yet I could still feel her presence. I will bury her husk next to Lucia’s, because Lucia surely needed another mother, just as she needed a father who wanted her and a country that understood her value.
Giang’s restaurant will become a destination prized by food critics who appreciate the irony involved in creating superbly original fare within consciously clichéd decor. I will never eat at Giang’s restaurant. I will lose touch with him and with Santane also, but not before she writes to tell me that Ed Blake now lives in his log house with a young woman named Olivia.
Lila Ames will die before me, and for her funeral I will send Sister Irene a blue silk cloth embroidered with rhinestones to drape across her body. Afterward, my connection to Sister Irene will fade quickly too. I’ve always been a person who knows how to leave.
I will refuse to speak again with Blake or with any government representative, and, when I am forced to be deposed about the fire that killed my brother, I play dumb, a pose that becomes easier and easier.
I still attend AA meetings almost daily, and since I say so little, people begin to assume I am wise. I sponsor a number of women, but this sponsorship consists mostly of offering phrases like “Go to meetings,” “Work the Steps,” and “Pray, even if you don’t understand what it is.” People in the program seem to have trouble breaking away from my gaze. “It’s your kindness,” they say, or, “It’s your eyes.”
Sweetie will take daily walks with me on the beach, each of us favoring a damaged leg. Sweetie will never be leashed or confined like Ruby and Lila Ames, so the Isle of Palms Animal Control officers will return her and write out their tickets without much comment. Perhaps they have decided I am wise too. Or simply crazy.
Estelle and Dan Peters will marry, and they will found a clinic on Johns Island named for her family, the Manigault Center for Health and Prosperity. Estelle, past ordinary childbearing age, will, with the miracle of hormones, conceive twins who are born perfect, a boy and girl, a jackpot.
The night the millennium changes and the computerized world does not implode I will spend with Dan and Estelle and their families and friends. Estelle is not yet pregnant, but she is rambunctiously happy. There will be more than a hundred guests, many of them children, at the family’s compound on Johns Island, and we will eat fried chicken and biscuits and grits, and there will be roasted oysters and even a barbecued pig that required some twenty hours of tending and swabbing with a mop soaked in Tabasco sauce. When night falls, giant speakers will blast Chuck Berry and Tina Turner into the yard, and I will discover that all South Carolinians, black or white, like the wicked dance we call the shag. After midnight, we cheer that the millennium has ended without dreadful incidents to mark it, and we will share many hugs and awkward kisses. Estelle offers me the opportunity to spend the night in her blue room, a cabin just large enough to contain a double bed, an armchair, and a desk. She lights a kerosene lamp and leaves me there, surrounded by indigo walls and a pale blue floor and ceiling. Even the window shades are blue. “I’ve never let anyone else sleep in here but Dan,” she says. I doubt she ever tells Dan that we were once more intimate friends.
Not long after the New Millennium party, I will begin to pretend that I can’t speak at all, and I will converse only with my dog, whose name I sometimes forget, and for the next year and a half I will live quietly in my hexagonal house on the Isle of Palms as I write out this account. I do not remodel my house, and I forget entirely about the alarm system, because I am no longer angry or afraid. I am, in fact, oddly happy, serene, at peace, which seems like God’s final joke.
In the summer of 2001, I will return to Naxos, where I will be floating in salty water when the third stroke comes, staring down at the tightly fitted stones, and I will drift for several hours before anyone discovers I am gone.