of her failure, which she couldn’t yet grasp, threatened to blot out the day if she didn’t cut this short.
“Call me next week, okay?”
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like someone else. Not her sandlot son, player of games, but a man, older and less wise than she knew what to do with. She stepped away before he could wrap her in his arms and make her disappear.
EMMA
S HE DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZE Sam Arno leaning against the back wall in the living room of her classmate’s house in Falls Village in the spring of 2004. She has not seen him in a couple of years, for one thing; for another, they haven’t exchanged more than a casual hello since, with the hunched bolting of an escapee, he abandoned Wyndham Falls for Torrington High six years ago, willing to make the long commute just to get the hell away. Why he’s crashing a senior high-school party when he’s already a college baseball star (word has it) at UConn, she can’t imagine. Though none of this, she viscerally understands, has anything to do with her level of shock at seeing him again.
He has changed. Grown and filled out; disposed of that small, weary boy with the traveling trumpet case. Become, as if reluctantly, physically beautiful. His body long and muscular and lean, his hands large and thrillingly veined. His face marked by sharp memorable planes and just the right amount of natural punctuation. This Emma observes for herself when, after urgent navigation across the crowded, flailing room, she manages, through force of need, to take up the empty place on the wall beside him, turn and really look at him, and ask him what he’s doing there. To which he stares back at her with green eyes flecked with splashes of gold, and gives some answer she instantly forgets. Because she has already reached the vanishing point, finding it hard to look at him head-on without looking past him, into the next moment and then the next, where in the context of private possibility all she can really imagine is him puttingthose strong hands on her, first roughly, then sweetly, then roughly, stripping her down layer by layer, till there’s nothing left.
They leave after about twenty minutes. They are standing near each other; then she looks up and finds him staring at her with a ravenous intensity, as if he’s just realized he is starving.
She follows him through the crowd. People make way for them. It never enters her mind not to go.
It is cold and poorly lit on the porch. The front door closes behind them and they are alone, the music and the shouting muted. She already knows they won’t be returning to the party.
“I want to show you something,” he says.
Half a mile up the dark country road is a house no one lives in. A working farm once, Sam tells her as they walk in the wash of moonlight at the edge of the road, twigs snapping under their feet, and then a kind of gentleman’s farm, and then the widowed owner, learning that he was going to die of cancer and wanting to spare his family the trouble, got his papers in order and killed himself with a shotgun in his barn, and before they’d even buried him his kids started fighting over the property, greedy to carve it up and sell it off despite his stated wishes, and the lawyers were called in and the courts slapped a freeze on everything, and for years the farm has stood empty and half ruined. The widower’s name was Carmody; Sam’s father was his lawyer and, briefly, the executor of his estate.
Sam turns brooding after telling her all this, maybe regretting having mentioned the family connection. Emma doesn’t confess that her parents are present too, in a way, a kind of pre-guilt already factored in, in spite or because of the warm liquid thrum between her legs every time her hip or arm touches his, her nipples erect in the night that is too cold for crickets, and the fact that she, who has never been especially keen on offering herself to the local boys, wants now, in
“Call me next week, okay?”
She leaned forward and kissed him on the cheek. He smelled like someone else. Not her sandlot son, player of games, but a man, older and less wise than she knew what to do with. She stepped away before he could wrap her in his arms and make her disappear.
EMMA
S HE DOES NOT IMMEDIATELY RECOGNIZE Sam Arno leaning against the back wall in the living room of her classmate’s house in Falls Village in the spring of 2004. She has not seen him in a couple of years, for one thing; for another, they haven’t exchanged more than a casual hello since, with the hunched bolting of an escapee, he abandoned Wyndham Falls for Torrington High six years ago, willing to make the long commute just to get the hell away. Why he’s crashing a senior high-school party when he’s already a college baseball star (word has it) at UConn, she can’t imagine. Though none of this, she viscerally understands, has anything to do with her level of shock at seeing him again.
He has changed. Grown and filled out; disposed of that small, weary boy with the traveling trumpet case. Become, as if reluctantly, physically beautiful. His body long and muscular and lean, his hands large and thrillingly veined. His face marked by sharp memorable planes and just the right amount of natural punctuation. This Emma observes for herself when, after urgent navigation across the crowded, flailing room, she manages, through force of need, to take up the empty place on the wall beside him, turn and really look at him, and ask him what he’s doing there. To which he stares back at her with green eyes flecked with splashes of gold, and gives some answer she instantly forgets. Because she has already reached the vanishing point, finding it hard to look at him head-on without looking past him, into the next moment and then the next, where in the context of private possibility all she can really imagine is him puttingthose strong hands on her, first roughly, then sweetly, then roughly, stripping her down layer by layer, till there’s nothing left.
They leave after about twenty minutes. They are standing near each other; then she looks up and finds him staring at her with a ravenous intensity, as if he’s just realized he is starving.
She follows him through the crowd. People make way for them. It never enters her mind not to go.
It is cold and poorly lit on the porch. The front door closes behind them and they are alone, the music and the shouting muted. She already knows they won’t be returning to the party.
“I want to show you something,” he says.
Half a mile up the dark country road is a house no one lives in. A working farm once, Sam tells her as they walk in the wash of moonlight at the edge of the road, twigs snapping under their feet, and then a kind of gentleman’s farm, and then the widowed owner, learning that he was going to die of cancer and wanting to spare his family the trouble, got his papers in order and killed himself with a shotgun in his barn, and before they’d even buried him his kids started fighting over the property, greedy to carve it up and sell it off despite his stated wishes, and the lawyers were called in and the courts slapped a freeze on everything, and for years the farm has stood empty and half ruined. The widower’s name was Carmody; Sam’s father was his lawyer and, briefly, the executor of his estate.
Sam turns brooding after telling her all this, maybe regretting having mentioned the family connection. Emma doesn’t confess that her parents are present too, in a way, a kind of pre-guilt already factored in, in spite or because of the warm liquid thrum between her legs every time her hip or arm touches his, her nipples erect in the night that is too cold for crickets, and the fact that she, who has never been especially keen on offering herself to the local boys, wants now, in
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