Chapter 1
I arrive late to the funeral, wearing black linen and the ugliest ballet flats money can buy. Fellow stragglers crowd the vestibule, heads bowed, listening to a muffled version of the service behind chapel doors. I slip sideways between polyester shoulders, mouthingSorry, and press close to the rose window above a bench dedicated to a student who died in the Civil War. Inside are disguised figures, washed violet by the Gothic glass, but I know it is him up there delivering the eulogy. The sound of his voice still makes me feel like I’ve sat on a stick of dynamite.
I go out into the courtyard with my hair gathered in my fist, fanning the back of my neck. It’s the third week of April and eighty-seven delirious degrees in the Finger Lakes region of New York state, two hundred miles closer to Toronto than Manhattan. There are no direct flights from Los Angeles to the town where I attended college twelve years ago, and the hypervigilance required for this day is now mazed with jet lag. I am digging through my bag for sunglasses, debating whether to walk or drive to the repast, when someone grabs me from behind. I do not scream. I’m told there is no such thing as normal, but how else to describe myself other than not?
“Hey, asshole.” I turn and shove Campbell in the chest. A boy with red hair stands solemnly by his side. Four years old? Six? I can never tell the ages of children.
“Tookie,” Campbell says. “This is Daddy’s friend Faye, and she’s on TV, so she’s allowed to use bad words.”
“I’m in the movies too, Tookie.”
Tookie gives me a tentative smile. He has small teeth that don’t touch, and he’s wearing linen pants that are too long and too tight, creased around the crotch from sweat. Silently, he slips his hand into his father’s and crosses his legs at the ankles like he needs a bathroom.
Overhead, the chapel bell tolls like a rebuke. “I missed most of the service,” I admit. “I got delayed for two hours in Detroit.”
Campbell grimaces. “Brutal, Faye.” He reaches out and relieves me of my shoulder bag, slinging it over his own. Campbell was assembled in a factory that trademarked 1950s male Americana—block jaw, dimpled chin, a shiny pat of blond hair parted neatly on the side. The manufacturers chipped him with chivalry too, right before they shipped him off for some lucky little girl to unwrap on Christmas morning.
“How did that go?” I tip my head toward the chapel.
“Oh,?” Campbell answers with a sigh, “it was definitely a funeral.” He bends his head, scuffs his shoe on the pavement, loosening a pebble caught in the treads. When he looks at me again I am startled to find him gray-faced and unguarded.
“It’s really good to see you,” I say, staring riveted at the replacement grief has made of my oldest friend.
“Kind of can’t believe you came.” Campbell knocks my shoulder gently with his own.
“Not many people I’d take a multi-leg commercial flight for.” I say this with a straight face and a spike of panic. It is Campbell’s uncle who passed away. He does not need a reason to be here, but I occupya nebulous realm. If only I could say I came all this way to honor the profound impact that my former film professor had on my life and leave it at that.
“The studio couldn’t spring for a PJ?” Campbell grins, squints up one eye handsomely in the sun.
“Doing my part to minimize carbon emissions.”
A breeze off the lake parts the flowering dogwoods, dusting us with pollen, and Tookie sneezes twice into the crook of his elbow.
“Bless you,” I say to him.
“Thank you,” he whispers back with red eyes.
“We snuck out early to meet the caterers at the house,” Campbell says. He tugs Tookie’s hand and turns to go. “I’ll walk you to your car.”
Behind me the doors to Saint Thomas the Apostle open. People begin to file out of the limestone tower, to tighten around us like a public stoning. “That’s okay,” I say, trying to keep my voice bright. He could be anywhere. “I’m down the street in the opposite direction.”
“You sure?” Campbell reluctantly returns my bag to me. I can tell it goes against every well-bred bone in his body to allow a woman to walk to her car alone, even on a street lined with hydrangeas.
“I’ll see you in a few.” I find my small black sunglasses and walk briskly to the rental car before anyone else can grab me.
I drive through campus with the air-conditioning blasting, trying to get my skin to stop buzzing. On the lawn of the last standing fraternity house, two shirtless guys toss a lacrosse ball back and forth, feet sliding around in battered brown leather flip-flops. I slow in front of the small yellow house where I lived my senior year with a group of girls who always felt more like colleagues than friends, then come to a completestop when I see the front door open. One brunette, one blonde, their hair in matching high ponytails, come bounding down the stairs with tennis rackets strapped to their backs, laughing and bumping hips in a way that more or less foretells their future. They’ll be roommates in a moldy prewar building in Back Bay, maids of honor three or four Septembers after, then, by the time I’m forty, they’ll be gifting each other the most expensive item off their baby registries, the white oak crib or the NASCAR stroller, whatever the in-laws didn’t snap up first. It’s not longing with which I watch them. I would not be who I am now if I were able to trade affection so easily, and I happen to like who I am.
I turn right at the President’s House, a stereotypical white stately thing, and coast alongside the deepest and largest of the Finger Lakes, the water so clean you can open your eyes four feet deep and see the kelp swaying like worshippers. A single sailboat ruffles the gray-blue surface, and on the dock a couple of girls are sunbathing with their shirts thrown over their faces. Aside from the sign posted at the water’s edge that provides the number for a suicide and crisis hotline, everything is as I remembered it when Campbell called me last week with the news.
I was finishing a late lunch with another writer (I write and direct the movies too, Tookie) when I glanced at my phone to see two missed calls from Campbell and a text.Call me when you can. Few things more ominous than that.
I excused myself and went into the bar garden, where phone calls are permitted, but both couches with the green botanical print were claimed, and in the smoking garden, people were smoking, so I went outside on the street by the valet and called Campbell back from there. The whole time I was running through the possible scenarios of what could have happened. Campbell is one of the few people I’ve stayed in touch with from the colleges, and we do not speak that often. Technically my alma mater is a women’s college that mergedwith the men’s campus down the hill around the time the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, and so everyone refers to it asthe colleges, though doing so makes me feel like an awful poseur. I wondered if Campbell was calling about the scholarship student whose script I had agreed to read in what can only be described as a full-circle moment, because I attended the colleges on the same writing scholarship. My former professor had emailed me about it last week, and because the former professor is also Campbell’s uncle, and because Campbell is still involved in the happenings at the colleges, it seemed conceivable it could have something to do with that, until Campbell picked up the phone and I heard the worn-out quality of his voice, like I was the fifth or maybe tenth person he’d had to terrible-text today to get them to call him back.
“Sorry,” he said. “I hate to send a message like that.”
“What’s going on?”
Campbell cleared his throat, started to speak, and had to clear it again. “PT passed away two nights ago.”