Never Coming Back(38)

“Asa,” Sunshine said. She always said his name wrong, with a z sound instead of an s sound. “Asa Chamberlain. I wish I’d known him. I feel as if I’d know you better, if I knew what he was like.”

“You would have loved him. Everyone did.”

“Why?”

“He was one of those people.” Asa appeared in my head, standing in the doorway of an unfamiliar room, smiling. A lump rose in my throat. I wanted to tell them more about him, about the unicycle he taught himself to ride, about the way he used to sing me to sleep, but the words wouldn’t come out. All I could manage was “He was a good singer.”

“Was he?”

“Yes. He used to go up to Fairchild Continuing Care and sing to the residents. Hymns.”

“So he was religious?”

I shook my head. No, Asa was not religious. Unless he was all-religious, in that way that some people are, where everything in the world has meaning, and everything and everyone is worthy. “Asa said that hymns were just songs. He had a magical ability to remember the words to any song. He used to sing Leonard Cohen songs to my mother.”

“Her man Cohen? She must have loved Asa, then.”

“Yes. Which is why I will never understand what went down between them that night I came back and he was so upset.”

“She never talked about it? Ever?”

I shook my head. They had heard bits and pieces about Asa over the years. A little when we were freshmen getting to know one another. More when he was deployed—Sunshine had been there when my mother told me the news over the telephone—and then those blurry weeks and months years ago, after the Humvee he was in blew up. That was it, though. There had been a lot left out.





* * *





He was a senior and I was a sophomore, but time goes slower in high school. So the two years I was with Asa, from fall of sophomore year until fall of senior year, were long, long years. They stretched out from morning, when I woke up and lay in bed picturing him, until night, when I undressed in the dark and lay down between cool sheets imagining that he was with me.

Sometimes he was. When Tamar was asleep and the pre-Asa Clara would’ve been too, when it was way into the night, he’d drive over and park on the logging road and then walk up to the house and brush his hand against the screen of my window. “You up?” he’d whisper, and I’d press my hand against his through the screen, and then he’d ease open the never-used front door instead of the always-used kitchen door off the porch, and then there he’d be. In my room.

He was like a miracle. This living, breathing boy, this boy I loved who loved me back.

“Are you real?” I would ask sometimes.

“As real as the Velveteen Rabbit,” he would say. His favorite book from childhood, which he gave me a copy of for my birthday and which, because of him, I tried to love too, but couldn’t. Too sad. Too hard.

We were together even after he graduated from Sterns High and started driving truck for Byrne Dairy, the rival company to Dairylea. He didn’t want to go to college, which made his mother angry. His parents were struggling with each other, had always struggled, according to Asa. By the end of his senior year his mother had moved out and Asa lived with his father in Sterns.

“Martha Chamberlain is a tough nut,” Tamar said once.

“Takes one to know one,” I said, because wasn’t Tamar also a tough nut? But she just looked at me. No comeback.

What was she thinking? What was going through her mind back in those days? She loved Asa Chamberlain, that much was clear. “That boy has the voice of an angel,” I once heard Annabelle Lee say to Tamar. “And the looks of one too, in a lumberjack kind of way.” Tamar didn’t say anything back—maybe she nodded, but I was eavesdropping from the living room so I didn’t know for sure—but the choir director was right on both counts. Once he knew how much my mother loved Leonard Cohen, Asa used to serenade her with his songs. “Hallelujah,” especially, because it was her favorite. I could still hear his voice in the kitchen of the house that used to belong to my mother and me, singing about those chords and that baffled king composer. She used to have this look on her face when he sang, a look I couldn’t read.

Now I wondered: Was that look happiness? Did Asa make her happy in a way that I didn’t?

His father, Eli, was not a tough nut. He might have given the impression of tough-nut-ness, but he was anything but. He was a tall, rough-looking, rough-speaking man, but you should have seen the way he used to pick up his dog, Miss Faraday, named after his kindergarten teacher, and smooth her already-smooth fur. Eli had found Miss Faraday in a ditch outside Watertown when she was a puppy, some kind of nameless pit-husky-boxer mix, as far as we could tell, and driven home with her on his lap.

He was the same way with his son.

“Clara, do you and Asa talk about what will happen after high school?” my mother once asked me. She had that look on her face, that same unreadable look.

“Sure. I’ll go to MVCC, he’ll drive for Byrne Dairy and everything will be the same.”

“You’ve decided all that together?”

“Not in so many words. But yes.”

I had already mentally rejected all the SUNY schools on a too-far-from-Asa basis. Oneonta, Cornell, Geneseo, Plattsburgh, Binghamton, New Paltz, Albany, all within three hours but still too far. I couldn’t stand the thought of being farther than half an hour away from Asa, who was happy exactly where he was. Happy with me, with his job, with Sterns.