Here So Far Away(78)

Someone sat opposite me and unwrapped a sandwich. I peered around the computer terminal. “Hi.”

“Hi,” Nat said.

“Yeah, hi.”

“Are you working on your English essay?”

“News report on Crimea. It’s an extra-credit thing for Gifford and Aker.”

“Cool.”

I pretended to work while I listened to her chew.

“Nat?”

“Yeah?”

“Thanks for stopping me at the play,” I said. “Even though I know you did it for Lisa.”

“Not just Lisa. If it weren’t for you, I probably would have started going with Doug before he sobered up. But I kept thinking about how you’d never settle for a guy who wasn’t perfect. Perfect enough.”

That wasn’t true, of course, so I just nodded and breathed the familiar lemon scent of her hair.

The next day she turned up again. On the third day Bill was with her, and on the fifth day, Lisa. We didn’t say too much. Stuff like, “The quiz is on Friday, right?” or “Have my apple.” Mostly we studied and ate, and when the buzzer went, we’d go back to our own sides of the classroom. But it went like that day after day, week after week, and slowly the space between us was closing.

Maybe it was the poetry books on the shelf behind Mr. Humphreys’ desk—Auden, Lowell, Rich, Yeats, Pound—or as my nan used to say, I could have pulled it out of my pancreas.

“Did you write that poem we read in class?” I asked. “About the two boys who used to be friends? Miss Aker said it was by a local poet, and everyone figured it was her, but now I’m thinking . . .”

Mr. Humphreys kept reading my Crimea report. It’d taken him ten minutes of staring in disbelief at my doctor’s note and an interminably long meeting with my parents and he’d insisted that I turn in my extra-credit assignments to him directly, but I had to hand it to him. He and Dr. Buster had really saved my bacon, so to speak.

“Did you hear me? I was asking if you wrote—”

“No.”

He wasn’t a good liar.

“I liked that line near the end: ‘We buried the reason’ . . . That’s not it. ‘The reason was buried like . . .’”

“‘The reason buried like a bone,’” he finished, shaking his head.

“It’s so sad that you can’t remember what made you stop being friends.”

“We were thirteen. The reason was probably stupid.”

“Do you have any idea when I can expect to stop being stupid?”

“Thirty-six. If you’re lucky.”

I slipped the book—the book—out of my bag. I’d been thinking about asking Miss Aker about the poem that Francis may or may not have bookmarked, which was probably not what the doctor ordered, as far as getting on with things, but not understanding it had been an itch I couldn’t scratch.

“Thought you were done with poetry for the year,” Mr. Humphreys said.

“Not reading it for school. Do you know her stuff?”

“I do.”

“Do you happen to know the poem ‘One Art’?”

“‘The art of losing isn’t hard to master.’”

“Right—oh, good. What does that mean exactly? She can’t really be saying that you get better at losing things. Places. People.”

“I think the point is she isn’t fooling anybody, not even herself. But I’d have to read it again.”

I slid the book across the desk to him.

“An oldie.” He turned the pages. Frowned. Flipped to the front, then back to the middle. “Where did you get it?”

“It was a gift.”

“A first edition. You’ve seen this, I assume.”

The poem was called “The End of March,” and below the title was a dedication: For John Malcolm Brinnin and Bill Read: Duxbury. Beside the dedication, in the margin, was an inscription scribbled in looped handwriting: For J.M.B., with affection and bottomless gratitude. E.B.

“That’s her?”

“Seems likely, though odd not to have signed the title page,” Mr. Humphreys said. “Perhaps she intended to surprise him.” He carefully slipped the book back into its plastic wrapper. “George, this could be worth a lot of money. Who did you say gave it to you? They might not have known its value.”

A ticket.

“I think he did,” I said.

Rupert was sitting on a park bench behind the nursing home, watching the river run.

I sat beside him and passed over a tin of cookies that Mum and Matthew had baked for me to bring. Oatmeal, Shaggy’s favorite.

“Hey, Rupert.”

“Oh, George. They said you were coming.”

His jacket parted and the ugliest creature in the world poked out its head and snarled at me. It might have been a dog.

“You got a new pet,” I said. “Don’t tell me something happened to Wilfred.”

“Wilfred is still alive, still a dick. This is Crystal. She belongs to my neighbor. Say thanks for the cookies, Crystal.”

Crystal disappeared into his jacket again.

“How are you feeling?”

“Old as hell. Sarah said I was out of my mind for a long while. Nice to be half back in it again.”