Hereafter

It seemed, as we drove down our old street where the elm trees no longer ruled, where hedges had long since overgrown their territory, that everything had changed. We saw faces at the windows we used to clean, faces of strangers, and stepping onto our old porches were people we will never know, who by the look of it didn't much care about the way their lawns were growing thicker, about the dead drifting leaves on their driveways. And this was house after house, in the neighbourhood we grew up in. The Buell's house, once prim with rectangular lawns and Mr. Buell watering it daily, wearing a brimmed hat to protect his face from the afternoon sun, and a voluptuous rosebush next to the porch that flowered every year. Mrs. Buell clipping roses to dry in her greenhouse, for pot pourri, that she would give to Chase Buell to hand to the neighbours as a gift. Now the house was hollow, Chase's parents having died seven years ago, leaving their home to decay. The front door, once red, was now plain and warped, every knot uncoiling. And the windows were glassless.

Tim Winer, the former brain of our outfit, remarked how dead it looked. The whole street, once a thriving suburban community on the edge of the city, now resembled one of those towns in an old Western movie. There was only a patch of fine dirt that looked like it could be blown away from the wind of a passing car, where once we had bathed, relaxed, in the sun in front of the Winer house; watching with innocent ignorance, the water- sprinkler systems spurt to life and spray the younger kids who danced in its music. Mr. Head mowing for the third time that week the lawn that could win the prize for best kept lawn in the country. Or Sam French and Harry the Gimp climbing each tree in turn, leaving their mark at the summit as explorers leave their country's flag. Or Mr. Faheem and Mr. Larson talking baseball over beers, sitting in deck chairs on Mr. Faheem's porch until it was time to Playball, when they retired inside to shout in unison at the television screen. It seemed quite dark now in comparison, looking at that square patch of dirt.

And then the house that holds a thousand secrets, but would not, will not, whisper them into our eager ears. The house that was once a palace of some ethereal substance that housed within its confining walls the five Lisbon girls. And those windows we squinted into from across the street to catch just a glimpse of one of them, once veiled by curtains almost too often, and always at the wrong time, were now black and empty and lifeless with a veil of dirt as thick as the annual resurgence of the ephemeral fish- flies that covered everything in June. The elm tree stump in front of the house was still there, stuck there for all time to watch the decay. It triggered in us the memory of the four remaining girls running out of the house wearing only nightgowns, and circling the elm tree just as it was about to be felled. We watched from across the street their holding hands, the news van pull up, the arguing, and all that ensued. Yet despite their efforts, the inevitable occurred, only later when they were gone, the tree left unprotected with its degenerative disease.

We stopped the car in front of the house. All the grief, every twisted riposte, torn cry and shredded condolence flooded back into our hearts and ripped us apart all over again. We got out of the car and stood in a line, each one of us filled with our own personal ache. Chase remembered Lux lying in the sun wearing her bikini, Kevin Head recalled all the girls together again, waiting in their school uniforms to get into the car. Tim Winer saw Cecilia, saw the spiked fence back beneath her window, and her on it. Joe Larson walked over to the tree stump and knelt beside it, ran his fingers along the word we etched into it more than twenty years ago.

WHY?

                                                                                                ***

Getting together again after so much time was weird. One morning we all picked up a letter from our doormats to read we had been invited to our High School Reunion. Stomachs flared into butterflies immediately, except for Joe Larson, the detective, who simply smiled and said, "Be nice to see some of the boys again," and threw it aside to promptly forget about it and lose it under the mountains of paper strewn across his apartment, until it was almost too late. The rest of us were excited but anxious, perhaps apprehensive of looking into the greying eyes of our old friends, once so vibrant. As if each other's pot-belly and thinned hair would remind us of how old we really were, our youth now lost forever. And seeing the aged faces of those we grew up with would eradicate the fantasy that our adolescence wasn't so long ago. Seeing our childhood friends under speckled light, in the gymnasium that held, still holds, the Dances where boy and girl met for the first time, nervous fingers interlaced, a few brave boys spinning their dates under the turning world.