Ray was dancing around his bedroom when Ruth walked in. He wore his glasses, which at school he tried to do without because they were thick and his father had only sprung for the least expensive, hard-to-break frames. He had on a pair of jeans that were baggy and stained and a T-shirt that Ruth imagined, and I knew, had been slept in.
He stopped dancing as soon as he saw her standing at the doorway holding the grocery bag. His hands went up immediately and collected his glasses, and then, not knowing what to do with them, he waved them at her and said, “Hello.”
“Can you turn it down?” Ruth screamed.
“Sure!”
When the noise ceased her ears rang for a second, and in that second she saw something flicker across Ray’s eyes.
He now stood on the other side of the room, and in between them was his bed, where sheets were rumpled and balled and over which hung a drawing Ruth had done of me from memory.
“You hung it up,” Ruth said.
“I think it’s really good.”
“You and me and nobody else.”
“My mom thinks it’s good.”
“She’s intense, Ray,” Ruth said, putting down the bag. “No wonder you’re so freak-a-delic.”
“What’s in the bag?”
“Candles,” said Ruth. “I got them at the grocery store. It’s December sixth.”
“I know.”
“I thought we might go to the cornfield and light them. Say goodbye.”
“How many times can you say it?”
“It was an idea,” Ruth said. “I’ll go alone.”
“No,” Ray said. “I’ll go.”
Ruth sat down in her jacket and overalls and waited for him to change his shirt. She watched him with his back toward her, how thin he was but also how the muscles seemed to pop on his arms the way they were supposed to and the color of his skin, like his mother’s, so much more inviting than her own.
“We can kiss for a while if you want.”
And he turned, grinning. He had begun to like the experiments. He was not thinking of me anymore – though he couldn’t tell that to Ruth.
He liked the way she cursed and hated school. He liked how smart she was and how she tried to pretend that it didn’t matter to her that his father was a doctor (even though not a real doctor, as she pointed out) and her father scavenged old houses, or that the Singhs had rows and rows of books in their house while she was starved for them.
He sat down next to her on the bed.
“Do you want to take your parka off?”
She did.
And so on the anniversary of my death, Ray mashed himself against Ruth and the two of them kissed and at some point she looked him in the face. “Shit!” she said. “I think I feel something.”
When Ray and Ruth arrived at the cornfield, they were silent and he was holding her hand. She didn’t know whether he was holding it because they were observing my death together or because he liked her. Her brain was a storm, her usual insight gone.
Then she saw she had not been the only one to think of me. Hal and Samuel Heckler were standing in the cornfield with their hands jammed in their pockets and their backs turned toward her. Ruth saw yellow daffodils on the ground.
“Did you bring those?” Ruth asked Samuel.
“No,” Hal said, answering for his brother. “They were already here when we got here.”
Mrs. Stead watched from her son’s upstairs bedroom. She decided to throw on her coat and walk out to the field. It was not something she even tried to judge, whether or not she belonged there.
Grace Tarking was walking around the block when she saw Mrs. Stead leaving her house with a poinsettia. They talked briefly in the street. Grace said that she was going to stop at home but she would come and join them.
Grace made two phone calls, one to her boyfriend, who lived a short distance away in a slightly richer area, and one to the Gilberts. They had not yet recovered from their strange role in the discovery of my death – their faithful lab having found the first evidence. Grace offered to escort them, since they were older and cutting across neighbors’ lawns and over the bumpy earth of the cornfield would be a challenge to them, but yes, Mr. Gilbert had said, he wanted to come. They needed this, he told Grace Tarking, his wife particularly – though I could see how crushed he was. He always covered his pain by being attentive to his wife. Though they had thought briefly of giving their dog away, he was too much comfort to both of them.
