The Woods

“Not much we can do about it, Bob.”

“I know. It’s just that…we’re doing a lot of good here, Cope.”

“I know.”

“But funding is always tough.”

“So what are you suggesting?”

“Nothing.” Bob hesitated and I could tell he had more to say. So I waited. “But come on, Cope, you guys plea-bargain all the time, right?”

“We do.”

“You let a lesser injustice slide so you can nail someone for a bigger one.”

“When we have to.”

“These two boys. I hear they’re good kids.”

“You hear wrong.”

“Look, I’m not saying that they don’t deserve to be punished, but sometimes you have to trade. The greater good. JaneCare is making big strides. It might be the greater good. That’s all I’m saying.”

“Good night, Bob.”

“No offense, Cope. I’m just trying to help.”

“I know. Good night, Bob.”

I hung up. My hands were shaking. Jenrette, that son of a bitch, hadn’t gone after me. He had gone after my wife’s memory. I started upstairs. Rage consumed me. I would channel it. I sat at my desk. There were only two pictures on it. One was the current school photo of my daughter, Cara. It had a prized spot, dead center.

The second photograph was a grainy picture of my Noni and Popi from the old country, Russia—or, as it was called when they died in that gulag, the Soviet Union. They died when I was very young, when we still lived in Leningrad, but I have vague recollections of them, especially my Popi’s big shock of white hair.

Why, I often wondered, do I keep this picture out?

Their daughter, my mother, had abandoned me, right? Dumb when you thought about it. But somehow, despite the obvious pain intertwined, I find the picture oddly relevant. I would look at it, at my Noni and Popi, and I would wonder about ripples and family curses and where it all might have started.

I used to keep out pictures of Jane and Camille. I liked having them in view. They brought me comfort. But just because I found comfort in the dead, that didn’t mean my daughter did. It was a hard balance with a six-year-old. You want to talk about her mother. You want her to know about Jane, her wonderful spirit, how much she would have loved her little girl. You want to offer some kind of comfort, too, that her mother was up in heaven looking down on her. But I didn’t believe in that. I want to. I want to believe that there is a glorious afterlife and that above us, my wife, my sister and my father are all smiling down. But I can’t make myself believe it. And when I peddle it to my daughter, I feel as though I’m lying to her. I do it anyway. For now it feels like Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, something temporary and soothing, but in the end, she, like all children, will learn it is yet another parental lie with minimum justification. Or maybe I’m wrong and they are up there looking down on us. Maybe that is what Cara will conclude someday.

At midnight I finally allowed my mind to go where it wanted to—my sister, Camille, Gil Perez, that awful, magical summer. I flashed back to camp. I thought about Camille. I thought about that night. And for the first time in several years, I let myself think about Lucy.

A sad smile crossed my face. Lucy Silverstein had been my first real girlfriend. We’d had it so good, a fairy-tale summer romance, until that night. We never had the chance to break up—we were, instead, ripped apart by bloody murders. We were torn away while still enmeshed in each other, at a point where our love—as silly and immature as it was supposed to have been—was still rising and growing.

Lucy was the past. I had given myself an ultimatum and shut her out. But the heart doesn’t really know from ultimatums. Over the years, I have tried to see what Lucy is up to, harmlessly Googling her name and stuff, though I doubt I would ever have the courage to contact her. I never found anything. My bet is, after all that happened, she’d wisely changed her name. Lucy was probably married now—like I had been. She was probably happy. I hoped so.

I pushed that all away. Right now I needed to think about Gil Perez. I closed my eyes and went back. I thought about him at camp, how we horsed around, how I used to fun-punch him in the arm, the way he’d say, “Wimp! I didn’t even feel that….”

I could see him now, with the skinny torso, his shorts too baggy before that was a fashionable look, the smile that needed major orthodontia, the…

My eyes opened. Something felt wrong.

I headed into the basement. I found the cardboard box right away. Jane had been good about marking everything. I saw her extraneat handwriting on the side of the box. It made me pause. Handwriting is so damn personal. My fingertips drifted over it. I touched her lettering and pictured her with the big Magic Marker in her hand, the top in her mouth as she wrote boldly: PHOTOGRAPHS—COPELANDS.

I had made many mistakes in my life. But Jane…it was my one great break. Her good transformed me, made me better and stronger in every way. Yes, I loved her and there was passion, but more than that, she had the ability to make me my best. I was neurotic and insecure, the financial-aid kid at a school with very few of them, and there she was, this nearly perfect creature who saw something in me. How? How could I be so awful and worthless if a creature this magnificent loved me?

Jane was my rock. And then she got sick. My rock crumbled. And so did I.

I found the photographs from that long-ago summer. There were none of Lucy. I had wisely thrown them all away years ago. Lucy and I had our songs too—Cat Stevens, James Taylor—stuff that was syrupy enough to be gag worthy. I have trouble listening to them. Still. To this day. I make sure that they are nowhere near my iPod. If they come on the radio, I switch stations at a dizzying speed.

I sifted through a stack of pictures from that summer. Most of them were of my sister. I pushed through them until I found one that was taken three days before she died. Doug Billingham was in the picture—her boyfriend. A rich kid. Mom had approved, of course. The camp was an odd social mix of privileged and poor. Inside that camp, the upper and lower classes mingled on about as level a playing field as you could find. That was how the hippie who ran the camp, Lucy’s fun-loving hippie dad, Ira, wanted it.

Margot Green, another rich kid, was smack in the middle. She always was. She had been the camp hottie and knew it. She was blond and busty and worked it constantly. She always dated older guys, until Gil anyway, and to the mere mortals around her, Margot’s life was like something on TV, a melodrama we all watched with fascination. I looked at her now and pictured her throat slit. I closed my eyes for a second.