Burning House Read Online Free Page A

landed on the mitt. This is the most Pammy has talked. Now she interests me; I always like people who have gone through radical changes. It’s snobbishness—it shows me that other people are confused, too.
    “That was the summer of sixty-seven,” she says. “I slept with a stockbroker for money. Sat through a lot of horror movies. That whole period’s a blur. What I remember about it is being underground all the time, going places on the subway. I only had one real friend in the city. I can’t remember where I was going.” Pammy looks at the newspaper beside her chair. “Charlottesville, Virginia,” she says. “My, my. Who would have thought twitchy little Pammy would end up here?”
    Spence tosses the ball. I jump, mitt high above my head, and catch it. Spence throws again. Catch. Again. A hard pitch that lets me know the palm of my hand will be numb when I take off the catcher’s mitt. Spence winds up. Pitches. As I’m leaning to get the ball, another ball sails by on my right. Spence has hidden a ball in his pocket all this time. Like his brother, he’s always trying to make me smile.
    “It’s too hot to play ball,” he says. “I can’t spend the whole day trying to distract you because Wynn stalked off into the woods today.”
    “Come on,” I say. “It was working.”
    “Why don’t we all go to Virginia Beach next year instead of standing around down here smoldering? This isn’t any tribute to my brother. How did this get started?”
    “We came to be with you because we thought it would be hard. You didn’t tell us about Pammy.”
    “Isn’t that something? What that tells you is that you matter, and Wynn matters, and Nicholas mattered, but I don’t even think to mention the person who’s supposedly my lover.”
    “She said she had been an addict.”
    “She probably tried to tell you she wasn’t twenty-one, too, didn’t she?”
    I sidestep a strawberry plant, notice one croquet post stuck in the field.
    “It was a lie?” I say.
    “No,” he says. “I never know when to let my jokes die.”
    When Nicholas was alive, we’d celebrate his birthday with mint juleps and croquet games, stuffing ourselves with cake, going for midnight skinny-dips. Even if he were alive, I wonder if today would be anything like those birthdays of the past, or whether we’d have bogged down so hopelessly that even his childish enthusiasm would have had little effect. Wynn is sure that he’s having a crisis and that it’s not the real thing with his student because he also has a crush on Pammy. We are open about everything: he tells me about taking long walks and thinking about nothing but sex; Spence bakes the French bread too long, finds that he’s lightly tapping a rock, sits on the kitchen counter, puts his hands over his face, and cries. Pammy says that she does not feel close to any of us—that Virginia was just a place to come to cool out. She isn’t sure she wants to go on with medical school. I get depressed and think that if the birds could talk, they’d say that they didn’t enjoy flying. The mountains have disappeared in the summer haze.
    Late at night, alone on the porch, toasting Nicholas with a glass of wine, I remember that when I was younger, I assumed he’d be our guide: he saw us through acid trips, planned our vacations, he was always there to excite us and to give us advice. He started a game that went on for years. He had us close our eyes after we’d stared at something and made us envision it again. We had to describe it with our eyes closed. Wynn and Spence could talk about the things and make them more vivid than they were in life. They remembered well. When I closed my eyes, I squinted until the thing was lost to me. It kept going backwards into darkness.
    Tonight, Nicholas’s birthday, it is dark and late and I have been trying to pay him some sort of tribute by seeing something and closing my eyes and imagining it. Besides realizing that two glasses of wine can make me