Last Summer at Mars Hill Read Online Free Page B

tops. I know .” He closed his eyes and wiggled his fingers and made a whoo-whoo noise, beckoning spirits to come closer. Moony laughed and covered her mouth. From where he sat Martin raised an eyebrow, requesting silence. Moony and Jason turned and walked outside.
    “How old do you think she is?” Moony asked, after they had gone a safe distance from the chapel.
    “Who?”
    “Mrs. Grose.”
    “Adele?” Jason frowned into the twilit distance, thinking of the murky shores and shoals of old age. “Jeez, I dunno. Sixty? Fifty?”
    Moony shook her head. “She’s got to be older than that. I mean, that story about Houdini, you know?”
    “Huh! Houdini. The closest she ever got to Houdini is seeing some Siegfried and Roy show out in Las Vegas.”
    “I don’t think she’s ever left here. At least not since I can remember.”
    Jason nodded absently, then squatted in the untidy drive, squinting as he stared out into the darkness occluding the Bay. Fireflies formed mobile constellations within the birch trees. As a kid he had always loved fireflies, until he had seen Them. Now he thought of the Light Children as a sort of evolutionary step, somewhere between lightning bugs and angels.
    Though you hardly ever see Them at night, he thought. Now why is that? He rocked back on his heels, looking like some slender pale gargoyle toppled from a modernist cathedral, the cuffs of his white oxford-cloth shirt rolled up to show large bony wrists and surprisingly strong square hands, his bow tie unraveled and hanging rakishly around his neck. Of a sudden he recalled being in this same spot two years ago, grinding out a cigarette as Martin and John approached. The smoke bothered John, sent him into paroxysms of coughing so prolonged and intense that more than once they had set Jason’s heart pounding, certain that This Was It, John was going to die right here, right now, and it would be all Jason’s fault for smoking. Only of course it didn’t happen that way.
    “The longest death since Little Nell’s,” John used to say, laughing hoarsely. That was when he could still laugh, still talk. At the end it had been others softly talking, Martin and Jason and their friends gathered around John’s bed at home, taking turns, spelling each other. After a while Jason couldn’t stand to be with them. It was too much like John was already dead. The body in the bed so wasted, bones cleaving to skin so thin and mottled it was like damp newsprint.
    By the end, Jason refused to accompany Martin to the therapist they were supposed to see. He refused to go with him to the meetings where men and women talked about dying, about watching loved ones go so horribly slowly. Jason just couldn’t take it. Grief he had always thought of as an emotion, a mood, something that possessed you but that you eventually escaped. Now he knew it was different. Grief was a country, a place you entered hesitantly, or were thrown into without warning. But once you were there, amidst the roiling formless blackness and stench of despair, you could not leave. Even if you wanted to: you could only walk and walk and walk, traveling on through the black reaches with the sound of screaming in your ears, and hope that someday you might glimpse far off another country, another place where you might someday rest.
    Jason had followed John a long ways into that black land. And now his own father would be going there. Maybe not for good, not yet, but Jason knew. An HIV-positive diagnosis might mean that Death was a long ways off; but Jason knew his father had already started walking.
    “…you think they don’t leave?”
    Jason started. “Huh?” He looked up into Moony’s wide gray eyes. “I’m sorry, what?”
    “Why do you think they don’t leave? Mrs. Grose and Gary. You know, the ones who stay here all year.” Moony’s voice was exasperated. He wondered how many times she’d asked him the same thing.
    “I dunno. I mean, they have to leave sometimes. How do they