Sunset Park

the discomfort of having to talk about things he has been struggling to avoid for years. He doesn’t want her to know that six months after he was born his mother walked out on his father and divorced him to marry another man. He doesn’t want her to know that he has not seen or spoken to his father, Morris Heller, founder and publisher of Heller Books, since the summer after his third year at Brown. Least of all does he want her to know anything about his stepmother, Willa Parks, who married his father twenty months after the divorce, and nothing, nothing, nothing about his dead stepbrother, Bobby. These matters do not concern Pilar. They are his own private business, and until he finds an exit from the limbo that has encircled him for the past seven years, he will not share them with anyone.
    Even now, he can’t be sure if he did it on purpose or not. There is no question that he pushed Bobby, that the two of them were arguing and he pushed him in anger, but he doesn’t know if the push came before or after he heardthe oncoming car, which is to say, he doesn’t know if Bobby’s death was an accident or if he was secretly trying to kill him. The entire story of his life hinges on what happened that day in the Berkshires, and he still has no grasp of the truth, he still can’t be certain if he is guilty of a crime or not.
    It was the summer of 1996, roughly one month after his father had given him The Great Gatsby and five other books for his sixteenth birthday. Bobby was eighteen and a half and had just graduated from high school, having squeaked through by the skin of his teeth in no small part thanks to the efforts of his stepbrother, who had written three final term papers for him at the cut-rate price of two dollars per page, seventy-six dollars in all. Their parents had rented a house outside Great Barrington for the month of August, and the two boys were on their way to spend the weekend with them. He was too young to drive, Bobby was the one with the license, and therefore it was Bobby’s responsibility to check the oil and fill the tank before they left—which, needless to say, he failed to do. About fifteen miles from the house, traveling along a twisty, hilly, backcountry road, the car ran out of gas. He might not have become so angry if Bobby had shown some remorse, if the dim-witted slacker had taken the trouble to apologize for his mistake, but true to form, Bobby found the situation hilarious, and his first response was to burst out laughing.
    Cell phones existed back then, but they didn’t have one, which meant they had to get out of the car and walk.It was a hot, oppressively humid day, with squadrons of gnats and mosquitoes swarming around their heads, and he was in a foul temper, irritated by Bobby’s moronic nonchalance, by the heat and the bugs, by having to walk down that crummy, narrow little road, and before long he was lashing out at his stepbrother, calling him names, trying to provoke a fight. Bobby kept shrugging him off, however, refusing to respond to his insults. Don’t get worked up over nothing, he said, life is full of unexpected turns, maybe something interesting would happen to them because they were on this road, maybe, just maybe, they would discover two beautiful girls around the next bend, two completely naked beautiful girls who would take them into the woods and make love to them for sixteen straight hours. Under normal circumstances, he would laugh whenever Bobby started talking like that, fall willingly under the spell of his stepbrother’s inane prattle, but nothing was normal about what was happening just then, and he was in no mood to laugh. It was all so idiotic, he wanted to punch Bobby in the face.
    Whenever he thinks about that day now, he imagines how differently things would have turned out if he had been walking on Bobby’s right instead of his left. The shove would have pushed him off the road rather than into the middle of it, and that would have been the end of the story, since there wouldn’t have been a story, the whole business would have amounted to less than nothing, a brief outburst that would have been forgotten in no time atall. But there they were, for no special reason arrayed in that particular left-right tandem, he on the inside, Bobby on the outside, walking along the shoulder of the road in the direction of the oncoming traffic, of which there was none, not a single car, truck, or motorcycle for ten minutes, and after he’d been