The Book of Joe

at the snot running from her nose with the back of her wrist. “And now I don’t know what I’m going to do.” This last sentence segued into a long, mournful sob as she buried her face in her hands on the table. I sat down and put my arms around her and she collapsed into me as if her bones had suddenly come loose in their rigging, her body convulsing against me with each new wave of tears. “Now I have nobody.”
    I wanted to tell her that she had me, but I knew that wasn’t true anymore, so I just held her and said nothing. We sat like that for a while, suspended in our pathetic, futile symmetry, a motherless boy and a childless mother with no place in between to meet and nothing of any real value to offer each other. I left there feeling neither grief nor sympathy but only a burgeoning fury at my abject worthlessness and a growing certainty that the time had come for me to get the hell out of the Falls.
    They’d pulled Sammy’s body out of the Bush River early that morning. His car was found in the woods near the waterfalls, and although there were never any published reports of the circumstances of his death, I could imagine in vivid detail what had happened. Just as Carly and I were finishing our marathon sex session in my bedroom, Sammy drove his car up to the falls and parked. As all around him couples in parked cars clumsily groped and petted each other, Sammy stuck some Springsteen into his tape deck, maybe even playing “Bobby Jean” at the same moment that I was listening to it in my bedroom, and drank enough beer to blind himself to the consequences of what he planned to do.
    Eventually, he stepped out of his car and stared down at the waterfalls, the combination of darkness and alcohol obscuring the churning waters below so that they didn’t appear particularly frightening to him. Then Sammy took a last, deep breath and hurled himself determinedly off the cliff and into the falls.
    And maybe in that last moment it felt good to be so bold, to have made that decision. And for that brief instant of flight, before the waters angrily swallowed him into their tumultuous darkness, maybe he finally felt free. And maybe I just told myself that because I knew that if I’d simply chosen to go for that drive with him instead of staying home to have more sex, Sammy would never have jumped.
    The rest of the year flew by in a blur. I went to school, hung out with Carly, and graduated, but I experienced it all from behind a gauzy veil of detachment, seeing everything and feeling none of it. It was like a switch in me had been turned off that day in Lucy’s kitchen, and I became one step removed from my own life.
    Sean Tallon made a crack about Sammy as he passed me in the hall one day, and without hesitation I punched him square in the nose, drawing a shocking spray of blood. He was more surprised than hurt, but he got over it quickly and pounded the shit out of me, bashing my skull in with the worn plaster cast on his broken arm while Mouse looked on, cackling hysterically. I studied my bruises in the mirror with an almost clinical interest, but I didn’t recall feeling any pain.
    Sean’s broken arm, coupled with Wayne’s disappearance, effectively crippled the basketball team. They had been easily knocked out of the play-offs in the first round, and for the first time in twenty years, the Bush Falls Cougars didn’t go to the state finals.
    About a week after Sammy’s death, someone threw a large brick through Dugan’s office window and trashed his trophy case. An investigation was launched, but the guilty party was never discovered. Looking back years later, I thought it was me, could sometimes recall the heft of the stone in my hand right before I threw it, but the memory was so vague and synthetic that I couldn’t be sure. Maybe I just heard about it and wished it had been me.

Twenty-Five
    To err, as they say, is human. To forgive is divine. To err by withholding your forgiveness until it’s too late is to become divinely fucked up. Only after burying my father do I realize that I always intended to forgive him. But somewhere I blinked, and seventeen years flew by, and now my forgiveness, ungiven, has become septic, an infection festering inside me.
    I stay in bed for two days, sweating feverishly beneath my blankets, stomach clenched, thighs like jelly. I don’t know if what I’m feeling is genuine grief or deep, paralyzing regret over not being able to grieve, but whichever it is, it