I should have been there, at the hospital, with Claire and Sean. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t in the note, either. I was here, in the expensive den of our expensive house, sipping White Swan vodka from a chipped rocks glass. Heather was here, too, sitting three feet away from me on a stool across the bar. Heather was seventeen and Sean’s girlfriend. Besides a gaudy black cross hanging from a chain around her neck, she was naked. She, too, was not in the note.

            
           Almost three days had passed since my wife Claire had called me at work, at the investment firm, sobbing into the telephone. I had barely been able to understand her. Sean had tried to kill himself, she’d said. Sean, while alone in the house after school, had swallowed a staggering number of little blue pills—a number well over the recommended dosage—and had then sat down to die in his bedroom. Claire had come home early and found him, though; had found him in his room, crumpled over the desk where he wrote those long, unfathomable poems, breathing shallowly, dying slowly. Claire had spoiled Sean’s plan.

            
           She hadn’t left his room once in those three days. And I should have been there, too, right then, sitting in the orange, upholstered chair beside Sean’s bed, in that sterile, depressing hospital room, crying and talking about why he had done it and what we had all done wrong and how from now on I would try harder to be a good father, like Andy Griffith, and he more like Opie.

           But Sean hated fishing. And I hated crying, and talking about whys and whats and hows. So when I had been there in that drab, depressing little hospital room, looking at Sean lying in bed, there had been nothing but silence. Because I didn’t understand, apparently. Apparently, I couldn’t understand, never had.

           And so instead I was in the den, standing there in my boxers, staring at Heather from across the mahogany bar. She was naked and leaning over the edge of the glossy wood, her left arm lying horizontal across the wooden surface. A joint hung lazily from the fingertips of her right hand. It was the third she had rolled in the past two hours. She had just taken a hit and was now looking straight up at the ceiling, staring with crossed eyes at the tiny smoke rings she spit into the air. She was very good at blowing smoke rings.

           She was not so good at other things. Or maybe I was not so good at other things. Or maybe those other things were just not good, given the time and the place and the circumstances. But she was in pain, she was hurt, because Sean had left her out of the note.

           “Look,” I had said earlier, after she had read it and seen she was not in it and started crying, “I’m not there either.”

           “Is that supposed to make me feel better?” she had asked incredulously. I had meant for it to make her feel better, but it hadn’t. Still so much pain. I wanted to know where she was getting it.

           I had been drunk when she’d arrived, and now I was more drunk. Heather reached across the bar for the rocks glass and took a sip of the clear liquid. She had been sober when she’d arrived, and now she was less sober. She spun on the bar stool to face the open room, scattering her wild, dyed black hair across her back and shoulders.

           “It’s disgusting, you know,” Heather said, “what you do to those animals.” I watched the back of her head move slowly from right to left as her eyes crept from wall to wall, staring at the animal heads hanging from the red walls. My hunting trophies. There were over twenty of them—I’d had to hang them staggered to make room for them all.

           “Men have always killed animals,” I said. I felt very self-conscious. I didn’t like having to defend this part of myself. “They don’t have feelings,” I added. She snorted.

           “It’s just such a . . .” she stared at the closest mount, an empty-eyed elk bull, grimacing and shaking her head,  “. . . brute ritual.” That was the phrase Sean used to describe my hunting. Brute ritual. Had she gotten it from him, or he from her?

            
           “Are you hungry?” I asked her. I wanted to talk about something else, and this is what people did when they smoked marijuana, right? Gorged themselves? I had only dallied in the stuff, over twenty years ago, and didn’t know if the rules had changed. Heather blew a stream of smoke out of her mouth and looked at me.

           “Not really,” she said, shrugging. She looked bored.

           “There are steaks upstairs,” I said. “Or hamburgers. I could thaw some hamburgers.”

           “I don’t eat meat,” she said. Neither did Sean. I didn’t understand this.

            
           I stared at her white throat above the cheap black cross, and I thought about Sean. My Sean. My son. I thought about him lying in that room some thirty miles away, my wife by his side. I thought about the empty pill bottle, and then the gun safe in Claire’s and my closet. I wondered why Sean hadn’t used my little .22 revolver, instead. The revolver would have been nearly foolproof.

            
           And I tried not to but I thought about the note that lay scattered across the coffee table, not eight feet away—lined page after lined page of Sean’s usual chicken scratch replaced by meditated, carefully transcribed words. Nine lined pages, front and back. Nine lined pages in which I was never mentioned. As if I simply didn’t exist.

            
           But I existed here, in my green plaid boxers. And Heather existed here, in all her smooth and girlish nakedness. I ran my palm over my face, over the three-day stubble on my cheeks and chin, trying to wipe away the reality of what we had just done. My fingers smelled of marijuana and Heather. I tried to remember just exactly how we had gotten here.

            
           “This is wrong,” I said stupidly, as if the thought hadn’t occurred to me until just then. But it had. I had known it was wrong to offer Heather a drink that afternoon, when she had shown up at the house earlier to retrieve an anatomy textbook she’d left in Sean’s room. I had known it was wrong to invite her into the basement, and to let her read the note. I had known it was wrong to take her into my arms when, at the end of page nine, she realized that she, too, was not there. But she was in so much pain, and I had just wanted to take it away. I had just wanted to make her feel better.

            
           “Yeah,” Heather said, staring at the burning tip of the joint and nodding her head slowly. “But so is trying to kill yourself.” Her eyes narrowed. They were a vivid violet color. She must have had special contacts.

            
           “Sean,” I said. Heather looked up at me expectantly. I didn’t know what else to say.

            
           “I love him, I think,” she said in answer to my silence. She picked up the chipped glass and with her white wrist, rotated its bottom in a tight circle. The vodka sloshed against the crystal sides, creating a little funnel in the center. Heather lifted the glass to her mouth and tipped her head back, her eyes half-closed as she drained the last of the liquid. She set the glass between us on the bar. “Yeah, I love him. Even though he doesn’t love me.”

            
           “I love him,” I said. We stared at each other, expressionless, silent. “He’s my son,” I added. I reached for the joint she held in her idle hand and took it from between her thumb and index finger. Her fingernails were painted black, the polish spilling beyond the edges of her nails in places, past the cuticles and onto the skin. Like a line drawing colored in by a four-year-old. I put the end of the joint between my lips and pulled the smoke into my lungs, holding it there for as long as possible. Heather sat up straight, bringing her breasts into view. I had forgotten she was naked, and so had she, apparently, or else she just didn’t care. Her breasts were large. Larger than Claire’s.

            
           “They’re real,” Heather said, catching my stare. She hadn’t meant for this to be funny, but I laughed, and a cloud of marijuana smoke erupted from my mouth. It diffused into the air around us.

            
           “You’re seventeen,” I laughed, my eyes following the cloudy swirls. “Of course they’re real.”

            
           She frowned. I had hurt her, I could see. I had somehow hurt Sean, and then he had hurt himself, and then I had hurt her, and now I just wanted to take her in my arms again and put something else where the hurt was.

            
           But I had tried that. We had tried that, half-an-hour ago, and then we had realized that the hurt must be somewhere else. Which we had really known all along. The note. That’s where the hurt was. And where she wasn’t. And where I wasn’t.

            
           “They’re wonderful,” I said, after too long of a pause. I slid around the bar and walked clumsily across the carpet, to the couch, and grabbed an ivory-colored afghan from its back. “You’re wonderful,” I continued, cautiously, turning back to Heather and handing her the blanket while trying not to look at her breasts. “Sean loves you very much. He told Claire that all the time.”

           I turned around to face the back of the bar, my eyes searching for the bottle of vodka that, before this afternoon, had been unopened. Now it was nearly gone. I grabbed it and turned back—Heather was now covered from the chest down—and tipped the remaining liquid through the narrow mouth, into the glass. Heather watched me do this and then started to cry. No heaving, no hyperventilating. Just a quiet, controlled cry. I thought maybe she was not really crying, that maybe she just thought crying was the appropriate thing to do. I wanted to know how she did it. I wanted to know how she conjured those tears. If they made her feel better, or just like a better person.

             



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