The summer I turn seventeen, a low cloud over Lake Erie hooks my parents’ Sunfish and they go down.  Even though their bodies are recovered, their voices are drowned.

            In the weeks that follow, I become a student of the family albums; the pictures neatly arranged in a dozen stiff volumes in a silent den, and I am surprised by how perfunctory the shots are.  Every face, every body is framed at eyelevel.  In no picture does either my mother or my father drop to one knee.  The pictures are utterly clean, bereft of perspective.  And hardly a shot exists that isn’t prefigured by the calendar.  

            I turn the pages on yellowed memories.  Holiday snaps of black-and-white picnics and church gatherings give way to faded Polaroids of birthdays and trips to relatives and summer friends fishing on campground piers. These are followed by the Instamatic births of two children, more birthdays, Christmases and public school graduations.  All the pictures are timely; together they outline the punctuals of life, not the motives that drive one.  And I find myself caught between grief and anger at how thoroughly my parents have been silenced. 

            There’s one odd one, though, a picture that’s simply wrong.  I am five and my sister, Elaine, is seventeen and looks impossibly big beside me.  She has black mascara and spiked hair.  Something gleaming pierces her nose.  She is holding my hand-the last time she holds my hand before she leaves.  I am smiling at the camera.  “Show teeth,” mother always said, and I always did.  In the kid pictures of me, regardless of the season, I wear an expression of perpetual summer.  Elaine is showing a different sort of teeth.  She is looking away from the camera, and away from me, with an expression of cool detachment.

            The funeral is in late July and in what is left of my summer I watch my brother-in-law, Jon, rebuild a truck.  I have been adopted by Elaine, retrieved from the family home, which is put up for sale.  I understand her kindness even though I don’t know who she is.  Shortly after the “mean picture” was taken, Elaine skipped home to study graphic design in a lowbrow college up north, and since that time Elaine and I have had no real relationship.  The time I was ten, and I stood as a groomsman at her wedding; I didn’t know anyone else in the room except my parents.  Elaine’s people looked frighteningly real in a surreal sort of way.  I learned later that the anorexic maid of honour whose shoulders cut sharp angles through her dress died within a few months of the wedding.  I remember that she was polite.  Elaine introduced her to me as her best friend.  “Best friend,” she said, “Meet best younger brother.”  It was like shaking hands with a skeleton.

            What I did know about Elaine didn’t fit the woman I met only occasionally over the next seven years.   She lived in family lore as the “girl in pigtails.”  That’s how the credits read in the t.v. show she once had a walk-on role in.  Elaine was four at the time, but the moniker stuck, even through her Goth years.  It wasn’t much for me to draw inferences from.

            During the time it takes to fully arrive at her house, to know where and how to stand without making everyone including myself nervous, I spend my afternoons with her husband—a giant of a Dutchman—because Elaine, I come to realize, is as shy of me as I am of her.  Our conversations almost always occur by the truck, mediated by Jon’s presence, which suits us both.  Elaine calls Jon “the man who saved me” as a term of endearment, and it doesn’t take long to learn why...

            His new truck is a 1949 GM, a sea-green lump of history that no one but Jon would have seen fit to salvage from the wreckage of time.  The truck was a gift from Elaine, who understands his need.  Jon is a mechanic by profession, a detective by aptitude.  Piecing together the truck, finding the necessary parts that will allow him to be a mechanic is the aspect of the task in which he most revels.  Parcels come regularly.  Usually they come from the United States; it seems America – especially California where they don’t salt the roads – is filled with shit-boxes that can be plundered for parts.

            “See here,” Jon says one day as he pulls something from a parcel, a glass bowl cocooned in bubble wrap.

            “What is it?” I ask. 

            “It’s the housing of an oil filter.  Can you believe it?  You’d never think anything so fragile could work in something so...tough.”

            He cups the clear glass in his giant hands.  No, I can’t believe it.  Even in its age-worn condition, the GM exudes power, and the idea that anything associated with its engine could be made of glass is astonishing.

            We don’t have much in common, but Jon is my confidante.  He has a rough sincerity that permits me to be confused around him.  He doesn’t question my wardrobe, my choice of black turtlenecks and dark jeans as a steamy July translates itself into an equally humid August.  I imagine I am dressing for my mood, but it isn’t clear to me what that mood is, only that the clothes make it hard to breathe for it.

            I ask one day as Jon pries the lumpy seat out of the cab with a crowbar, “Do you think I’m wrong to be so angry?  Shouldn’t I be sad?”   

            Elaine is there, too.  She has withdrawn into herself.  I can see it.  She is slight and, I imagine, pretty (at least her hair is coiffed and there’s nothing in her nose), but she has a certain posture, a look of delicateness, like there’s something fragile in her as well, that betrays the tenor of her thoughts.  Her arms rub her shoulders while her eyes dissect her feet. 

            “It’s hard not to be mad when someone you love dies,” Jon says simply.

            “It wouldn’t be so bad if they’d left anything behind, but there’s nothing.  Had they written stories or painted a picture – painted anything but the bathroom walls...at least there’d be a voice.  All art has a voice, you know.  True art always makes a sound.  Without art there is no history.”  (I’m awash in theories.)  “The closest they came to making art was taking photographs, and there’s nothing in them.”

            Elaine flushes suddenly and says, “I don’t know about history.  I don’t know about art.  But I was looking at their pictures this morning, and what I saw in them is love.” 

            She makes the word sound surprisingly bitter, and I’m stunned.  She has never rebuked me before, never spoken like a sibling.  It has escaped my attention somehow that she grieves for them too.  “I’m sorry,” I say.

            “Don’t be.”

            “Here,” Jon says, the next day:  “Hand me the five-sixteenth.”

            It always amazes me how he can know the size of the wrench he needs by looking at the head of a bolt.  He is never wrong.  Mechanics is his element, and his talent is mysterious.  I wonder how it works.

            I myself will be a writer, not a mechanic.  I am working on a story that might be philosophically autobiographical.  I can’t tell.  It’s about a man who cannot experience life on his own.  Alone in a beautiful landscape he is left with no impression except a feeling of loss, because no one shares his experience and for beauty to work he realizes that it has to be framed for him – someone else has to enjoy it.  The man isn’t sure whether that makes him extremely shallow or good.  He does, after all, see beauty reflected in the joy of others.  That’s my character, the one I’m creating.  I still haven’t settled on an age for the man, but the plot, I figure, will decide that for me.  Anyway, I won’t make him outrageously old – twenty-five, tops. 

            I think the story is philosophically autobiographical because I think it’s how I feel about my grief.  I’ve been cold and unclear.  It wasn’t until I realized that Elaine was broken that I started to awaken to my own sadness.  Her grief makes mine real.

            As I rifle through the toolbox (I’m a clumsy assistant), she is there beside me.  She taps my shoulder.  She says, “I’m sorry about my temper yesterday.”

            “I liked your temper yesterday.”

            “I was thinking about what you said, about how silent they are for you, and I was jealous.”

            “Jealous?”

            “I didn’t know them.  I didn’t get to know them.  Well...I wasn’t a very good kid.”

            “You were the girl in pigtails.”

            “Ha!  For thirty seconds.  The rest of the time I was the girl on drugs, the girl who threw a tantrum when they caught her having sex and who left home as soon as possible.  I was always too embarrassed...Did they hate me?”

            “NO.”  I fairly shout it.  As a matter of fact, they had never spoken poorly of Elaine.  Not once.  In my presence they had only praised her.  I am struck by their ability not to confess, by the strength of their quiet love.

            She is crying softly.  She says, “I never apologized for not knowing them.”

            Jon, who hasn’t heard any of our conversation, breaks in.  “Where’s that five-sixteenth?”

            “You need a name,” I tell Jon the week before school starts.  I’ve been accepted at York.  I’m not quite certain what I’m going to do there, but I’m checked into a mishmash of classes.  I’m in res, and I’m happy to know that worries Elaine, who time has made cautious.  “We can’t just call it the G.M.  Where’s the glamour in that?”           

            “I have got a name.  I’ve had one all along, but you might not think it...” he reaches for a word, “romantic.”