The Afterlife Read Online Free PDF Page B

mirror.”
    Ferris asked, though he knew the answer, “You’ve been working in the bushes?”
    “I
had
to,” the child whined. “They were coming into the yard. There was hardly any yard left. I’ve been feeling exhausted lately, too.”
    “Chills and fever?”
    “Chills once in a while. I don’t know about fever. The thermometer’s broken.”
    “Is your neck stiff?”
    “Only in the mornings, a little sometimes.”
    “Jamie, you poor guy. We must get you to a doctor.” As Ferris bent lower to re-examine the symptom, he tried to suppress the happy thought that he had got out just in time.

Brother Grasshopper
    Fred Emmet—swarthy and thick-set, with humorless straight eyebrows almost meeting above his nose—had been an only child. If he ever fantasized a sibling for himself, it was a sister, not a brother. His father had had a brother, an older brother, who, he let it be known, had dominated him cruelly. Yet into even his more resentful reminiscences crept a warmth that Fred envied, as he tried to imagine the games of catch, decades ago, on the vacant lots of a city that no longer had vacant lots, and the shared paper route in snow that was deeper and more dramatic than any snow today is, with a different scent—the scent of wet leather and of damp wool knickers. Though his father’s brother had deliberately thrown the ball too hard, and finished delivering papers to his side of the street first and never came back to help but instead waited inside the warm candy store, a brother was something his father had
had
, augmenting his existence, giving it an additional dimension available to him all his life. “My brother down in Deerfield Beach,” he would drop into a conversation, or “If you were to express that view to my brother, he’d tell you flat out you’re crazy.” And, though the brothers lived over a thousand miles apart, one in Florida and the other in New Jersey,and saw each other less than once a year, they died within a few months of each other, Fred’s father following his older brother as if into one more vacant lot, to shag flies for him.
    But this was years later, when Fred’s own children were grown, or nearly. He had married early, right after Harvard, supplying himself with another roommate, as it were, rather than launching into life alone. He envied siblings their imagined power of consultation, of conspiring against parents who otherwise would be too powerful. Not the least of the charms his future wife held for him was her sister—a younger sister also at Radcliffe, with her own circle of friends. Germaine was more animated, more gregarious, and more obviously pretty than Fred’s sensible Betsy. Among her numerous suitors the most conspicuous was Carlyle Saughterfield, a tall bony New Englander with a careless, potent manner.
    Fred had been sickly and much-protected as a child, and even his late growth spurt had left him well under six feet tall. He found Carlyle, who was two years older than he and a student at the Business School across the river, exotic and intimidating—a grown man with his own car, a green Studebaker convertible, and confident access to the skills and equipment of expensive sports like sailing, skiing, climbing, and hunting. Carlyle and his B-School friends would load up his snappy green convertible with skis and boots and beer and sleeping bags and head north into snow country with the top down. Details of their mountain adventures made Fred shudder—sheer ice, blinding fog, tainted venison that left them all vomiting, ski trails bearing terrible names like Devil’s Head and Suicide Ravine. Climbing in the White Mountains one summer, Carlyle had seen a friend fall, turning in the air a few feet away as Carlyle pressed into the cliff and gripped the pitons.
    “What was the expression on his face?” Fred asked.
    Carlyle’s somewhat protuberant eyes appeared to moisten, as he visualized the fatal moment. “Impassive,” he said.
    His voice, husky and