She opens the bottle with an alarmingly rusty corkscrew and pours a full mug for her and Seth, half a mug for Tomasz. “Hey!” he protests.
“Give him some more,” Seth says. “He’s earned it.”
Regine looks skeptical but fills Tomasz’s mug, then they raise them in an awkward toast. “To being alive,” Regine says.
“Again,” Seth says.
“Na zdrowie,” Tomasz says.
They drink. Tomasz spits his right back into his cup. “Bleck!” he says. “People like this?”
“Haven’t you had communion wine?” Regine asks. “I thought Poles were Catholic.”
“We are,” Tomasz says, “but I always believed communion wine was flavored to be hard to drink, otherwise, why such a small taste? But real wine . . .”
He doesn’t finish the sentence, so Regine does. “Is supposed to taste like grape juice?”
He nods. “It does not.” He sniffs at his mug and takes another drink, a small sip this time. “It is terrible,” he says. Then he sips it again.
Seth drinks his own. He’s had wine at dinner with his mum and dad, much to the scandalized chagrin of his friends’ decidedly non-European parents. He never much liked it, too vinegary, but here, now, this feels like less a drink than a ritual, and he’s happy to have it.
Regine doesn’t drink much, though. She holds it in front of her awhile, then sets it down on the table.
“Don’t you like it?” Seth says. “It’s not bad. A little heavy, but –”
“He drank,” she says. “His breath, it always stank of . . . Even in the memory, it stank. I didn’t think it would bother me, I’ve had it before, but.”
“But,” Seth agrees. He sets his own mug down. Tomasz does too.
Regine scratches at a non-existent spot on her pants. “Is he down there, you think? I guess I didn’t really believe it till now but . . . He’s gotta be, doesn’t he?”
“My parents are,” Seth says. “I saw them on a display screen. They’re in there somewhere. Living their lives.”
“And my mother, too,” Regine says. “Carrying on with a dead daughter and a shit husband.” She coughs away some emotion, but there’s a dark question on her face and she says no more.
“My mother is dead,” Tomasz says, matter-of-factly. “But I find a new family! A brother and a sister.”
“Stepbrother,” Regine says, grinning as Tomasz makes to protest. “All right, half-brother. Adopted.”
“Oh,” Tomasz says, “I am thinking we are all adopted.”
“I saw a baby in there,” Seth says at this. “In one of the coffins. With its mother.”
They stare at them. “But how is that possible?” Tomasz asks.
“There are probably ways, if you think about it,” Seth says. “But however they did it, they believed in the future.” He leans forward and places his hands on the coffin in front of him. “Listen.”
Tomasz simply looks at him, but he can see Regine tense, see her bracing herself.
“Right,” he continues. “Okay. I saw both of your deaths. I didn’t mean to, but I did.” He taps the coffin, no longer looking them in the eye. “I think it’s only fair I tell you about mine.”
He begins to talk.
He tells them everything.
Including the end.
73
“You’ve got a visitor,” his mother said curtly through his bedroom door on a Saturday morning.
“Gudmund,” he said to himself, his heart lurching in his chest enough to make him light-headed. He hadn’t seen him since that night a few weeks back, when Gudmund had promised they wouldn’t lose contact, when he promised there was a future, if they just held out for it.
Since then, though, Gudmund’s cell phone had either been confiscated or had its number changed, and there were no answers at any of his e-mail addresses. But surely he could have borrowed someone’s phone at his new school or set up a fake e-mail account. You couldn’t keep people from communicating these days, not if they wanted to.
But there’d been nothing.
Until now.
He practically bounded out of bed to the door, opening it –
And finding Owen blocking the way.
“Hi, Seth,” his brother said.
Seth placed a soft hand on Owen’s chest to push him back. “Outta the way. I’ve got –”
“I wrote a song on the clarinet.”
“Later, Owen.”
Seth thumped heavily down the stairs, turning into the living room, his eyes bright, his voice too loud, saying, “Christ, Gudmund, I never thought I’d –”
He stopped. It wasn’t Gudmund.
“H,” Seth said. He felt his skin getting hot and knew an embarrassed blush was starting up his neck.
But it was an angry blush, too.
H hadn’t spoken to him, hadn’t even acknowledged his existence since the pictures had come out. The worst of the abuse at school had settled down some, but there was still the minefield around him that felt as if no one could approach him, even if they wanted to. Seth knew H had always been the weakest of them, the one who’d suffer the most by association when it turned out that his two closest male friends were doing each other.
But he’d always been good-hearted, too, hadn’t he? Beneath all the stupid jokes and goofing around, Seth had always thought H was basically decent. Which made the exile particularly painful.
“I’m not him,” H said, hunched there on the sofa, sitting underneath that awful painting by Seth’s uncle that used to scare him as a little kid. H hadn’t even taken off his coat. “I haven’t seen him.”
They were alone. Seth’s mum had disappeared to who knew where, and his dad was still working on the kitchen.
The silence stretched, until H finally said, “I can go, if you want.”
“Why are you here?”
“I need to tell you something,” H said. “I need to tell you something that I don’t even know if you need to know. But.”
“But what?”
“But maybe you do.”
Seth waited for a moment, then went to the chair that faced the couch and sat down. “It’s been shit, H.”
“I know.”
“I thought you were my friend.”
“I know –”
“I didn’t do anything to you. We didn’t do anything to –”