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“I am trying,” he said. “I am trying, I swear.” It was around then that I
realized Peter Van Houten had a dead person in his family. I considered the
honesty with which he had written about cancer kids; the fact that he couldn’t
speak to me in Amsterdam except to ask if I’d dressed like her on purpose; his
shittiness around me and Augustus; his aching question about the relationship
between pain’s extremity and its value. He sat back there drinking, an old man
who’d been drunk for years. I thought of a statistic I wish I didn’t know: Half of
marriages end in the year after a child’s death. I looked back at Van Houten. I
was driving down College and I pulled over behind a line of parked cars and
asked, “You had a kid who died?”
“My daughter,” he said. “She was eight. Suffered beautifully. Will never be
beatified.”
“She had leukemia?” I asked. He nodded. “Like Anna,” I said.
“Very much like her, yes.”
“You were married?”
“No. Well, not at the time of her death. I was insufferable long before we
lost her. Grief does not change you, Hazel. It reveals you.”
“Did you live with her?”
“No, not primarily, although at the end, we brought her to New York,
where I was living, for a series of experimental tortures that increased the misery
of her days without increasing the number of them.”

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After a second, I said, “So it’s like you gave her this second life where she
got to be a teenager.”
“I suppose that would be a fair assessment,” he said, and then quickly
added, “I assume you are familiar with Philippa Foot’s Trolley Problem thought
experiment?”
“And then I show up at your house and I’m dressed like the girl you hoped
she would live to become and you’re, like, all taken aback by it.”
“There’s a trolley running out of control down a track,” he said.
“I don’t care about your stupid thought experiment,” I said.
“It’s Philippa Foot’s, actually.”
“Well, hers either,” I said.
“She didn’t understand why it was happening,” he said. “I had to tell her
she would die. Her social worker said I had to tell her. I had to tell her she would
die, so I told her she was going to heaven. She asked if I would be there, and I
said that I would not, not yet. But eventually, she said, and I promised that yes,
of course, very soon. And I told her that in the meantime we had great family up
there that would take care of her. And she asked me when I would be there, and I
told her soon. Twenty-two years ago.”
“I’m sorry.”
“So am I.”
After a while, I asked, “What happened to her mom?”
He smiled. “You’re still looking for your sequel, you little rat.”
I smiled back. “You should go home,” I told him. “Sober up. Write another
novel. Do the thing you’re good at. Not many people are lucky enough to be so
good at something.”
He stared at me through the mirror for a long time. “Okay,” he said. “Yeah.
You’re right. You’re right.” But even as he said it, he pulled out his mostly
empty fifth of whiskey. He drank, recapped the bottle, and opened the door.
“Good-bye, Hazel.”
“Take it easy, Van Houten.”
He sat down on the curb behind the car. As I watched him shrink in the
rearview mirror, he pulled out the bottle and for a second it looked like he would
leave it on the curb. And then he took a swig.
It was a hot afternoon in Indianapolis, the air thick and still like we were inside a
cloud. It was the worst kind of air for me, and I told myself it was just the air
when the walk from his driveway to his front door felt infinite. I rang the
doorbell, and Gus’s mom answered.
“Oh, Hazel,” she said, and kind of enveloped me, crying.

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She made me eat some eggplant lasagna—I guess a lot of people had
brought them food or whatever—with her and Gus’s dad. “How are you?”
“I miss him.”
“Yeah.”
I didn’t really know what to say. I just wanted to go downstairs and find
whatever he’d written for me. Plus, the silence in the room really bothered me. I
wanted them to be talking to each other, comforting or holding hands or
whatever. But they just sat there eating very small amounts of lasagna, not even
looking at each other. “Heaven needed an angel,” his dad said after a while.
“I know,” I said. Then his sisters and their mess of kids showed up and
piled into the kitchen. I got up and hugged both his sisters and then watched the
kids run around the kitchen with their sorely needed surplus of noise and
movement, excited molecules bouncing against each other and shouting,
“You’re it no you’re it no I was it but then I tagged you you didn’t tag me you
missed me well I’m tagging you now no dumb butt it’s a time-out DANIEL DO
NOT CALL YOUR BROTHER A DUMB BUTT Mom if I’m not allowed to
use that word how come you just used it dumb butt dumb butt,” and then,
chorally, dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt dumb butt, and at the table Gus’s
parents were now holding hands, which made me feel better.
“Isaac told me Gus was writing something, something for me,” I said. The
kids were still singing their dumb-butt song.
“We can check his computer,” his mom said.
“He wasn’t on it much the last few weeks,” I said.
“That’s true. I’m not even sure we brought it upstairs. Is it still in the
basement, Mark?”
“No idea.”
“Well,” I said, “can I . . .” I nodded toward the basement door.
“We’re not ready,” his dad said. “But of course, yes, Hazel. Of course you
can.”
I walked downstairs, past his unmade bed, past the gaming chairs beneath the
TV. His computer was still on. I tapped the mouse to wake it up and then
searched for his most recently edited files. Nothing in the last month. The most
recent thing was a response paper to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Maybe he’d written something by hand. I walked over to his bookshelves,
looking for a journal or a notebook. Nothing. I flipped through his copy of An
Imperial Affliction. He hadn’t left a single mark in it.
I walked to his bedside table next. Infinite Mayhem, the ninth sequel to The
Price of Dawn, lay atop the table next to his reading lamp, the corner of page

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138 turned down. He’d never made it to the end of the book. “Spoiler alert:
Mayhem survives,” I said out loud to him, just in case he could hear me.
And then I crawled into his unmade bed, wrapping myself in his comforter
like a cocoon, surrounding myself with his smell. I took out my cannula so I
could smell better, breathing him in and breathing him out, the scent fading even
as I lay there, my chest burning until I couldn’t distinguish among the pains.
I sat up in the bed after a while and reinserted my cannula and breathed for
a while before going up the stairs. I just shook my head no in response to his
parents’ expectant looks. The kids raced past me. One of Gus’s sisters—I could
not tell them apart—said, “Mom, do you want me to take them to the park or
something?”
“No, no, they’re fine.”
“Is there anywhere he might have put a notebook? Like by his hospital bed
or something?” The bed was already gone, reclaimed by hospice.
“Hazel,” his dad said, “you were there every day with us. You— he wasn’t
alone much, sweetie. He wouldn’t have had time to write anything. I know you
want . . . I want that, too. But the messages he leaves for us now are coming
from above, Hazel.” He pointed toward the ceiling, as if Gus were hovering just
above the house. Maybe he was. I don’t know. I didn’t feel his presence, though.
“Yeah,” I said. I promised to visit them again in a few days.
I never quite caught his scent again.

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