O’Neil and Stephen run for a while in silence, under heavy trees that obstruct their view of the sky and the weather it contains. They are circling the hill, O’Neil knows, skirting its base, but there doesn’t seem to be any way up. Beside him, Stephen breathes heavily, and once in a while O’Neil pulls back to let his friend catch up. Stephen is holding his arms too high-as if he were carrying a pile of wood, when they should be closer to his waist to open the chest-and he is running on his toes, which scuff noisily when he lands. This will hasten the shin splints his heavy sneakers have already guaranteed, but O’Neil decides not to say anything. After about a mile they pass a big house with a barn and two speckled horses grazing on the front lawn; a dirt road veers to the right, along the edge of the property. A bent sign at the roadside reads, Skyline Drive, and beneath that, a warning: Minimum Maintenance Road. Someone has shot three holes in the sign, their edges haloed with rust. Beyond, the road turns again to the right and ascends into the trees.
“No way,” Stephen says. He stops and bends at the waist to brace himself on his knees. For a second O’Neil thinks his friend is about to throw up. Stephen gives his head a horsy shake and spits hard onto the gravel.
“Just don’t think about the hill.” O’Neil’s legs feel thick and sore, and he knows that if he stops moving his courage will leave him.
“It’s these shoes,” Stephen says. “I can’t believe you let me wear these fucking shoes.” He spits again and collapses on the ground, bracing his back against the thin signpost. He waves O’Neil on, his eyes already closed. “Here is where my job ends,” he says.
O’Neil doesn’t respond, and starts up the hill alone. He guesses it’s a mile at most to the top, but he runs easily in case the distance has deceived him. It surprises him, how bad he feels. Though he has slept only six hours and that not well, he hasn’t run for three days, and usually his body stores the energy. Today he feels as if he’s never run at all; his side aches, his fingers tingle with a strange coldness, and he cannot find the correct rhythm-legs, arms, lungs, the body’s musical sentence in three-quarter time-to match the hill that rises under him, carrying him up into the woods. The road is sloppy from late spring runoff, and O’Neil hears the soft gurgle of a nearby creek, winding its mossy way down the hillside. He passes a small house, then a second, larger one, with a gracious wraparound porch and a hammock slung in the yard, and he wonders how it would be to live up here as his sister does, to raise a family in this country of tall trees and long winters; for a moment he imagines that such a life is what he would like to have someday, believing it but also hoping that turning the idea around in his head will carve a space his jangling body can slide into. When it doesn’t, he thinks about Mary, who is awake by now and dressing for the wedding in her room with her friends, and about the children they may someday have, the kind of work they will do, and the houses they will live in. He thinks about a book he read years ago-a book he loved and had forgotten-about a boy who lives alone in the forests of Maine and befriends the trees and animals. He thinks about his sister, who will stand with him at the altar, her husband and sons; he remembers his parents, how he misses them on this, his wedding day.
O’Neil has climbed for ten minutes when the road levels and gives onto a grassy clearing with a view to the north and behind him, higher up, a field in which a herd of sheep dreamily graze. O’Neil stops and stands with his back to the field, resting his hand on a smoothly weathered fence post. Below him he can see his hotel and the town of Southwich, its grid of streets and houses and shops, and his heart expands at the sight of this happy and attractive place that exists for no reason. To the west he finds the main road where it follows the lake, a shimmering expanse two miles away, and beyond it the great sullen peaks of the Adirondacks, now socked in heavy haze. Again O’Neil looks east, toward his sister’s house, and counts seven lines of clouds drifting almost imperceptibly toward him in the lazy air. Far off, a curtain of rain falls into the hills.
It is here, alone with the town laid out below him, that O’Neil allows himself to think about his parents and remember the accident that killed them twelve years ago. This is why he has come. He does not believe in heaven, or the existence of consciousness after death, but he knows that his awareness of them is never far, like a ghost that travels beside him, always at the edge of his vision; and that when he wishes to feel close to them, as he does today, he can bring this awareness into focus, briefly, in a picture. He closes his eyes and lets his mind range. The image he selects is from his sister’s wedding, a year before the accident: his father in his tuxedo, standing on a chair to toast the gathering; his mother laughing, her head thrown back in release, her face opening with pleasure at the wit of the toast O’Neil can no longer hear. There is my father, he thinks, my father, toasting. There is my mother in her blue dress. He holds the picture in his mind as long as he can, until the colors blend and shift, the signal breaks up like a radio station gone out of range, and what remains is only a spidery light that dances against the interior of his closed eyes and the memory that they are dead. Then he says a prayer against the rain and heads down the hill.
Stephen is asleep at the bottom, and together they walk back to the hotel. By the time they return it is after ten. Mary’s parents are finishing breakfast in the dining room, and before O’Neil can hurry up the stairs they see him and wave him over. They are dressed for the wedding, and O’Neil, in his damp T-shirt and shorts, stands awkwardly by their table and eats a cinnamon roll while they talk about the weather. If it looks like rain, Gretchen wants to know, will they still hike up to the meadow? She hopes he’ll say no-Mary’s family has been a little uncomfortable with the plan all along-but he says he’s not sure; he’ll have to talk to Mary. Probably, he says, if it looks like rain but isn’t actually raining, they will go ahead with it.
O’Neil finishes his roll, takes another off the table to eat later in his room, and excuses himself to meet his friends and dress. He has nearly crossed the lobby when the manager stops him and hands him the phone: his sister.
“What about the weather?” she asks.
O’Neil rubs his eyes. He is exhausted by the question, and doesn’t want to make any more decisions. Guests are beginning to come downstairs. He really needs to go get ready. He tells his sister he doesn’t know.
“Well, it’s raining over here. It was raining, anyway. I don’t see how the old folks are going to make it up the path.” There is a scratching noise on the line, and O’Neil’s sister’s voice drifts away. “Stop it, Noah. Here, play with this.” Then she returns. “O’Neil? Sorry, he’s fussing. The caterer is here too. I think she wants to talk to you about the chairs. If it’s raining we’ll need to put some under the tent.”
“That’s all right.” O’Neil thinks for a minute. What is it he needs? He looks up to see their friends, Russell and Laurie and their young son, Adam, coming down the stairs, the three of them wearing rubber boots and Russell swinging a folded umbrella like a putter. They laugh when they see him still in his running shorts with his wedding an hour away, as if this is typical in some way, which O’Neil knows is certainly true. He is late for almost everything: the last one dressed, the last car in the drive, the last to turn in his grades; except for Stephen, he is the last to marry. “Listen, Kay,” he says.
“Jack, can you do something with him, please?” There is a shuffle as Kay hands his youngest nephew off. “What’s that, hon?”