“That’s right,” O’Neil said. “That’s where she is.”
“With her mommy and daddy. Our other grandparents.”
“Yes, they’re all there together.”
“Cool it, Noah,” Sam said. “Let him eat.” He looked at his uncle. “I’m sorry, O’Neil.”
“No, it’s all right,” O’Neil said. “We can talk about it. I don’t mind at all.”
“Did they die too?” Simon asked.
“Yes, they did, a long time ago. But that doesn’t matter. You see, in heaven there’s no yesterday, or today, or tomorrow. It’s all the same in heaven. So, you’re there already, too, with your mom. Think about it. How could it be heaven if she didn’t have you there?”
Noah frowned. “But I’m alive,” he said.
“Yes, you are. And you’ll live many, many years. Your whole life. But when you get there, it will be like only a day has passed. Not even a day. No time at all. That’s heaven.”
Noah eyed him skeptically. “How do you know?”
O’Neil looked at him, then at Sam. If they had been alone, he would have thrown his arms around the boy and told him how sorry he was, how much he loved him.
“Your mother told me,” O’Neil said.
It happened in September. O’Neil had been back teaching four weeks. He had just turned forty; later, he would wonder if this fact had something to do with what occurred. As the day approached, Mary asked him if he wanted her to plan a party, and though he said no, he knew she would do something. That night, a Friday, he came home to a darkened house. As he opened the door he assumed he would be stepping into the party he had refused, but found only Mary and the girls, coloring with crayons on construction paper at the kitchen table. Happy birthday, Daddy, the girls cried, and hugged him tightly. They showed him what they had made: a picture of the two of them, enclosed in a heart. Go shower, Mary said, as he was admiring it. We have a dinner reservation at seven; Mrs. Carlisle will be here any minute. They dressed and drove to the restaurant, and only when they were seated at their table did O’Neil notice the balloons and the gifts and lift his face to find all his friends there, laughing at him, the oblivious O’Neil.
Forty: how unlikely it seemed. As a boy O’Neil had computed his age in the year 2000-an impossibly distant future-and discovered, to his astonishment, that he would be forty years old. Under the eaves of his bedroom he had wondered, What would the world be like then? Would we be living in outer space, in bubbles under the sea, soaring to work in helicopters? Would he even be able to enjoy these wondrous things, being so old? Yet here he was, the same person, living in the same world, none of it truly changed. He drove a car to work, lived in a house twice as old as he was, looked at the stars when he cared to, feeling only the vague appreciation one gave to anything beautiful and useless and far away. Every day he went to school, just as he had as a boy. Amazing.
Was your birthday all right? Mary asked, driving home from the party. Was it what you wanted? Dozens of old friends had come, some he hadn’t seen for years. His college roommate, Stephen, had even driven down from Boston. O’Neil told her it was; it was perfect, he said. You know, in this light, you don’t look forty, Mary said, and squeezed his hand promisingly. My gift to you comes later, handsome man.
She meant she was pregnant. She did not tell him that night, but he thought she would soon; that was how it had been the first two times, Mary keeping the news to herself until she was sure, living alone with her secret like the answer to a question she wasn’t sure anyone had posed. Well, he thought as sleep came to him, perhaps it wasn’t so. She would tell him, or not. She was, or she wasn’t. He would wait to hear. So, in the meantime, his belief-for that’s what it was-would be a secret too.
Monday he drove to work, his mind buzzing with happiness. Everything he saw-the morning sunlight rebounding in the turning leaves, the bright yellow school buses and dutiful crossing guards, a woman putting on lipstick in her rearview mirror at a stop sign-filled him with a strange delight. It flowed through him like a benign electric current. So much joy! So much to look forward to! The awful months were over; he had stepped back into life. In the faculty workroom the morning talk among his colleagues was still of summer pleasures, of gardens planted and trips taken, of books read and movies seen, of mountains scaled and rivers kayaked and long, unhurried days doing nothing at all. They were teachers, with more time than money; their enjoyments, modest to a fault, seemed to O’Neil to possess the same unassuming purity of green grass, summer light, and flowers in a pail, and he listened to their stories with a feeling like kinship. This life they described was, after all, the same one he had chosen.
“O’Neil, what’s gotten into you?” someone asked-the science teacher who, so long ago, had explained the leaves to him. “Nine months to go,” Paul said. “What’s there to be so happy about? You’re grinning like an ape.”
“Was I?” O’Neil laughed and sipped his coffee; he didn’t know.
“Forty years old,” another said, shaking his head. He was a young man, just a few years out of college, who had joined the faculty a year ago. He had spent his summer teaching sailing on the coast of Maine, and was as brown as a shot of scotch.
“It’s not so bad,” O’Neil reassured him.
The young man helped himself to a cookie off the tray. “I don’t know about you, but I’d want to go hang myself.” He lifted his face and smiled so everyone could see he was joking. An embarrassed titter ran through the room.
“Trust me,” O’Neil said. “You won’t feel like that at all.”
The bell rang; off they went to class, sliding into the river of students that flowed through the hallways. Clanging lockers, books, and backpacks strewn everywhere-huge piles of them, heaped under stairways and in every open corner-the urgent din of voices, the girls erupting in shrieks, the boys croaking and wailing: it was like stepping into chaos itself. Let’s hurry it up now, O’Neil heard himself saying. They darted from his path like minnows in the shallows. Let’s move it along, people. How like a teacher, he thought.
His ninth graders were studying the Odyssey. It was, by the standards of the school, a rite of passage; his department chair liked to say that students at the academy had been reading it since the Trojan War itself. Even in the lower grades the students spoke of this task like a terrible fate that awaited them all. The Odyssey! they cried. All of it! It’s, like, a thousand pages long! And yet most of them came to like it, even as they refused to admit this. War, magic, adultery, ruination, betrayal; nymphs and cyclopses and men turned into pigs; a long trip and the yearning for home. What was it, in the end, but a metaphor for the trials of growing up? They had read to Book Eleven, “A Gathering of Shades,” in which Odysseus and his men, blown to a dark and nameless shore by Circe, queen of Aeaea, filled a trench with blood to summon forth the spirits of the dead.
“What are we seeing here?” he asked them. “Is Circe doing him a favor, or not?”
Half a dozen hands went up. “It’s like Odysseus is getting another chance,” a girl said. “Tiresias tells him everything that’s going to happen to him, so he can avoid it. It’s like he’s reading Cliff Notes.” She smiled. “Like he’s cheating on a test.”
Others disagreed; one boy, a passionate rationalist, thought it was a dirty trick.
“What good can it do him?” he asked. “How can it help you to see the future, if you can’t change it?”
“Well, that’s just the question,” O’Neil said. “What do you think? Is the future fixed, or isn’t it?”
The boy was immovable. “The future is what it is,” he said.
The discussion was spirited; they moved through the text line by line. As the end of the period neared they came to the part where Odysseus was approached by the ghost of his mother. Though he had taught the book a dozen times, this scene remained, for O’Neil, a moment of the deepest poignancy-the great hero, so full of arrogance, reduced to a childlike yearning for his mother’s touch. He rose, took his copy of the book from his desk, and read these lines to them: