A home at the end of the world by Michael Cunningham Read Free Book Online

really are aliens, they will think I’m the lowest member of the house. While I hesitate over whether to go back to my room to change, people start coming back inside, talking about a trick of the mist and an airplane. People resume their dancing.
    Carlton must have jumped the back fence. He must have wanted to be there alone, singular, in case they decided to take somebody with them. A few nights later I will go out and stand where he would have been standing. On the far side of the gully, now a river swollen with melted snow, the cemetery will gleam like a lost city. The moon will be full. I will hang around just as Carlton must have, hypnotized by the silver light on the stones, the white angel raising her arms up across the river.
    According to our parents the mystery is why he ran back to the house full tilt. Something in the graveyard may have scared him, he may have needed to break its spell, but I think it’s more likely that when he came back to himself he just couldn’t wait to get back to the music and the people, the noisy disorder of continuing life.
    Somebody has shut the sliding glass door. Carlton’s girlfriend looks lazily out, touching base with her own reflection. I look, too. Carlton is running toward the house. I hesitate. Then I figure he can bump his nose. It will be a good joke on him. I let him keep coming. His girlfriend sees him through her own reflection, starts to scream a warning just as Carlton hits the glass.
    It is an explosion. Triangles of glass fly brightly through the room. I think for him it must be more surprising than painful, like hitting water from a great height. He stands blinking for a moment. The whole party stops, stares, getting its bearings. Bob Dylan sings “Just Like a Woman.” Carlton reaches up curiously to take out the shard of glass that is stuck in his neck, and that is when the blood starts. It shoots out of him. Our mother screams. Carlton steps forward into his girlfriend’s arms and the two of them fall together. Our mother throws herself down on top of him and the girl. People shout their accident wisdom. Don’t lift him. Call an ambulance. I watch from the hallway. Carlton’s blood spurts, soaking into the carpet, spattering people’s clothes. Our mother and father both try to plug the wound with their hands, but the blood just shoots between their fingers. Carlton looks more puzzled than anything, as if he can’t quite follow this turn of events. “It’s all right,” our father tells him, trying to stop the blood. “It’s all right, just don’t move, it’s all right.” Carlton nods, and holds our father’s hand. His eyes take on an astonished light. Our mother screams, “Is anybody doing anything?” What comes out of Carlton grows darker, almost black. I watch. Our father tries to get a hold on Carlton’s neck while Carlton keeps trying to take his hand. Our mother’s hair is matted with blood. It runs down her face. Carlton’s girl holds him to her breasts, touches his hair, whispers in his ear.
    He is gone by the time the ambulance gets there. You can see the life drain out of him. When his face goes slack our mother wails. A part of her flies wailing through the house, where it will wail and rage forever. I feel our mother pass through me on her way out. She covers Carlton’s body with her own.
    He is buried in the cemetery out back. Years have passed—we are living in the future, and it’s turned out differently from what we’d planned. Our mother has established her life of separateness behind the guest-room door. Our father mutters his greetings to the door as he passes.
    One April night, almost a year to the day after Carlton’s accident, I hear cautious footsteps shuffling across the living-room floor after midnight. I run out eagerly, thinking of ghosts, but find only our father in moth-colored pajamas. He looks unsteadily at the dark air in front of him.
    “Hi, Dad,” I say from the doorway.
    He looks in my direction.