The Cranberry Hush: A Novel (3 page)

“I probably don’t need
all
those,” he said.

“Oh, I thought you were hungry?”

“I am,” he said, blushing just a little, or maybe those were
his freshly-showered cheeks. “But some things never change.”

“Still have the legendary weak stomach, huh?”

He smiled, as though he was happy I remembered, and I pulled
two of his pancakes onto my own plate. “That OK?” I said, and he nodded.

“Could I have some coffee?” he said, reaching for the French
press with his free hand. “Is this coffee?”

“Yeah, but it’s probably stone cold.” I touched the back of
my hand to the glass. “Might be OK, actually.”

That it was still warm, the pot I’d made before going to sit
on the stoop, made me realize how little time had passed since the coolest
thing about today was that I didn’t have to go to work. It was just over
forty-five minutes but felt more like a year. Or—no—it felt like
some kind of space-time portal had opened up and I’d fallen years-deep into an
alternate past.

He poured himself some coffee—he always drank it
black, luckily—and brought his breakfast to the table. I put the last
pancakes on the other plate and sat down with him. He divided his pancakes into
two piles of two and cut them neatly into sections, like a pizza. He ate from both
stacks at a time, dipping each forkful into a creeping pool of syrup he
maintained at the side.

“These’re good, thanks.”

“No problem.” I squirted zigzags of syrup across my
plate—too much, but it was something for my hands to do. “Let me know if
you want any more.”

He chewed and nodded.

“So how is Beth?” I said. “I guess I haven’t seen her in
like four years.” He looked a little uncomfortable as he tipped his mug to his
face, and I realized she was bound to be a sore subject. “Oh, I’m sorry, you
probably don’t want to—”

“Nah, it’s OK. She’s good. Hasn’t changed much.”

“It’s hard for me to picture her outside the dorm.”

“Yeah.”

“So wasn’t it—I don’t know—kind of mean? That she
made you leave in the middle of a blizzard?”

He swallowed. “Like I said, same old.” He grinned for a
second. “No, it was a pretty mutual thing.” He stabbed another pancake wedge,
looked around for another one that matched its size, dunked, and brought the
fork to his lips. “We just took it as far as we could take it, and then... Well,
Beth has never been into wasting time. You know, go go go.” He chewed.

“Well that’s good it wasn’t messy. It’s always easier when
things aren’t messy.”

“No, not messy,” he said and considered for a second, “but
like final, you know?”

For a while we ate in silence. A lump of butter slid across
one of my pancakes and plopped into a puddle of syrup. I dragged a piece of
pancake through it.

“So you gathered up your stuff and decided to pay me a
visit, huh?” I was still trying to work up to the question of why. It seemed a
long way off still, though.

He was looking up at the blue dog with a content smile and
turned to me. “I still have some shit at her place,” he said. “I would’ve been fine
with staying a little longer. But she was visiting her parents and I thought I
should sort of make my official exit before she got back.”

“Where’s she from again?”

“Rochester,” he said, but that didn’t ring a bell. “New
York. Anyway, don’t blame me for not calling you first. I would’ve if you had a
phone!”

“What do you mean? Of course I have a phone.”

“Haha. Maybe they just didn’t have your number?”

“Who? Where’d you even come across my address, anyway?”

“Shuster alumni directory. It’s all there online.”

“It is? Jeez. I don’t even own a computer.”

“Really? Why not?”

“Just don’t see the need, I guess.”

“Well it’s all in the directory, all your vital statistics.”

“So
that’s
how you
found me,” I said.

I meant it to be funny but there was a sting in his eyes, as
though a soap bubble burst on his cornea. He got up from the table, rinsed his empty
plate. He stood smoothing with his foot a square of yellow linoleum that had
curled up away from the baseboard under the sink.

I felt bad.

“When you finish eating,” he said without turning around, “I’ll
help you shovel.”

Pulling on my boots again, I noticed the photo
Griff was looking at earlier. It was a snapshot of him lunging off his bed in
our dorm room, taken mid-jump by me from my bed, where I was sitting. Jumping
back and forth between our beds, a game kids play in motel rooms, had been
Griff’s stress relief when writing research papers. In the picture his body was
a blur but his face was clear, frozen in an airborne gasp, his hair fanned out
behind him. A split-second after I snapped it he landed on my bed with a force
that slid the mattress halfway off its black metal frame—and me along
with it. Laughing and red, he’d hauled me to my feet.

It was something I thought about a lot. College memories
played through my mind like television reruns on a high-digit cable channel
dedicated to making my present feel inadequate. Watching Griff stomp out into
the snow in his sweatshirt and scarf, I thought maybe that’s why having him
here didn’t feel quite as strange as it probably should’ve. I’d spent so much
time remembering, that even though we hadn’t talked in years his name had never
left the tip of my tongue.

I buttoned my coat and followed him outside. The yard tools
were in the garage, which also housed my Jeep. The garage door opened manually,
and to get to the handle we had to dig down into the snow. It took our combined
strength to get it to screech up along its frozen tracks.

“If I hadn’t come you would’ve been stuck,” Griff said.

“Nah, I probably wouldn’t even have shoveled,” I said. In
fact, I wasn’t sure I’d ever shoveled this driveway. After the neighbor lady’s
was done I usually made do with ruts in my own.

I could only find one shovel, stuck to the wall with springy
metal grips, alongside a rarely-used rake and a never-used hoe.

“Give it here,” he said, taking it. “I’ll do it until I get
tired.”

While he shoveled I kicked a crater in the snow by the edge
of the driveway and sat down. Crazy how being surrounded by millions of flakes
of ice can feel so cozy. A boy and a girl dressed in snowsuits walked down the
street pulling red plastic sleds. There were no hills around and I wondered
where they were going.

Griff tossed the snow back over his shoulder with the
enthusiasm of someone digging for treasure. When he’d cleared half the driveway
he stabbed the shovel into a pile and rested his chin on the green plastic
handle. I got up to take my turn.

He waved me away. “I have a little left in me,” he said.

“... Suit yourself.” I settled back into the snow.

“So since we’ve covered my romantic disaster,” he said after
heaving a load of snow against the fence that separated my yard from my
neighbor’s, “what have you been up to? Seeing anyone?”

“I was for a while,” I said. “In the fall.”

“Guy or girl?”

The question—the matter-of-factness of it—made
me smile. Unlike some people, Griff had never treated my bi-ness as something I
might outgrow.

“Girl. Melanie. She works at the art gallery down the street
from my comic shop. Or worked. I assume she still does.”

“You working there? At the comic shop, I mean?”

“Yeah. Sort of a manager. We don’t really have titles. My
boss Simon owns the place.”

“Can’t say I’m surprised. You always liked your funny books,”
he said with a laugh. “Anyway, go on— Melanie?”

“Yeah.”

“Hot?”

“Very.” She’d had the most beautiful chocolate-colored hair.
It was long, went down to the middle of her back. When we kissed we could hide
in it, like people behind a waterfall. “There’s not a lot to tell,” I said. “We
dated for like four months. Fun, cute. I thought it was going pretty well. Then
her ex came back from Iraq and was worth a second look, apparently, now that he
was some kind of war hero. Suddenly me and my superheroes were second rate.”

“What happened?”

“She gave me the heave-ho in a McDonald’s drive-thru.”

“Ouch.”

“Yeah. Burgers went cold that night. I was pretty pissed
off.”

“About the burgers or the dumping?”

“Well, both.” I gathered a clump of snow in my hands and
pressed it together, but it was too light for snowballs and sifted through my
fingers. “But what can you do, right?”

Griff nodded and tossed a load of snow over his shoulder. “Yeah,
what can you do.” He’d cleared most of the driveway and was breathing out big
white clouds.

“Aren’t you tired?” I said, getting up and really hoping
he’d hand over the shovel before he passed out. “You said you barely slept last
night.”

“Now that you mention it, yeah.” He started to take another
scoop but slowed and stopped. “OK. Here.” He harpooned the shovel into the
remaining square of snow.

He walked up the driveway and took over my vacated snow
seat. “So what did Melanie think of the bi thing?”

“Oh, I don’t know. She seemed OK with it,” I said, heaving a
shovelful of snow. “I think she thought it was interesting.”

“Cool.”

“It’s funny how it works. Gay guys love it when they just want
to hook up because they think I’m actually straight and hooking up with
straight guys is hot.”

“Seriously?”

“Apparently, yeah. But they hate it for a relationship. And
I’m not really a one-night-stand kind of guy, I guess. Then girls usually hate
it flat-out because they think I’m actually gay and just waiting to break out
of the closet. It’s kind of rough.”

“I get that. There’s so many variables and stuff that can
make people wrong for each other, though,” he said. He waved his arms through
the snow on either side of the snow-chair, giving it angel wings. “You probably
have more crap to deal with than average, I’ll give you that. But it’s not like
it’s a cakewalk for me either, you know?”

“I guess.”

I finished clearing the driveway down to the sand and the
crushed purple shells, hacked through the snow bank at the end, opening my
house to the street and to Harwich beyond. Finally I cut a path along the walk
up to the front porch. Griff had been quiet for a while and I noticed after
putting the shovel away that he had fallen asleep.

“Griff, wake up,” I said, shaking him by the shoulder. “You
can die doing that.”

“I need to crash,” he mumbled.

“Come inside,” I said, pulling the garage door closed, “before
you get hypothermia.”

There was no bed in the spare bedroom, and in the
living room just the two corduroy chairs.

I offered him my own bed, glancing down at the chipped teal paint
on the baseboard heater as I said it, my arms crossed masculinely over my chest.
With Griff I’d always been afraid of implications.

He mumbled something that sounded like
thanks
and scuffed down the hall to my room. I heard the headboard
smack the wall. I felt like smiling, and may have, but at the same time my
heart began to pound with the full weight of whatever was going on here.
Through the picture window I watched a flashing plow grind its way down the
street, leaving in its wake a new snow bank at the end of my driveway. We were
snowed-in all over again.

The yearbook was still lying on the chair. I sat down and opened
it across my lap, flipped through the pages like a squeamish med student
through a medical textbook, afraid that on the next page, or the next, would be
blood and guts. My memories were carefully filtered and I was wary of seeing a
photo that rekindled one I was happy to have forgotten.

I didn’t expect to be in much of the yearbook, though, and I
wasn’t. Amidst the standard thumbnail photos I found the one starring Vincent
J. Dandro: I was leaning against my Jeep, new when the photo was taken and gleaming
cobalt blue in the sun. In the space beneath the photo that most graduates
filled with inside jokes and cryptic memories, I was surprised to find that I’d
written only “I never drink when I fly,” a line I recognized immediately as
coming from the movie
Superman
, but
which I had absolutely zero memory of writing. I cringed. The quote looked
awkward, uncomfortable, even sad, especially in comparison to other people’s.
It couldn’t have really meant anything to me; it was probably just the first
thing that came to mind when I was filling out the form. It was profound only
in that it showed I had nothing more meaningful to say.

To the right of my photo was Virginia Daniels, a good-looking
auburn-haired number with perfect eyebrows and pouty lips, and to the right of
her, there he was: A. Griffin Dean.

His smile looked a little forced but it was a good,
professional picture. His hair was shorter than I ever saw it back then. A tie
hung loosely around the collar of his paisley shirt, over which he wore a solid
brown vest. Beneath his photo was an unpunctuated list of things I didn’t
understand, and that stabbed me with sadness. They must’ve been from the two
years I hadn’t been part of. Ah, but here was one I did recognize. It said
simply,
Pantie-O’s
—a reference
to the breakfast cereal with undergarment-shaped marshmallows we’d crafted from
an empty Cocoa Krispies box.

I wondered, not for the first time and as always with a
mixture of loneliness and guilt, how much he’d thought of me during our second
half of college. Had he put that in there just for me, or were Pantie-O’s a
joke he let other people in on? Was it no longer just ours?

I turned the page.

The club photos were next—I hadn’t been in any of the
clubs—and then came the sports teams, the intramural baseball team being
the second and last photo I expected to be in. I was OK. I played
outfield—never liked hitting. I liked being far enough away to almost
just be a spectator like the rest of the crowd, but with the special potential,
unique among them, to at any moment appear out of nowhere and make a
game-winning catch. It barely mattered that I never did.