In November, one month before he was to sing his last solo in the Christmas recital, Gregory got lost for four hours somewhere out between Two Ponds and Sitidgi Junction. They had to call the search and rescue team to find him, and by the time they did, Gregory had hypothermia and frostbite on six of his toes. It had been an accident, of course, but that didn’t change things for his mother. She went as blank and calm as a ghost when she saw him coming, all bundled up out of the search and rescue van, and didn’t speak to Gregory’s father for seven days. At night – the Christmas recital only weeks away– she fed Gregory spoonfuls of fish oil and rubbed stinging ointment into his throat and his chest.
On the seventh day, when it became evident that Gregory would be well again, and in plenty of time for the Christmas solo, Gregory’s mother turned to Gregory’s father and, in her comforting way, as on so many occasions before, said: “I’m going to leave you one day, Charlie Dell.” With that, everything returned to normal. Gregory’s father received Gregory’s mother’s forgiveness with the same slight bow of his head that he used once a year in church, when he went up to receive his annual communion, or they asked him to pray.
The day had started out ordinary enough. They’d packed sandwiches and thermoses filled with sugary hot chocolate, and taken off on their snowmobiles across JoJo MacIntosh’s frozen lawn, just as they had every weekend that fall. Gregory had turned 13 in August of that year and had received for the occasion his own brand-new 12 gauge Remington – a present from his father – and after that he went goose hunting every time he could. But now it was the end of the season, and most of the geese had already flown. They’d be lucky to find any, and they didn’t have much time to try: The sun was barely even rising any more. It just sort of peered out at the edge of the horizon, and sat there for a while, illuminating the treeline in a dull glow.
They were able to get up a pretty good speed as they headed out across the field, and when they passed under the line of electrical towers which marked the limit of town and the scrubby woods closed up behind them, Gregory felt relieved to be leaving that world, and everything it contained, behind. His mother preparing sandwiches for the 50/50, his two sisters yelling at one another over the sound of the TV. And, of course – this most of all – the Christmas solo.
Every year for four years now he had sung the Christmas solo, and each time perfectly. Everyone said so, but he didn’t need them to. He had felt it himself. How everyone stopped shuffling around in their seats. How no one hardly dared to think – or breathe – when he sang. But four years. That already made him too old. Miss Frostic, the choir director, said so. She said she probably shouldn’t have even assigned it to him this year. “Wouldn’t that be just like luck,” she’d sigh sometimes, after a practice in which he’d sung the solo through so perfectly that even the people walking by in the hall had stopped to listen at the gymnasium door. “Have his voice crack for the first time right in the middle of the Christmas solo.”
When they found themselves at Two Ponds they stopped their snowmobiles and shared a thermos-cup full of hot chocolate, passing it back and forth. There were no birds anywhere in sight, and no sound of them either. In fact, it was so dead quiet you could pretty well hear the after-hum that the snowmobile made when it wasn’t running any more. Gregory hadn’t even known there was a sound for that. His father looked at him, and shrugged – taking the last swig of hot chocolate. After that they would probably head back home.
But then they heard them. All at once. As if there was no distance from which the sound approached. Gregory’s father had his gun up and ready before any birds were even visible in the sky and it was a surprise to Gregory when the first shots rang out. He was some distance behind his father now, having trouble with his own gun, and he worried that all the birds would be gone before he even got it in the air. When he finally raised it, though, he saw that the sky was thick with them. It was a relief when he fired.
As soon as he did, he knew that the shot had connected. First the gun knew, then his hand knew, and then what seemed a long moment afterward his eye saw what his gun and his hand already knew: a single form dropping slowly, silently, from the sky. He felt his heart in his throat; it was an ugly, unswallowable thing. The rest of the birds, and their noise, and the interruptive blows of his father’s gun got further away as he took off after the invisible space that the bird had made in the sky when it fell, but he didn’t notice this – or anything – until much later. Until he was standing right there, underneath that invisible space, and there was nothing there. No, nothing for miles. He was suddenly – startlingly – alone. The sound of the birds was gone now, too, and even the hum of his snowmobile when he cut the engine went immediately quiet and cold. He got down from his snowmobile and began dragging the area for the dead goose in methodical straight lines, keeping the snowmobile in plain sight – but it was dark, and getting darker, so he couldn’t go very far. After a short time he gave up and sat down on his snowmobile and pulled his legs into his chest. He wished that he had been the one carrying the hot chocolate, but it didn’t matter: Everything, he told himself, would be all right.
But then, with a thud in his chest, he realized that he didn’t know that. That this – this exact thing – had never happened before; that, as a matter of fact, nothing had ever happened before when it happened. That was what it meant to be alive: You were always at the exact point at which nothing had yet happened; where everything might. Even things that seemed like they had happened – his mother, for example, telling his father for the thousandth time, “I’m going to leave you one day, Charlie Dell”– had never happened before in the moment that they actually did.
He thought of the goose lying – invisible – somewhere nearby in the snow, and all of a sudden it made him angry to think of that. He wanted to shout something, he didn’t know what yet, at the top of his lungs, but he was too angry at the way that his voice would just get lost in all of that emptiness to think of anything to say. It made him angry to not be able to think of anything to say.
But then, and without quite knowing how, or when he had begun, he realized he had started to sing. The only thing he knew, start to finish, by heart: the Christmas solo. Quietly at first, his voice tight in his throat. But then louder. For the first time, as his voice rose, he willed it to break. He sang louder, and then again louder, and on every note he willed that something in him – some thing, that is, deep in his throat or his heart, wherever the sound was coming from – would crack and break.
But his voice remained unchanged, clear and high. Still nothing had happened; still everything was yet to come.
