Free Across a Green Ocean by Wendy Lee Page A

strangely calm, as if she were reporting something that had happened in another country. Although he comprehended what she was saying, his eyes were fixated on his own hand, lying on David’s hipbone, like a long, pale lizard. It was impossible that in one moment he should feel so complete, and then in the next, absolutely empty.
    Without telling David what was wrong, he dressed and left the apartment, walked twenty blocks downtown in a daze before remembering he had told Emily that he would meet her at the train station. That night, at his mother’s house, after his mother and sister had gone to sleep, he finally called David to tell him what had happened. He did not say he would see David when he got back. As if an outsider to the situation, he listened to David struggle to find the right words to say and give up, a pattern that he would later recognize with other friends, coworkers, and people he didn’t know at his father’s funeral.
    After ending the call with David, Michael sat in his old bedroom, still trying to feel something. He thought of his mother and sister in their own rooms, the efficient walls of silence that surrounded them all. Finally, he was able to dredge up an old hurt that had long since scabbed over but would twinge if he prodded it hard enough. It was much easier to feel anger at his father, and something his father had done years ago, than at the randomness of his father’s death.
    Michael had seen his father two weekends earlier, one of the rare times he’d gone back home that summer—partly to escape the heat in the city and partly to get some perspective on his relationship with David, which was turning out to be much more intense than he’d expected. At the time, David’s closeness had been part of everything that had felt too close about the city; simply another thing that he needed to get away from. His father had been his usual taciturn self, glowering over something as minor as a creaky door hinge or a dead patch of grass on the lawn. He’d also been particularly concerned about a crape myrtle tree in the backyard that had caught a disease and had consequently lost all of its leaves, appearing as though it were in the dead of winter. Michael’s father talked to him about what to do with the tree and finally announced he was going to cut it down; Michael had agreed. That was the essence of the last, illuminating conversation he had with his father.
    At the funeral, since he didn’t speak Chinese, most of the people there bypassed him. Emily seemed to be handling everything in her usual, capable manner, and he felt unnecessary, like an uninvited guest. So instead he snuck away early on with Amy Bradley, who had come in from Boston, where she attended design school. They went out and sat on the back porch.
    “How’re you holding up?” Amy asked.
    “Could be better,” Michael replied. “Any chance you got a cigarette on you?”
    Amy grinned. “I have something better.” She extracted a neatly rolled joint from her pocket. “I thought you might need this.”
    For a moment, Michael hesitated, knowing it wouldn’t look good if he were caught smoking pot at his father’s funeral. What would his mother think? But what the hell—next to Emily, he looked like a delinquent, anyway.
    Passing the joint back and forth reminded him of when he and Amy were teenagers, parked in the woods in her parents’ car, or up in her room. They spent afternoons at her house with pads of heavy Manila paper, Amy sketching clothing designs and Michael sketching her as she sketched. She was already into fashion then, making clothes on her own sewing machine and using Michael as a dress form. You make the perfect model, she gushed, which he interpreted to mean that he had the figure of an anorexic, prepubescent girl, and wasn’t sure if he should take it as a compliment or not. Still, he stood motionless for hours as she pinned and re-pinned.
    You would not have known Amy was talented in that arena