Read Online The Other by David Guterson - Free Book Online Page B

Carol refused to look at our mother, but I went up and saw that her face had been arranged in approximately the expression I’d seen at Alpental when she snow-sprayed my father with rental skis. My mother in death had a mischievous regard. As the coffin was lowered, Carol laid flowers. At the same moment, my father took off his sunglasses and put his carpenter’s hand on my biceps. It stayed there until the coffin was in the ground, and then my father slid his sunglasses on and, done holding himself up, removed his hand.
    My father did two things shortly thereafter. He started paying Carol to look after me, and he split between us the $10,000 from our mother’s life-insurance policy. He didn’t turn us over to our grandmothers or aunts for the same reason he didn’t remarry—to his way of thinking, the love we needed was just across death’s divide, and to try to replace it would be to adulterate our mother’s presence and prompt it to wane. That’s a sword with a double edge, of course, well intentioned but inherently dangerous, even for a man who didn’t believe in ghosts or an afterlife.
    Mourning took me a while. I remember going to baseball practice early so I could sit in a plum tree before anyone else showed up. In this period of what probably looked like obtuseness, I felt there was something hallowed about my $5,000 in life-insurance money, which I left in a bank and didn’t touch. Five thousand dollars wasn’t much, but it was my version, if wan and proletariat, of John William’s muscular trust fund. When I told him about it, he asked if there were strings attached, because—he added—he had strings attached: he had to enroll at a college, he said, to get his first $50,000. Bowing to this, he was going to Reed, a liberal-arts school in Portland, Oregon, family-approved but not on the East Coast, home to Rhodes Scholars but not far from mountains. I was going to the University of Washington, about a mile from where I’d grown up, partly because you could get in with a 2.8, but mostly because the tuition there was $540.
    We had different plans for the summer months, too, following our mineral-spa blood pact. My hand had healed pretty well, but there was a raised white scar across my palm that looked like a crescent moon. John William had one, too, but his was straighter. He was now bent on solo beach-hiking, in Oregon, whereas I was using my inheritance, or some of it, at least, to shift about in Europe among the horde of young Americans who descend on Europe every summer with Eurail Passes, guidebooks listing the addresses of hostels, and overstuffed, filthy backpacks. My aim was to have experiences. I had no other purpose in going. I thought that if I was to be a writer I would need to travel in foreign places and take notes on how things looked, sounded, and smelled. When I told John William this, he snorted. He said that my orientation was backward, and that if I felt so dire about seeing the world I should go to the Andes or Mongolia. I ignored that and told him to write me at some hostels I was set on inhabiting—Avignon, Barcelona, Grenoble, Brunico—Brunico because I was planning on soloing myself, in the high country of the Dolomites.
    On my own, I flew to Amsterdam and spent my first night abroad at the Seamen’s House, a salty fleabag open to anyone with a few guilders. The next day, I sat by the Herengracht with a packet of frites in my hand, crying, because this is what had become of my mother. She’d been transmuted into an experience I was having—me beneath a patinaed lamp, looking at windows framed by pilasters and listening to bicyclists bumping over cobblestones while ringing their quaint little bells. I did the things you do when you are eighteen and alone in Amsterdam, which is to say I milled on the Damrak in a surfeit of melancholy, pinching my pennies and taking notes on the pigeons, distrustful of all comers. I found other streets more lived in, more personable, where the