Whispers

Chris Elms is a name I’ve never forgotten. I think you remember too much of everything. Memory has a mean streak as well as a kindness. We tend to want to remember what we like. I have no other occasion to remember him. There was a real elm tree in their yard. A big pane of glass looked out onto it, as big as a man, or a boy. It’s hard to decide what you are at thirteen. They were in that bedroom on a summer day, Chris and my brother. I was ten. One decade, but it had seemed so huge to me. “Don’t go there,” my grandmother said. Her voice was fierce. I hadn’t heard it like that before. She meant the Moselle house. They were German Catholics, or Spanish and German Catholics. Their colors weren’t certain. The father, Vince, had haunting green eyes, as did his wife, Emily. They had two boys, as our family did, only two. This was years before that summer of the window and the elm tree. I was six. “Do you want any gum?” Emily, the mother, had asked me, her hair black and her skin darker, more enigmatic than her husband’s. The boys’ skin color was in between their mother’s and their father’s, which was lighter, his skin almost uncomfortably silken, as of a dead body. I don’t even remember him talking to me. He had a kind-looking face, and he was thin, and so was she. “Black Jack,” I said. That was a popular chewing gum, in sticks. “I’ll bring you some.” She smiled at me, then left us alone. The boys were going to entertain me. They took me into their room in a house that was two doors down from our own, on Crestlake. There was an alley behind, and all the houses had front and side doors and garages, and the trash stayed in the alley. I don’t know how I got in the house, whether they invited me or I asked. I didn’t know that my grandmother, who was spending a week with us to clean my mother’s house—her daughter-in-law’s—would be so angry about my thoughtless visit. The room was messy, unmade beds, two of them. I remember looking at a jar, a Kerr jar, with a little red cloth over the otherwise gaping hole of its round top, held in place with a rubber band. “What’s that?” I said. “Why do you like Black Jack gum?” the younger boy said. (I don’t remember his name, nor that of the other; they were boys, they had faces; I had written my name on the back of the wood leg of one of my