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In my memory, fireflies pop here and there against the trees but the trees do not look like trees, more like imitation trees, black construction paper cutout trees as if the whole landscape is impersonating a better landscape, a perfect landscape. It is a moonless night or a night of a new, absent moon: everything waiting for the beginning of something else—pond fountains full blast against the rising din of crickets and peepers and that late-summer whir I've never been able to place, that ominous insect sound at summer's end, an explosion of noise abruptly extinguished. And within all of it the burst and put-put-put of sprinklers.
Now empty of the players in white shorts and collared shirts, spiked shoes. Empty of anyone's mother or father. Only sounds of nature and maintenance, dark expanses of expertly mowed grass and hills, sand traps banked against shorn greens with ramrod-straight flags dead in the no breeze and still water. The all of it designed for entrapment.
I drive fast—dodging the sprinklers, hilarious, Carly sitting next to me and Stephanie balancing in back, squatting and holding on to the metal braces for the golf bags, her flip-flops tucked in the well near Carly's feet. We are flying, ascending the hill on the seventh hole my mother hates given the nasty dogleg, the immediate rough, the way the hill blocks the copse along the too-narrow fairway.
Too often you were fooled into aiming straight with one of your better irons instead of chipping to the crest; too often you watch as the ball soars over the hill, hoping it might drop to where you picture the green to be, land in the hole or right next to the hole, a short putt, the flag pulled away by the caddie or your partner at just the last minute before the ball plunked into the metal canister, hand in glove, slipping in, really, with such grace you couldn't believe your skill or your luck.
But this will never happen, even for members with handicaps in the single digits. The downward slope of the seventh hole angles such a sharp left, a true dogleg, that the fairway only narrowly banks the thick copse, sycamore and white pine, massive and decades-old trees original to the Huntington estate: some people in town still remember the earlier forests of elm and sugar maple and red oak; the beech that blocked the sun in the woods' interior, like a black heart bound by the same stone the Italians used to reinforce the old walls from generations before the generations anyone could claim as their own, generations that arrived and imagined this land tamed, beaten into pasture.
The crops died. The people died. The forest grew. The sound the wind, mostly, but on this night silence: a still breeze. We were drunk. School would begin in a few weeks. Tenth grade. We were not yet sixteen. There were fireflies against the black backdrop. This I remember. The entire landscape a stage set. Lights off. No moon. This part I remember. No moon. The bursts of water: laughing. The dead whir of those insects starting then dying then starting again.
Over that hill, the seventh-hole hill, we flew. The trees suddenly there so we flew, we were flying, our weight shifting and our screams, laughing and drunk with it—the heat in our faces from the sun we had all day soaked in—and then that jolt, the jolt of the tilt, the hard left, the sudden tilt, still laughing, Carly screaming my name as if I could do anything but I could not do anything, the cart already tipping as if in slow motion though we were flying, we flew, Stephanie thrown from the back, never clear to me how, so that in my mind's eye I see her not tumbling but something far more beautiful, as if the hard turn, the sudden shift sent her aloft to fly as she flew into that white pine, a pine so stately, so old and wise, my mother blamed the thing for not having the sense to save a child, save Stephanie, to tilt one way or another so that her trajectory, trajectory not a word I would ever use but one I heard again and again from first the cops and then the judge and then just regular people who thought it best from here on out to repeat the story for me, as if I weren't there, or as if I needed to be reminded what I had done, because what I had done was kill her. I had killed my best friend.
Excerpted from His Favorites by Kate Walbert. Copyright © 2018 by Kate Walbert. Excerpted by permission of Scribner. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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