Notes From a Reunion
In Clayton’s version of the story, Dario had been dealing drugs and was high when he was killed. Nora said no, he had cleaned himself up but was desperate for money. The local newspaper said toxicology results were pending, but no one recalled reading any follow-up stories. Clayton made the obvious point that if you pull a gun on a driver while hitchhiking and he grabs it, then shoots you in the chest, you’ve definitely fucked up what was a dumb plan to begin with.
Meanwhile, Nora said another former classmate was in prison for a botched armed robbery at a convenience store outside Holyoke. He’d be out in four years with good behavior, she said, which didn’t sound like a safe bet to me. A third classmate, whom we all considered a nerd, was profiled in The Boston Globe a couple of months earlier. He’d become a rare book dealer and brokered a ten-million-dollar deal between a Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright and the University of Texas for the guy’s complete papers. Nora said his commission would be like ten to twenty percent. “Do the math,” she said. I still can’t remember the playwright’s name.
I had hoped to keep this first evening of our twentieth high school reunion to a couple of beers, not being in the mood for long digressive stories and idle gossip after too many drinks. But the summer solstice, my favorite day of the year, was upon us and I was intoxicated by the sun’s slow slide through high purple cirrus over the Berkshires to the west. About ten of us were sitting on the deck of a new brewpub near Northampton that overlooked the Connecticut River. A magnificent stand of oaks on the other side of the river was perfectly mirrored on the still water as we reflected on the fragmented, imperfect memories of our youth.
This was the same location where my parents ran a roadhouse that burned to the ground the year after we all graduated. My dad was in the midst of a mid-life crisis, at least that’s how he saw it. He and my mom collected the insurance money, moved up to Vermont and opened a ski shop near Magic Mountain. I don’t think the move solved anything for him, despite the resort’s name. He was a man who never seemed to outgrow his disappointments, perhaps because he was unable to believe in the many gifts he was born with. Sitting here with my high school classmates all these years later, I had more empathy for him.
I’d been divorced ten years (no children) and recently broken up with a woman to whom I was briefly engaged. It was a mutual decision, we told our friends, but who really believes that? Not me.
She wanted out more badly than I did, though to be honest, I was probably ready. I knew this much: I had lately been spending too many evenings watching BBC murder-mysteries set in bucolic English small towns, trying to convince myself it was for the best. On top of the breakup, my once-budding career as a residential architect was drifting sideways as interest rates continued to climb.
* * *
Everyone was deferential toward Sammy when he pulled up in a red Tesla and parked in the handicapped spot. He climbed out of the car with difficulty and pulled one of those quad canes with four small legs from the passenger seat. As he walked toward us, I saw his slight limp.
“You assholes started drinking without me,” he shouted. “I’ll forgive the girls, but you guys know better.”
“Says the jock who hid a fifth of Wild Turkey in his locker and shared it only with the cheerleaders he was trying to screw,” said Clayton. We all laughed.
Sammy reached over with his cane, hooked a deck chair, pulled it toward him and sat down. We’d been best friends in grade school though drifted apart in high school and our early adult lives. But around the time of my divorce I needed a second opinion on a legal issue with my then-wife and gave him a call. He was more helpful than I expected, wouldn’t accept any money and we rekindled our friendship. I bought him lunch a couple of times, and eventually we ended up texting and talking on the phone every couple of weeks.
“Who’s buying the beer?” Sammy asked. “Better not be Clayton or it’s Old Milwaukee for all of us.”
Sammy was thinner than the last time I had seen him. The skin on his arms was nearly translucent and sagged from lack of muscle tone the way you see on eighty-year-olds. His hair was prematurely gray and fell down to his shoulders, and he was bald as a granite dome on top.
He’d lettered in both track and gymnastics. Back when the two of us sailed through the Cape Cod Canal the summer after our senior year, he’d been in a lot better shape than I was. I can still see him leaning out over the bow of his uncle’s 28′ sloop with a lion’s mane of sun-bleached blond hair held back by a purple scrunchy, flaunting a big fat joint at ten a.m.
He asked if anyone knew if Angela was coming. No one responded. The moment teetered on the edge of discomfort.
“She said she might, but her brother doubts she’ll show,” Clayton said finally. “Then again they don’t talk much. Not since their sister Maya got out of rehab. And that was quite a while ago.”
Clayton worked with Angela’s brother Rahzel as a corrections officer at the state prison in Gardner. They were a couple of years apart, and both joined the Marines right after high school. Clayton was with Rahzel when he was wounded in an ambush in Helmand Province in southern Afghanistan. Rahzel never talked about it, but Clayton told me over a couple of beers once at a Super Bowl party.
It always struck me as a little weird when Sammy brought up Angela after we got back in touch. He did this a lot. Some high school romances never really fade, at least for one of the two people. It hadn’t for him. Sammy was married to a woman he met at Amherst and they had three girls, all doing well in middle and high school. He didn’t talk about his family much though.
* * *
I must have been about ten when Dario appeared at our kitchen door one cold autumn morning as my sister and I were eating breakfast. Our house, built in the 1870s, sat behind an old Connecticut River tobacco barn at the end of a long driveway outside of town. Given its location, few friends dropped by, certainly never before school. With an embarrassed grin, he said he stopped by to say hi. My mom, not missing a beat, asked if he wanted to join us for breakfast. He nodded and sat down at our kitchen table. The comforting smell and crackling sound of bacon frying in a cast iron skillet filled the air.
I asked whether he was ready for the math test that day and he said he hadn’t had a chance to study. My older sister said nothing as Dario wolfed down the scrambled eggs, bacon and whole wheat toast, and when my mom asked if he wanted more, he nodded. After we ate and my sister and I hurriedly brushed our teeth, my mom drove us all to school as if nothing was strange. We were all quiet in the back seat of my parents’ Oldsmobile station wagon.
A couple weeks later during recess Dario came up to me and asked if I wanted to study with him. We could hang out at his place and do homework. He said he lived with his dad just down the street from the Dairy Queen on Route 9. His parents were divorced and he didn’t see his mother very often. She had moved back to Nicaragua for a few months, he said. Sure, I said, why not? My mother was in Brattleboro for the afternoon seeing her shrink. Since she’d been so friendly toward Dario and he’d been so quietly appreciative of our generosity, I figured she’d be fine with it.
His small front yard faced the highway and the front door was open when we arrived. I noticed the screen door had a gash across it, as if someone sliced it with a knife. Several of the stair risers to the second-floor apartment where he and his father lived were cracked and kicked in, like someone had attacked them in a bad mood. I heard snoring in one of the bedrooms as we sat down at the yellow Formica table in the kitchen and began to study for our history test. I asked if he had anything to drink. Dario, always thin as a rail, opened the refrigerator. There was a quart of milk, a half-dozen eggs, a half a stick of margarine and two cans of Pabst Blue Ribbon.
“Do you want some milk?” he asked.
It never occurred to me that someone’s refrigerator wouldn’t be full of food. I said I was fine with a glass of water.
* * *
Angela made an appearance at the reunion picnic the next day. She pulled up in a silver S550 Mercedes coupe. I could never tell the model years of those cars, never having owned one, but it looked new. As she walked toward our potluck, I couldn’t help checking her out, almost like I might have in high school. She wore neatly braided cornrows in a precise stitch pattern with a tight bun in the back, which was new to me. She used to keep her hair pretty short and I think she even had it straightened for a few months during junior year. The new look gave her a mature elegance which she carried with ease. She’d brought a Mediterranean platter from Whole Foods, which didn’t surprise me. She’d always been very conscious of what she ate. Now, twenty years later, she still looked hot.
Nora headed toward her, almost running. They gave each other a big hug as Angela put the platter down on one of the picnic tables. Angela lit up with that big smile I always remembered, and said softly under her breath but within earshot, “I hate going to these things honestly.”
Sammy was deep in a conversation with Clayton that I had already walked away from. Clayton was to the left of Bernie Sanders in terms of his politics, but had recently gotten a permit to carry a Glock G19. No, I didn’t want him to show it to us and no, I didn’t want to hear about his marksmanship prizes.
Sammy edged his way away from Clayton, who looked put upon that Sammy also didn’t want to hear more, and headed toward Angela. She side-eyed him as he approached her, cane in hand, wearing a blue Lacoste polo shirt and a pair of faded khakis. He could have been one of those guys you see at the Master’s Tournament standing in the gallery behind Phil Mickelson or Bubba Watson. With his long gray hair and bald pate it was quite a look.
“I’m trying to decide if I still have a crush on you,” he said loudly enough so we could all hear.
“Sammy, you’re still a damn flirt, aren’t you?”
“I didn’t know whether to get a divorce, because I didn’t know if you were coming.”
“You’re too late sweetheart and you know it,” she said. She cracked that familiar smile we were all suckers for and rolled her eyes.
* * *
Dario was one of those kids who could get A’s without trying in subjects that interested him and usually failed everything else. When it came to the Civil War, he was as good as Wikipedia, even though we didn’t have it back then. Not just the battles of Gettysburg, Antietam and Shiloh, but Milliken’s Bend, Fort Wagner and the Battle of the Crater, as well as the generals who won, those who lost — all of it. He was laying me to waste as we quizzed each other at his kitchen table. I told myself I had studied hard, but he was making clear I hadn’t. To this day, I’m still in awe of what that kid could keep in his head.
We were reviewing Lee’s surrender at Appomattox when out of the blue he asked if I knew about Lincoln’s Dream. Was that like his Gettysburg Address, I asked.
“Naw, that ain’t it at all,” he said dismissively. He pushed his chair back from the table with his skinny arms around the back of his head, as if he were an authority on the subject.
Lincoln had a premonition a few days before he was assassinated at Ford’s Theater, Dario said. In the dream, he woke up in his bedroom in the White House and went downstairs to the East Room, where he saw a covered corpse lying on a catafalque. I still remember how clearly and confidently Dario pronounced that word — “KAT-a-falk.” It was surrounded by Union soldiers. Lincoln asked one of them whose body lay under the white sheet. The soldier replied it was the president. He had been shot by an assassin.
I told Dario I didn’t believe in that stuff.
“You don’t have to,” he said. “He did and the premonition came true.”
* * *
By mid-afternoon, folks were drifting off from the potluck to do other things ahead of the banquet that evening. Clayton and a few of the guys who still lived in town were talking about some controversy with the school board over trans kids. Like everywhere else, it was parents’ rights versus the woke crowd. I leaned woke, but didn’t want to get involved.
Sure enough, over by the amphitheater, Angela and Sammy were sitting on a picnic table, just the two of them, engrossed in conversation. Sammy was doing most of the talking, getting an occasional laugh out of Angela. He was by turns animated and dialing up the charm, and then deadly serious. I was helping Annette and a couple of others clean up. I fought the urge to eavesdrop, which I knew was bad form even among old high school friends.
Sammy eventually headed back to his car, waving goodbye to us with that cane, and Angela, after texting on her phone, walked up to me.
“Sammy needs a filter,” she said. “Did he forget we graduated twenty years ago?”
“It only gets worse with age for some of us.”
She shook her head. “He’s still funny as hell, even when he’s not trying.”
“He said he gets together with Rahzel sometimes.”
Angela stomped her feet, as if she were trying to keep herself warm, even though it was like seventy-five degrees.
“I don’t have much contact with Rahzel,” she said. “We don’t see eye-to-eye on some things.” I knew from Clayton it had to do with when their sister Maya nearly died after OD’ing nearly ten years ago.
“It’s hard with siblings sometimes.”
Angela nodded and out of the blue started crying. I didn’t know what the hell to do so I just put my arms around her.
“That asshole Dario,” she said.
* * *
When Dario’s father came into the kitchen, his eyes were bloodshot and he was wearing a faded Allman Brothers tank top and boxer shorts. He was more buff than any of the other dad’s I knew, certainly more than my own dear pudgy father.
He strode over to the refrigerator, popped open one of the two beers, and without turning toward us, asked Dario who I was. Dario told him we were classmates and studying for a test. He closed the refrigerator door and looked at me but said nothing for a moment.
“My boy’s a genius,” he said, as if it were an established fact. “You’re going to learn a lot from him. He’s going to be famous someday. I truly believe that.” He said “truly” the way someone does when they’re not convinced it’s necessarily true.
He took a couple of steps to the kitchen window, stuck his head through it and leaned his arms on the sill. He gazed at the Dairy Queen, which was busy this time of day.
“Dario, here’s five dollars,” he said, turning to give his son the money. “You go and get your friend and yourself a milkshake or cheeseburger or something and just keep studying.” Then he looked at me and said, “You just stay with my boy as long as you need to.”
He turned, walked back into his bedroom and closed the door. I heard him get back into bed. He never asked my name. It was four thirty in the afternoon. Dario said his father worked the graveyard shift at the Smith & Wesson factory in Springfield.
* * *
Angela asked if I wanted to go for a walk. We were close for a while in high school, though we never went out. I always enjoyed her company and like I said, I couldn’t help but feel energized by whatever that thing was that she still radiated, even after twenty years. Not everyone who has it hangs on to it. We walked down by the river, which in high school served as an aquatic thread that tied together so many moments of our youth — training for track, partying, making out, sex when we were lucky.
“Dario had a thing for Black women and we all knew it,” she said. “He came on to a few of us. Everyone knew he was bad news.”
“He loved your sister, that’s what he told me. Although he was high at the time.”
“l don’t know why she was so susceptible to him. She sure pushed away a lot of guys who weren’t nearly as fucked up as he was.”
She said these things calmly, as if she’d worked it all out a long time ago.
“Did he ever tell you about the psychic?” she said. “She and Dario went to see one in Boston when he was trying to get clean. Not a therapist, a psychic. It pains me to tell you this because that’s the sway he held over her. “
The psychic told them they were unleashing powerful forces within themselves and with others because they were so deeply in love and came from such different backgrounds. She said they had to be careful.
“Did Maya believe any of it?”
“She said she didn’t believe in psychics, but it got her thinking,” Angela said. “She thought she was in love with him, but that it wasn’t going to last.”
We had walked more than a mile and were a couple of blocks away from the Dairy Queen.
I told her how Dario’s dad believed his son was a genius and how he could ace the subjects he was interested in but sank like a stone with those he wasn’t. Angela nodded like she already knew this. Maya was smart, she said, but wanted to be liked more than she wanted to be a good student.
“The first time she told me she was getting high with Dario, I wanted to slap her,” she said. “I knew how charming he could be, how he cast a spell on her. Her friends told her he was bad news and he was too old.”
She said that when they started going out, Maya was a sophomore in college and he was working part-time as a dispatcher at a trucking company. Maya knew he was dealing on the side.
I told her I ran into him once about that time. He wouldn’t stop talking about her, like he was obsessed. His skin was pale, his eyes sort of vacant, and he talked at me without making eye contact.
“Yeah, that was about the time they started getting high together,” she said.
The day started to drift toward late afternoon. I thought of all the things I had promised myself I would get done that day. I’d only really meant to stop by the potluck for an hour or two.
“Do you want to get a drink?” she asked. I think she was tired of walking but still had a lot churning in her mind. It was as if seeing Sammy had set something off in her.
I knew a place just off Main Street that didn’t get busy until evening. We’d be able to talk more easily there, and probably no one we knew would notice us. We sat in the back patio surrounded by a high circular hedge that created a natural sense of intimacy. A few Smith College students, with piercings and tats in abundance, were working on their laptops.
She inspected the wine list carefully, then ordered a dirty Manhattan with an olive. I had a glass of pinot noir. We sat in silence for a few minutes, as if waiting for the drinks to arrive required a momentary pause in the conversation.
“What was weird was that somehow Sammy knew about Maya and Dario’s relationship,” she said. “I think he was worried about Maya and he also wanted a reason to stay in touch with me.”
Angela said she had a two-year-old son by then and another child on the way. Her husband, whom she’d since divorced, didn’t get along with Maya. He’d grown up in a home with a lot of substance abuse and had no patience being around anyone who was a user. He worked all the time anyway, and they were trying to sustain their marriage by having more children. She remembered harboring major doubts about this approach, but she wanted her son to have a sibling. They had a little girl and split a couple of years later. That’s when she was got back into banking and worked her way up to become a financial advisor. I could see how she’d be able to project the confidence and trust to woo wealthy clients and run their portfolios.
“Do you know anything about Sammy’s law practice?” she asked.
“He was always busy, at least until he had that stroke. Everyone over at the courthouse knew him.”
“He called one day and warned me a couple of detectives were on to Dario, and if they were on to Dario, they were on to Maya.”
“I would have taken him at his word on that.”
“He wouldn’t say who the cops were, but told me Dario and Maya better clean up their act quickly because the investigation was gaining momentum.”
I told Angela I wondered how the Dario I knew in fifth grade would have thought of himself ten years out of high school, digging a hole he couldn’t climb out of.
“When do you know you’ve taken your bad decisions so far that you’ve tuned out the part of your brain that knows better?” I said. “How did he convince himself that getting high with the woman he was in love with would make her love him more?”
Sammy had been adamant that Angela shouldn’t speak to anyone other than Maya about the investigation. This was shortly before his stroke, she said. Maya didn’t take Sammy’s tip seriously and said he was just trying to get in her pants. Maya said Sammy never liked Dario because he was jealous of Dario’s smarts and he was more successful with Black women than Sammy was.
“When she said that I knew Maya was under Dario’s spell,” Angela said. “She wasn’t seeing reality clearly. It was like the psychic was right.”
* * *
I was working as a bag boy at the Stop & Shop on King Street during high school when I ran into Dario’s father in the checkout line. I said hello, and he stared at me quizzically for a moment as he was paying the cashier. It was as if he thought he owed me money for something but couldn’t remember what. When I said I was a friend of Dario’s, he stared up at the fluorescent lights above him, which further exposed the light pallor of his white skin. He was searching his memory.
“We studied together when we were in grade school,” I said. “You gave us money for the Dairy Queen.”
He watched me as I bagged his two six packs of Pabst, pork chops, some iceberg lettuce, sliced American cheese, and a loaf of whole wheat bread.
“You’re the brainy kid whose dad ran the roadhouse out on Route 9. I remember you. You were a good influence on my Dario. Or used to be. I don’t know what’s up with my boy. Do you?”
He put his wallet in the back pocket of his overalls, then turned to me with pain in his eyes.
“We don’t run in the same crowd much anymore,” I said. “He’s always friendly though.”
I didn’t want to say something that would get Dario in trouble with his old man. Dario had been suspended earlier that month for skipping so many classes. Despite his growing pariah status, he would stop in to see Mr. Schwartzman, the history teacher, during office hours. He still had a thing about the Civil War. Mr. Schwartzman was one of those teachers who everyone thought was cool, who kids could talk to. He didn’t care whether you were a good student or a lousy one. Mr. Schwartzman and Dario would talk for hours about the Civil War, the tensions that led up to it, and the legacy that remained.
“Well, my boy’s going places. A lot of people in this town think they’re better than us and don’t believe it, but they don’t know him. I do. He’s smart. You just wait and see.”
He was talking to me like he would to a teacher during parents’ night. Like he was still trying to convince the world they should believe in Dario the way he did. The old man looked in good shape, but his eyes still had that bloodshot quality. I wondered if he still worked at Smith & Wesson.
* * *
Angela had polished off her Manhattan when the waitress came by and asked if we wanted another round. I looked at my watch—it was approaching five p.m. I still had some pinot noir left but figured I hadn’t spoken to Angela in years and had no idea when I might speak with her again. We were trying to put the pieces of a puzzle together, though neither of us quite acknowledged it. We weren’t just reminiscing. We ordered another round.
“Sammy was the first one to call and tell me Dario had been shot and killed,” she said. “I hadn’t spoken to him in months and he called at like eight a.m. He wanted to be sure I knew before anyone told Maya.”
He didn’t have many details but said he’d see what he could find out. When he called the next day, they talked for more than an hour. Angela had gone over to Maya’s apartment to tell her and ended up spending the night there. Maya went into the bathroom, gotten high and when she came out, she seemed okay for a few minutes. Then she broke down and lost it. Angela said she was worried this was the beginning of Maya’s unraveling. She paused for a minute and then said, “Or maybe that began the minute she started dating Dario.”
I told Angela that about a week after Dario’s death I got a call from a woman who claimed to be his mother. She had a Spanish accent and said her name was Rosaria. She lived in Boston. She and Dario’s father were going through his apartment and found a journal. Dario wrote that he wanted to become a history teacher so he could teach students about the Civil War. He had started taking classes at the local community college part time and was hoping to get into UMass. And he wrote about a premonition he had shortly after he met Maya: she was the girl he wanted to marry but he wouldn’t live long enough. Dario’s mom said there were several passages about me and my mom, and the distinct, savory flavors of the eggs, bacon and toast she made for him that morning all those years ago.
Toward the end of the call, she said she had a request. Would I be a pallbearer at Dario’s funeral? She wanted one of his friends from before his life became so difficult. I didn’t tell her, but the thought went through my mind that his life had always been difficult. That was why he wrote the things he did.
Angela sat quietly as I was speaking. She rubbed the back of her neck in a restless gesture. I wondered if she’d heard enough and wanted to leave.
“I knew a couple of the other pallbearers,” I said. They were cousins I had met when he invited me to a Dia de los Muertos celebration in high school.
“They acknowledged me but didn’t say anything. What was there to say?”
I told Angela how funerals have always felt like such strange events to me. You’re thinking about the deceased, then about whether you fed the dog, then what the person looks like inside that mahogany box they will lie in for the rest of eternity, then about everyone who is there with you feeling the loss as much or more than you are.
Angela said that Maya refused to go. She stayed in her room all day listening to Tupac and Biggie on her headphones—both rappers had been murdered by then. Angela didn’t think it was just the trauma of Dario’s death that kept Maya from going. It was like an earthquake for her, and the aftershocks were shattering the edifice of self-delusion she and Dario built for themselves.
“I knew I had to get her out of that apartment, so I waited about a week and then we took a trip down to Manhattan for a long weekend. We didn’t do anything extravagant, just wondered around Soho, the West Village, Chinatown, walked over the Brooklyn Bridge. Sometimes a change of scenery can make a difference. Sometimes not. I think it helped.”
I could see why after all these years Sammy was still stuck on her. She spoke with a clarity and poise about her sister, in a tone of voice that revealed deep compassion, rather than attitude about how close she was to permanently fucking up her life. She knew her sister needed support and love rather than judgment.
Angela said Maya coasted along for a couple of months, was doing okay in school, but that somehow Dario’s father got her phone number. She didn’t want to speak to him, but she picked up on his third try over the course of several days. The conversation started out friendly enough, but he soon started yelling at her that Dario’s drug problem was her fault, that she seduced him into using drugs and was the cause of his death.
“She should have hung up on him. But she decided to tell him the truth. Dario was the one who talked her into using. Not the other way around.” Maya told him he was a blind, ignorant man if he believed his son wasn’t responsible for his own fate. He should take a hard look at himself if he wanted to understand what happened to his son.
The phone call set Maya over the edge, and it was a couple of days later that their brother Rahzel found her unresponsive in her apartment.
“They rushed her to the ER in an ambulance and didn’t release her for five days,” she said. That was when she went into drug rehab. She eventually started to put her life back together.
“I had a big argument with Rahzel after that,” she said. “He told me he was going to go after Dario’s father. I told him it was clear that everyone had already suffered more than they could bear.”
“What did he do?”
“Nothing for a few weeks.”
Angela found out later that Sammy and Rahzel had been going on walks together. They’d be out for hours at a time. It was helping Sammy build up his stamina after his stroke.
Sammy reached out to Angela and told her that rightly or wrongly, Rahzel believed Dario’s father was responsible for Maya nearly killing herself when she OD’d. Angela told him she knew that. Sammy kept saying you never know the scars you’re inflicting upon another person. If you’re lucky, you begin to understand the ones you carry.
Dario’s old man was driving one night on the same road where Dario had been hitchhiking. It had never been determined where on that road Dario was picked up, but Sammy said the police report he had seen placed it somewhere between Northfield and Miller’s Falls. I know that stretch of road because my grandparents lived up there. Dario’s father must have picked out that old Oak tree ahead of time because it sits alone out in a field about thirty yards from the road. You’d have to aim for it. That’s what Sammy said. Dario’s father must have been going fast, because the engine block of his Camry was pushed clear through to the backseat. An old buddy, the son of one of my grandparents’ friends who I hadn’t seen in years, found him in the morning. He’d been dead for hours.
Angela said she didn’t know what Rahzel had said to Dario’s father, but he had words with him a few days before the car accident. Rahzel wasn’t smug when he told her. He almost acted contrite. “Rahzel is a combat veteran and a prison guard,” she said. “He’s learned a thing or two about settling scores.”
* * *
Maybe it was both of us trying so many years later to process an intense period of our lives, but Angela and I started texting on a pretty regular basis after that afternoon. Maybe it was a desire on my part to feel less alone after breaking up with my fiancé the previous year. But I was ambivalent at best about entering into another relationship with anyone. If Sammy had known any of this, I think he would have had another stroke.
In one of our texts, we realized we were both going to be in Boston for work in mid-September. We arranged to meet for dinner at an Italian place in the old North End where I used to bartend the year after I graduated from Northeastern. It had been completely done over by new owners. I hardly recognized it.
“It’s a novelty to see you some place other than Northampton,” she said as the waiter had left with our drink order. “You don’t look so much like someone I knew in high school. More like a man who is at ease with himself at this stage of his life.”
I thanked her for the compliment, though didn’t go into all the reasons I didn’t think it was true. I told her she had the calm countenance a woman whom the world may have tried to push around, but she learned how to push right back and carry on with life. She gave me a warm smile, looked down at the table, and then turned her head as if there was someone else in the dining room who she knew.
“Do you know someone here?” I asked.
“I feel like we’re doing something we’re not supposed to do,” she replied.
“Then we just carry on like it’s something we are supposed to do. We’re two old friends having dinner.”
She said she had recently taken up birding and was planning a trip up the Maine Coast in October to follow the migration of the warblers, thrushes and, if she was lucky, peregrine falcons. When she was out in nature she wasn’t thinking about the past, just focused on what was in front of her—a sense of timelessness and time passing in the same moment. I said I could see the allure of that.
I shared that in my spare time I was reading about the Civil War and planning a trip in the Spring to visit some of the battlefields in the South. The conversations about Dario and Maya had reminded me of the abiding passion he had for that period of history. I always admired that about him when we were in school together. In my reading, I came across several lesser-known battles that, all these years later, still stayed with me from when we studied together in grade school. And I remembered they had something in common.
Whether the Union side won or lost, Dario loved to talk about the battles where Black Union soldiers fought. I had totally forgotten about it, but a dim light switched on in my middle-aged brain and I was intrigued by his intent focus on this. I read that one of the bloodiest battles of the war took place in Milliken’s Bend, Louisiana, just north of Vicksburg, in 1863. The Black troops, all of whom were formerly enslaved, had only a month’s worth of training. Yet they attacked the Confederates in fierce hand-to-hand combat with bayonets, rifle butts and fists. The Union side won, but a Confederate general observed that the white Union soldiers ran in the other direction when the order to charge was given. The Black soldiers, known as the African Brigade, suffered one of the highest casualty rates of the war.
“Dario was drawn to stories like that,” I said. “Long odds and a high price for victory.”
I told her I wondered if this was something he was conscious of. There seemed to be a lot in his life he was either blind to or unable overcome, not unlike his father.
“Do you think Dario had faith in himself,” she asked. “He acted like it right up until the moment he died.”
“Faith and ignorance dance around each other sometimes. You mix in drugs and you’ve got a masquerade ball. It can be hard to tell one from the other.”
***
I don’t know when the idea occurred to Angela that she wanted me to join her on the trip to Maine, but the week after we met for dinner she texted me asking if I’d be willing to take a few days off from work. “This could be fun and another set of eyes will help me spot those peregrines,” she said. “Think about it.”
I was surprised she was so forthright and said I’d get back to her in a couple of days. I had accrued more than enough vacation time and needed a break. It was almost like she was daring me; it was she who had clarity about our time together, not me. I’d always been intrigued by peregrines, which can dive faster than any other bird on the planet yet soar for hours on thermals of rising warm air. They’re revered for their hunting prowess and have a certain noble quality about them. I read that their name is derived the Latin word peregrinus, which means pilgrim or traveler. The more I learned, the more I wanted to see them in the wild.
A few days before we left, I was out walking after work and an image appeared in my mind of the two of us sitting atop a rocky cliff on Monhegan, an island off the Maine coast I had visited as a child. The sun felt warm on our faces though it was a cool October day. We were peering through our binoculars watching a couple of peregrines soar along the craggy coast. Powerful gusts of wind rising off the cliffs lifted them high above us. I reached over to hold Angela’s hand and she squeezed back softly. I felt a renewed sense of what I understood to be faith. I’ve never had a deeply held sense of optimism about the future, but the moment felt like a premonition—an uplifting one. I believe that Dario, despite the flaws that killed him, would have understood.