The Children Read Free Page B

had stopped. But they didn’t stop. Spin must have regretted that gentleman’s head start he’d granted her. We all laughed about that later, when we watched the video together. He had underestimated her.
    Suddenly, she flies out from behind some trees on the left of the screen and almost hits Spin. This is the 2:04 mark I was telling Sally about. He says a word, and then he’s skiing very fast behind Laurel.
    â€œShe waited until we got to the bottom to tell me she was on the U.S. Olympic team,” Spin told us a few months later, when we all watched the video together.
    â€œShort-listed,” Laurel corrected him. “I wasn’t on the team. I was short-listed. I tore my meniscus during the trials.”
    So modest.
    Spin definitely says something around the two-minute mark. I don’t know why I hadn’t noticed it before. I watched it. Then I watched it again.
    â€œI’ll get you,” he says. Or maybe it’s “Look at you.”
    It’s really something, seeing the world from Spin’s perspective. I think that’s why I keep watching it. You can hear his breath in that video. You can see the tips of his skis pointing left, right, left, right, then straight down the mountain.
    Spin always made everything look easy. You should have seen him play tennis when he was a kid. You should have seen him play the guitar or the banjo. Spin made the varsity hockey team at Holden his freshman year, but he’d been skating here on the lake with us from the time he could walk. That’s how I like to think of him now—the way he was before he met Laurel. Out on the lake. Often alone. Practicing stick handling and shooting, his hockey stick snaking along the ice, flicking the puck this way and that. There’s a calmness that’s specific to a frozen place such as a lake or a ski slope. The cold air traps sound. A skater’s edge on crusty ice sounds like the only thing on earth. I can still see him now, gliding backward, skates crossing one over the other so effortlessly. And that thin amber light you get here on the lake on winter afternoons. On weekend mornings, we always had pickup games in front of the house. The loud clacks of the hockey sticks, the triumphant cries, the angry objections and laughter, Whit’s roaring protests. We haven’t played hockey on the lake in years. Kids play at the other end of the lake now that we’re all grown up. The ice freezes here first, but nobody skates on this side of the lake anymore.
    When he was at Dartmouth, Spin wrote his thesis on the negative effects of invasive species on New England lakes and ponds. He did much of his research here on Lake Marinac. He majored in environmental sciences, with a minor in musical theory. He was the only one of us who was truly gifted musically; the rest of us had to work at it, even Sally.
    The afternoon of Whit’s funeral service, after everybody had finally left our house but the family, Sally kept playing the same melody on her violin. It was Bach, or something grim like that. Over and over and over again. She and I were sitting on the porch swing as she played. I put my hand on the body of the violin for a moment. My intention was to get her to stop, but then I felt the long whine of the bow running through the instrument and into the tips of my fingers. The vibrations went all through me. I felt the pull of the bow across the strings and wished I had learned the violin or cello. We spent a good part of the afternoon like that. Sally weaving the bow up and down, me with my hand touching the body of the violin. It was Spin who got us out of our funk. He brought out one of Whit’s banjos.
    The banjo is a happy instrument. Even if you play along with a sad song, as Spin did that day, the rolls that accompany the chords do something. They add humor. Soon Spin had Sally on some other melody altogether. It was a Celtic-sounding thing. Some kind of reel, one of those