The mother walks through the midnight darkness of the upstairs hallway in their New Jersey home, pushing open the door to her only child's bedroom. She checks his closet—sometimes she'll put on his clothes to feel close to him, to smell him, to be with him—and then examines his books on a shelf. Her boy had a way with words and wanted to become a writer, and now the mother is looking for a message from him, a clue, even though she knows she'll never really find one. The coach ambles onto the football field in western New Jersey where it all went so terribly wrong two autumns ago. He comes here now, in the rolling green foothills of the Pocono Mountains, to be close to the spot where he last saw the quarterback who was unlike any other player in his 37-year coaching career. He's still trying to understand the cruelness of it all, the meaning of that last game, even though he knows he never really will. The best friend sits on a wooden bench in the park where they played together and dreamed together. He closes his eyes and replays it all again on the grainy film of memory: the basketball games in this park, the football, the soccer, the skinned elbows, the laughter. The bench is the best friend's favorite place in the world, and on many summer nights when he's home from college he'll come here and, alone in the pines, rehash the final hours of the life of Evan Murray, wondering if football is to blame, trying to make sense of his best friend's death at age 17, even though he knows he never really will. Read more
