“They should have assigned this in physics class,” Lucas was complaining. “Why would a poet know how the world’s going to end anyway?”
“You think the poem is really about how the world is going to end?” Cassie’s husky voice.
He was relieved. Cassie was helping Lucas with his homework, that was all.
“Fire or ice. That’s how the world will end. It’s what he’s saying.”
“Desire and hate,” Cassie said. “The human heart can be a molten thing, and it can be sheathed in ice. Don’t think outer space. Think inner space. Don’t think the world. Think your world. Frost can be an incredibly dark poet, but he’s also a poet of intimacy. So what’s he saying here?”
“Thin line between love and hate, basically.”
“But love and desire aren’t the same, are they? There’s the love of family, but we don’t call that desire. Because desire is about an absence, right? To desire something is to want it, and you always want the thing you don’t have.”
“I guess.”
“Think about Silas, in the last poem they gave you. He’s about to die, and he comes home.”
“Except it’s not his home.”
“In that one, Warren says, ‘Home is the place where, when you have to go there, / They have to take you in.’ One of the most famous lines Frost ever wrote. Is that love or desire? How does his world end?”
Nick, feeling self-conscious, took a few steps down the hall toward his bedroom. Cassie’s voice receded to a singsong murmur, asking something, and Lucas’s adolescent baritone rose in impatience. “Some say this, some say that. You feel, like, Make up your friggin’ mind already.”
Nick stopped again to listen.
Cassie laughed. “What’s the rhythm telling you? The poem’s lines mainly have four beats, right? But not the last lines, about hate: ‘Is also great.’ Two stressed syllables. ‘And would suffice.’ Clear and simple. Like it’s funneling to a point. About the ice of hatred, how potent that is, right?”
“Mad props to my dawg Bobby Frost,” Lucas said. “He could flow, no doubt. But he starts with fire.”
“A lot of things start with fire, Luke. The crucial question is how they end.”
Nick debated whether he should join them. He wouldn’t have hesitated in the old days, but Lucas was different now. What was going on was a good thing, yet probably a fragile thing too. Lucas wouldn’t let him help with his homework anymore, and now that he was in the eleventh grade, Nick wasn’t much use anyway. But Cassie had somehow figured out a way to talk to him, and she knew that stuff-she was a natural. A goddamn valedictorian.
Finally, Nick walked past Lucas’s bedroom, which let them know he was home, and made his way to his own room. Removed his clothes, brushed his teeth, took a quick shower. When he came out again, Lucas was alone in his room, sitting at his computer, working.
“Hey, Luke,” he said.
Lucas glanced up with his usual look of annoyance.
Nick wanted to say something like, Did Cassie help? I’m glad you’re focusing on work. But he held back. Any such comment might be resented, taken as intrusive. “Where’s Cassie?” he said.
Lucas shrugged. “Downstairs, I guess.”
He went downstairs to look for Cassie, but she wasn’t in the family room or the kitchen, none of the usual places. He called her name, but there was no answer.
Well, she has the right to snoop around my house, he thought. After she caught me going through her medicine cabinet.
But she wouldn’t do that, would she?
He passed through the kitchen to the back hallway, switched on the alabaster lamp, kept going to his study.
Unlikely she’d be in there.
The door to his study was open, as it almost always was, and the lights were on. Cassie was seated behind his desk.
His heart thumped. He walked faster, the carpet muffling his footsteps so his approach was silent. Not that he was intending to sneak up on her, though.
Several of the desk drawers were ajar, he saw.
All but the bottom one, which he kept locked. They were open just a bit, as if they’d been open and then shut hastily.
And he knew he hadn’t done it. He rarely used the desk drawers, and when he did, he was meticulous about closing them all the way, otherwise the desk looked sloppy.
She was sitting back in his black leather Symbiosis chair, writing on a yellow legal pad.
“Cassie.”
She jumped, let out a shriek. “Oh, my God! Don’t ever do that!” She put a hand across her breasts.
“Sorry,” he said.
“Oh-God. I was in my own world. No, I should apologize-I shouldn’t be in here. I guess I’m just a low-boundaries gal.”
“That’s okay,” he said, trying to sound as if he meant it.
She seemed instantly aware of the drawers that had been left slightly ajar and began pushing them all the way closed. “I was looking for a pad and a pen,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind.”
“No,” he said. “It’s fine.”
“I had this idea, and I had to write it down right away-that happens to me.”
“Idea?”
“Just-just something I want to write. Someday, if I ever get my shit together.”
“Fiction?”
“Oh, no. Nonfiction. Too much fiction in my life. I hope you don’t mind my coming over tonight. I did call, you know, but Marta said you were at work, and Lucas and I got to talking, and he said he was busting his head over some poem. Which turns out to be one of the poems I actually know something about. So I…”
“Hey,” Nick said. “You’re doing God’s work. I’m afraid my arrival broke things up.”
“He’s going to write the first few paragraphs of his poetry term paper. See where it’s heading.”
“You’re good with him,” Nick said. You’re amazing, is what he thought.
Maybe that’s all it was. She came over to help him figure out some Robert Frost poem.
“You ever teach?”
“I told you,” Cassie said. “I’ve pretty much done everything.” The pinpoint ceiling lights caught her hair, made it sparkle. She looked waiflike, still, but her skin wasn’t so transparent. She looked healthier. The dark smudges beneath her eyes were gone. “‘He thinks if he could teach him that, he’d be / Some good perhaps to some one in the world.’”
“Come again?”
Cassie shook her head. “It’s just a line from Death of the Hired Man. It’s a poem about home. About family, really.”
“And the true meaning of Christmas?”
“You Conovers,” she said. “What am I going to do with you?”
“I have a few ideas,” Nick said, attempting a leer. “God, you’re good at everything, aren’t you?”
“Coming from you? The alpha male? Jock of all trades?”
“I wish. I may be the most math-challenged CEO in the country.”
“Is there a sport you can’t do?”
He thought a moment. “Never learned to ride a horse.”
“Horseshoes?”
“That’s not a sport.”
“Archery, I bet.”
“I’m okay.”
“Shooting?”
He went dead inside. After a split second, he gave a small shake of his head, looking perplexed. For a second his eyes went out of focus.
“You know,” she said. “Target shooting, whatever it’s called. On the range.”
“Nope,” he said, hearing the studied casualness in his voice as if from a distance. He lowered himself onto a rush-seated Windsor chair that invariably threatened to leave splinters in his backside. Laura had banished his favorite old leather club chair when they moved. Frat house furniture, she called it. He rubbed his eyes, trying to conceal the flush of terror. “Sorry, I’m just wiped out. Long day.”