Edwin did not come to see him in prison. His grandmother did, every Sunday. She sat stiffly across a folding table from him in the visitors’ room, beneath an overhead fan that ticked as it uselessly stirred the warm air. It was from her that he learned that Edwin was looking in on Sara and Bryan in the evenings. He had been fired from Indigo Bay, of course, but recently he had started a new venture silk-screening island-themed apparel—T-shirts with palm trees, neon sunsets, a pineapple wearing sunglasses, slogans: I’M ON ISLAND TIME. WHAT HAPPENS ON THE CRUISE STAYS ON THE CRUISE. His merchandise was already in a few of the souvenir shops in Hibiscus Harbour. He was giving Sara money. Clive was grateful. Edwin had always helped him, and he was helping him now, as Clive still believed he always would.

Two months after his release from prison, he flew to New York. He thought Edwin might come to say goodbye, but when the time came to drive to the airport in his grandmother’s church friend Verna’s car and Edwin had not come, he was not surprised.

He made his way in New York, as he had already told me. He built a life passed in the solitary fellowship of other men. He had been gone three years when Sara told him she had married Edwin. That was over fourteen years ago, so long that it was difficult to believe it wasn’t always true, that there was a time before the mother of his child married his best friend. He had been through so much. He had lost his father and been abandoned by his mother, gotten a girl pregnant and become a father too young, been a suspect in a murder, gone to prison, started over in a new country, had the shit kicked out of him in a vacant lot in Brooklyn. Yet it seemed to Clive that the man who lived through all that was still an innocent, for he had not yet lain awake at night imagining his son walking between Sara and Edwin, one hand in each of theirs. His boy, laughing with delight as they lifted their arms and swung him into the air.

Why had Edwin done it? Did he love Sara, or had he only married her to hurt him, to reject the love that had hung in the stars like an open question on their last night together? Or maybe marrying Sara had been a way of holding on to the only part of Clive that Edwin could have—Bryan; maybe Edwin’s most wounding action was also his greatest act of devotion.

Two years after Sara and Edwin married, Clive received a letter from his grandmother. It was autumn. He remembered because just before he found the letter in the metal mailbox he shared with his roommates, he paused on the stairs outside the apartment building to scrape the tacky samara wings from the bottoms of his shoes. He read the letter in the dark hallway. Buried in updates about the renovation of St. George’s, about the local election and Verna’s nieces from Toronto, was the news that Sara had given birth to a son, Edwin Jr. Eddie for short. Clive saw his son and Edwin’s growing up together. More than mates, more than breds. Brothers. The thought of it was so sweet to him his chest ached. He knew that to feel this way after what Edwin had done made him a chump. Edwin had stolen the only life he had ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and children and not-so-bad work and Sunday afternoons at Little Beach. Yet he was grateful. It seemed to him that this life was better off without him in it, for surely he would have spoiled it with his clumsy touch.

What if he had known everything that was waiting for him? What if, when Edwin approached him in the schoolyard on the first day of second grade, back when he was only Clive, you had shown him all that was going to happen and said, Will you take this life? What is there to say? He would have walked right up to Edwin and joined the game. Because of Edwin he’d lost everything, but without him, he would not even have had these things to lose. He needed Edwin. He could make no sense of his life without him.

Years passed. He was thirty-five. One summer evening he was walking through Prospect Park—the air redolent with charcoal, laughter and music wafting into the huge night above the lawns—when he heard his name.

“Gogo? Clive fucking Richardson, is that you?”

It was Bery Wilson. She marched right up to him and wrapped him in a tight embrace. “I’ve thought of you,” she said. That was as close as she came to talking about the past. She told him she was an artist now—something about the city as canvas, pain as art. She wore her hair in a Mohawk, shaved on the sides and natural on top. In the purple twilight, he could make out tattoos of birds on her arms. An Asian girl and a white guy ambled over and said hello. Bery introduced them to him as members of her collective.

“Join us,” said the guy.

“We have veggie dogs,” said the girl.

“Yes, please, come sit,” Bery said with a smile. How had she managed it? The anger seemed to have evaporated out of her altogether.

He told her he was running late, though the truth was he had nowhere to be.

“I understand,” she said. Then her face turned serious. “You’ve heard about Edwin?”

Clive spent the months after Bery told him that Edwin was dying waiting for his friend to reach out to him. (“Cancer,” she’d said, and when he asked what kind she said she wasn’t sure, she only knew that it was everywhere now.) He imagined it so many ways. He would be getting out of the shower, or paying for dinner at the Little Sweet, when his cell phone would ring. “He’s asking for you,” Sara would say. Clive would fly home, arriving just in time. The house would be dark and quiet, Bryan and Eddie having been sent out to occupy themselves despite their protestations, for they knew their father was dying and did not want to leave his side. Clive would walk through the kitchen and the parlor to the bedroom. When he first saw Edwin in the bed he would gasp. His friend would be unrecognizable—his skin ashen, his cheeks sunken, the sockets of his eyes alarmingly prominent.

Hey, Gogo, Edwin would say, as if it had been only hours since they’d last seen each other.

They would talk. About the boys. About their own boyhoods. Remember the time we climbed the radio tower? Remember sneaking into E.T.? Remember, remember, remember. Edwin would close his eyes, as if drifting off to sleep, and for a minute Clive would think he was gone. Then Edwin would open his eyes again, and when he did they would be glazed with tears. He would look up at Clive with that old grin.

Will you miss me? he would say.

Clive would take Edwin’s trembling face in his hands. He would lower his head and kiss his best friend lightly on the forehead, and they would know without having to say it that all was forgiven.

But Clive did not hear from his friend, and one day his grandmother called and told him that Edwin had died. He tried to wrap his mind around the truth that Edwin was not still down on the island, away from him, unseen for years, but still there, still here, but he couldn’t. It was only then he recognized that all these years he had held on to the buried belief that someday, somehow, they would be brought together again, and that in their new, shared aftermath they would have all the time and words and silence they needed to understand together everything that had happened. Now this would never be. He had moved into another chapter in his life, one in which he would have to live without the possibility that the central mysteries of his life would be demystified.

Ever since, his days passed like walking downhill. He drove his taxi, moved from apartment to apartment. He kept apprised of the news in the lives of his friends and acquaintances. There was a gallery in Fort Greene where from time to time he saw Bery’s sculptures on display. He and Ouss still got together once or twice a year for a meal. Ouss and his wife owned a hardware store on Tremont Avenue. They had four girls; the eldest was on a full scholarship at Exeter.

At night, he walked. Every evening when he set out, the details of the neighborhood were overwhelming—a lover’s quarrel on the sidewalk, blinking lights in the windows of an electronics store, peaches at a fruit stand so ripe their perfume made him woozy. But the longer he walked, the more the city receded, until the world around him rendered itself invisible and he began to hear water lapping against the edges of the metropolis, which became water lapping at the edges of another island, and then he was not walking through New York anymore, but through the landscape of that other world, that other life. He would stop at a basketball court or a playing field to watch the boys at play, and he would see them all there, shouting and tussling on the pitch, Edwin and Des and Damien and Don. Sometimes a boy left the raucousness of the game behind to sit in the grass, or to hum a song to himself, and Clive knew that he was Bryan; his boy was beautiful and sweet and everything good. And once a year, he walked to Manhattan Beach with its gray sand and its mangy gulls swirling overhead and ate an American chocolate bar that tasted all wrong but was the best he could do, and in this way he marked the day he lost all of them forever.

If only Alison hadn’t found it so necessary to stir up the shit between him and Edwin, to intrude in things she didn’t understand. If only she hadn’t gone off and done whatever she did. It wasn’t just her own life she was risking—had she thought about that? Had it occurred to her for even a moment?