WE

Chapter OneNew Jersey, June 2036

The second Tuesday of June gave Ben Bender nothing in particular, which was his favorite kind of day. School was two weeks behind him and would stay behind him forever now, the cap and gown already returned, the tassel hanging off his desk lamp where his mother had looped it so it would be the first thing he saw every morning, proof that something had been finished. The morning was warm before eight. The neighborhood smelled like cut grass and hot asphalt, the two smells New Jersey is issued every June whether it asks or not, and somewhere up the block a sprinkler was ticking through its slow circle like it had all summer to get where it was going.

He came downstairs at twenty after seven with his sketchbook under his arm, the way other people carry a phone, and went past the photo wall without looking at it.

That was a skill, not an accident. The wall ran the length of the staircase, and his mother tended it the way some women tend gardens, straightening frames that had not moved, swapping school pictures forward a grade each fall. Ben at five with a missing tooth. Ben at six in a soccer uniform, standing in goal with his hands on his knees, already listening to something outside the frame. Ben at seven on the boardwalk at Point Pleasant, sunburned, holding a hermit crab out to the camera like a small hostage. Then Ben at nine, taller, thinner, his smile relearned. Then ten, eleven, on and up the stairs.

There was no eight.

Nobody had ever said so out loud. The wall just stepped over that year the way you step over a gap in a dock, without looking down, and by now his eye did it on its own. Seven, nine. A whole summer, a whole grade of him, folded shut somewhere in a box his mother kept or did not keep, and the two of them passed that gap a dozen times a day and never once stumbled on it. It was the smoothest thing in the house.

His mother was at the counter with coffee and the small television going, the one that lived under the cabinet and played the morning shows at her while she made lists. His father had left for the office at six forty, which he did in summer so he could be back for the good part of the evening. Ben poured cereal and sat, and the television said, in that bright wide awake voice morning shows use for everything from wars to dog birthdays, that coming up after the break, it has been nearly ten years since the event at a small Vermont lake stunned the world, and a new documentary asks what we It did not ask what we. The television had changed its mind. It was a cooking segment now, and a man in a denim apron was very excited about ramps.

His mother had not appeared to move. The remote lay by her coffee cup, and her face was pleasant and closed, reading her list, and if you had been anyone else in New Jersey you would have sworn she had never touched it.

Ben ate his cereal. Under the kitchen, under the ramps and the sprinkler and the spoon against the bowl, he could hear what he always heard, what he had heard for as long as he had ears, and what he had understood at some point around age eleven that nobody else heard at all.

The best way he had ever found to say it, and he had only ever said it in his own head, was that the world sounded like a house where someone is quietly listening in the next room. Not a sound. The shape a silence makes when it is occupied. When you stand in a dark kitchen at midnight and know, without one creak of evidence, that your mother is awake upstairs. It was like that, under everything, all the time, faint as the hum of the refrigerator, and like the refrigerator it disappeared unless he went looking. It had no direction. It had no opinion. It was just there, patient, the held breath of the next room over, and he had called it the quiet since before he was careful with words, and he had stopped mentioning it the same summer the photo wall learned to step from seven to nine.

"You're at the store today?" his mother said.

"Ten to six."

"Dinner's at seven, your father wants to grill." She looked up, and her eyes did the flick they always did, sketchbook, then his face. "You could leave that home once."

"I could," Ben agreed, and took it with him, and she smiled despite herself, and under her smile he heard the other thing, the thing her voice had carried under it for ten years, so steady he could have hummed it: don't be strange where people can see you. Please. I love you. Don't be strange.

He never told her he heard it. That was the other skill.

Grabowski's True Value had employed Bender men for two generations, in the loose sense that Ben's father had stocked shelves there in 1998 and now Ben rang the register summers, and Stan Grabowski held both facts in his head as a dynasty. It was a good store, old, deep, and dim, the kind where the aisles narrow as you go back in time toward the plumbing wall, and Ben liked it for the same reason he liked drawing. People came in holding a broken thing and told you what they thought was wrong, and it was Ben's job to listen until he found out what was actually wrong, and the two were almost never the same.

At ten forty a man came in with a length of pipe and a story about a leak under his kitchen sink, and under the story Ben heard the leak was in the upstairs bathroom and the man could not face the ceiling coming down, so they solved the sink first, which is a thing you can do for people, solve the small wrong problem kindly while they get ready to say the big one. At noon a woman bought her fourth smoke detector of the spring, and her voice said the old ones kept failing, and under it he heard that she woke at three every morning certain she smelled smoke, and had since her husband died, and that no alarm on earth goes off for that. He carried the box to her car. He did not say anything wise. He had learned by seventeen that hearing it was not the same as being invited to it, and that the kindest thing his ears had ever done for anyone was let him stand next to them without needing to be told.

Marcus came by on his lunch break with two sandwiches, because Marcus's family owned the deli two doors down and feeding Ben was how Marcus said most of what he meant. They sat on the loading dock in back with their feet hanging, the way they had since they were fourteen, and Marcus talked about August, when he would leave for Rutgers, and the dorm, and the meal plan, machine gunning through it, funny about all of it.

"You good?" Ben said, when the sandwiches were done. "Your dad?"

"He's fine. We're fine." Marcus squinted out at the dumpsters like they were a horizon. "It's fine."

The word fine came out of him three times, flat and smooth as skipped stones, and underneath it Ben heard the sound he had been hearing under Marcus for two years now, the recycling bin at the curb on Monday nights clinking too heavy, the father asleep in the den at four in the afternoon, the store passing to an uncle nobody liked, the whole house of it. He did not say any of that. He said, "You'll come back at Thanksgiving and the deli will still smell like your grandmother's peppers, and you'll be so happy you'll cry in the walk-in."

"I have never once cried in the walk-in."

"You cried in the walk-in when the Devils lost."

"That was an emergency," Marcus said, with dignity, and punched him in the arm, and under the laughing Ben heard it ease, a little, the way it always eased when somebody stood next to the true thing without making him say it. That was the whole trick. That was everything Ben knew how to do.

In the afternoon Lily Okafor came in for her shift and worked the paint counter, shaking cans in the machine that rattled the whole front of the store, and between customers she leaned on the register and asked if he was going to Dana's party on Saturday, the big one, the last-summer-before-everybody-scatters one.

"Are you going?" Ben said.

"I don't care either way," Lily said, and shrugged one shoulder, and looked at the paint chips.

She cared completely. It came off her like heat off a July car, and it was not about the party, and Ben stood there with the register between them and heard the whole of it, the way he could never not hear things: that she had a countdown running in her head of days before September, that the college he had not said yes or no to was four hundred miles from hers, that she had practiced I don't care either way in the mirror of her mother's Honda in the parking lot eleven minutes ago.

And here is what the gift was worth, the famous gift, the thing that made him strange: he could hear everyone on earth except himself. He looked at Lily looking at paint chips, and his own chest was a radio between stations. Fondness, static, fear, static. He had a deposit envelope for the art school sitting on his desk at home, filled out, unsealed, unmailed, three weeks now, and when he tried to listen under his own indecision the way he could listen under a stranger's sink story, he got nothing. The quiet did not work on the inside. He was the one room in the world he could not stand outside of.

"I'll go if you go," he said, which was the truest thing available.

"I said I don't care either way," Lily said, and cared completely, and smiled at the paint chips, and the can shaker rattled the windows like weather.

His father grilled that evening the way he did everything, with a project manager's calm and a level of documentation the chicken did not require. Ben sat on the porch steps with the sketchbook on his knees and drew him, twelve feet away in the smoke, and this was the other thing, the thing that went with the ears. He had drawn all his life the way some kids never stop narrating, and somewhere in there the drawings had gotten ahead of the cameras. His mother said it nicer than that. She said his pictures always caught people. What she meant, and what she did not like if she looked too long, was that a photograph of his father showed a fit man of fifty at a grill, and Ben's twenty minutes of pencil showed the same man with the mortgage in his shoulders and the tenderness he was embarrassed of in his hands, turning chicken he had bought because his son liked thighs and his wife liked breasts and he liked the versions of them that happened at the picnic table, and all of that was somehow in it, in a drawing of a guy at a grill. Truer than the camera. He never said that out loud either. There were by now a great many things Ben Bender did not say out loud, and he had stacked them so neatly for so long that he mistook the stack for a personality.

The cardinal came to the feeder while he was shading the smoke. They had cardinals all summer, the feeder saw to that, but this one landed and did not eat. It sat on the crossbar with its head tipped and looked at the yard, at the grill, at him, in that sideways way birds audit a place, and it sang a little run Ben had never particularly noticed from a cardinal before, three short notes and a long one, and for no reason he could have given you, his pencil stopped.

The quiet under the world leaned in.

That was wrong, and he knew it was wrong even as he thought it, because the quiet did not do things. Eighteen years it had been the same held breath in the next room, directionless, opinionless, the flattest fact of his life. It did not lean. It did not turn toward you like a face. And yet for the space of one bird's song he would have sworn in any court in New Jersey that the listening in the next room had put down what it was holding, and that what it was listening to was him.

Then the sprinkler ticked, and the chicken hissed, and his father said the thermometer was lying to him again, and it was an ordinary June evening from one edge of the yard to the other, and the cardinal ate like any bird and flew off about its business.

Ben looked at the page. Without deciding to, in the top corner, above his father and the smoke, he had drawn a little horizon of water. Flat. A lake seen from a shore he was not standing on. He had no memory of his hand doing it.

He closed the book on it, the way you shut a drawer with your hip, and went in to set the table.

The mail came late on their street, quarter of seven, one of those routes the post office kept promising to fix. Ben heard the truck's brakes two houses down while his mother was carrying the corn out, and because his hands were empty he went down the driveway in the long gold light to the box at the curb, and that walk, forty feet of concrete he had walked ten thousand times, barefoot, unhurried, a boy with all the time in the world, was the last stretch of ordinary in his life, though nothing along it said so.

Circulars. The water bill. A postcard from his grandmother in Cape May, a lighthouse on it, wish you were here in the world's steadiest cursive.

And one envelope, heavier than the rest, cream colored, the kind of paper that means a person stood in an aisle and chose it. His name on the front, not Ben, his whole name, Benjamin Bender, in a careful hand, blue ink, the letters upright and deliberate like someone building a small wall, and beneath his name, in the same hand, underlined once:

To be opened on or after his eighteenth birthday.

His birthday was in January. Whoever had written this did not know the date, only that it mattered to wait for it, and had waited anyway, and the waiting was somehow in the handwriting, he could hear it the way he heard everything, five months of an envelope propped against a sugar bowl in a kitchen he had never seen while somebody made up their mind.

The postmark said WHITE RIVER JCT VT.

Ben stood at the mailbox in the gold light with the circulars under his arm, and the quiet in the next room of the world was leaning again, he was sure of it now, and up the driveway behind him the screen door opened, and his mother called something cheerful about corn that ended in the middle of a word.

He turned around. She was on the porch step with the bowl against her hip, and she was looking at the envelope in his hand the way you look at a car that is not going to stop in time, and her eyes went where anyone's eyes go, to the upper left corner, to the return address he had not read yet, and every drop of the evening went out of her face at once.

Ben looked down.

One line, that careful blue hand, smaller up there, almost shy.

D. Hamilton, Woodward Reservoir, Plymouth, Vermont.

"Ben," his mother said, from very far away, in a voice with everything under it. "Give it here."

He did not.