The Things a Brother Knows (12 page)

I can see the marks on the wall from where he taped up my Rand McNally map before returning it to me in the dead of night. His computer, with its broken motherboard, still sits on his desk. The radio, quiet, tucked on the shelf between a set of barbells and books with worn-out spines.

I’m cataloging the place. Trying to make some sense out of everything by figuring out what’s here and what’s gone.

He’s gone.

That I know. He took those printed out maps. And all the new stuff Mom bought for him except for the cell phone. I found it, still in its package, behind a row of shoes in his closet. That box from Marty Muldoon’s is nowhere to be found. I know because I looked for it everywhere.

I roll out my Rand McNally map, pin it to the bed and stare at it.

I could wait for the second destination. Or the one after
that. He has all sorts of addresses scribbled into the baby-blue Atlantic.

Or I could go now. Today. Tomorrow might even be safe. If I go soon, I could catch up with him in Poughkeepsie.

There was a short period after Boaz left for boot camp when I imagined that as soon as I turned eighteen I’d follow him. I’d walk the path he’d blazed. I’d get fitted for a uniform. Pummeled into a muscled physique. Shaved close to the scalp.

This wasn’t because I wanted to become a marine. And it certainly wasn’t because I believed, like Boaz did, that part of becoming a man is fighting for your country. It was as simple as me assuming, as I had all my life, that someday I’d be like my brother. That I’d follow right behind him.

I got over that quickly enough. I grew out my hair. Took up smoking. Once Boaz was gone, I started feeling my way through a life outside of my brother’s shadow, only to learn that shadows grow even bigger when cast from half a world away.

It’s today, I decide. It has to be today.

I cross the street to Zim’s but he isn’t home. I look around back, figuring I might find him shooting baskets. Nope. Propped up against the garage I see Zim’s old skateboard, and I grab it. It’s the same one he used to ride back in the days when there was nothing more important to either of us than skateboarding. I don’t even have a board anymore, and I figure that’s part of my problem. Not that I don’t skate, but that
nothing ever took its place. There’s nothing in my life as important to me as skateboarding once was.

I ride Zim’s board over to Pearl’s. Mama Goldblatt answers the door.

I don’t have a thing for women in their late forties, but if I did, I’d be totally hot for Mama Goldblatt. She’s smart and beautiful, and she’s got some big job at the public television station where she produces shows on world music and culture, and I know how Pearl likes to pretend her mother is totally lame and out of touch, but the truth is, if Pearl grows up to be one half as hip as Mama Goldblatt, she’ll be doing just fine.

“Levi. Darling,” she says in her deep lullaby voice. “How
are
you?”

It’s the first I’ve seen her in weeks.

“I’m okay.”

“And your brother, he’s home now?”

“Not exactly.”

“No?”

“He was here, but now he’s left again.”

“He got called back?”

“No, no. He’s just gone off to, like, collect himself.”

“Oh. That doesn’t sound so good.”

Here’s another thing about Mama Goldblatt: she’s got a serious rack, or as Mom likes to call it, an “ample bosom.”

There’s something about her, and I don’t think it’s just her chest, that makes me want to tell her everything. When I’m around her I fight the urge to crack myself open like an overripe melon, and it’s lucky for Pearl I fear her wrath more
than I’m undone by Mama Goldblatt’s lullaby voice, or else by now I’d have shared Pearl’s secrets, and Mama Goldblatt might have locked her away in a real convent.

“Is Pearl here?”

“Out back. But grab something from the kitchen first. She tells me you’ve been living off a diet of peach frozen yogurt.”

Pearl is reading in the sun under a ridiculously large hat.

She shrugs. “What can I say? I burn easily.”

“I need a ride.”

“Where?”

“Poughkeepsie.”

“Isn’t Poughkeepsie like three hours away?”

“About.”

“I’m due at work in forty-five minutes.”

“Maybe it’s time for a sick day.”

She thinks this over. “I do love the dramatic prospect in that idea.”

“Have I mentioned that you’re looking a little peaked?”

She coughs. Rubs her temples. She groans. Then she coughs again. “How’d that sound?”

“Perfect.”

We take I-90, which couldn’t possibly be a less interesting route. I-90 is nothing but a big slab of concrete cutting the state of Massachusetts in two, and here we are, barreling down it. The very act of driving down the interstate seems so absurdly unsafe suddenly. We’re just suckers in a little cocoon made of tin.

Every choice we make is a risk. Every single choice.

Pearl puts in a CD she made for road trips. She’d had it sitting on her shelf for over three years. This is the first chance she’s had to play it. Two songs in and she pops it out again.

“Jesus, I had bad taste at fourteen.”

“Didn’t we all.”

I have the address and directions folded into my lap. So much information, one small click away. If only there were a Web site that could answer the
why
of it all.

“Has it occurred to you,” Pearl asks, “even if only a little, that maybe Boaz actually
is
hiking the Appalachian Trail, and that we’re going to show up unannounced on the doorstep of some guy named Laura who’ll look at us like we’re totally insane?”

“Loren.”

“Whatever.”

“Yeah. It has. But if I’m wrong at least you learned your road trip mix sucks the big one.”

“True that. Another question, if I may.”

“Go on.”

“What makes you think he’s going to come home with us?”

It’s not as if I haven’t thought about this. I’ve thought about it plenty. It’s just that I don’t get anywhere with that thinking except back to the floor of my room staring at my toes.

In other words: nowhere.

I shrug. “It’s a shot in the dark, I guess.”

“Better than not taking any shot at all.”

That’s why I love Pearl.

We trade in I-90 for the Taconic Parkway. A major improvement. Still no walker’s road, but pleasant enough. Only two lanes in either direction lined with trees full to bursting.

Pearl lights a cigarette and the smell turns my stomach. I haven’t had much to eat today. I open the window and stick my head into the oncoming rush of air like a golden retriever.

We find the address without any trouble. It’s a big house, peeling white paint and three stories, sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac, an American flag hanging from the front porch.

Pearl is dying for a pee. We haven’t stopped since Framingham. We get out of the car. I do a big stretch and freeze right in the middle of it. For the first time since this whole plan occurred to me, I’m hit hard by fear.

Not a creeping fear.

A paralyzing, didn’t-even-know-it-was-coming-and-now-I-can’t-move kind of fear.

But then Pearl comes over and links her arm in mine, and that fear starts to recede. She whisks me up the porch steps to the front door, where one of the two buzzers is marked with the name L. Cowell. She pushes it before I have a chance to hesitate. She pushes it three times.

“C’mon, c’mon …” She’s hopping up and down.

I go back to that exercise we learned in yoga. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself in my safe place. I try picturing the slope of my roof, a warm evening, Pearl stretched out next to me.

Instead what I see when I close my eyes is a fist punching me full in the face. I’ve never taken a punch to the face, but I
always suspected it isn’t like it looks in the movies. Guys always get up and go about the fighting in the movies. They stand up. Shake it off. Wipe the blood from the corners of their mouths and then, with narrowed eyes, dig in harder. But I’m pretty sure I’d be done for. Leveled flat. Game over.

“Hello?” A voice on the intercom.

“Hi.” Pearl waves, not seeming to care that there’s no camera attached to the speaker. “I gotta pee.”

I push Pearl out of the way and step closer.

“Hello?”

My voice cracks and I sound like a Girl Scout making her cookie rounds.

“Um, I’m looking for Boaz? Boaz Katznelson? I’m his brother.”

The door buzzes. Pearl pulls it open and we stand faced with another door and a narrow staircase.

“Up here,” the voice calls.

The stairs are creaky and the carpeting stained. We make our way up two flights. By the time we reach the top, Pearl is out of breath.

Loren stands in the doorframe wearing nothing but plaid boxers and a white T-shirt. If I’d had any question about how Boaz knows him, which I didn’t, the haircut is a dead giveaway.

“Hi,” Pearl says. “I know you don’t know me. But I seriously have to urinate.”

“Come on in.”

He points her toward the bathroom. I step in behind her. The ceiling is low and slanted and the place feels like an attic
hideout. The kind of spot I’d have died to go as a kid and pretend I was all grown up.

“You’re Bo’s brother?” he asks like he doesn’t quite believe this could possibly be true.

“Yeah. Levi.”

There doesn’t seem to be any air-conditioning. All the heat from the whole massive house gathers in this tiny collection of rooms.

“So, Levi. What are you doing here?”

Sweating. I’m sweating. That’s what I’m doing here
.

“I’m looking for Boaz.”

“I hate to break it to you, but you’ve come to the wrong place.”

“He’s not here?”

“Nope.” Loren disappears and returns pulling a pair of shorts up over his massive thighs. I guess it finally occurs to him that when meeting people for the first time, it’s advisable not to do so in your underwear.

Pearl comes out of the bathroom. “My bladder and I thank you.”

“Can I get you guys something to drink?”

I sit down on a small and wildly uncomfortable sofa.

“I’m sorry,” I say. “We don’t mean to … I don’t know … I just thought he was …” I put my head in my hands. “Shit.”

“Water would be nice,” Pearl says. Loren heads for the kitchen. She sits down next to me and leans in close. “I guess we should have called first.”

“Ya think?”

She pokes me hard in the ribs. “You owe me gas money.”

Loren returns with two lukewarm waters and a cold beer for himself. He settles himself into the chair facing us. He’s far too tall for the low ceilings. Too big for his chair. There are many traits Loren possesses that any reasonable person might find menacing: shoulders like a cow’s hindquarters, permanent scowl, deep-set eyes and a scar from his eyebrow to his scalp.

If it weren’t for the fact that the cups he poured our water into have bright purple flowers on them, I might just hightail it out of here leaving nothing but a cloud of dust in my wake.

Instead I say, “Sorry to turn up like this, I know it’s kinda weird, but, you see, there’s this map … well, lots of maps, and your address was in the ocean, and there were some e-mails, and I thought I knew—even though he wouldn’t tell me anything, I was pretty sure I knew, at least I knew
this
, that he’d be here—but I guess I was wrong.”

Loren takes a long drink of his beer.

Pearl sits forward. “What Levi’s trying to say, and forgive him, he can get a little tongue-tied, is that he thought Boaz was here and he’s a little surprised to find that he’s not.”

Loren begins to peel the label off his sweating beer bottle.

“Nope. He’s not here.” He gestures around the living area as if we need some physical proof. Then he sits back deeper into his chair and cracks a smile. “But I didn’t say he wasn’t here before.”

“He was?” I jump up from the sofa like I’ve got someplace to go and quick. Like maybe if I start running fast enough I might be able to catch him.

“Sit down, junior,” Loren says.

I sit.

“So, whaddya want with Bo?”

I stare at him and his marine haircut. I know Dov has plenty to say when it comes to my hair and what sort of signal it sends about me, but that’s different. Nobody with hair like Loren’s could ever be anything but a marine. His haircut announces, without any room for misunderstanding, exactly who he is.

“I want him to come home.”

“Why?”

“Because he needs to. It’s time.”

“Levi,” Loren asks me, “what do you know about the Marines?”

“Nothing, really.”

“Exactly.”

He leans back in his chair, like Abba does when he’s just put me in checkmate. He rolls his beer bottle slowly back and forth over the vast plain of his forehead.

“You see,” he continues, “you don’t know. You never
will
know. Whoever this guy Boaz was, this brother you thought you knew, he’s a marine now. He’ll always be a marine. Even if he wishes it weren’t so, he can’t undo it. It’s in his blood. Nobody can undo it.”

When Boaz left for training in California, he sent home a shirt for me, athletic gray with the letters USMC across the front. He must have bought the smallest size he could, but still, I swam in that shirt. I only wore it to sleep in, and by the time I grew big enough that I didn’t look absurd in it, I still wore it only to sleep in. I never once wore it out in public.
That U and S and M and C—those letters were blue, but to me, for reasons I couldn’t quite understand, they felt scarlet.

“How long was he here?” I ask.

“Not too long.”

“Where did he go?”

“Why would I tell you that?”

“Because I want to help him. I want him to come home. I want everything to be normal again.”

Loren laughs. “That would be nice, wouldn’t it?”

He stands up and goes into the kitchen for another beer and I go perfectly still until the sound of the bottle cap separating from the bottle, that small
clink
and the
whoosh
coming from a room away, rattles me like the loudest clap of thunder.

Loren returns and resumes his seat.

“That your girlfriend?”

He nods in Pearl’s direction. I’ve practically forgotten she’s here.