The Things a Brother Knows (7 page)

“Let’s walk,” Pearl says.

The loop around the pond is a little over a mile. She starts out ahead and Zim and I jog to catch up. The moon is full. Its reflection spiderwebs its way across the water. A warm wind rustles the leaves. Laughter rolls in from far off in the woods. I’m with my two best friends in the world and it’s a night so beautiful it’s like it sprang from the pages of a child’s picture book. It’s the kind of night that might fill another person with a sense of peace, but for me, all a night like this does is shine a light on the places where everything is going wrong.

Pearl is panting.

“You know,” I say, “you really should quit smoking.”

“Stuff it, Saint Levi.”

We walk without talking. Somehow Zim and Pearl sense that I’m not up for it.

A boulder appears on the path in front of us. Pearl and Zim take to one side and I take to the other. I almost whisper
Bread and butter
, but only because I’ve heard Mom say it a
thousand times, not because superstitions carry any weight with me at all.

“It used to be only me he ignored,” I finally say, “but now he’s ignoring the world.”

Pearl slows her pace so she’s walking by my side. “If it makes you feel any better, he used to ignore me too.”

“Not me,” Zim says. “He was always really cool to me. And don’t hate me for saying this, Levi, but he was pretty cool to you too. He just had a lot of stuff going on at the end of high school, and he had to deal with your parents, and how everyone freaked out about his decision, and I’m not sure it’s fair to take all that so personally.”

I stop in my tracks. I feel Pearl’s hand on my wrist.

I don’t know if she’s trying to hold me back from punching Zim, or if she’s just trying to show me she’s on my side.

Pearl lets go and it feels like she’s uncorked me, like all the blood drains right out of my body. I’m not going to punch Zim. Of course I’m not going to punch Zim. I’m not filled with fight.

I’m filled with worry.

“It’s just … I don’t know. I don’t know what’s happening with him. He doesn’t do anything. He just spends all his time on the Internet,” I say.

“You’ve just described the entire American population under the age of forty-five,” Pearl says.

“And he looks at maps. Lots and lots of maps. I guess this could be taken as a good sign, like he’s actually interested in something, but it sure doesn’t feel like it.”

“What kind of Web sites does he go to?” Zim asks.

“How would I know?”

“Because you check his history when you take back your laptop.”

“I do?”

“Yeah, dude. You do.”

“Yeah. I do.”

“So?”

I let out a big sigh. “It’s bleak.”

We’ve arrived back at the parking lot.

It’s almost midnight. I’d be worried about getting home if I had a curfew or if I thought anyone was waiting up for me.

“How bleak?” Zim and Pearl ask in unison. They look at each other and, because they’re so rarely in synch, they can’t help but smile a little.

I tell them how he spends his days looking at desert combat video shot by the shaky hands of soldiers with their pocket-sized cameras. How he visits Web pages that have outlived their subjects, turned from sites where cocky young guys with names like Spike once blogged about scratchy army toilet paper into online memorials. Virtual warehouses storing the grief of others.

I tell them something they already know. That Boaz used to be one of those people who had everything. But still, there were things he wanted. Things to fight for. Even if that part of him cost us all so much.

I tell them how he’s gone and disappeared.

Pearl stops with the keys in her hand and looks at me over the roof of her car. Her face stone straight. Very un-Pearl-like.

“He’s in there somewhere, Levi. Really, he is, and he’ll be back. Somehow he’ll be back.”

Zim nods his head.

I want to believe them. And I try.

But the moon is gone now, vanished behind some clouds, taking the warm air with it, and this is no longer a night that might bring somebody peace.

It’s a night full of worry.

And for me that worry is this: maybe he
is
back. Maybe this is it.

There’s a saying about the military that you go in a boy and come back a man. But I’m pretty sure Boaz went in a man and came back a ghost.

W
HEN
I
WAS LITTLE
I
USED TO SLEEP
with my parents. I’d wake up, find my way down the darkened hallway and invent some sort of excuse for why I’d arrive at their bedside in the dead of night.

My foot aches. There’s a noise outside my window. There’s something itchy in my sheets.

I don’t sleep with my parents anymore because, well, that would be totally gross. But I’m still someone who wakes, for no real reason, in the middle of almost every single night.

Now when I do, more often than not, I hear Boaz. Sometimes it’s typing. Tonight, I hear him soft-screaming.

I don’t get up. I don’t go to his door or go see if there’s anything I can do to help him through the dark hours.

I reach for my radio alarm clock and I fill the room with music from my favorite station. A song I’ve never heard.

Tonight I turn the dial. Just a touch. A fraction of a fraction too small to measure, until I can no longer hear my brother.

All I can hear is static.

I see Christina when I go with Pearl to a movie at a different theater from the one where Popcorn Guy works. She sits three rows ahead of us. Her date is tall, thin. Long, tanned arms. Blond goatee. A T-shirt from Boston College Law School.

At some point during the first half of the movie he leans over and whispers into her hair. He kisses the arch of her neck. She lowers her head onto his shoulder.

I grab Pearl and try rushing her out the door at the start of the final credits, before the houselights come up.

“I gotta pee,” she says.

“C’mon, Pearl. Can’t we just get out of here?”

“Did you see the size of my soda? Sorry.” She shrugs, her hands comically covering her crotch. She darts into the bathroom.

I step outside and study the posters for the movies coming soon to a theater near me. I wonder when the ticket-buying world will finally tire of movies spoofing fringe sports.

“Levi!”

I could pretend it’s not my name. Bill. Bill would work for me right about now. Bill, the guy who just can’t wait for the next movie about an Ultimate Frisbee team down on its luck.

She comes and stands beside me.

“Hi, Christina.”

She holds out a packet of Twizzlers. “Want one?”

I don’t, but I take one anyway. Her date seems to have disappeared. Maybe he has a girl’s bladder like Pearl.

“How are things?”

“By
things
do you mean Boaz?”

It comes out sounding a lot pissier than I intend it to. She takes a step back and looks into the Twizzler packet as if she might find something valuable in there.

“Yes. I do.”

“Well, if you really want to know, he never leaves his room, and he barely talks, and he spends all his time online, and sometimes I wake up to the sound of him screaming.”

She sighs. She reaches over and she takes my hand. She must still think I’m a small child. She was always kind to me this way. She showed me the sort of affection a sister might to a much younger brother.

But now it’s just sort of awkward.

Yet not so awkward that I let go, because it’s not so often, in fact it’s never, that I get to hold the hand of a girl like Christina.

“How about Reuben and Amanda?”

“You know my parents,” I say, but then I realize she doesn’t. She knows who they were before Boaz left. And that’s a whole lot different from who they are now. She knew them when Abba used to make Mom laugh. When Mom used to paint. When they’d listen to music together even though they have such different tastes, and sometimes, they’d dance in the living room and I’d cover my eyes because it was too embarrassing to watch. She knew them when there was a whole world we might talk about at the dinner table and nothing was off-limits, not politics, not war.

“What can I do?” she asks. “Really, I’ll do anything.”

Mr. Blond Goatee returns. So does Pearl. They’re standing next to each other, a few feet away, staring at us. He’s probably thinking:
Why is this kid holding my girlfriend’s hand?

And Pearl is probably thinking:
He should have gone for the boob
.

“I don’t know. You could stop by again? Get him outside? Maybe take him for a drive. Get him out of the house and into the fresh air. Talk to him.”

“I’ll give it a try. I’m probably not his favorite person in the world, so I can’t promise I’ll get anywhere, but I’ll give it a try.”

She untangles her fingers from mine, but I can feel her hand, the warmth and softness of it, long after she wanders off under the arm of her boyfriend.

I go to see Dov.

I don’t call ahead. I figure my chances of finding Dov at home are pretty good. He never seems to do much beyond visiting us and loitering at the Armenian deli.

I arrive at the building just as someone is leaving. I slip in the front door and walk up two flights of stairs to apartment G.

I hear his voice from across the room.

“Hold your horses! I’m coming! Just a minute!”

Dov sounds harassed even though I only rang the buzzer once.

“What, what?” he’s saying, but then he slaps on a broad smile when he sees that it’s me. “Oh, look. The Avon Lady came calling.”

“Hi, Dov.”

He kisses my cheek. “Come in, come in. Can I get you a coffee? A soda? A shot of whiskey?”

“I’m good.”

Dov’s kitchen, living room and dining room are all part of the same square space. He has a worn-out plaid couch and a TV. A round table with two mismatched folding chairs. His bedroom is dark. The window looks out onto the brick wall of the building next door. He sleeps on a single mattress.

It’s the apartment of someone who long ago threw in the towel.

“To what do I owe this pleasure?” He pats a spot on the couch next to him.

I sit. Dov puts a hand on my knee.

“I don’t know.”

There’s a picture of my grandmother in a frame on Dov’s nearly empty bookshelf. Dov doesn’t keep books. He buys them used from the library and donates them back.

The photo is black-and-white. She’s sitting on the beach under an umbrella, her hair tied back in a checkered scarf, caught mid-laugh. I wonder what that laugh sounded like. How she smelled. If she had soft skin.

After she died, Dov left the kibbutz and moved to Boston to be near their only son. I was born six months later.

We sit side by side on the couch without speaking. Somebody is screaming at somebody else in an apartment upstairs. A dog barks feebly from the courtyard below.

Dov must have some idea of why I’m here. He’s not totally
clueless. But Dov just sits. The picture of patience. A man who has nothing but time.

I take a deep breath and let it out. “I’m worried about Boaz.”

“Oh,
motek
. Of course you are,” Dov says. And then, “We all are.”

“So why isn’t anybody doing anything?” My shirt is sticking to my back. I had to walk fourteen blocks from the nearest T stop.

“Maybe I’ll take that soda now,” I say.

Dov shoots up from the couch, happy to have a task. He roots around in his cupboards and then pours a generic brand of cola into a jelly jar with ice.

“Listen, Levi.” He sits back down next to me. “We all have our ways of dealing with the shit life serves up. The terrible things we’ve seen. The pain of loss. Change. Whatever.” He turns my chin to face him. He tucks a strand of hair behind my ear. “We have to let him go through what he needs to go through. We can’t expect too much too soon. It’s not what we hope for, but it’s to be expected. We just have to wait.”

“Dov,” I say, and I feel my cheeks redden, “I’m tired of waiting.”

There’s a danger in what I’ve just said. Or at least in the way it sounded. I’m keenly aware from growing up around Dov and Abba that self-indulgence isn’t something to be tolerated. It’s a singularly American phenomenon, Dov and Abba believe—the child who thinks the world revolves around him.

It’s not really what I mean, though. This time, for a change,
I’m not really talking about myself. And maybe Dov gets that, because he doesn’t scold. Instead he says, “I know,
motek
. It isn’t fair.”

“I know about waiting. It does nothing. No good at all. But it’s all anyone’s doing.”

Dov looks at me carefully.

“Your parents, you know. They do their best. They’re trying to give him the space he needs.”

“I guess so. But … I think there’s something else.”

“What?”

“I don’t know. It’s just … I think he’s up to something. He’s planning something. He’s going somewhere, and I don’t know why, or where, or what he’s going to do, but it doesn’t feel right. None of this feels right.”

I sit in the sticky silent company of my grandfather.

Waiting.

“There are resources, Levi. Things we can look into if it gets to that. This I’ve talked about with your parents. But we’re not there yet. He was screened before his release, and he’s been deemed healthy. And for now at least, we need to give that the benefit of the doubt.”