Are We There Yet? (2 page)

As his star rises, Danny finds himself working longer and longer hours. By the time he leaves the office, the wastebaskets have been emptied and the floors have been vacuumed. He has begun to forget what his apartment looks like. (His friends might say the same about him.) Gladner and Gladner (both devotees of Ted Newness, the management guru) tell Danny they will give him a raise—as long as he takes a vacation in the month of July.

Three days later, Mrs. Silver calls with her offer.

Danny Silver doesn't doubt for a second that he's being tricked into taking a trip to Italy.

“It's all
prepaid
,” his mother proclaims. “I know this is such short notice. But I just don't think that your father can go. Italy isn't a place for sitting. And his leg—well, you know your fa-ther's leg. We had hoped it would be okay by now. But who can know such things?”

Danny's father is fine. The day before, he played eighteen holes of golf.

“How are you feeling, Pop?” Danny asks once his mother has passed over the phone.

“Oh, I don't know. The leg's been acting up.”

“But you were playing golf yesterday.”

“Yes, yes, yes. I must have overextended myself. A damn shame. About Italy, I mean. But Mom tells me you and Elijah are going to go….”

Aha
, Danny thinks.
The hitch.

There is a whisper and a shuffling noise as Mrs. Silver takes back the phone.

“I know, I know,” Danny's mom says as her husband recedes to the couch.“I hadn't mentioned that part. But it's only fair. We have two tickets. Two sons. And it's prepaid. Nonrefundable. Your father can't go. So I can't go.”

“Ask the Himmelfarbs,” Danny offers. “They're your best friends, after all.”

“The
Himmelfarbs
? Do you know how much this trip
costs
?” Mrs. Silver takes a deep breath.“No. You and Elijah should take the tickets. It's a week. Nine days.”

Nine days with Elijah. Nine days with Quiet Boy, Mr. Virtue, Boy Misunderstood. Elijah, who never seemed to change. Not since he was ten or so and started to grow quiet. His mind seems to be working on two levels at once—
pass the salt
and
contemplate the pureness of the clouds
.He is always dazed, and he is always kind. Faultlessly kind.

Danny can't stand it.

“Have you asked Elijah how he feels about this?” Danny is hoping that Elijah might still say no. Since Elijah is still in high school and Danny is in the Working World, the two of them rarely have to see each other.

“Yes,” his mother replies. “He thinks it's a great idea.”

Danny can hear his father chuckle in the background. He can imagine his father giving his mother a thumbs-up sign and his mother smiling.
Prepaid. No refunds.

His mother continues. “It's over the week of July Fourth. You'd only have to take six days off from work. And you haven't been
anywhere
this year.”

“Okay, okay, okay,” Danny relents. He wonders if it counts as being tricked if he knows what's really going on.

“You'll go?”

Danny smiles. “There is nothing in the world I would rather do.”

There is still a chance that Elijah will back out….

But no.

At one in the morning the night before departure, Danny wakes up with a start.

He hasn't talked to Elijah since their mother made the offer. He should have talked to him, and has tried to, but whenever he's called, someone else has answered. Probably some pothead incapable of taking a message. Danny wants to be well-Fodored and well-Frommered by the time he sets down on Italian soil. But what will Elijah want to do? What does Elijah
normally
do?

I'll have to talk to him. For a week. Nine days.

But about what?

How's life?
(Two-minute answer.)
How's school?
(Five minutes, tops.)
How's life with the dope fiends?
(Maybe not a minute—maybe just a Look.)
What do you want to do today?
(That one could stretch out—maybe twenty minutes each day, depending on the repetition of shrugs.)
So isn't this a fine mess we're in?
(Rhetorical—no help.)

Danny gets out of bed, switches on the light, and squints. He counts his traveler's checks; he's bringing extra spending money, assuming Elijah won't have any. He takes out the list of gifts he has to buy, makes sure it's in his wallet, and makes sure his wallet is on the bureau by the keys.

He knows he is missing something. He is always missing something. He can never get past the first step of finding it, which is knowing what it is.

He stays up most of the night, doing things like this. He doesn't want to forget anything. And, more than that, he wants to think of something to say.

Seven years apart. Danny can remember the moment his father called to say Elijah had been born. Elijah can't picture Danny younger than ten, except from the photographs that hung around the house long after Danny left for college.

They never had to share a room, except when they went down to the shore. Spending the day by the pool, broken by stretches of playing on the beach. Danny was the Master Builder of sandcastles, Elijah his ready First Assistant. No two castles were the same, and in that way no two days were ever the same. One day would bring the Empire State Building, the next a dragon. Danny always sketched it first on the surface of the beach. Then Elijah dug, providing sand and more sand and more more sand until he hit the water beneath and had to move a little bit over to start again. As Danny created windows out of Popsicle sticks and towers out of turned-over buckets, Elijah would wander wide to collect shells. Sometimes the shells would be decoration, and other times they would become the residents of the castle. Extended shell families, each with a name and a story. As Danny dipped his hand in water to pat the walls smooth, Elijah would explain what went on inside, making the shape and the hour more real than Danny could have ever made alone.

There would always be extra shells, and at night Elijah would line them up on the dresser, sometimes according to size, sometimes according to color. Then he would crawl into his bed and Danny would crawl only two feet away into his own bed. From there, Danny would read Elijah a story.

Whatever older-kid books Danny was reading—Narnia being chronicled, time being wrinkled—he would send through the stillness to his brother. This was supposed to put Elijah to sleep, but it never did. He always wanted to find out where his brother would take him next.

Cal drives Elijah down from Providence in her bitchin' Camaro. It was buck-naked white until she and Elijah covered it with the primary-color handprints of all their friends. It's a 1979 model, the transmission is crap, and it goes from 0 to 60 in just under four minutes. But, man, once it gets to 60! The Camaro is, joyously, a convertible. Cal and Elijah zoom down I-95, blasting pop from the year of the car's birth, swerving from lane to lane. When they can hear each other over the wind and the music, they speak Connecticut:
I will not Stamford this type of behavior. What's Groton into you? What did Danbury his Hartford? New Haven can wait. Darien't no place I'd rather be.

As they reach the New York state line, Elijah feels the urge to turn back. He can't pinpoint why. It seems the wrong time to be leaving. He doesn't want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), and then the world will change forever and he will go to college and eventually become an adult. That is not what he wants. He does not want those complications, that change. Not now.

He tells himself to get a grip. Cal is driving him forward. Cal and everyone else will be here when he returns. It's like he's traveling into another dimension. Time here will stop. Because he is entering Family Standard Time. None of it will carry over to Cal, to the Camaro, to the state of Connecticut.

He will go with his brother. He will have a good time. Life will be waiting for him when he gets back. Not a bad deal.

Elijah smiles at Cal. But Cal isn't looking. Then she turns to him as if she knows. She smiles back and blasts the music louder.

Danny's mother drives him. He lives in New York City. Therefore, he doesn't have a car of his own. When he wants to travel far, he signs out a company car. But this time, his mother won't hear of it. Those are her exact words—“I won't hear of it”—as if it's news of an ignoble death.

“Just be nice to him,” his mother is saying now. He's heard this before.
Just be nice to him.
He heard it after he dared Elijah to poke the hanger in the socket. After he put glue in Elijah's socks, telling him it was foot lotion. After he turned off the hot water while Elijah was in the shower. For the fifth time.

Elijah could have retaliated. But he never even tattled. Elijah has always taken his mother's words to heart. Elijah can just be nice. Sometimes, Danny thinks this is all Elijah can be.

“
I mean it,”
his mother stresses. Then her tone shifts and Danny thinks,
Yes, she does mean it.

“I worry about you.” She looks straight ahead while turning the radio down. Danny thinks it remarkable that she still doesn't look old. “Really, I do worry about you. I worry about you both, and that you won't have each other. There aren't many times that I wish you were younger. But when I remember the way the two of you would get along—you cared about him
so much
. When he was a baby, you were always feeling his head and coming to me and saying he had a fever. Or you'd wake us up, worrying he'd been kidnapped. All night, I had to reassure you that he was okay. Staying up with the older son instead of the baby. But it was worth it. In the middle of the night, when you couldn't sleep, you'd beg me to take you to Eli's room. And when
I did, you would sing to him. He was already asleep, and still you wanted to sing him a lullaby. I would whisper with you. It was so wonderful, even if it was three in the morning. For a few years after, you watched over him. And then something happened. And I wish I knew what it was. Because I'd undo it in a second.”

“But, Mom—”

“Don't interrupt.” She holds up her hand.“You know it's important to your father. It's important to me. It's also important to
you
. I don't think you realize it yet. You both can be so nice and so smart and so generous. I just don't understand why you can't be that way with each other.”

Danny wants to say something to assure his mother. He wants to tell her he loves Elijah, but he's afraid it won't sound convincing.

So they remain silent. Eventually, Danny turns the radio up a little and Mrs. Silver shifts lanes to make the airport turnoff. She asks Danny if he's remembered his traveler's checks, his passport, his guidebooks.

“Of course I remembered them,” Danny responds.“I'm your son, after all.”

That gets a smile. And Danny is happy, because even if he can't do anything else right, at least he can still make his mother smile.