Ask Him Why (18 page)

“I like you,” I said.

“I guess I just meant who acts like they do.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Don’t be,” she said. “I haven’t been much nicer to you than you have to me. I guess it just didn’t matter before this.”

Then we didn’t talk for a long time. Literally several minutes. Enough time that under normal circumstances, the awkwardness of not talking would have driven one of us away. But we just hung there together. Obviously not wanting to be alone. I thought it was sad that we needed each other and couldn’t figure out a way to say so.

Then she spoke suddenly, and I jumped.

“I know! I have Hamish MacCallum’s phone number. I’ll call him.”

“For what? To say what?”

“Just to ask him what we should do.”

“How would he know what we should do?”

“He knows everything.”

She pulled her cell phone out of her shirt pocket. I knocked it out of her hand and onto the bed.

“Don’t use your cell phone if it’s roaming! You want to go through what I just went through with Mom?”

“Oh. Right.” Her forehead creased up, and I could see how much weight she’d put on this idea. How convinced she was that it would solve something. “I guess I could use Aunt Sheila’s phone, but I have to get her permission first. I’ll have to talk to him fast.”

“I still have all that birthday money,” I said. “You can tell her you’ll pay her back.”

Then her eyes came up to meet mine. For the first time.

“That’s so nice. Why are you being so nice?”

“I’m nice sometimes!” I said. A little stung.

I didn’t want to tell her why I made the offer. It wasn’t entirely unselfish. I was beginning to think maybe Ruth was right. Maybe this guy was a source of everything. Everything we never knew where to find. Maybe I would take his address and phone number after all. Maybe I didn’t have to talk to him about Joseph. Maybe I could just talk to him about all the things I didn’t understand.

“Well, thanks,” Ruth said. “I can’t call from down here, so I’ll just come back down and tell you what he said. Or do you want to come along and listen?”

“No, that’s okay,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

I was still not willing to let on that I cared. Maybe even that I believed.

Maybe I believed because Ruth believed so strongly. Maybe because I needed to. And because there was nothing else around that I wouldn’t be an idiot to believe in. No water balloon that hadn’t already burst.

And left me a dripping fool.

Ruth was away for twenty minutes. I timed it on my watch.

I paced.

But when I heard her come back down the stairs, I threw myself on my back on the cot. Didn’t let on that I’d been anxious.

“How did it go?” I asked. Like I only barely cared.

“Not quite like I thought.”

She sat on the edge of the cot again. Now I wished she’d go farther away. And I wasn’t even sure why. I felt like electricity at that point. I wasn’t a good mix with anything else.

“Well, what did he say?”

“A lot of things. I wish you’d been there. I can’t repeat them all.”

“You don’t have to. Just tell me what he thinks we should do.”

“Nothing,” she said. “There’s nothing we
can
do.”

Splash. Another water balloon in my unsuspecting face. Without words, without a lot of forethought, I made up my mind in that moment that I would never be unsuspecting again.

“That’s
it
? I paid for a long-distance call out of my own money for
that
?”

“Well, there was more, but . . . Aubrey, there’s no real answer to what we should do. We don’t know where we’ll be at the end of the summer. What do we do about that? Nothing. There’s nothing we
can
do. There’s no money. We can’t fix it so Dad has money. Hamish MacCallum says we’ll find out it was never about the money anyway.”

“Oh. Great. So he thinks it’s just fine.”

“No. He didn’t say that. He didn’t act like it wasn’t a problem. Or like we shouldn’t be upset about it. He just thinks we have to accept it. We just have to wait and see what happens. He says the part that’s driving us crazy is trying to fix a future that isn’t even here yet. He says when it gets here, then we can figure out how to get through it. But now it’s just driving us crazy because it’s all unknown. So we just have to stay in the moment we’re in. You know. Take things on one moment at a time.”

“What an incredible waste of money.
My
money.”

“Aunt Sheila says we don’t have to pay her back.”

“Oh,” I said.

It was the first good thing anybody had told me all day. Small though it was. And it couldn’t make its way in against the tide of crap. I had no space to accept it.

“Could you go away now?” I said. “No offense. I just want to be alone.”

I didn’t, actually. I wanted somebody around. But I wanted it to be somebody who wasn’t only making everything worse.

She left without comment.

Then I felt bad. Because I knew she was having as much trouble as I was.

But I decided it was her own fault. For being stupid enough to believe an old man she’d only met once had all the answers we needed.

And worse yet, for tricking me—even for only twenty minutes—into believing it, too.

Chapter Fifteen: Ruth

It was the first week in August when the media circus began to truly blossom outside Aunt Sheila’s door, looking for Aubrey and me. Maybe triple or quadruple in numbers overnight. I didn’t think too much about why, I guess because it seemed inevitable, like something that will always happen if given enough time.

But eventually I did ask—Aunt Sheila, that is, not the vultures. I was well trained not to engage the vultures, and I really thought Aubrey was, too. I think we all thought so.

Aunt Sheila and I were sitting at the dining-room table, which wasn’t in a whole separate room from the living room. It was just sort of over in the corner. We were sitting across from each other, playing chess. We’d played anywhere from three to five games a day all summer, and I had beaten her a grand total of once. Aunt Sheila wasn’t one of those older people who let you win. With her, you had to earn it.

Aubrey was slumped on the couch watching TV, one of those cartoons that’s all raucous action, and the volume was too loud, and it made it hard for me to think about my chess moves. But I wasn’t saying so, because any little thing could set him off by then. He had a thousand fuses, pointing in every direction, and you played with fire in his vicinity at your own risk.

“So, I haven’t asked you this before, Aunt Sheila,” I said, “but why are there so many reporters here all of a sudden? I mean, a few days ago it started kind of suddenly. You know. There were five or six and now there are dozens. I was thinking maybe it’s because they can’t find our parents to bug them.”

Aunt Sheila had her hand on her queen, preparing for a move but scoping out the board one last time before jumping. When I asked, she put her hand back in her lap and sighed.

“I probably should have told you,” she said. “But you guys weren’t watching the news or going online, and I thought maybe it was on purpose. I thought maybe you were really happier not following the whole Joseph’s trial thing. So I saved some newspaper and magazine clippings about the court-martial. I figured you could read them later just as well as you could while it was going on. If you wanted to.”

“They’re done court-martialing him?”

“Pretty much. They’ll probably announce a sentence any time now. So I think the zoo out front is a combination of that and the fact that they can’t find Brad and Janet to bug, like you said. Plus it’s a big story again now, and they’re desperate for anything new to put up on the screen. I’m sorry if I should have told you sooner. I wrestled with myself about it. Should I have?”

“Hmm,” I said. “I’m not sure.”

“You want to read what I clipped? It’s not very exciting.”

“No,” Aubrey said, and it was the first I realized he was listening to us. “We don’t care.”

“Speak for yourself, Aubrey,” I said. Then, to Aunt Sheila, “Maybe. I think. Maybe let me know when they have a verdict. Or a sentence. Or . . . you know. Something.”

“What
verdict
?” Aubrey shouted. “What do you think the verdict’s going to be, Ruth? Some big surprise that’ll be. He disobeyed a direct order to go out on duty and pulled a bunch of other guys in on it with him. He never denied it. You think they’re suddenly going to decide he didn’t do it, even though he says he did? The only thing we’re waiting for—I mean,
you’re
waiting for, is the sentencing. We just don’t know yet what they’re going to do to him for it.”

I looked at Aunt Sheila, and she had a wry half smile on her face.

“It speaks,” she barely whispered, really more mouthing the words.

I burst out laughing, which I have to tell you felt like a very foreign concept. I vaguely remembered laughing, but it was like an old friend who’d moved away years ago and you didn’t even think about him anymore until the moment something reminded you.

Aubrey looked up from the TV for the first time, suspiciously, to see what was so funny, or maybe just to make sure it wasn’t him.

I know Aunt Sheila wasn’t trying to be mean, but it was hard not to point out that Aubrey had been quite the mummy all summer. He barely moved, and he didn’t speak, especially not when spoken to. He was bored here, which I didn’t blame him for, but he’d attempted to solve the problem by adopting watching TV and ignoring us as his hobbies.

“Okay,” Aunt Sheila said at a normal volume. “If I hear there’s been a sentence handed down, I’ll tell you.” Then, more in Aubrey’s direction, “‘You’ meaning Ruth and only Ruth. A brick wall doesn’t have to fall on me, Aubrey.”

It wasn’t the next morning, but the morning after, when it happened.

I jumped awake to a bigger-than-usual flurry of sound out front, as though everybody had begun talking at once, too loudly and excitedly, shouting to be heard over everybody else.

I ran to the window, drew the curtain back, and looked out.

It was only just barely light, and my brother Aubrey was standing in front of them, just outside Aunt Sheila’s open gate. He had his arms raised, as if commanding silence. He looked like a performer stepping out onto the stage before a huge and enthusiastic audience of his fans. I could see microphones desperately extended in his direction on the ends of anxious arms, each branded with the call letters of a radio or TV station. Cameramen struggled to keep a clear shot through the crowd, trying not to be jostled by the shoving. Two long boom mics lifted themselves over the throng and descended in the direction of my brother.

I blinked into artificial lights that bothered my eyes from all the way inside the house, and I wondered how it felt to Aubrey to have all that glare pointed right into his face. Then I remembered all his years staring at the chandelier, and I realized there was nothing you could do to his corneas that hadn’t been done before. Whatever you could dish out, they’d seen worse.

At first, his body-language demand for silence had no effect, and I could hear them shouting questions at him, and I could hear words, but everybody was talking at once and they all warred with each other. But the questions all seemed to involve the words “your brother, Joseph” and “ten years.”

I unlatched the old-fashioned lock on the wooden windowpane and forced the bottom half up, which wasn’t easy.

“Aubrey!” I screamed through the screen. “Don’t say anything!”

I have no idea if he heard me or not. I only know that a moment later, I heard his voice rise above the crowd, and he did a little shouting of his own.

“Be quiet and I’ll tell you!”

Then everyone was quiet, and either Aubrey was talking in a normal voice or not talking at all, and that left me utterly powerless and unable to even follow what was going on. I knew it was a disaster, but I wanted to know exactly how much of a disaster and exactly what kind.

I hurried out of my guest bedroom and to the front door, where I ran into Aunt Sheila in her nightgown. Literally ran into her. We bumped foreheads hard and bounced off each other and looked into each other’s faces while rubbing the sore spots.

“What the hell is he doing?” she asked me.

“I have no idea,” I said. “I think he’s lost his mind.”

The door opened in, and we jumped out of the way of it, and Aubrey walked by. He honestly looked as though he thought he could go right back down to the basement without answering for anything.

“Aubrey!” Aunt Sheila yelled, and I realized I’d never heard her raise her voice in anger before.

He stopped and turned around. “What?” he asked with the kind of casual air that takes planning, not the kind that’s genuine.

“What did you say to them?”

“The truth.”

“What truth? The truth about what?”

“They asked me how I felt about Joseph getting ten years, and I told them the truth.”

Then he turned and walked away.

I looked at Aunt Sheila and she looked at me.

“I thought you were going to tell me when Joseph got sentenced,” I said.

“News to me, too, kiddo.”

Then she walked into the kitchen and made a phone call, even though it was much too early to call anybody, and I pictured my mom stumbling out of bed, more than a little perturbed, to answer the phone.

I looked out the window in the front door and watched almost everybody scrambling away, gunning the engines of their news vans, slamming the doors. I pictured them racing each other back to their respective newsrooms, all vying to be the first to file the story of the words Aubrey had just given them.

Whatever words they had been.

It took me fifteen minutes to gather up the nerve to go down to the basement to confront him, and all he would say at first was “Go away, Ruth.”

“Why did you even talk to them?” I asked, but he didn’t answer. “What were you thinking that even made you go out there? Did you get up and go out there all on your own?”

Which was a stupid question, because clearly no one dragged him out of the house.

But he still wouldn’t answer.

So I broke out the big guns.

“Mom and Dad are going to kill you. And you better hope not literally, Aubrey, because it’s not out of the question.”

“Too late,” he said. “It’s done.”

I thought that was interesting, because almost everything Aubrey had said in the last few months involved the words “I don’t care.” But even Aubrey couldn’t pretend not to care about the wrath of Brad and Janet.

“I just want to know what you said to the cameras.”

“So you’ll have to wait for the evening news, then,” he said. “Won’t you?”

Aunt Sheila and I didn’t have to wait for the evening news.

We sat at the kitchen table, our chairs pushed together, shoulders nearly touching, drinking coffee and staring at her ancient laptop. She just kept refreshing the page on the news search for Joseph’s trial.

And then suddenly the first hit was there—though there’s no way I can account for how long we waited—and it stunned me, like it hadn’t been exactly what we’d been waiting for all along.

Youngest Stellkellner: “Ten years is not enough,”
the headline said.

“Oh, shit,” I said. “He did
not
say that.”

Then I realized I never cursed in front of Aunt Sheila, or just about anybody else for that matter, but I never got a chance to back up and ask for forgiveness, because she clicked again.