Brother/Sister (5 page)

First thing I did was I turned down the music. Then I called up to her, “Hey, Mom, check it out. You’ll never guess what I did.”

Then I waited.

It took her, like, five minutes, maybe longer, to open her door. She leaned out over the railing, frowning at me way down in the living room. “The music, Will. I was listening to that,” she said.

I had to crane my neck to talk to her up there. She was wearing that red-and-brown Tibetan knit cap she likes so much. It’s like her security blanket or something. “Can you come down here a second?” I said.

“Why?”

“I’ve got something to show you.”

“What?”

“Just . . . a thing, Mom. It’s important.” I don’t know why I was hiding the trophy like this. I had this image in my head of her sitting on the big white couch in the living room and me displaying it on the coffee table, like placing it on its throne and seeing her ooh and ah.

“Well, bring it up here, then.”

“Mom, please.”

I sat down on the swivley white leather footrest that floats around the living room, and propped my trophy on the table.

“What’s that?” she called.

“It’s the thing I want to show you.”

“Okay, I’m coming down, but only because you turned down my music.”

Mom started making her way slowly down the platforms curving around the room. Her hand never left the railing, clutched it so tightly her knuckles turned white. After each step down, she stopped for a second, recalibrating her balance, fake smiling at me.

That’s when I finally realized she was bombed.

I picked at a fleck of dirt that had gotten stuck to the figurine, feeling suddenly like someone had kicked my knees out from under me. I wasn’t special anymore. How could I have ever thought that?

By the time she got to the bottom, I’d decided, why bother.

She came and stood right behind me, not getting too close, but hovering there. I could feel her heat behind me, studying my trophy, feeling sheepish and remorseful, I was sure, trying to come up with the right thing to say. Then she swiped her hand at my head, playfully, like she was flirting with me. Of course, she missed.

“Did you steal that?” she said. That’s her idea of a joke.

I refused to answer her.

She wandered around the table and sat on the couch.

“You won,” she said.

“I won.”

She was beaming. Just . . . so proud of me. Shocking. I mean, really. This wasn’t the kind of situation I was used to with her, this being pleased with me. This noticing me.

She was crying she was so happy. I could almost see the beautiful, natural woman she’d been back in the days before Dad had left, shining through. The dimpled cheeks. The capacity for awe.

And then we were both crying. Like chumps. Like sentimental fools. I didn’t even care that she was drunk all of a sudden. All that mattered was that she was proud of me. She lifted the trophy off the table and held it in her lap, running her finger along the outline of the golfer on top, cradling it, like it was hers, a baby she’d protect with her life if she had to.

“I knew you’d win,” she said. “I had a feeling this morning. Like a vision of you all dressed in white and glowing with an overpowering, blinding light. And I just knew. You’d outgrown the sensitive boy you used to be and now you were going to show the world the man you’d become.” She stopped then. She stared at the trophy, moving her lips but not saying anything. She was working something out in her head. “I liked that sensitive boy,” she said.

“I’m still me, Mom.”

“You’re still you.” She got quiet again.

There was a time, when I was young, before Dad left, and for a little while after that, when I’d thought my mom was the most amazing person on earth. She just . . . she’d seemed so strong, holding us together as a family, regardless of what horrible selfish thing Dad had done this time. She’d talk to me like I was a little adult. I mean, like I was her friend, her partner in survival, and I just happened to be a short little guy. She’d hold me on her lap and sing me these songs that she made up off the top of her head about how special and noble and brave I was. And I believed her. I remember, I felt like we were in the fight together, like she would help me and I would help her, and if we just kept at it, we’d find a way to pull ourselves—and Asheley, of course, all of us, the whole family—we’d pull ourselves up out of the junk heap that was our lives and we’d, like, soar away. We’d leave it all behind.

That was back when she had her drinking under control. I mean, I don’t know. She was . . . She’d been . . . pristine, at least to me. Full of hope and passion. And maybe this was stupid of me, but I’d thought after her last stint in rehab that the other person inside her, the one, the, like, brilliant, golden warrior she had inside her would come galloping back. I’d thought the broken-down person she’d become was going to be gone forever.

But no.

When she’s drunk, her emotions are like physical forces that tug and pull at her body, beating each other up inside her. And this day, when I got home from the invitational, something was going on now in there. She was trying to control it, but there was ugliness yanking at the edges of her mouth.

“Too bad you can’t tell your dad about this,” she said. “He’d cream himself. Golf was the most important thing in the world to him. Or that was the story, right? He’d stand on that cliff out there and send balls out into the bay for four, five hours at a stretch. He cared more about golf than he did about me.”

“Mom, don’t.” I knew how this went. She got on the topic of Dad and it could only end two ways—either she was wailing for the rest of the night about how terribly she missed him, how perfect and caring and tender he was, or she was screaming about that asshole who ruined her life, so smug and selfish that she could have disappeared into the ocean and it would have been weeks before he noticed she was gone. “Don’t ruin this.”

“Don’t ruin this. Don’t ruin this.” She turned the words over in her mouth like they were made of sand. “It’s always me ruining things. Right, Will? Is that it?”

“Mom.”

“You men have it all figured out. Everything has its little place and as long as I stay inside mine and smile and pat you on the head it’s okay, but guess what, Will, you’re the child and I’m the mother, and you don’t get to decide what I can and can’t say.”

“Mom, you’re not making sense.”

“Your ass, I’m not. Don’t ruin this. Bah.” She spit. She actually spit. Not at me, but she sent a big gob across the table. “I know what ‘don’t ruin this’ means. It means don’t go snooping around learning about things you don’t want to know. It means I can fuck any old
intern at my firm
I want and your job is to have the kids off at school by seven and dinner on the table and don’t ask questions. Is that how it is, Will? Now that you’re a big man champion golfer? You’re going to make sure you keep me in my place?”

“Forget it,” I said. I almost wished I’d lost the stupid golf tournament.

“Don’t tell me to forget it. I’m the parent here.”

Sometimes the only thing to do is beg her to stop. To plead with her. That’s what I did now. “Everything’s okay, Mom. I was just trying to show you the trophy I won. It’s not important. I’m tired. I’m going to go to my room now.”

When I tried to take it from her, she pulled it tighter to her chest and twisted around to avoid me.

“Sure. Go. Storm off. Isn’t that typical. You’re just like—”

And I totally lost it. “Don’t you dare! Don’t you ever! I am not. I’ll never be like that man. If you weren’t such a drunk, maybe you’d—” I was screaming at the top of my lungs. Just, total blind rage.

And then she leapt up and took a swing at me. With my trophy. I tried to get out of the way, but she caught me in the arm. The golfer on top of it—you know, it was posed in mid-swing, the club sort of jutted up away from its body—and this club sort of hooked my skin and sliced. It was pretty deep. Blood. It stung. All that.

See? Right there. I’ve still got the scar.

She came at me again and I ducked and sort of fell back and went sprawling onto the floor and my trophy whizzed past like a baseball bat and Mom went spinning after it, losing her balance and tripping over herself and falling into the coffee table. Like, really falling. She hurt her wrist really badly where she’d tried to catch herself, and she sort of tumbled over and pulled herself up onto the couch, whimpering and crying and holding her hurt hand and staring at it. And I saw later, she’d cracked the glass a little bit in the corner of the table.

The horrible thing was that in that moment I didn’t even ask myself if she was okay. I was worried about the trophy. If she’d broken it or something.

I crawled across the floor and pulled it toward me, and right away, I saw that the golfer had snapped off.

My body felt like it was made out of concrete. Like my evil emotions were pulling me through the floor. I was turning into mud. I sat there where I’d fallen and just . . . I don’t know, I was paralyzed.

Drop dead
?

I mean, yeah, I guess I did send him a text saying that, but, I mean, there was a reason. It wasn’t just . . .

Well, if you’ve got his phone, then you can see for yourself. There’s a context for all those text messages I sent him.

So, okay, so, here’s where it starts, right? I couldn’t have been more than three blocks from Shakey’s when I got the first text from Craig asking where I’d run off to.

Home. I couldn’t take it.
I wrote back.

Ten seconds later I got his response.
Couldn’t take what?

And what did he say to that? How did he respond to my telling him I was totally emotionally overwhelmed? He said,
What about our deal?

And you have to imagine how misunderstood I felt when I saw that. I was getting more and more upset.

The light I’d been stopped at turned green, and I don’t like to text while I’m driving, so I dropped my phone in my lap. Craig can wait, I figured. I’d get back to him at the stop sign up the road. By the time I got there, he’d shot off three more messages.

This was going to take a while. I pulled onto the gravel along the side of the road and put my car in park.

I wrote him back.
Sorry. Driving. :)

And he wrote:
How bout I come over?

I couldn’t help wondering what kind of spectacle he was making of himself back at the restaurant. I could just see him narrating our text war for the crowd, reading my messages and making sarcastic comments about them, trying to get everybody to laugh at my behavior, getting them to group-think what to write back.

If his goal was to make me paranoid, it worked. Everybody liked Craig, even if they didn’t take him all that seriously. He was the kind of guy you wanted at your party. He upped the goofiness factor. I was sure there were other girls out there who’d love the chance to try to tame him. But I was too pissed at him to go begging for explanations.

I typed back:
Is that a threat or a promise?

Why did I put up with him? Good question. I have no idea. No. That’s not true. I put up with him because when he wasn’t acting crazy like this, he was crazy in love with me, and there aren’t that many guys out there who care enough to try and make you feel special. But at that point, I’d had about all I could take. If this was how special felt, he could have it back.

And yeah, in the last message I sent him, I said,
Drop dead, Craig!!
But, I mean, it wasn’t a threat. I was just trying to make sure he understood how totally pissed I was at him.

Then I turned my phone off. Let him be the one to suffer for a while. I sat there in the dark along the side of the road for, I don’t know, half an hour, listening to my iPod and trying to talk myself down from hyperventilating.

I was overwhelmed, you know? Not really thinking about what I was saying. You can’t really think I meant I wanted him dead. I swear, I didn’t. He was my boyfriend! I loved him!

Or, not exactly. He’d been there for a while, hovering in the dark outside the glass doors, hidden by the reflections, watching us go at it. He’s always doing this. He’s a total lurker, tugging at the bottom of his flannel shirt, his big bug eyes bulging into his giant plastic glasses like they’re trying to pop out and run across the room. But that’s when he decided to stop creeping around and do something to help.

He slid open the door and wandered onto the little step-thing that leads down into the room. “Hey,” he said. And he threw his hand up above his head and gave a kind of loose wave. “Maybe it’s time for us all to chill out a little, huh?” No matter how tense the situation, no matter how crazy and out of control, Keith talks like he’s some sort of half-wit cowpoke, slow as ice, like he’s messing through the information coming at him and gradually, gradually, putting it together into an intelligent thought. Too many drugs. That’s what you get.

Mom gave him a look, like, you want a piece of this too? And then she let loose this tirade. “Oh, look at the big man coming to save the day? Is that it, Keith? You think you’re gonna protect him?” And then she, like, hissed at him—actually hissed! Like a cat! She was spraying spit everywhere while she talked. “Try me. I’m just getting started.”