Brother/Sister (6 page)

Keith just stood there, staring, like he’d taken a handful of Valium or something. That’s his way. He thinks somehow that if he stays completely passive, she’ll realize how crazy she’s acting and give up. Which never happens. It just spurs her to get more hopped up and spiral completely out of control.

“What’s it to you, anyway? You’re not his father. Ha. If only. What a laugh that would be.”

Nothing from Keith. Just more of that staring. He dug his fists into his jeans pockets and waited.

“Good thing it could never happen, huh?”

She was so focused on Keith now that I’d been forgotten and part of me thought I should make my escape, crawl out of the room and flee back to the cliffs, where the hard stone and wilderness were more predictable and I might be able to sink back into myself.

“Huh, Keith?” she said.

I don’t know what kept me there, honestly. I kept thinking about my trophy. Staring. Fixated. Wishing there was some way I could snatch up the pieces and pull them to me and press them back together and make them whole.

“Good thing. You’re broken down there. Didn’t know that, Will, did you? Good thing, too. Imagine, little Keiths running around? Leering at all the little girls they can’t have?”

By now Keith had slipped down to sit on the step. Holding his phone like a threat between his legs. That same defeated look plastered across his face.

“Right, Keith? Right? Say something, you asshole!”

She kept at him like this, pulling herself up from the couch sometimes to shove her finger at him and stomp her foot, then tumbling back, falling over herself. She must have drunk a gallon of vodka at least before I got home. The alcohol was metabolizing in her system now. She was getting so bombed she could barely hold herself upright. And wherever she landed, she’d swear at Keith, and me too, if she noticed me, like it was all our fault.

Then she started throwing things. Scraps of paper that she crunched into balls, pens, PS3 game cartridges, anything she could find. There was a hammer—Keith must have been working on something that day. He makes his living as a carpenter, pick-up jobs. Works with a few contractors around the area. And when he’s not working, he sometimes putzes around our house fixing things. He’s always leaving his tools all over the place. Anyway, when she cranked that at him, it flew into the wall and left a massive gouge.

That’s when he called the Christers. He didn’t say anything, just flipped open his phone and punched in the number.

The Christers is just what Ash and I call them. Their real name is Family Life Blood Church. They’re a kind of crunchy gooey group of Jesus fanatics. And they run a weird, sort of cultish rehab center called Hope Hill, where Keith got sober a few years ago and where Mom had gone a bunch of times, too, but, obviously, without the same results. Keith was, well, I’m not sure if he was a believer or what. I guess he was. It’s not like he went in for all their weird rules or anything, and he didn’t talk about it with us much. He knew Asheley and I thought it was a bunch of bullshit. But he did, like, visits to shut-ins with them, though, and he always let them use his Eagle to cart stuff back and forth to the beach for the weird loaves-and-fishes thing they did every Easter.

It took me a second to realize this was what he was doing. Not until he was talking to them, laying down the address, saying, “Yeah, she really needs some help.” The Christers know our place. We’ve been through this before. It always ends tragic.

“No!” I shouted. “Fucking Keith, no!”

I leapt up and threw myself at him, trying to wrestle the phone away from him, but no matter how skinny and out of it Keith looks, he
was
in the army. And in juvie before that for stealing some bozo’s Camero back in the day. He knows how to fight. He’s fast. And stronger than you think. He pushed me back and I came at him again and got my arms around his waist and we started wrestling each other to the ground, throwing fists when we could. Kicking and flailing and knocking into everything. I don’t know what I was trying to achieve. Mom was cackling at us, like this was the show she’d been waiting for all this time.

And then the big white van the Christers drive around showed up and that was that.

Yeah, I caught the tail end
of that thing with Mom.

It was close to ten by the time I made it home and when I got there the first thing I saw was the white van stalling there in the driveway, its back doors flung open, and I knew right away what had happened. The Christers were here. Oh, crap.

Don’t get me wrong. I don’t have anything against Jesus, or God, or whatever. I sort of sometimes think I even believe in him, but the Christers, they were something else entirely. I mean, it was like, besides believing in God, they wanted to “walk in Jesus’s footsteps,” which meant, basically, they tried to live like people in Biblical times. The sandals. The togas. The berries and nuts. It’s not like they shoved this stuff down anybody’s throat, but still. Weird, you know? They were Keith’s friends.

And if they were here, that meant something crazy must have happened. Mom was dragged out of the house before I even made it out of the car. Two bearded guys, one on each arm, and her bucking and skidding, her face red and blotchy, her hair flying wild, stumbling and lurching as the guys coaxed her down the driveway.

Just what I needed. A great capper to a great day, right? Something good had happened to me, and duh, of course, that means everything’s got to turn into total crap. But what could I do? I got out of the car and headed toward the house trying to make like this was all normal everyday stuff—which, I guess, it sort of was. I’d just been stupid enough to get my hopes up, to think over the past few months that it might be possible for things to turn out okay for her. Us. Whatever.

She saw me, of course. We walked right past each other. I wasn’t sure if I should try to hug her or what, but it didn’t matter, because she got this ugly look on her face and started jumping around and pulling away from the guys. They were holding her elbows so tightly that their fingers were turning white, whispering to her in that way they did.

She squawked at me, “Ash! Ash!”

I said, “Hi Mom.” Totally defeated. Just, too much of everything.

“Don’t go in there,” she said. “Your brother’s in there.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Okay.”

“He’s . . . You tell him . . . I’ll be paying attention. If he touches you—if he does anything to hurt you—he has no idea, I’ll . . .”

Before I could think, she was being shoved into the backseat of the car and the door was slamming on her.

And one of the guys taking her to the van, just a little guy, but stocky—he looked like he was barely older than me—gave me a kind of weirdly blissful half-smile, like he somehow thought I’d appreciate the great kindness he was doing for her. I almost told him to go fuck himself, but I caught myself. That would have just made it worse.

As I went inside, I ran smack into Keith. His greasy backpack was thrown over one shoulder, and he seemed a little twitchy, but, given what was going on, he was calmer than you’d think. He was taking the Eagle, he said, to follow behind the Christers and deal with the paperwork and whatever else, keep an eye on her.

“Okay,” I said. I didn’t really care. Or I cared about her, in a complicated, infuriated way, but I couldn’t have cared less about what he was up to. What I wanted was for him to let me get past him so I could find Will and see if he was okay. I figured he wasn’t. I mean, obviously. No wonder he hadn’t responded to my texts.

But Keith lingered. In that creepy way of his. He sort of held himself back like he wanted to touch me, to pat my shoulder, or give me a hug or something, to comfort me, but then also thought maybe that was inappropriate, like he didn’t trust himself to be touching me no matter how harmless those touches might be.

“Okay,” I said. “Bye. You better get going if you’re going to catch them.” And I backed along the wall to get around him.

I called out for Will, but he didn’t answer, so I went sleuthing through the open chambers on the ground floor level of the house. I found him in the living room area, balled up like a potato bug in the corner behind the stereo. Like he’d found the smallest, most hidden spot in the room to tuck himself into.

“Will?” I said. “You okay? What happened?”

He didn’t answer. He barely even bothered to look up.

Except for all the shattered people around me, it didn’t look like there’d been that huge a scene, not by our standards, at least. There weren’t any gaping holes in the walls or broken windows, or upended lamps on the floor. The place looked normal, basically. There was a pretty big crack in the glass of the coffee table, big enough that a chunk had broken off in the corner, but that’s about it.

I don’t know why, but this made me feel worse. It was like none of the usual things that blow up right before Mom is taken away had blown up. In which case, why hadn’t we dealt with it ourselves? Why did the Christers have to be called this time? It’s not like we don’t know how to lock her in her room until she passes out. Something less obvious must have happened, some dark smoke must have risen up inside everybody and clouded their emotions with soot.

It was a mystery, and it would haunt me later, but right then, the important thing was that I go to Will and help him.

I crawled in behind him and wrapped my arms around him and rocked him gently back and forth. His muscles were so tense, like somebody had tied them into a thousand knots. Neither of us said anything for a long time. Eventually, his body softened and relaxed. He melted into me and let me hold him up. He was sobbing, long silent moans, and I just kept rocking him.

Whatever emotions I was feeling were manageable somehow, subdued. I was the one being strong this time, weirdly.

Eventually, his sobs leveled out into a wet, calm silence. He cleared his throat. “They’re taking her to Hope Hill,” he said. That’s the rehab clinic up in the hills. She’d been there before. “She might be there for a couple months this time.”

I absorbed this information without saying a word.

“Did you hear me?” he said.

I nodded into his shoulder. He was looking up at me now, and I noticed that he was cradling the trophy he’d won that day and that the golfer that was supposed to be standing on top of it had broken off somehow.

I felt bad for him. Worse even than I felt for me.

Ash was upset
that they were taking Mom away again. I mean, I was too, but not in the same way. I was still sort of reeling from the fact that she’d attacked me. And even though I didn’t trust the Christers—or Keith—to do much besides screw with her head, part of me thought, you know what? Maybe this is a good thing. Maybe once Mom realized how close she’d come to bludgeoning me, once she realized that she’d actually sliced me in the arm with my trophy—I thought this all might scare her straight or something.

But while she was gone, I understood, I’d have to take extra special care of Asheley. I’d be all she had. And she needed, you know, some sense of family, of normalcy in her life.

To be honest, I was pretty sure that she and I would be better in a whole lot of ways if it were just the two of us in the house.

So, that night while we sat on the floor of the living room decompressing and bolstering each other up, I tried to explain to her why sending Mom to Hope Hill might be a good idea.

I told her about the time Mom tried to run Dad over with the car once while he was putting up that old fence we used to have. He’d been standing in the middle of the driveway with the hose in his hand, like, spraying down the area where he’d been working. She’d gotten it into her head that he wasn’t doing this to make the yard nicer like he’d claimed, but that, instead, he was doing this to trap her. Like turning the place into a prison or something so that she’d never be able to leave again. She reeled out of the house and into the station wagon and gunned it, headed straight at him. Dad hardly had time to realize what was happening. The hose went flying, whipping around like it had a bucking bronco trapped inside it, spraying water everywhere. Asheley and I came running out, not having any idea what was going on, but bawling our brains out anyway because we could tell, whatever it was, it was bad. And Dad’s there straddling the front end of the car, his legs splayed out, his arms wrapped around the hood trying to get a firm grip, like he thinks he’s Superman, able to bring her to a halt with pure force of will, skidding backward from the pressure of the car pushing into him, until he was almost right squashed up against the fence he’d just put up.

“She was so crazy angry at him that day,” I told Asheley. “Just surging with anger, and when she tried to shift the car into overdrive, she put it into reverse instead. Then she gunned it again for the final deathblow, and she went slamming the other way into the garage door. I mean, it’s just lucky he made it out of that situation alive.”

And before you say it, I know. I know. I’m just like her. It’s not like I got it from nowhere.

But, anyway. “Yeah,” I said to Asheley, “good times. He pulled her out of the car and held her so tight that she couldn’t move her arms, much less take a swing at him. And he just stood there with her like that until she exhausted herself and calmed down.”

Talking about these sorts of things with Ash was tricky. She’s got such an impossible idea of who Dad is. He was an action figure in Asheley’s eyes. This big, strong shadowy presence that watched from a distance, waiting for the moment when she absolutely needed him. Then he’d swoop in and save her from all this.

I’m sure, even now, after everything that’s happened, she still has these deluded ideas about him. When he used to come up, I always had to make sure that I didn’t go crushing her fantasy of him. No matter how wrong it was. No matter how much I wanted to correct her and tell her exactly what kind of a total asshole he really was. I understood that she
needed
this fantasy. It gave her hope. And if I even tried to show her who he really was, she’d fly into a total panic. She’d yell at me, “Shut up! Shut up, shut up, shut up!” She just refused to hear it.