Dive (3 page)

Where’s your mom now? I asked, confused and wondering if my own mom was breaking the law, trying to steal a husband while the wife was out at work or grocery shopping. I wouldn’t have put a move like that past Mom, she never said no to a little sneakiness, like returning clothes to the store after wearing them with the price tags tucked in, or pretending like she’d never ordered that second or third glass of wine whenever we went out to a restaurant.

You got up in my face and told me in that same girl voice that your mom died from breast cancer two years ago. I had heard about breast cancer and my box turtle, Fast-Slow, had died last year, but I did not want to talk about these wrong things—breasts, cancer, or dying—with you, an older kid I hardly knew.

Can I see your room? I asked.

I’ll show you her, you said. There’s pictures.

So while Lyle and Mom made sandwiches and lemonade in the kitchen, we shared a space on the living room couch, a photo album parted over our laps, while you made me hear the story of your mom. You wouldn’t stop about it, how sometimes she used a wheelchair and how she lost her hair from the medicine, and how, right before she died, you all went on a cruise to Bermuda. It was the most perfect week of your entire life, you said. You even saw a thresher shark.

I must have sat there a billion years, watching your grimy fingernail as it dragged over squares of ultrablue sky or a suntanned Lyle, but mostly of your too-skinny mom with her head wound in a scarf and her arms spiraled around a littler version of you.

This is boring, I said after a while.

Leave then. Who wants you here—you or your fruitcake mom? You shut the book and centered it carefully on the coffee table. My dad knows some ladies, but my mom is number one. She’s number one, he tells me all the time. No one can take her place. Your mom’s not so good-looking, either. Her ears stick out.

I pushed my nose into my baseball glove and smelled and hoped for a terrible thing to say back.

My dad could whip your dad in a fight.

Anyone could whip my dad in a fight, you said. Even I could. Maybe one day I will.

It wasn’t the answer I expected. I want to go now, I said.

Go. Who’s stopping you?

Her ears do not stick out.

Nobody asked you to come here. My mom talks to me at night from Eternity and she said, Don’t let strangers in our house, especially not in the dining room with the silver candlesticks, because they could be robbers.

So I punched you where it hurt. I knew, since I was getting beat up a lot in my new school. A good six inches above the belly button, square between the ribs. You doubled over, then jumped, catching my leg as I made a coward’s break for the kitchen. Then you leaped and rolled on top of me, grinding your elbow into my chest until I thought my heart would rupture. I was pounding the floor with my heels and wheezing for Mom, and with her and Lyle only a sprint away, you knew your time was almost up. Still, there were a few seconds left where you could have punched back, jammed some fingers, maybe yanked a joint out of its socket.

Instead you mashed my cheeks tight between your thumb and fingers, then pulled my head rough to the side and dipped your face low to my ear to whisper words damp and hard enough to flood shivers through my body.

You’ll never be my brother.

T
HE PLANE LIFTS INTO
the air. My ears pop and Lyle passes me a stick of gum. He says he bought it at the airport shop along with my apple juice. Lyle is a think-aheader.

“Mal’s probably just starting her champagne and shrimp cocktail.” I try to get a look.

“Sit down, Ben. The seat belt sign is on. They’ll put you in airplane custody if you can’t follow directions.”

“You’re lying.”

Lyle shakes his head. “I’ll have to report you to the GCA.”

“Whatever.” I fiddle for my seat belt. When I was younger, Lyle had me believing that the GCA was a real place, like a courthouse. You were the one who told me there was no such thing as the Good Citizens’ Alliance.

That’s Dad’s phony-baloney, you told me. Only in his dreams is there a place like that. He’d elect himself president. President Citizen.

Even after four years, Lyle won’t let on that the GCA’s a joke.

A plane lady wheels down her cart, asking if anyone wants a beverage. I call out, “Grape pop!” before Lyle can intercept my choice with more juice. Lyle asks for coffee but he doesn’t drink it, just watches it and stirs it with a plastic straw.

“Not since Thanksgiving, right? Five months, it’s been,” he says.

“That’s about right.” I know what Lyle means. It’s been five months since we saw Mom and you. It should have been four months, but you both were on a boat this past Christmas, on a scuba-diving trip along with your new girlfriend, Melanie, and some people from Mom’s job at the vet clinic. So Mom had pushed up your visit to Thanksgiving, except for Lyle made it to be like Christmas, baking his special gingerbread and buying presents, and he didn’t schedule any clients for the whole week.

“Mom brought that free turkey,” I say.

“Free-range, not free,” Lyle tells me. “He seemed good, wouldn’t you say?”

“Dustin? Yeah, he was good.”

“He got tall. He was always going to be tall.”

Which kind of gets me, since it’s looking like I’m not going to be tall like you or like Lyle. Runt, you used to remind me. Or Big Ben, for a joke.

“His hair covered his ears,” I remind Lyle. “You didn’t like it that way, but he said it was the style there. Sure isn’t the style here, huh?”

“Mmm.” Lyle closes his eyes. His hands rest under his head. He is twisting off each part of Thanksgiving and then putting all the pieces back together. Soon he will ask me a question about a wrong piece. Sure enough, a few minutes later, he opens his eyes.

“Did you think he was too skinny?”

My mind works on that one. Then I say something about how living at the beach, I guess a person’d get skinny. Running and swimming all the time. “Dustin told us he was always outside,” I remember. “He bought that surfboard. He said he was on the beach night and day.”

“Mm-hmm,” Lyle answers. “He’s loved water since he was a baby. Probably we should have taken more vacations upstate, near the lake. That might have been—”

“Even Mom looked skinny, for her.”

“Well, but that’s from smoking,” Lyle says. “A pack-a-day habit destroys you. Appetite, lungs, metabolism. If you’re not smarter with your own health when it comes time to make those choices, then I must have raised you wrong.”

Only lately Lyle has let slip a few bad things about Mom. Lyle’s words usually line up straight on a balance beam of caution. Could be it’s because I’m getting older, and he feels more man-to-man. Could be because by now he figures Mom isn’t coming back to us. Which is something I knew the day she left.

M
OM MOVED HERSELF AND
me into your house pretty quick after our first visit. I knew you weren’t one hundred percent happy about it, but I wasn’t the one making decisions. All I could try to do was to keep out of your way during your gloomy fits; let you eat the last of the taco chips or watch whatever you wanted on TV, even if I’d got to the remote first.

Besides, it soon came plain to see that your moods depended more on what was churned up inside you than what happened around you, which made you hard to predict. One minute you were letting Mom dance you around the kitchen with the stereo turned up past the 40 dB line, the next thing we’d find you sitting in the dark on the back stoop, telling us no, you didn’t feel like eating dinner and no, you didn’t want to come inside. Lyle told me and Mom that your moodiness had been a part of you since always. He said this in a sort of emptied-out voice, like that lost way people comment on how the universe is too big for measuring, or how many hours a person sleeps in one lifetime.

Meantime, Mom never seemed to be anything except for excited. On the phone to Grammie, she went on and on about whirlwinds and getting swept off her feet, like Lyle was a twister running her down. Most likely there should have been more waiting time, but I guess when two people don’t want to be alone, there’s nothing to stop them from crashing into each other.

Mom dialed-a-lawyer to start the divorce from Dad, who finally showed up late that spring, wearing some extra pounds around his middle and smelling too strong of ketchup and coffee. He took me to lunch at the doughnut shop and promised to call me every week and maybe take me out to see the Space Station that summer, just us guys. I told him that the Space Station was a great idea, and I watched Dad’s car all the way down the block after he dropped me off, but he had been promising me the Space Station since I was four years old. Dad’s leaving was mud on my heart, but it was also a feeling I’d got comfortable with. Through all the years I remember of Mom and him, there was never a time when one or the other wasn’t threatening to go.

Until Lyle’s, I’d been everywhere and lived nowhere. I’d camped out in apartments and trailers and mobiles and sometimes with Grammie, who’s way up north and lets me eat corn chips and red hots for dinner. I’d sat in passenger seats, slept in lobbies, waited on doorsteps, played at neighbors’ houses—it didn’t matter where I spent my time so long as I stayed Out of the Way while Mom and Dad messed up or straightened out things between them.

But I’d never been part of a real house, with a newspaper delivered to the front lawn and yellow tomatoes growing out back. So in my mind, you were the lucky one. You’d had the paper and tomatoes your whole life, and the way I saw it, Lyle had rooms to spare. Even if you were mad that I was budging in, I didn’t concern myself about it, not really. Not enough to say I didn’t want your work space for my very own bedroom. Not enough to stop myself from scraping
BEN
into the trunk of your backyard maple. Not enough not to list your address as mine when I started scouts camp that summer.

Your moods were nothing, in exchange for what I got.

On Lyle’s instruction, you cleared out your posters from the walls of your work space, along with your comics collection and Spider-Man rug, and we weren’t better than two strangers on the third floor, no more than a bathroom and the silence between us. Even at Mom and Lyle’s engagement party, you played that game of always stepping out of the room I walked into.

You hated me fierce all through that first year, and when I remembered to, I hated you back.

M
ALLORY DOESN’T COME TO
visit us until the movie is starting. She crouches next to Lyle’s seat and they whisper together. I lean hard over my armrest, but I can’t hear their secrets. The lady sitting on the window side has fallen asleep and her breath is crawling too close on my ears and neck. I hold my shoulder up to my ear, then I zip my jacket all the way to my chin. Then I nudge the lady with my arm to redirect her breath. The first time doesn’t work so I nudge harder and she wakes up with a gasp noise.

“Would you please mind your space?” she says in a whisper that has slurp in it.

“You were breathing on me,” I answer, in my regular voice. Lyle turns and with one hand he pushes my chest deep into the seat back.

“Is my son making trouble?” he asks.

“He woke me up,” huffs Slurpwhisper. “He elbowed me.”

“I’m very sorry about that. Ben and I will make certain it won’t happen again,” says Lyle. They talk over me like I’m not even here.

I stretch back my neck and roll my eyes and go, “Shheeez.”

“Come on, Ben,” Lyle says. “What would Ms. Faunce think? At the last parent-teacher conference, she told me you’d been maturing in leaps and bounds.” He takes his hand off my chest. Even though it didn’t really hurt, I go, “Oww!” and start a wild coughing fit. Leaps and bounds—like I’m some dumb rabbit. Ever since that conference, Lyle’d been way over-talking those leaps and bounds, even though old Ms. Faunce is the type who’d put in a good word for any kid.

“Bennett,” Mallory whispers. “Do you want to trade? If you give me your word that you’ll behave, I’ll let you.”

“Trade for the rich-people seats?” I ask, leaning over Lyle, who is looking at Mallory like she just lost her mind.

“Right.” She nods at me slowly. “But you have to promise you’ll be a man. Promise me no horsing around up there. No elbowing, no nonsense.”

“I promise, I promise,” I say.

“I’ll tell the flight attendant Lyle and I want to talk privately, and that’s why we’re trading.”

“Okay, yeah.”

She pats Lyle’s arm and is back in a minute with one of the plane ladies.

“Nice meeting you,” I say to Slurp-whisper as I stand up. She opens one eye at me and frowns.

Mallory leads me to her big spaceship seat and makes me promise her again. So I promise her again. Then the plane lady comes over with earphones and a blanket. I move back the seat as far as it can go, set my earphones to a good music station, and settle in.

Inside my mind swims up a picture of you, the way I imagine how you are now, asleep in a germless steel bed and wearing one of those tie-back napkin nightshirts that hospitals use for clothes.

Ben, if you want to use my old room as your work space, you can have it, you tell me in pretend. ’Cause I’m never coming home again.

But Lyle’s sad, I answer you. He needs you back. Even if I don’t, not really, not anymore.

But you’re way better than me at being Lyle’s kid, you say.

“You think?” I ask out loud, and my own real live voice freaks me; not just because of how it bursts out by accident, but because it sounds way too happy.

Boy am I a jerk.

I look over at my new neighbor, Eggcheeks, to see if he’d heard me talking, but he’s rolled over on his chin and snoring. I take care not to elbow him. I know how to keep a promise.

I
T WASN’T UNTIL AFTER
I saw you dive that my hate feelings about you changed some. The town pool and tennis club had opened for the summer, my first summer at Lyle’s, and one day we all went over for swimming. I was feeling not-so-good with the day at first, on account of Mom. She was wearing her new pink two-piece. Pink is her favorite color, but like everything else, Mom took it to the extreme. The rest of the mothers had on one-piecers, some of them with attached lettuce-leaf skirts. Mom seemed to have a spotlight shining on her stomach, from the way people’s eyes kept straying to it.