Sons of the 613 (11 page)

“Isaac, one, two, thr—”

“No.”

“All right, if he ain't gonna go, I'll go again,” says Craig, and he gets a running start and brushes past me as he rushes to the cliff edge and launches himself into space.

“WeeeeYOOOOOooo!!!!” he says on the way down before splashing messily into the river.

“You see how easy that is?” says Darrell.

Just because your nephew is retarded, I have to be retarded too?

“All right, go,” said Josh. “I mean it.”

“No.”

“Go!”

“I don't want to!”

I am aware of Darrell watching the exchange, waiting to see who is going to win the contest of wills. He thinks this is funny. I see Josh glance over at him and shake his head subtly, inviting Darrell to share in his disgust, the four hundredth time he's done that today.
Can you believe what a pussy my little brother is?
I want to kick both of them in the balls.

“All right, then,” says Darrell, “guess I'ma go. WEE- YOOOOoooo!!!”
Splash.

“Isaac, this is one of those times when you can either stand up and be a man or be a failure.”

Now I
am
crying, my eyes welling up.

“I don't care.”

“Isaac, we have to leave and go home in about twenty minutes. And before we go, you are gonna jump off that cliff.”

“No, I'm not going to.” My voice has that thick, slurry sound you make when you're talking through your tears.

“Yes, you are.”

“No, I'm not.”

“Just jump!”

“No! No! I'm not going to!”

“
I'll
go.”

A female voice. I turn, hurriedly wiping my face, and my heart does a backflip.

“Lesley,” says Josh, “what are you doing here?” His tone is not of the
What a wonderful surprise!
variety.

She shrugs. “You said you'd be here.”

She's wearing a bikini top and cutoff jeans. She looks incredible. She shifts her gaze to me and smiles and says, as if everything was normal, as if I wasn't standing there with tears and snot gleaming on my face, “Hi, Isaac.”

Then she says to Josh, “You know, you shouldn't make him jump if he doesn't want to.”

“Yeah, well, he's too much of a pussy to—”

“WEEEYOOOOO!!!” I whoop, cutting him off, and before the thinking part of my brain can step in, I'm airborne over the river and then plunging toward the swirling water.

 

Jesus I'm
still
falling Jesus why did I do this Jesus why did I—

 

I scramble back up the path, wet, cold, exhilarated, alive.
Alive!
HA HA HA HA
HAAAA!
When I get to the top I'm going to rush straight into Lesley's arms for a celebratory hug and—Where is she? She's gone. Josh and Darrell and Craig are there. Lesley isn't.

Darrell is clapping as I get close. “Thatta boy!” he says, and gives my hair a muss before I can pull my head away.

“You see what you can achieve when you focus?” he says while I'm twisting around, trying to find Lesley. “You understand now the power of confronting—”

“Where'd she go?” I say to Josh.

“Who?”

“‘Who?' Lesley!”

“She left.” He's fuming about something.

“Why?”

“Sounds like someone's got a bit of an infatuation,” says Darrell in his wise, amused elder voice.
Boulder, roll down the slope and flatten him.

“Did he really jump?” says Craig to Josh, like I'm not worth talking to.

“Yeah, he really jumped,” I say to Craig. “Why'd she leave?”

“I was thinking you were gonna be too much of a pussy to jump,” says Craig.

“Thinking? Wow, big step for you,” I say. “Why did she leave? She drove all the way out here and just left?”

“Definitely infatuated,” says Darrell, nodding his head and grinning.
Meteor. Bear. Frozen shitcube from a passing airplane. Anything.

“Josh, why did she leave?”

“She just left.”

“What did you say to her?”

“What did I
say
to her? What's it to you?”

“What, it's like she's his friggin' girlfriend or something,” says Craig to Josh with a hopeful smile, waiting to be rewarded for his great joke. Instead Josh turns his head and just looks at him, a deliberate, blank-faced, dreadful moment that makes Darrell hurriedly interject, “Craig, whyn't you come over here for a bit?” For a few seconds I almost feel a glimmer of affection for my brother.

“Okay,” I say, “I jumped off the stupid cliff. Can we go home now?”

 

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: E
LECTRONIC
E
SPIONAGE

We say our goodbyes at Taylors Falls and leave Darrell and Craig there. Josh doesn't say anything about my jumping, like it didn't count. It's a long way to drive in tense silence. After a while I fall asleep.

We're cold and formal with each other during haphtarah practice. I don't mention anything about the day, and he doesn't bring it up. We might as well be unrelated, Josh just a grimly professional hired tutor.

When he gets up to use the bathroom, he leaves his cell phone on the desk. The instant he is out the door and down the hallway I grab the phone and start scrolling through his call history. Outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, outgoing, to someone named Trish. Lots of them—days of them—with only a few incomings from her.

Lots of incomings from Lesley, especially over the past week. A few outgoing.

I pause and listen for Josh. I don't hear anything.

I go to his text inbox, but it's empty, and so is his outbox, everything scrubbed clean. There's one text in his drafts file, a fragment of a message to Trish—“Unfair? How bout u? Y can't u”—and then it stops.

There are other calls, names I don't recognize. The most recent call from Lesley was at 3:23 P.M. today, one of a cluster that he never answered.

I get up and go to Josh's doorway and lean out into the hall. The bathroom door is still closed. I step back into the room and stare at the phone, at Lesley's unanswered call.

What I should do is put the phone back down. Instead I press the call button.

Lesley answers.

“I hope you're calling to apologize.”

I nearly drop the phone in a rush of terror and excitement and jab the end call button, then race back to put the phone on the desk, hop away from it, and stand frozen in frightened-squirrel pose, arms hugged close to my sides, fists together under my chin. From down the hall comes the sound of the toilet flushing and then hand washing.

The phone rings. I jump. More frozen squirrel.
Ring.
I scurry back to the desk and stand over it, dart my hand out, pull it back, repeat, then snatch up the phone and hit end call. The phone falls silent midring.

I put it down. The phone and I regard each other, neither moving.

It beeps. New text.

WHAT RU DOING? it says.

The bathroom door is opening. Here he comes. I fumble with the phone and accidentally hit reply, then have to work my way back to select Lesley's message and figure out how to delete it. Josh is coming down the hall, three steps from the door. I highlight the message, delete it, put the phone back in its place, and leap into my seat just as he is rounding the corner into the room.

“Did my phone ring?” he says as he sits down.

“Yeah, but they hung up,” I say.

He picks up the phone, sees who it was, makes a face, and puts the phone down again.

“All right, let's keep going,” he says.

 

ISAAC, SERIOUSLY, YOU HAVE TO CALL ME BACK BECAUSE WE WERE WAITING FOR YOU AGAIN AND YOU DIDN'T CALL. ARE YOU COMING TO MY B-DAY PARTY? ARE YOU DEAD?

D

 

Yitzhak, I hope you're okay. You missed it: Jensen threw a total shit fit today at Darrick Prince. I took notes in math if you need them :)

Sarah

I eat in silence while Josh and Lisa talk. After dinner I do some homework. Josh watches TV. There's a terse message on the answering machine from Danny, and several more e-mails from him, but somehow I keep putting off calling him back.

At nine fifteen I'm doing math homework in the kitchen when the phone rings. Josh answers.

“That depends. Who's calling? Oh, yeah, hey, Sarah! How are you?”

He looks over at me, grinning. I mouth
No!
to him and wave my hands violently.

“He sure is,” says Josh. “Boy, am I glad you called. We were just talking about you. He's sitting right here. He's been hoping you'd call.”

I bury my face in my hands.

“Here,” he says, holding the phone out to me, then knocks it against my skull several times until I snatch it from him.

“Hello?” I say.

“Hi, Izzie!” says Sarah. She's one of the only people besides my mother who call me that, which is what happens when you've had Passover dinner together every year since you were born. “Are you okay? I was just wondering if you needed those notes from math.”

She goes on. I answer with as few syllables and as little emotion as possible. All the while, Josh is pantomiming all sorts of perverse acts.

“What? Condoms? Of course I can lend you some condoms!” he announces in a loud voice, just before I say goodbye and hang up. He finds this very funny.

“I would not touch her if you paid me a million dollars,” I say, fuming.

When I'm done with my homework I shower, and then go out to the tent without being asked.

But tonight, when I fall asleep, I have a plan.

 

M
ERIT
B
ADGE
: B
REAKING AND
E
NTERING

1:15 a.m.

Out of the tent, moving quietly across the backyard, detouring toward the edge of the lawn, where the illumination from the security lights is weakest.

This time I go around to the front door. Josh's window faces toward the rear, and he's less likely to spot me this way. Plus, I had loosened the bulb in the fixture on the front porch, the one that would normally light up automatically because of the motion detector.

The key fits and turns in the lock. I had remembered that my dad kept a spare in his office junk drawer, along with ancient cuff links and strange fraternity pins and campaign buttons for someone named Dukakis. I pocketed the key in the morning, my plans already forming.

I close the door behind me slowly, slowly, then stand quietly, listening for any sounds. Nothing. I reach under the hallway table and find my father's shoes, feeling in the left one for the small flashlight I'd put there.

I keep the flashlight off for now. First to the kitchen and the refrigerator, easing the door open, slipping a hand in and holding down the little button on the inside so that the interior light doesn't go on. Quick rummaging for the pizza box. I sit on the floor with the lights off, next to an off-kilter rectangle of moonlight coming in through the sliding doors that go out to the back porch. I eat the pizza cold, wolfing it down, the cheese hard and waxy.

Then downstairs, fast walk in the dark to my parents' bathroom, shut the door, turn the faucet on to a slow trickle, and give myself a head-to-toe sponge bath with a washcloth.

Then upstairs again, naked except for the towel wrapped around my waist, staying on the right side so the stairway doesn't creak. I stand at the entranceway to the hall that leads to Lisa's room, Josh's room, and my destination: my room. Josh's light is off. I move cautiously down the hall, noiseless on the carpet.

Twist the door handle and open my door in a smooth, slow motion,
shooooosh
as it brushes over the carpet,
shoooosh
as I ease it shut, the tiniest of clicks as I twist the handle back into place, then off with the towel. I squat to place it over the bottom of the door to block out any stray photons, straighten, feel for the light switch, flick it on, turn, and shriek like a girl.

 

“What are you doing in the house?” demands Josh. We're in the living room, where he herded us after all the excitement. “How did you get in here?”

“What are you talking about? What is he doing in my
bed!?
”

“Dude, seriously, I can, like, go sleep on the sofa or just split.”

This last slurry bit is from Patrick. As in punk-rock Patrick from the club, Patrick the Ear Chewer.

“You're not sleeping on the sofa,” says Josh to Patrick, who WTF is he doing in our house?! To me: “You're going back outside.”

“I'm not going back out there!”

Patrick is wearing black boxers and one black sock. Now that we're not in a dark club and he's not covered in several layers of studded leather, I can see that he has a lot of tattoos of the skull/demon/naked-lady variety. His Mohawk lies completely limp down over his shoulders, like a deflated sea urchin. Even with his boxers on he's wearing more than me. I'm holding a sofa pillow in front of my crotch.

I was not expecting to turn on the light and find him splayed out on my bed, his mouth wide open and his eyes only half-shut, like he was dead. That's what caused the shrieking. Then I turned and tried to run out of my room, remembering too late about the whole shutting-the-door business. By the time I had unscrambled my brain and managed to find the doorknob and yank the door open, Josh was already out of his room and yanking
Lisa's
door open—“Because I thought all that high-pitched screaming was her,” he said. Then she did start screaming, because of Josh nearly pulling her door off the hinges, then I came running into the hall and ran right into Josh, which was like running into the door but more painful.