The Half Brother (14 page)

There were guys too.
Its something to experience love is good right?
I wrote back immediately that yes that was fine but he damn well better be taking precautions, all around.
Im not stupidd jeez Charlie also on balance as they say I like women more so Calm down Charlie
.

He’d told me before that he promised nothing to a girl, or boy,
ever.
No point. Things here change to fast
. I restrained myself from telling him he’d grow out of it. I imagined him facing one person, then another, with his clear, utterly honest eyes.
Thats it
. If he broke hearts, it was through no fault of his own. He never mentioned drama.

I saw him once a year or so, when he came home to Atlanta, and I made myself go there to see him. I watched him with his high-school buddies, and when they talked about old times—drinking at Collier Park, stealing the Big Boy and putting it on the roof of the gym,
Oh holy shit remember? remember?
—he laughed as loudly as all the rest but I could see that he
didn’t
really remember, that he had no access to that self anymore, and that their wistfulness baffled him. They were all in real estate or banking or law, and that baffled him too.

When he was home, he couldn’t talk about Haiti the way he could in his letters. His vitality seemed to pale. When I’d take him to the airport for his trip back, he’d be nearly quivering with excitement and relief, holding it in for my benefit I supposed, not understanding that I knew quite well he wasn’t escaping, but returning.

He was resolute in not acknowledging the tension between Anita and me. But an entirely tense country? A hand-to-mouth existence, disease, poverty, death?
O Charlie
, he wrote, safely back in squalor.
I am living I am living I am living
.

THEN 9/11 HAPPENED.
Then the war in Afghanistan. It took him nearly a year, but he got there. He started working for a relief organization in Kabul and took trips outside the city, to visit schools, to give vaccines. He didn’t want to be in the capital but no other westerner was crazy enough to live outside it if they weren’t military, and he relented. I thought he missed Haiti but when I asked him, during a rare phone call, he said, “No, I was done there.” But then he launched into a tirade about Kabul’s too-convenient plumbing, electricity, restaurants. “People think it’s so bad here. This is
civilization
.”

I was getting sick of his weird purity. “Well, for God’s sake, are you actually making any difference?”

“No,” he said, and his voice was full of despair. “It’s angry here. Everyone’s angry.”

“It’s a fucking war, Nicky.”

“That’s not it,” he said. “I’m not close enough to it. Not close enough. I can’t get to it.”

“Close enough to
what
?”

But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, answer.

HE GOT SOME INTESTINAL PARASITE
that made him drop thirty pounds that he didn’t have to lose. I was surprised he even told Anita. He’d gotten so confused, so out of touch with the way normal people,
we
, reacted, that he thought her being a nurse would make telling her okay.

Instead, she called me. “I need information. I don’t even know what he’s taking. He says he’s better, but he won’t tell me what he weighs.”

“He probably doesn’t know.”

“If he’s going to a doctor he would know.”

“He’s not going to ask. If the doctor told him he wouldn’t remember.”

“All he has to do is—”

“Jesus, Mother,” and I felt her cringe, because she was still a country girl and you still didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, but I didn’t care. “I can’t make him do anything. I don’t know why you’re asking me. What are you asking me to do here? What power do you imagine I have?”

I ignored my own worry—no, fear—and the kinship she and I had because of it. Instead I thought how I could push her like this, now. I could be cruel and she would say nothing. I didn’t do it much and I didn’t like myself afterward, but it was almost a discipline, to make myself so blunt, unmerciful: it was my role now, it was my due.

AND THEN, ALL AT ONCE,
it was over. He was traveling outside the city, in a small convoy, when the van ahead of them drove over an IED. His car went off the road and he lost consciousness, but just for a few minutes; that was all, that was it. But afterward he couldn’t sleep. Woke up every night screaming, and finally they, whoever
they
were, convinced him he had to leave.

I went to Atlanta. He looked desiccated. He slept a lot, and in between Anita took him to doctors. He was drinking special milk-shakes.
She’d never been much of a cook, and she loathed waste, but now she was making food all the time, mounds of unseasoned chicken and white rice, throwing most of it away untouched. I felt superfluous—or worse; Anita said, “He doesn’t want to collapse around you.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you think he
would
collapse? I mean—maybe he needs to.”

“Of course he doesn’t,” she said.

We were in the living room. I don’t know how we’d ended up in there. Maybe because it was the farthest from Nick’s bedroom. Maybe also because that part of the house smelled the least of smoke. I could tell my mother had started smoking inside again. But the living room didn’t even have an ashtray.

When Anita and I had moved into that house, Hugh’s house, the baronial living room had been nearly empty, and twenty-five years later it was still underfurnished, a beige, corporate-looking sofa and two chairs lonely on the enormous Oriental rug. She had told me years before that she’d only stayed in the house so when Bobo and Big Hugh drove by they could know that she was still there, part of Hugh was still there, although she had no feeling for the house one way or the other. I found myself inspecting the carved limestone mantelpiece, the moldings and coffered ceilings with a new eye. I wished Win were there to compare notes with.

“They all had training,” my mother said firmly. “He’s going to be fine. He knew the risks, they knew all about it—IEDs, snipers, mines. They all knew what could happen. And he was already weak, because of the GI situation.”

“Mother.”

She didn’t answer. She wanted to start talking in medical lingo. She knew I knew it. She went over and sat down on the window seat, limping a little. “You need to see someone about that leg,” I said, but she ignored me.

She was still young, only sixty-one, and in certain lights looked younger, her features still fine, her auburn hair thick, her figure still voluptuous, impractical—her body had never fit her. But the direct sun coming through the bay window revealed that smoking had done its work, etching rough lines and graying her skin, which had once been milk white.
She was sometimes short of breath, and one leg tended to swell; her legs had always been elegant, but now she wore pants almost all the time. She’d shifted to a desk job at the hospital and would not admit it was because she couldn’t be on her feet. Her aging enraged me. But we stayed out of each other’s business. That was the pact. So only Nicky was left.

“He’s not good,” she said finally.

“No. He’s not.”

“There were children. In the van. That hit the mine. That blew up.”

“There were?”

“I don’t know why we let him go,” she said. Behind her, through the leaded bay window, I saw the yard sloping up, behind the cracked and weedy tennis court, and daffodils dotting the ivy. It was mid-March. “I don’t know how we did it. Nicky of all people. How could we—Charlie. Charlie.” She was looking to the side, through the little diamond panes, not at me. “He picked them up. Bodies. Limbs. Pieces. He saw all of that. Nicky saw all of that.”

He’d made a bet and lost. He’d been looking for a present so intense it would envelop him, and now he had a moment he could never leave.

A FEW DAYS LATER
she said, “I want him there with you.”

“With me?” There was a pause. “At Abbott?”

“Yes. Please.”

Her voice was matter-of-fact. Anita did not do guilt or guile. It was a request, not a command.

“He can teach,” she said. “He’ll be good at it. He’ll be happy there with you. You know he will.” She didn’t beg, or clasp her hands, but that was the closest I think my mother ever got to getting on her knees in front of me. I heard it, in her voice, some dire knowing.

For a moment, just for Nick, my mother and I were co-conspirators, as of old. We were planets, and he was the sun.

I thought for a moment of Divya, when I had held open my arms for her ghost ship of grief to engulf me instead, and how I had done it, and was stronger now.

I was thirty-eight. It was remarkable to contemplate. And my house had been empty and waiting for a long time.

Ten

The row of blond heads in the front pew, and at the end, one dark. She turns and looks at me pleading, and I stand and push past the knees and out of the pew and out the door and into the blinding white world. And vomit to the bile. And get in my car. And disappear.

In my mind sometimes I’m still there, moving, road gray and frozen ahead of me, I have never come back.

MAY AND I HAD SPOKEN
only once more.

She’d gone back to Paris after that and written letters, and called and called, and one day finally I’d picked up and she’d said, “Is there someone else?” and since that was as good a reason as any I’d said yes, because I wouldn’t sicken her the way I had been sickened; it wasn’t truth that sickened, but knowledge—truth was there regardless, but did the tree’s fruit exist if you did not eat of it?

She’d said, “You loved my father more than me. That’s the real truth. You wanted to get close to
him
. And that is fucked up, Charlie.” I’d said she was right. I hadn’t sounded like anyone I knew, least of all myself, certainly not any self I had ever been with May. Maybe that was why she’d been crying, because I’d transformed, I had tricked her, legless belly in the dust.

She’d said she hated me and I’d said, good. Although the safest
thing was not hate but the end of hate, passion replaced by cold neutrality. I wanted this mostly for her sake but for mine too, because I wanted so much to make a sacrifice in the name of atonement. To have her look at me, hear my voice, and feel nothing. And I would feel the punishment of that pain.

And I’d believed I’d heard it, then: the space, the moment where she’d decided, or realized; when she killed something, or gave it up, or watched it disintegrate. It was a before and after, with finality, and I’d almost said
Now you’re grown up
but I didn’t. But I had been glad that the thing was done.

And then she’d said that she was the one who was never coming back. Abbottsford was mine if I wanted it, she didn’t care. I’d heard that ice in her voice, the absolutely genuine disinterest even beneath the tears. I hadn’t thought I would get my wish so soon. And so that had been the last time we spoke.

I heard news of her, sometimes, inadvertently: she’d gone back to Paris, she was teaching in Dallas. Still, when I saw her, day after day—whenever I saw a tall girl, a dark-haired girl, a girl dipping her face shyly away, or hugging her books to her chest and hunching as she walked, regretting her height—my first thought was always
No
. Even before the excitement and then the disappointment and then the relief when the girl turned and was not May. Because she was supposed to be living a shining life, elsewhere. Because, elsewhere, she was glorious: I hadn’t hurt her at all.

AUGUST. THE LONG ABEYANCE.
Zenith of ordinary time.

Heat, and perfect stillness.

Nicky was ensconced in Abbottsford. He’d gained a few pounds. He’d thought Abbott was a good idea—a great idea. “I get it,” he said. “Time to grow up. But I love it here anyway.” He’d refused to live with me, though. “I’ll crash with you all the time,” he said. “But I need my own place. Besides, I don’t think you want a roommate. You wouldn’t like that much, Charlie,” and after one open-mouthed moment I’d shouted with laughter and relief. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, laughing too.

Still he could drop by the house anytime, with his light and need; but today, he’d gone to Boston, to see friends. So I was off duty. Off, on—both new to me.

When Divya called I almost didn’t answer, but then I did. (Either way, of course, would have changed nothing.) “Did you see the e-mail?” she said.

“What e-mail?”

There was a pause. Then, “Oh, Charlie. My dear.” Her voice was a long sigh. “Your ramparts have been well and truly breached.”

Eleven

There was a Labor Day tea. Because there would be a Labor Day tea for ever and ever amen. And Divya wore an orange salwar kameez, and her hair was complicated (as Ram would have said), and Anil was home from law school, tending bar, which was a long folding table in the corner of the garden. I asked for bourbon. “It’s kind of swill, Charlie,” he said, holding up the bottle.

“Do you think I really mind?”

He didn’t answer, just gave me a look and poured, generously. He didn’t know. Divya hadn’t said anything. What would she have said?

Then Adam Salter—the very one, the young assistant dean, who was now the middle-aged headmaster—began his usual remarks.
So wonderful this special place true excellence the whole person the Abbott family
. He’d start his introductions in a minute, and I pivoted discreetly, scanning the crowd. Salter caught my eye:
Where is he?
And all I could do was shrug. Because my brother was not the issue, no, not at all. Then Salter’s darting eyes stopped somewhere beyond me and he broke into a huge smile. “There he is! Excellent timing, Nick!”

“Thank you, sir.”

I turned and there he was, looking sheepish, probably having just realized how fine he’d cut it. His khakis were a little rumpled. He had on an old seersucker blazer that I guessed, by its sacklike tailoring and slightly wide lapels, to have been scavenged from the remnants of
Hugh’s closet. He’d remembered a tie. But he’d forgotten to change his tennis shoes, and I knew that if you looked, not all that closely, you’d be able to see his left big toe through the holes. He was as gaunt as a saint, and his red cheeks were clear and ardent as a boy’s—as if he’d just come off some twilit playing field in the snapping air of autumn. As the weight of everyone’s gazes sank onto him, one hand crept up and snaked through his flopping hair.