The Half Brother (25 page)

I was trying to think when I’d seen this Anita before. “No more straight lines for you,” I said.

“That’s right,” she said. “My rudder is broken. Around and around in circles. Oh, my.”

I pictured her in Abbott Pond, in the shining blue center, making endless rings. “You’ll never get anywhere,” I said.

“Nowhere.”

“You’re stuck.”

“Stuck. Oh, my.” She held up a bathing suit, bright red, by the straps, and made it do a dance. In amazement I watched the mother of my youth.

BEFORE THE BREAK ENDED,
Divya asked if I wanted to offload a course or two. “No, thanks, I’ve just got three this semester, and Nicky already dropped one of his,” I said. “We’ll be fine, and frankly, I need to get out of the house, Div.”

“Is someone going to be there all the time?”

“Most of the time. She is refusing to be babysat. Nick and I have
figured out a schedule. And, um, May is going to help out too.” Divya raised an eyebrow. “And there are visiting nurses coming, and physical therapists and all that.”

“I think you are crazy.”

“This is all temporary.”

She rolled her eyes. “I’ve got good subs available. A very nice woman who used to teach at Northfield Mount Hermon. You don’t know what might come up. Maybe just drop the seniors. There are other electives open. That would be best—”

“Absolutely not. That’s my baby, Div, come on. It’s a great class. I didn’t think I’d get anyone for Rilke and Eliot, but there you are.”

“Charlie,” she said. “You silly man. They’re there for you, and you know it.”

“No, I don’t.”

“False modesty doesn’t become you. What about Nicky?”

“Good luck if you try to take
him
away from anyone else.”

“But, I mean, how is he?”

“Fine.”

She tipped her head, a telltale sign of exasperation. “Charlie, listen to me. May told me he’s having nightmares. She said he’s not sleeping at all.”

“He’s okay at my house. Sleeps through the night.” Like a good child.

“Are you sure he’s sleeping? Or is he wandering around?”

“Of course he’s not wandering around.”

“Because that’s what he’s doing at May’s,” she said. “And of course, Charlie, she couldn’t talk to you about this.”

“Of course she could.”

“Charlie.”

A few days after that, or nights, when Nick was next sleeping over, I woke up and heard the creak of floorboards. Footsteps only, no crutches, no chair. We had walkie-talkies set up for when Anita needed us; mine was silent.

I heard him going down the stairs. No lights went on. I heard the back door open and close.

I refused to look at the clock. I didn’t want to know. It was dark,
deep dark, one or two o’clock with any luck, with a cushion of real night left; there was time to get back to sleep, to recover, to have these sentient moments seem like a dream, if I remembered them at all.

Was he wearing a coat? Was he even wearing shoes? Was he hungry? How long had he been awake?

The creaking steps, silent, was that a sound, no, I listened for the door, I felt my body grow less heavy. Awareness beckoned. If I tipped over into it. And the gray light would begin to edge the windows. And the night would be over and day would begin and I could not. Could not.

Could not.

Nicky sitting motionless on the patio. He had taken himself there. I turned over and fell back to sleep. It was much easier than I had thought it would be.

ONE DAY I WALKED PAST
Nick’s classroom and saw Celia Paxton huddled at the seminar table, her shoulders heaving, Nick beside her, a decent distance away. And the door was widely, properly open—why wouldn’t it be? I lingered at the door for a moment, and finally he saw me and shrugged. He looked concerned but preoccupied; he didn’t have that rapt, tragic look I watched for, the one he got right before he was sucked down his vortex of empathy.

He told me later that she wanted to feel bad about breaking up with Zack, but didn’t.

“Is that all?”

“They were together a long time,” he said. “He’s pretty wrecked about it. She feels like a bad person. She asks me these questions. What is selfishness? What is love? So, yeah, Charlie, that’s all.”

“And what do you say?”

“What do I
say
?” We went outside and he turned right, without comment, in the opposite direction from the parking lot, and so I knew he wanted me to walk to his apartment with him, or just walk—we did that sometimes, walked in circles, and I didn’t ask where he wanted to end up. “I don’t know,” he said. I heard the edges of his voice fraying. “I don’t even know what I say. I tell her I have
no idea. Charlie, why do people come to me? Why does anybody
ever
come to
me
?”

I stopped and turned to him. I wanted to shake him senseless, to smooth him down, to fold him up, put him to bed and watch serenity overtake his face, tuck him away, sleeping prince. There were circles under his eyes. “Tell them not to,” I said. “Especially Celia. Tell them to go away. Tell them to come to me. Anything.” I held the knobs of his shoulders in my hands, held them too hard, but he just stood there. Why did they think he was bottomless? That he of all people could carry extra weight?

Next time I would get up. I would sit with him outside in the snow all night long if I had to.

“Nicky,” I said. “I know you’re not sleeping. You know Mom is going to be okay, right? She’s here with us. She is going to be fine. She’s safe at home in my house and she’s going to be fine.” He glanced up at me and gently stepped out of my grasp, and I thought that the look on his face was the closest he’d ever come to disappointment with me—but if he had fully admitted it, he would have also had to say the unsayable to himself.

And after that? I could have gone to May. Or Divya, or Celia’s advisor, Louise Henri. I could have called in reinforcements. This was Abbott, we knew our kids, this was the kind of thing we didn’t let go under the radar, that we didn’t let fester, or blossom. I could have gone to them; I could have.

ANITA SAT ON THE STEPS
of the church in noonday heat. Her granddaddy was inside, in his office, and she was waiting for him. She had new sandals, with two straps over the foot, and absolutely flat soles. They meant summer. She stood up and walked across one of the long steps and back and listened to their
slap slap
. She sat down again and looked around her, closer and closer. The light so bright. Along the step, a line of ants, walking like crumbs. She was not alone. Creatures of the earth.

She was four or maybe five or maybe six. Old enough to remember.

Then there was larger movement and she looked up. A man was
approaching, familiar, as most adults in the town were familiar to her, but she didn’t know his name. He was wearing overalls and work boots and no hat. The white lines in his red face were wrinkles from squinting into the sun. He walked along the road from outside town, came up the sidewalk to the church, stopped in front of her, and considered her awhile. “I hope you’re grateful to your granddaddy,” he finally said. “Taking you in like he done.”

She wasn’t afraid because she knew that adults said anything they wanted to to children. But she didn’t answer.

He seemed to expect shame. He was telling her the answer to a question that was a constant in her life, a condition. This
taken in
. How her mother did not live in their house, or town—how she would reappear with no warning, blond, beautiful, wholly unlike Anita, and then leave again. Her own presence, her mother’s absence, her father’s seeming lack of existence were facts; they snapped into a whole and made her. She did not understand it, but now, all at once, she believed it.

The man exuded a baleful patience. And then, abruptly, he turned and walked away. The bulwark of Granddaddy’s church was behind her and she waited for the inrush of safety, but she hadn’t felt what she was supposed to, she’d refused the shame that was her due, and so the safety didn’t come.

Nineteen

I was waiting at the house for Nick to show up so I could run some errands. Anita scoffed at our caution, but I didn’t feel good about leaving her alone with the stairs and her crutches for too long, and Nicky enthusiastically agreed. He’d said he’d be there as soon as his last class was over.

But instead the doorbell rang, and it was May.

“Nicky had to stay for some conferences,” she said. “I guess there’s a test tomorrow and people are freaking out.”

“He didn’t mention that.”

“Well, he wouldn’t. He thinks everyone’s brilliant. He thinks his tests are easy.”

She was carrying several bags. She was going to make us dinner. Nicky hadn’t mentioned this either. She was going to make a double batch of this chicken dish, no,
coq au vin
, that was the official name, she said that, and then we could freeze some. She also had soup, muffins, spaghetti sauce. “I didn’t know you cooked,” I said.

“Any fool can watch cooking shows,” she said. I followed her into the kitchen, where she found space in the freezer for the soup. “I was very bored in Dallas. I got very domestic.” Once again I didn’t mention the fiancé. I wondered if she had gotten domestic because of or in spite of him.

She put the muffins in the bread box on the counter. “They’ll keep
a couple of days and then you should freeze the rest of them too. You can just defrost them one at a time in the microwave.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Will you remember?”

“Tell Anita.”

“Right.” This seemed to amuse her. “You’re welcome.”

“Thank you,” I said. “You’re very kind.”

Had she ever stood here, in my kitchen, before? Of course she had.

“May-May? Is that you?”

She turned to the voice. “Hi, Anita!” she called, and disappeared into the living room.

I heard Anita say, “You’ve still got your coat on! Charlie didn’t take your coat?”

“Oh, I can hang up my own coat!”

“I’m going,” I said. “Ladies?” I heard laughter. “May-May?” I wasn’t speaking loud enough to be heard. I knew it. “Bye,” I said, to the empty kitchen.

I BEGAN TO NOT
feel surprised when May walked in the door. Or when I walked in and found her already there.

But I could feel the effort my mother was expending not to talk about her. When her name did leak in, I knew it was only one of maybe a dozen times that Anita had almost said it.

One day, after May had left, Anita began, “Charlie—”

“No.”

“You don’t know what I was going to say.”

“You cannot tell her.”

“But, son—”

“It would wreck her,” I said. “You don’t want that. And don’t you see how happy Nicky is? Don’t you see that? Aren’t you glad? Do you want to wreck that too?” She looked down at her hands, folded in her lap. “It is the
only thing I am asking you
,” I said, and I felt like stone, forbidding and eternal, and Anita didn’t say anything more.

HOW HAD MAY BEGUN IT?
“Nicky has told me so much about you”? “My mother is from south Georgia too”? And Anita feigned ignorance, but May sensed there was something she was supposed to hunt for, something easily missed, a golden egg hidden in deepest underbrush?

For Anita was telling her stories.

One evening my mother said, “You know, I used to like sitting under my grandmother’s table. In the kitchen.”

“Like a fort?” Nick said.

“No, I’d do it when she was sitting there. With her lady friends. In the middle of their legs.” She chuckled self-consciously. “I can’t imagine why she let me. Except that it kept me quiet.”

“How old were you?” May said.

“Little. Little-little. But old enough to remember. And one of the women one time—it was our neighbor. Memaw didn’t like her much. This neighbor would come over and Memaw would be in her housecoat and slippers and she wouldn’t even change. So that’s how I knew. And one day this woman said something about a redheaded stepchild. I’d never heard that before, and I thought she was talking about me.”

“But she wasn’t?” Nick said.

“Oh, no. It was just an old expression. For someone you don’t treat so well. You say,
They treat her like a redheaded stepchild
.” Her fingers were twitching beside her plate. No one would notice but me. But I knew that right about now there should be a long drag; then a tap in the ashtray, without looking. (
Charlie, empty this ashtray, please. Charlie, find me an ashtray
. They were the only requests she used to make of me that had been anywhere close to favors. I’d done the dishes, taken out the trash, cleaned my room, but she would never have dreamed of asking me to bring her a glass of water, or the book she was reading, or a deck of cards to play her solitaire;, but I’d see her patting her pocket, and if she came up empty I’d go to her purse or her coat or the pocket of her other sweater. It was what I did for her. She’d favored pockets, then.)

“She said something later though,” Anita was saying. “That time, or a different time. I don’t know. They would just forget I was there, I expect. I would sit there quiet as a mouse.”

“What did she say?”

“She said something about my complexion. Memaw wouldn’t let me out in the sun, but I went anyway of course, and I got the worst burns. She said she’d never seen a child so pale. So the neighbor lady said, well, at least you know there’s no nigger in
that
woodpile. And Memaw said, yes, there’s that at least.”

“Mom,”
Nicky said.

“I didn’t say it, son,” Anita said. “It was just another expression. But it used to be so important.” Her fingers twitched. “To know. People used to think it was very important.”

“Because they didn’t know who your father was,” May prompted.

“Yes. Because of that.”

There was a fiction afoot, which was that I knew all these stories. Anita and I let it stand. The truth was our business. As a child, I had felt the past sitting there, undeniable, but I had known with great certainty that my mother only looked forward. Together we pretended that history, by definition, was dead and could not hurt us anymore, or rather she pretended and I, not knowing any better, believed it. Now the past was filling in. Hints and guesses and ghosts gaining color and weight. Beginning to breathe.