The Half Brother (29 page)

Zack was on fire, relentless on goal, even behind the mask I could tell his focus was absolute. The other hapless goalies down again and again on rubber knees, and again and again he got past them. I brought a hat to every game, to throw on the ice, just in case.

I MISSED ONLY ONE GAME,
on a Friday night when I sent May and Nick instead. I stayed home with Anita and pretended I wasn’t babysitting. We watched
Casablanca
on TV, and she fell asleep while Bogey and Bacall were in Paris, and I spent the rest of the movie mostly watching her face, afraid it would twist or sag. It never did, but she didn’t look peaceful either. Her brow furrowed and behind her closed lips her mouth dropped open in a look of grim, disquieting astonishment. Finally I turned off the TV and woke her up and helped her to bed.

As it turned out we lost, 2–1, but a rout had been expected, so it felt almost like a victory. Zack didn’t score—that had been Darius—but he was credited with the assist. He’d also gone down once in the second period, but Nick hadn’t even noticed; no one much did. It was a collision like dozens of other collisions.

Zack didn’t admit to the double vision until the next day, when he tried to get out of bed and vomited just from sitting up. That’s what I heard. On Monday, he was once again missing from my classroom, from everyone’s. There were scans and consultations, and second and third opinions, and finally unanimous agreement: he could never set foot on another rink or field. He could not be in the military, any branch; he certainly would never fly a plane. He was lucky to be alive, and another hit could kill him.

“
I THINK I SHOULD TELL YOU
,” Anita said. “I had another one today. It’s like a curtain coming down over my eyes. It passes down and then up. And I couldn’t say my name. So I sat down in a chair and I stayed there. And ten minutes later I was fine. Charlie, I just thought you would want to know.” She paused. “There’s nothing I can do, though.”

“Then I don’t know why you’re telling me,” I said. It was just us. Just my mother and me. She told only me because I could handle it. Charlie can handle these things. I thought of her sitting, alone, waiting for whatever was going to come next. “But tell me anyway,” I said. “Always tell me.”

It was afternoon—I’d just gotten home. The days were getting longer already, the sun higher; it was blinding on the snowy mountains. The kitchen was flooded with light.

Overnight it had snowed, a light powder, and now it was blowing, glittering in the sun. A southerner would be amazed. Floating snow like silver dust. Here in this foreign land. “Look at that,” I said, and stepped away from the window, so she could see.

SHE SAID THAT
I should go visit Zack, flat on his back in a dark room, and I said I would. She said that she’d like to go herself, and I said I’d take her. We should give it a week or so, though, she said, because that boy has to sleep, he has to heal. It would be too soon for visitors. I saw that she was looking for a patient besides herself.

“I wonder if that girl will go to see him,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be bad or good.”

“You think about them that much?” I said.

“I had a boy like that in the ICU,” she said. “In a coma. His girlfriend visited all the time. Cried and cried. I got impatient with her, I remember that. I think I kept it to myself all right though.”

I made a sympathetic noise.

“They kept hanging on and hanging on, they wouldn’t unplug him.”

“Mom,” I said. “We won’t do that to you. And Zack is not in a coma.”

“I know that,” my mother said, inscrutable, unrepentant.

No, he was not in a coma, but neither did he want to stay flat on his back for a week, and one night he got up when everyone else was asleep and walked to the gym; he could think better in the cold, maybe; maybe the cold kept him together—that was how I felt, sometimes, winter as a bracing, binding agent, winter as discipline, and
maybe Zack Middleton was the same. The cold in his nostrils and he thinks,
I’m all right, they’re all full of shit, I’m fine
.

And so he goes around and around and around: flying. If there hadn’t been a recent warm spell, if Abbott Pond had been thickly frozen, maybe Zack would’ve gone there—because, it seemed, he needed to skate. To fly. But that elemental motion was forbidden to him now, so he had to sneak out to do it. It was a little after midnight, they found out later, from the security camera footage at the rink, where Zack went instead—but if he had been at the pond he might have looked up at the geometry of Orion stretched against the sky, that gargantuan wheeling warrior, the ice of his sword at the ready, and felt a protection and wonder.

The brightest of Orion’s stars is dying; I wonder if Zack knew that.

But instead he used his father’s keys to the rink and the alarm and he laced up his skates and flew bareheaded and alone. The only sound the scraping of the blades against the ice. Around and around.

He knew that rink so well—he carried
that
geometry in his body; at least that’s what I imagine. If he’d closed his eyes, he might’ve been fine. If he hadn’t relied on his vision, doubling the boards like fun-house mirrors; if he had instead closed his eyes and
felt
the limits of the rink—then maybe he could have kept going, around and around, flying.

There is no Icarus constellation, I later discovered. A gross oversight. But there’s a crater named for him on the moon. I looked it up. Apparently astronomers are known for their dark humor.

Someone found him in the morning. Not Booker—thank God not Booker. Instead a part-time janitor, filling in, whose name I don’t know, who saw the dark heap on the ice, the crumple of Zack, who had miscalculated, who had hit his head for the last time in the night, who had fallen to earth for good.

I KNEW THAT,
at the cemetery, there might be a pile of dirt and a shovel, and a polite line of somber people waiting their turn. I warned Nick, who had never been to a Jewish funeral. A shovelful of dirt
and it would be final and real, I said, but also palpable, deeply right, a mitzvah.

But what I did not expect was how cold it would be that day, how Zack’s grave would be on a hill, and how there would be so many people it would be hard to see; that the pile of dirt would be enormous; that there would be no explanation or announcement of this custom, this rite, just the sounds beginning. The cut of the shovels, the ringing of the rocky soil on metal. The clods thudding on the casket. I couldn’t see who was digging. There was no polite line.

But then the crowd shifted without seeming to move, amoeba-like, and through gaps in the wall of motionless people I could see two men: Angela’s father, and Booker. Booker was wearing a yarmulke but he was so tall I could see it only when he bent to dig. Together, they lifted the dirt and poured it in. Lifting, pouring, from the towering pile. Divya reached up and held on to my arm. My other arm around Nick. May close by his other side.

Then Booker’s father, a man even taller and darker than Booker, took the shovel from Angela’s father, but Booker kept going; another black man, another, then another white one, uncles, cousins, took the other shovel, but Booker would not stop, until finally his father put his arms around him and then gently slid the shovel from his hands the way a parent slides a toy away from a sleeping child.

And Booker bowed his head and wept. The hole was so deep. Bottomless. The dirt kept going in. I couldn’t see Angela but I could hear her, the most defeated, wretched sound I had ever heard. And beside me Nick pulled away and I realized I’d been leaning on him and I nearly fell. “Charlie, Charlie, shhh,” May said, tears pouring down, and the tears were like light on her face, light in my own eyes, and I could see her, I could see. She looked after Nick, stumbling away down the hill, and I shook my head, and May came under my arm where Nicky had been and Divya still there on my other side and we all stood unwilling to let go.

A MEMORIAL BEGAN
at Zack’s locker but became so large it was moved to a bank of overflow, unused lockers at the end of the first-floor
hall. The notes and stuffed animals and photos multiplied day by day; Zack’s name was spelled a foot high. All the girls in their dorm rooms, crying, drawing bubble letters, making collages, turning this enormity into ritual and then finally into kitsch—who could judge them? The Diversity Forum had made a huge poster. “We are all one Abbott—We love you, Zack.” There were multiple pictures of Zack and Celia. There were baby pictures, some with our old house recognizable in the background. There was an enormous picture of him from freshman year, in his football uniform, helmetless, smiling, Zackie Bear oh Zackie Bear, and I saw Nicky stop and stare at it, incomprehension on his face, whenever he passed.

A WEEK AFTER THE FUNERAL.
The pall beginning to lift by the merest fraction. Then: Dex Pentecost at the windowed door of my classroom. “ ’Scuse me, people,” I said, and went over and opened it a crack. “Hi, Dex, can it wait?”

“It’s Mr. S.,” he whispered. “In our class. He’s—I think you need to come.” Our eyes met. “He’s crying,” Dex said.

I glanced back into my room. “I’ll take them,” he said. It was my sophomores. “We’ll just hang out. Go.”

“Invisible Man,”
I said.

“Got it.”

I went past May’s classroom. They’d come to me. Me. Downstairs. Other end of the building. His room next to last, the door closed; I don’t know what I expected but when I went in it was nearly silent, the class frozen except for Marina, who was crouched at the front of the room next to Nick, slumped down under his whiteboard. “Mr. S.,” she said. “Mr. Garrett’s here.” She looked up at me, uncertain in her new role. “Your brother’s here.” She patted him gingerly on the shoulder. “It’s okay.”

His head was between his knees, his head covered with his hands. Sackcloth and ashes. He looked horrible: unshaven, uncombed, unshowered by the smell of it. I got him up. I told the class I would be back. We went out in the hall and closed the door. “Nicky,” I said.

“I’m sorry—it just—God, Charlie, I looked at his seat, and I couldn’t—”

The exhaustion was suddenly crushing. I put my hand on the wall to hold myself up. “They’re all crying in there, Nick. There’s a time and a place. You have to give them order. You have to make them feel safe.”

“It would be dishonest,” he said. “They need to know—”

“Jesus,” I said. “They do know. Go home. I’ll come over later.”

He looked stricken. “We can’t just leave them in there,” Nick said.

I turned my back on him. “Go home.”

I went back in, alone. I apologized for my brother. To a one they looked amazed, said it was all right, and then Celia stood up and asked if she could leave, and before I could answer she ran out of the room.

I thought of her at the funeral, flanked by her parents, who had flown in from Hong Kong. They had been two of the most beautiful and expensive-looking people I had ever seen. Celia was not adopted, as it turned out: her father was a blond, blue-eyed American, her mother a Hong Kong native, porcelain skinned, exquisite; between those two visions Celia had faded to plain; the parents had looked distressed and, very faintly, impatient.

Minnie looked after her with anguish and just a shade of self-importance. “Why don’t you go check on her,” I said, and waved her out. Celia probably shouldn’t be left alone anyway.

The rest of them looked at me with absolute credulity, with faces wiped clean of attitude, of bluff. I told them that they weren’t imagining it, this was all horrible. I told them there was no way around but through. I said we had one another and to be kind. I knew what I was saying was true, but it felt like there was no truth to be had except the finality of Zack’s absence.

Then I dismissed them, went and dumped the whole sorry mess in Nancy Beamer’s lap—she’d round up everyone, subs, advisors, dorm parents, and I even told her to tell May; I wasn’t going to do it—and then I went back to relieve Dex, who was reading aloud to the class and actually had them laughing. Oh ye Dexes, oh ye salt of the earth. Ye competent and uncomplicated. We shall rise up and call ye blessed.

WHEN I WENT TO NICKY’S
after classes were over, it was clear May had recently been there: papers were stacked, dishes washed, pillows fluffed. That precise V dent in each one. Maybe I’d just missed her. I sensed the remnants of freshness, of purpose, in the air. How quickly she’d moved through, establishing order.

Nicky didn’t answer when I called out to him.

He was in bed, on his side, facing away from the door, a position I knew, remembered, and beside him on the floor a liter of vodka, nearly empty. May’s ministrations had stopped at that bottle. She had left it there for me to see. I went and stood over him, so I could see his face. “Nicky.” He grunted at me, opened unfocused eyes, closed them. I could smell it now, in the room, in his evaporating sweat.

I reached down and shook him, hard, my hand, my arm seeming separate from me—they had their own ideas. I held on too tight to his ropy young self, oh my poor poor emaciated brother. I took pleasure in squeezing too hard. I felt for a moment what I could do if I let my control lapse altogether.

“Ow,” he said, turning over to his back. He groaned and dragged his eyes open again. “Charlie, what the hell.”

“What the fuck have you been doing?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Do you do this a lot? How long has this been going on?” He curled up again, small, small. “It’s just this once, right? You don’t
do
this. Do you hear me? No. You don’t. You don’t hear me and you
don’t do this
!”

He was muttering something into the filthy bedclothes. I shook him again. “I can’t hear you.”

I was waiting for him to start talking about Zack. Something that would make me furious.
That empty chair. Celia’s so upset
. But instead he said, “I’m sorry I said I would stay here forever. I’m sorry.”

I let go of his arm. I sat on the edge of the bed. I’d had a rudimentary plan when I came over: I was going to talk him down, or up, whichever way he needed to go. Then I was going to take him back to campus, in time for dinner; I was going to sit there in the dining hall with him, with his wet hair freshly combed, maybe a fresh cut on his now-smooth chin, the circles still there under his eyes, gray velvet,
the circles that I’d seen May smooth with one gentle finger, and I was going to watch the parade. All the girls, and the boys too, marching, no, drifting by, lingering: all deferential, all acolytes. All hoping. A long slow line of those kids, fresh and fortunate, wanting him, as we always want the rare, the delicate, the souls with the air of elsewhere.