The Things a Brother Knows (11 page)

But no.

Loren is a guy, someone Boaz served with, judging from the nature of their e-mails. Honestly, I barely get what they’re talking about, and maybe someone else would say the same thing about an exchange of messages between me and Zim, or me and Pearl, but this feels different.

Anyway, the one thing I do understand is that Loren doesn’t know what Boaz is up to any more than I do, because when he asked, Boaz just said he’s
passing through Poughkeepsie
.

I figure it should take him around nine days to get there. That’s if he walks about twenty miles a day.

I go back over the neighborhood walks of my past. The ones where I’m sorting through some difficult piece of news. I always had someone next to me, someone to talk to. And it kills me that Boaz, even if he is the King of Silence himself, is on this walk alone.

I stand up and go back to my room. I’m hoping to drift back to sleep, though I’m pretty sure that won’t happen. I climb into bed, pull up the covers and brush up against a foreign object.

I’ve lived my entire life sleeping alone in this bed, so the presence of something next to me, anything next to me, delivers quite the shock.

It’s tucked under the covers, on the side of my bed closest to the wall. I reach for it—a long, rolled-up piece of paper wrapped in a rubber band, frayed around the edges. I slide off the rubber band and unfurl it slowly. In the dim light of my room, my eyes take their time adjusting.

Pastel-colored states and baby-blue oceans swim into view.

My old Rand McNally map.

Boaz must have snuck in here in the dark—maybe he padded across my rug in his tube-socked feet.

I stare at the map while the sun comes up. Boaz didn’t take the time to erase his pencil scrawlings. They practically fill the Atlantic.

Are they clues? Is this an invitation? Does he want me to know where he’s going? Does he want me to find him? Stop him? Join him?

Or is he simply giving me back what I demanded, like a whiny little brother?

I roll up the map. I stash it under my bed.

I never go back to sleep.

I
SIT INSIDE
V
IDEORAMA ALL DAY
, alone but for Bob and the fake buttery smell of microwave popcorn.

Outside in the world people are swimming in creeks. They’re riding bikes, maybe giving a friend a lift on the front handlebars. Somewhere out there a boy is gearing up to kiss a girl for the very first time. Maybe on a camp tennis court, in the fading light of day, to a chorus of just-stirring crickets.

Outside someone is walking toward something.

For something.

Because of something.

I don’t mean to romanticize the messed-up world of my brother, but any way you cut it, as I sit in here running the scanner over bar codes and calculating change for a twenty, I’m wasting the minutes away.

And then I have this revelation that is so totally not a revelation, because I’m pretty sure revelations are supposed to rock your world to the core and this is the most obvious thing ever, but here goes: There’s more to do. More I can do. There is more than this.

I race to Frozurt on my lunch break.

I’ve discovered I’m able to stomach the peach, if it’s the price of spending time with Pearl. She readies my order when she sees me walk in. Granola on top.

“You better eat quick,” she says. “I don’t think Il Duce much likes your lunchtime visits.”

“So what?”

“So we don’t want to make him angry. Nobody likes Il Duce when he’s angry.”

I can see him sitting in the back office, in a swivel chair, talking on the phone and folding paper airplanes.

Pearl leans over the counter. “How’s your day going?”

This isn’t idle talk. She’s asking something bigger. How is
this
day going?

The fifth since he’s been gone.

I tell her how I woke to an empty house. It’s not unusual for Abba to rise early and head in to work. He’s not the type to linger over the paper and a cup of coffee. But today Mom was gone too. She left a note on the table.

Off to interview for a freelance thing
.

Waffles in the fridge
.

So I tell Pearl that waffles don’t belong in the fridge, and Mom doesn’t belong at a job interview. Both disrupt the natural world order.

“I guess it’s time,” Pearl says. “She’s no longer got any business sitting home worrying. And besides, the pay is lousy.”

“She’s got plenty of reason to sit home and worry.”

“She might, but fortunately, she doesn’t know it.”

“But I do.”

“Yes, you do.”

“And I’m going to do something about it.”

When I get home from work there’s a letter waiting for me.

The letter is from Christina Crowley.

I take it up to my room and lock the door behind me. I climb out onto the roof. I hold it in my hands and stare at my name in her handwriting.

I don’t want to open it right away.

I want to know what it feels like to sit with an unopened letter from Christina Crowley in my lap.

I slowly slide my finger under the back flap of the envelope and take out a single sheet of white paper. I unfold it with the precision experts must use in dismantling a bomb.

What do I expect?

A whiff of perfume? A lipstick kiss? A declaration of her undying love in feminine cursive?

Or maybe what I’m hoping for is all those sad little things—perfume, kiss, cursive—not for me, but for my brother, like somehow she’d find it necessary to communicate to me that her love for him didn’t die when he chose to leave her for a war.

What I read instead is a note. All business: Here’s how to reach me in Washington if you need to. Here’s my e-mail, my new cell phone number and the address where I’ll be living, it’s a studio in Georgetown, with Max.

On day eight I go for a run.

Mom started a new job. She’s doing graphic design for an advertising firm. Two months is all she’d commit to. By then she figures, Bo will be back, brand-new digital camera filled up with pictures of the Appalachian Trail. By then she figures, maybe he’ll need her.

Dusk’s arrival hasn’t done much to cool off the day. About every other house has its sprinkler system on, and I go out of my way to run through the drops of water, which disappear from my skin as quickly as they land.

I run through the same streets Boaz took on his way out of the neighborhood, but when I get to the intersection where his route went west, I turn the other way, in toward familiar places.

This is the way to school. To Pearl’s. This is the way into Boston, where I go sometimes when I need a reminder that the world isn’t tiny. That there are places where people look at you just because you happen to be walking by, not because they think they know something about who you are, or what you’ve been through.

I come up on my school. The gate to the athletic field is open.

I run down to the track and knock off eight laps. Two miles. I’m pretty sure this is what guys on the track team do. They run around in circles. Around and around with no place to go. It starts to do my head in, all those circles, so I leave. Back through the gate, out onto the street, and up toward the front of the school.

The streetlamps have switched on even though it isn’t all that dark yet. Big pools of yellow light scatter down the sidewalk ahead of me. I’m closing in on the main building.

We’ve been out a few weeks now. The front of the school is deserted except for one car.

I don’t have to get any closer to see that I know this car. Not as well as Dov’s lime-green Caprice Classic, but that’s only because Dov’s car was my first, and cars, like I imagine it must be with girls, leave their mark on you.

I slow to a walk and try to catch my breath before approaching from the rear.

I made that dent in the left bumper, and afterward Mom wouldn’t let me drive her car for a week.

Something must be terribly wrong.

Why else would she come out in this disappearing dusk to look for me? When has Mom ever come looking for me?

I catch my breath but my pulse won’t slow. I stand for a minute, thinking maybe she’ll see me in the rearview mirror. Then I notice her head in her hands. Her body is shaking.

I come up on the passenger side. I rap the glass lightly. She jumps, but then she sees it’s me. She fumbles for the button on her door and unrolls the window. She wipes her eyes with a tissue she pulls from her purse.

“What are you doing here?” she asks.

I crouch down and lean on the doorframe. “You aren’t looking for me?”

She shakes her head and then blows her nose. She reaches for her keys and finally turns off the ignition. I open
the passenger door and climb into the car, moving her new briefcase to the floor by my feet.

“If you aren’t looking for me, what are you …”

I stop once I catch a glimpse of her view through the windshield. School’s out. Nobody’s around. Summer’s in full swing. Another class has graduated and gone on to start bright futures, but rather than wishing them well, those magnetic letters on the sign in front of the school still welcome Boaz home.

“I’m sorry,” she says.

“For what?”

“For this.” She gestures to the wadded-up Kleenex on the floor of her car. To her tear-streaked face. “I know I should be happy. I should feel relieved. Lucky. We
are
lucky. So incredibly lucky. I know that. I know there are mothers everywhere, all over this country, all over this world, who would give anything to trade places with me. Who would love the chance to cry because they’re
worried
about their sons. There are mothers lost in the wilds of their own grief, who miss the days of worrying. I know. I know worrying is far better than grieving. But, God help me, sometimes I don’t know the difference. I can’t separate the grief from the worry.”

“Mom.” I know I should say more, but in some way it’s as if I’m not even here. Like anyone could have stumbled into this passenger seat in his sweaty running gear and caught her soliloquy.

She’s talking to herself, or to the universe, more than she is to me. But it’s good. It’s good. Because Mom isn’t as clueless as I thought she was.

“It’s good,” I mumble.

She looks at me sideways. She checks her face in the mirror and wipes away the mascara trails from her cheeks.

“You know, this is so far from how I imagined things would turn out, sometimes it seems I’m living someone else’s life.”

“I think I know the feeling.”

She leans back into the driver’s seat. “I never let you boys play with guns or toy soldiers when you were little. When Boaz was a baby, I dressed him in pink striped pajamas. I fed you hot dogs without sulfites. I thought I was doing everything right.”

“You did, Mom. Look.” I point to the sign. “He’s an
American Hero
. You must have done
something
right.”

“I know. It’s just … this isn’t what I wanted for him. I never wanted
this
. And now, I just want him back.”

“He’ll be back.”

She searches my face until she sees me.

“Where do you think he is, Levi? I mean, where do you think he is right this minute?”

I have no idea if she’s testing me. If this is my chance to share what little I know. Or what little I think I know.

“I gave him a cell phone,” she adds. “A new one. But he doesn’t turn it on.”

No, this isn’t my chance. It’s not what she wants, and sometimes, I guess, it’s just better to do what someone wants of you.

“Mom, there’s probably no reception on the trail. I’m sure when he gets somewhere with service, he’ll check in.”

She nods. She looks up at the sign. Her lips move, just the slightest bit, as she reads those words over to herself again.

“Where is he?” she whispers.

All the light has left the sky. The yellow streetlamps make a pathetic effort to tame the darkness.

“I think maybe he’s lying in his new sleeping bag,” I tell her. “I think he’s waiting on the stars.”

I
’M SITTING IN HIS ROOM
. On his bed. The mattress is back on the frame now. I can picture Mom, struggling underneath its unwieldy size.