The Things a Brother Knows (20 page)

She unzips my backpack and takes out my cell phone and flower hat. She turns me back to face her, then programs her number into my phone with her nail-bitten thumbs.

“I’ve already followed you over ten miles on foot.” She hands my phone back to me. “Now it’s up to you.”

She puts my hat on my head. Grabs the wide brim with both hands and pulls me into her. She kisses me lightly. Way too quickly. Then she smiles.

“And win back your Red Sox cap, will you? This one doesn’t go with your eyes.”

W
E WALK UNTIL SUNDOWN
.

We stop, finally, to spend the night in Philadelphia: the City of Brotherly Love. The motto comes from William Penn, the English Quaker, who imagined the area as a place where everyone, no matter his color, religion or background, could come and live in harmony and peace.

I learn all this from the motel pamphlet, which I’m reading for the second time, because Bo won’t talk to me. In fact, our room is like a Quaker meetinghouse. Totally silent.

Some city of brotherly love.

“I’m sorry,” I say.

Nothing. I wish he’d tell that story about Celine again. I wish he’d say something. Anything.

I get up from my bed and I go to the table and I take out the cards and I shuffle them. I do this because it gives me something to do. And I do it because I like the way the cards feel in my hands. I like the soothing sound of a perfect bridge, like running your finger over the teeth of a comb.

“I mean, you’ve got to try and see where I’m coming
from. I just want to know. I want to know what you’re doing. Why we’re here. Where we’re going. I’m kind of flying blind. I don’t know if you’ve ever been there. If you’ve ever been in a situation where you’ve not known what it is you’re doing. It’s not an easy place to be.”

I take a few of the nuts we use for betting and I pop them into my mouth without thinking about it.

“So I’m sorry, Boaz. I’m sorry I went looking through your pack. I really am.”

He gets up from his bed and comes over to the table, and he takes the seat across from me.

“Deal,” he says.

I start whipping cards his way. I don’t give him a chance to change his mind.

“I know what it’s like to not know what you’re doing.”

“You do?” I ask.

“Yes. I do. So deal.”

I wake to someone pounding on the door.

Bo’s bed is empty, but I hear the shower running so I know it’s not him.

Celine
.

I throw on my cargo pants and run to the door and fling it open to find Zim and Pearl. He’s got one arm draped around her shoulder and a large, wrapped gift in the other.

“Happy birthday, my birthday brother.”

“What? How?”

Then I remember that Pearl was the last person I talked to before I went to sleep and I read to her from the motel
brochure. In there somewhere it must have mentioned the name.

“Richard and I decided your eighteenth birthday warranted a road trip,” she says.

“But? How?”

“Well.” Zim’s cheeks redden. “She came over last night at midnight. To, you know, be the first to wish me a happy birthday. And then we got to talking about you, and how my birthday wouldn’t be the same without you because my birthday belongs to us, so we decided to come surprise you.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah. Wow. There I was, alone with a girl in my room at midnight, and I gave it all up for you.”

“I’m the girl,” Pearl says. “In case that wasn’t obvious.”

“Yeah, I get it.”

“So happy birthday,” Zim says.

“You too.”

The funny thing is, I didn’t even remember. So much of growing up you wait until the day you’re eighteen, when the world sees you as an adult, and then the day finally comes, and I can’t even remember.

“Come in,” I say.

“We can’t,” Zim says. “We both have to be at work in six hours and it took us five and a half to get here.”

“You’re really going to turn around? Right now? You’re going to drive all the way back?”

“Yep,” Pearl says. “Luckily, there’s good company.”

She steps across the threshold to my room and kisses me on the cheek. “Happy birthday, Levi.”

Zim hands me the wrapped gift.

“But I don’t have anything for you,” I say.

“That’s all right. I’ll consider you not giving me any shit about Pearl my birthday gift.”

They look crazy happy standing on the threshold of my motel room. They’re here. They’ve come all this way to see me. And I’m guessing they took the drive just to sit next to each other and to hold each other’s hands. And I get that. Because I’d drive twelve, twenty, one hundred hours just to sit next to Celine. But also, they came to see me. I’m not getting left behind.

He gives me one of those guy hugs with lots of hard pats on the back and then I watch them walk down the stairs to Pearl’s car. He has his hand on her elbow. I watch Zim open the passenger door for her. She climbs in and he walks around to the driver’s side and starts up her car, and they take off.

Bo is still in the shower. He takes showers that last longer than the administrations of some small nations. I sit down on the bed and unwrap Zim’s gift.

It’s his skateboard.

Bo comes out with a towel wrapped around his waist and a puzzled look on his face.

“It’s Zim’s,” I say. “I don’t have one anymore. But we used to skate all the time. We lived for skating.”

“I remember.”

“Zim and Pearl stopped by and dropped it off for me.” I turn it over in my hands. “It’s my birthday.”

Bo pulls on his clothes. He doesn’t need to bother
toweling off his head. He doesn’t have enough hair to hold water.

“I guess I missed a lot in the shower.”

“Your showers last forever.”

Bo sits down next to me. He spins one of the skateboard’s wheels.

“I’ve gone a month without a shower. And even when there were showers to be had, you got in and got out ’cause some other guy was waiting. Often we were in old barracks that had no hot water, so contractors were hired to install water heaters, and sometimes they screwed up the installation, and there’ve been like twenty deaths from electrocution, where guys step in and get electrocuted just turning on the faucet. I never saw it happen, but it’s one of those things you hear about. So taking a long, hot shower in a place where it feels safe to do so is maybe the best part of being back.”

The wheel on the board stops spinning.

“So that’s why I take long showers,” he says.

“Thanks.” I nod. “That’s good to know.”

“You’re welcome.” He makes a move to get up, but then he sits back down next to me. “Is this your worst birthday ever?”

“No, of course not.”

“I’m not counting the one where the magician never showed and I threw on Abba’s tie and tried to make a penny disappear up my sleeve and all your friends booed me.”

I’d forgotten all about that. I was turning five.

I laugh. “That was worse. So was the one where we went looking for fossils.”

“Yeah. The streets of suburban Boston are practically paved with dinosaur relics. I tried to talk you out of that one, but you’d have none of it.”

“See? This is so not my worst birthday ever.”

“Good. Because it’s my best of your birthdays.”

I ride on Zim’s board, slowly so that I keep pace with Bo. This isn’t a time for liptricks or ollies. I skate in a straight line. It sure beats walking.

After a mile or more of silence Bo asks, “Aren’t you going to call Celine?”

“How do you know I haven’t?”

“Just a guess.”

“I will.”

“It’s your eighteenth birthday. Nut up.”

He shoves me off my board and grabs it. He jumps on and pushes off so he’s far enough ahead of me that I can talk in privacy—or at least as much privacy as one can get on the Baltimore Pike.

I flip open my phone. I scroll down to the Cs.

Nothing.

Apparently I don’t know anyone whose first or last name begins with a C. In the space where
Celine
should be I find nothing.

Nada. Zip. Zero.

My heart sinks.

But I saw her. I saw her program her number in. She did it right in front of me.

Or was that just an elaborate ruse? Something she did to make it seem as if she liked me when really she never wanted to hear from me again?

I close the phone. Then I open it. I scroll down, starting with the As. I scroll frantically and then I find her. Right below
Demario’s Pizza
. Right above
Dov
.

Dion, Celine
.

I press send.

Smacked down, instantly, by the dreaded voice mail.

Beep
.

“Hey, Celine. It’s Levi. How are you recovering from the walk? I tend to feel it in my lower back, and I’m pretty used to this whole walking thing, so I can only imagine how your lower back feels. Anyway, that’s why I called. To see how your lower back is doing and also the rest of you. Call me if you want. Or if you don’t want you could still call me just to be nice. Because, like, it’s my birthday, so I figure if you don’t call—”

Beep
.

Okay, so I tend to ramble. I don’t know how to do the brief voice-mail message. I wish I’d thought it out more. Chosen my words carefully. But I don’t really care. She left me her number. That’s what matters.

I run to catch up with Bo. My brother, on wheels.

Five days: that’s about how far I figure we are from Washington.

Six days: that’s when the support the troops rally is scheduled to take place on the Mall.

Two a.m.: that’s what time it is, and I can’t sleep.

I stare at the ceiling.

And I get to thinking. All sorts of thinking.

I wait until I’m certain Bo is out. It’s hard to get a handle on the depth of his breathing over the sound of the radio static, but I can see the steady rise and fall of his chest, so I’m pretty sure he’s a goner.

I tiptoe out of the room in my socks and head to the motel’s business center. Not surprisingly, it’s deserted. For one thing, it’s two in the morning. For another, who comes to this crap motel to do business?

I go online.

I read about the rally. It’s a big one. It even has its own Web site: A Million Strong for America! I have no idea if that’s a realistic number. Probably not. But maybe so. Maybe people are flying, driving, walking in from all across the country.

BRING YOUR FLAGS
!! screams a banner across the bottom of the home page.

Could that be it? Could that be all the clown is hiding? A flag folded tight enough to fit inside a child’s shoe box?

I search on. I read more.

Because while I was lying there not sleeping, while I was watching the digital numbers on the motel clock march toward daylight, while I was listening to the static and the faint sound of my brother breathing, I got to thinking about how little I’ve bothered even trying to understand.

I’m not pro or anti. I’m just nothing.

I’m just a nothing who can’t sleep.

So now I’m sitting in the motel business center in the deadest dead of night, and I’m thinking, and I’m reading, and I’m learning, and I’m getting ready to be one of a million strong.

I’m getting ready to take a side.

T
HE NEXT MORNING
, finally, after all these weeks and miles and blackjack losses, I ask him the big question.

“Why not a car? Or a train? Or a bus? Why are we walking all the way to DC?”

“I just like walking.”

I hop off my skateboard.

“That’s bullshit,” I say.

He doesn’t stop.

“You can tell me.” I holler because now there’s a distance growing between us. “I want to know.”

He doesn’t say anything. I stand there with my board in my hands in the middle of another one of those moments.

I must choose my path.

I could turn around and ride Zim’s old skateboard home. I could accept Bo’s brush-off answer, let it go at that. Or I could catch up to him and make him see that I want to know. I really want to know. I want to know because I care about him and all this matters to me. He matters to me.

A couple of good kicks and I’m right beside him again.

“You take long, hot showers because they make you feel safe. I know that. You told me that and it’s okay. Nothing terrible happened because you shared that information with me. So. Why don’t you want to ride in cars?”

He doesn’t look at me. He doesn’t answer. He walks and I ride in silence, and together we cross the border into Maryland. I imagine at some point people fought hard for these borders. That these sorts of divisions mattered to somebody. But now you wouldn’t even know you’d left one place for the next if it weren’t for the sign welcoming you here and informing you that the state flower is the black-eyed Susan, the bird is the Baltimore oriole and the motto is
Manly Deeds, Womanly Words
.

“We were on the outskirts of this province in the north,” he begins. “One of the more hellacious regions in that whole hellacious country, and we’re rolling along, it’s dusk, and you can’t think about IEDs, because if you did, you’d never get in your Humvee in the first place, and IEDs can happen anywhere, anytime, and we know that, we’ve seen that, over and over again, but you just have to move ahead and take it on faith that you won’t be one of the unlucky ones to make their acquaintance.”

If it hadn’t been for my late-night research session, I wouldn’t even know that
IED
stands for improvised explosive device. Otherwise known as a roadside bomb. One of the goals of A Million Strong is to get more Cougars, which are like Humvees on steroids, and are a far better match head to head with an IED.

“So this one night we’re rolling along, and I’m joking with my buddy about something stupid, and the next thing I know there’s this big explosion as our Humvee and this IED are formally introduced. The whole fucking thing just blows apart. One minute everything is quiet, everything is fine, you can even let yourself have a laugh about something not worth remembering, and the next minute your friend is lying three feet away from his legs. And you check yourself. You feel your head, and you feel for your limbs, and everything is there. It doesn’t even make any sense, but everything is there, and you’re fine. And you look at your friend. And you look at his legs. And your brain doesn’t let you comprehend what you’re seeing, but you can’t just pass out. You can’t disappear into blackness. You have to do something. Say something. But what do you say to somebody who is lying three feet from his legs?”