The Visibles (27 page)

“I’m not going to get into Johns Hopkins,” I hissed.

“Isn’t the University of Maryland close, too?” Rosemary suggested.

“
And
there’s that job,” Philip added.

I cut my eyes over to him. “I couldn’t get that job.”

“You don’t know that.”

“What job?” Steven asked.

“It’s nothing,” I said, stomping on Philip’s foot.

“It’s a research associate job,” Philip said excitedly, ignoring me. “A friend of mine’s wife works at a biomedical institute near Baltimore. They help develop drugs and treatments by doing genetic research. I told him about Summer’s degree, and he said she should apply.”

“That sounds wonderful.” There was a frozen, hopeful smile on Rosemary’s face.

“It’s working with fruit flies,” I said limply. “It’s not
that
wonderful.”

“So?” my father said. “You worked with plenty of fruit flies in college.”

“It’s…” I shook my head. “I’m not going to get it, okay?”

I glowered at Philip. He tilted his head, lifted his shoulders up to chin level.

The waitress gingerly set down our dinners, warning us that the plates were hot. My father smacked his lips and said,
Mmm.
I could feel Philip’s eyes still on me, but then Angie asked him a question about digital cameras, something else he knew a lot about. I let the warm, soothing risotto wash over me, trying to savor this moment—I was in Brooklyn, which I’d missed ever since I’d moved to Cobalt and then Annapolis. Only, the restaurant was dingy and small—I was practically sitting in the lap of the diner next to me. Outside, scattered trash and chicken bones lined the gutters. A cab honked its dissonant horn when an SUV paused too long when the traffic light turned green. I
felt hypersensitive to the smells and noise, as if I’d never lived in the city at all.

Between dinner and dessert, Rosemary stood up and checked the vibrating phone on her hip. “Ugh, work,” she groaned.

“I’m going to get some air, too,” my father said. And Philip slid back his chair, heading for the bathroom. Angie and Steven remained, draining the rest of their wine glasses. Steven flagged down the waitress and asked for another carafe of wine.

I watched Rosemary weaving around the tables for the door. “Don’t you think it’s strange that she has to check in with work?” I mused aloud. “It’s just a plant store. And it’s not like she even
owns
the place. She’s just an employee.”

Angie twisted up her mouth. “I think she’s nice.”

“I’m just saying it’s silly, is all.”

Steven simply didn’t react. I watched as he took Angie’s hand. It still astounded me, the tender way he touched her. I’d had no idea Steven had it in him.

Steven leaned forward. “Was Philip in your grade? I can’t place him.”

I grabbed my wine glass and swallowed the rest, rallying. “He’s from Cobalt. He was Stella’s neighbor. That’s probably how you remember him.”

I watched the realization drip down his face. “Ah.” He laughed, then smiled, then gave me a look of disbelief. “He was still living there? Down the street? That’s how you know him?”

I shook my head. “Samantha was in touch with him. We emailed and talked on the phone for a while, and then I visited him. He was living in New York at the time, actually, but then his job transferred him to Annapolis.”

Steven sat back. His eyes were on the ceiling, and I could tell he was reliving that night he confronted me in Philip’s yard. I felt embarrassed, as I knew I would. “So I guess it’s serious, huh, if you moved in with him?” Steven finally asked.

“Not necessarily.”

Angie and Steven exchanged a glance, their eyebrows raised.

“It’s not like we’re engaged,” I said hurriedly. “I mean, who knows, right? We might not marry anybody, Steven, with the models we had for parents. And, I mean, we were into some pretty weird stuff as kids. It’s not like we had a normal childhood.”

Steven just stared, aghast.

“Well, he seems really nice,” Angie said quietly. She picked up her messenger bag and stood. “Excuse me.”

We watched as she slipped out the front door, found my father, rooted through her bag, and lit up a cigarette. Then Steven dumped the rest of the first carafe of wine into his glass. “I would appreciate it if you didn’t discuss some of the things I used to be into,” he said quietly. “Like, you know. That time in Cobalt. All that crazy stuff I used to say. I mean, Angie doesn’t really know about any of that. She wouldn’t get it.”

I crossed my arms over my chest and felt my heart knocking against my wrist. “These days, I thought you’d be saying I told you so.”

Steven’s Adam’s apple bobbed. “Look—”

But I was on a roll. Here he was, finally in front of me. “I thought you’d be saying that we should’ve sent every foreigner out of the country when we had a chance. That we should’ve screened everyone, whoever they were. That this was bound to happen—everyone was saying it wouldn’t, but they were too stupid to pay attention. You would’ve found Mohamed Atta and killed him with your bare hands. You would’ve snuffed out every last one of them, and then we wouldn’t be in this mess.”

“Summer,” Steven warned. “That’s not fair.”

I raised an eyebrow. My cheeks felt seared. “It’s not?”

Something I’d been holding in for years was now wafting around the room, vaporous and spectral. I wasn’t sure if it felt good or not. I didn’t even know what I was angry about, exactly, and what chances Steven had taken from me. Philip and I had still ended up in the same place, after all. Hadn’t we?

But it was more than that—Steven could have been a better brother to me. And maybe I could’ve been a better sister to him. We hadn’t really tried hard enough, neither of us. We had both a lot and very little to work with.

“It was just a phase I was going through.” Steven ran his hands through his thinning hair, making it spike up. “It was just a thing, okay?”

I sighed, suddenly out of energy. “Yeah. Okay.”

He pulled out the collar of his shirt. “Jesus. I feel like they turned up the heat, huh?” Steven twisted around and looked at Angie, who was leaning against the front window. We couldn’t see her cigarette, so it looked as if there were a thin curl of smoke rising up from the center of her palm.

Then I noticed something else. I leaned forward. “Is Dad
smoking
?”

My father stood next to Angie. He put a cigarette to his lips, breathed in, and blew a smoke ring toward Angie’s head. Angie laughed.

“I guess he is,” Steven said, his voice flat.

I sighed. “Dad keeps all kinds of secrets.”

Steven frowned, uncertain. “I doubt he does from you.”

“Ha.” It came out hard, sharp.

“I’m serious. You guys are, like, the same. You always were. I always felt so jealous, actually, how easily you understood him.”

An incredulous laugh caught in my throat, but there was no trace of mockery in his face anywhere. “Well, I don’t understand why he’s smoking,” I finally said.

For one moment, even though we barely knew each other, we were connected. Steven and I held the same past that started everything, that made everything flip. Once Angie and Philip and my father and Rosemary returned, we’d be splintered apart again, but right then it was just the two of us, The Schnoz, spying on our mysterious father. Back then we’d been so certain he was a superhero, and thought that since we looked like him, we’d grow up to be superheroes, too.

It was amazing how the old Brooklyn neighborhood had remained crystallized in time. There was Mrs. Delaney walking one of her many yellow Labs, still wearing that big purple parka that made her look like Grimace from the McDonald’s commercials. There was Mr. Gould, still dancing in front of the window—he never could figure out how to
close the curtains. There was Mrs. Fry’s same collection of pinwheels, trapped under a film of ice.

I put the key in the lock, anticipating the dogs’ jingling collars until I remembered they were in Vermont. The apartment looked as I had expected it would—boxes everywhere, most of the furniture gone, a big hole in the kitchen where the fridge used to be. New granite countertops and dark cherry cabinets in the kitchen. A new coat of paint on the walls, and new light fixtures in the kitchen and living room. My father had taken the curtains off the windows and stripped the freshly sanded wood floors of their rugs, making the whole place seem enormous.

We went to my bedroom. There was a poster of the Smashing Pumpkins on the wall. Pairs and pairs of Gap jeans in the closet. My old
Baby-sitters Club
s from elementary school were on the bookshelves, as were my biology textbooks. I opened a random drawer; inside were things I hadn’t thought about in years. The pale pink leotard and iridescent tights from the year my mother urged me to try ballet. A little crystal box someone had given me in a Secret Santa exchange. A Nintendo Game Boy, without batteries. I shut the drawer again.

Philip swayed in the doorway. “So this is it.”

“Only for a little while longer, I guess.”

“I used to imagine you here, you know,” he said. “When we were young.”

I smiled into my chest. “What did you imagine me doing?”

“Just…being you. Lying in your bed. Looking in the mirror. I imagined you thinking about me, maybe.”

We’d had this conversation thousands of times by now—that the time we met in high school during my grandmother’s funeral was more significant than either of us had ever dared to let on, but we’d both felt silly, afterward, for holding on to it. But I guess it wasn’t silly, after all.

Over those first long phone conversations, me in Cobalt, helping Stella through the last few months of her life, Philip in New York, before his company moved him to Annapolis, I could connect to him in a way
I had never been able to connect to anyone. I could tell him things I’d told no one else. Maybe it was because we weren’t face to face, or maybe it was because he told me things about himself, too—that he had been teased all his life for his father’s religion and appearance. That he’d had an obsession with the ThunderCats cartoon when he was young, and wished that he could just become a ThunderCat to escape harsh, confusing pre-adolescence. That one girl he had dated had called him too feminine and sensitive and had cheated on him. He didn’t seem sensitive like my father, though—he just seemed willing to talk. And willing to accept what I had to say.

With that connection, though, came a vulnerability I’d never really felt before, and with that vulnerability came paranoia. I was stunned when he asked me to move to Annapolis with him after Stella died. I waffled over it for a few days, wondering if I really should go. I was afraid that soon enough Philip and I would discover the hateful things about each other, and our relationship would recede into alienation. Or we’d realize that there was no plausible way two people who met once as teenagers would actually end up together. There were some days when I didn’t think about it, but most days I did, at least a little.

I pulled the quilted comforter back and sat down on my old bed. “You didn’t have to kiss my dad’s ass like that, you know.”

“I didn’t kiss his ass.” Philip looked surprised.

“Yeah, you did. How you loved his shirt? How you loved
Vermont
? You’ve never been to Vermont.”

“I didn’t say I’d been. I said I wanted to go. And anyway, what’s wrong with wanting him to like me?”

The back of my neck ached, the same way it used to after I played Steven’s video games too long. I always played so clenched and tense, afraid that an enemy would come out from the pixilated ether and disintegrate me with his mace or sword or three fire-breathing heads. “My dad was really nervous tonight, wasn’t he?”

“Well, he was seeing all of you again. It’s been a while, right?”

“No, I think there was more than just that.” I thought about my father’s fluttering hands, how he’d gone outside to smoke. I had confronted him about it afterward and he’d shrugged, saying it wasn’t a
habit or anything, just something he picked up during his boring days at Merewether. “Maybe he’s tense about selling the house. Or maybe he’s tense about me. It’s not like I’ve talked to him much.”

“You talk to him all the time.”

“Yes, but not
real
talk.”

“So have a real talk with him.”

I wandered out into the hall, made a right, and entered my father’s bedroom. There was a bleached mark in the wood floor at the foot of the bed, the leather box’s old spot. There were no curtains to frame the big square windows, and the Lower Manhattan skyline spread out before us, missing a couple of its most essential buildings. Tiny lights strung on the tops of the South Street Seaport clipper ships twinkled and danced. Headlights drifted up the FDR.

“What are you doing?” Philip asked, scaring me. He’d changed into his pale blue hospital-scrub pajama bottoms. He’d had them since his mom had cancer, when he was a teenager.

I didn’t turn. “Why did you tell them about that research job?”

I could tell Philip was smiling. “I think it’s a great job for you.”

He had brought a printout to me a few weeks ago.
The Developmental and Molecular Pathways division is looking for talented, self-motivated scientists interested in using Drosophila as a genetic model system for the elucidation of disease-associated pathways and identification of target genes and compounds.
As I studied it, he stood back, arms crossed over his chest, an exuberant smile on his face.

“I didn’t want my father to know about that job,” I answered now. “I didn’t want anyone to know.”

“Why? I know someone. You would at least get an interview.”

I glared at him. I’d known about RNA interference, which was what the job was mostly about, for a while. It was a process where a group of very tiny molecules stopped pieces of RNA from doing damaging things, like letting virulent viruses take over a cell and attack the body. The action the molecule performed was called
silencing
—I always imagined that they were clapping a hand over the RNA strand’s mouth, telling it to shut up and stop making trouble. The protein that cleaved the RNA strand in two was called a
dicer,
which made me think of
the complicated gadgets we sold at Chow’s. Perhaps one day an RNA interference dicer would be packaged and on the shelves next to the Cuisinarts. I’d be the only one with the knowledge to sell it.