‘Does he seem to even get it? About our mom?’
‘Hard to say with Ben. If he does, we didn’t see it. So, listen. You were in New York, right? I heard you were in New York. I heard you work in one of the World Trade Center towers, but I’m guessing that’s one of those small-town, get-it-wrong things.’
‘No, that was true. Past tense, though. I
worked
in the towers. Nobody works in them now except forensic specialists and fire crews. And even then it depends on your definition of the word “in”.’
‘Right. I knew that. So … where were you? When it happened?’
‘Home. I was a little late getting out of the house.’
‘Whoa. So you would’ve been …’
‘Yeah. I would have been. But, as it turns out, I’m not.’
‘So, did you hear it, or turn on the TV, or …?’
‘I live right across the river from lower Manhattan. I had a perfect view.’
‘You watched it?’
I didn’t answer. It wasn’t a decision so much. More an absence of emotional fuel. Instead I watched as Larry pressed the lighter to the end of his cigarette, then puffed until it was drawing well. He cracked the window to draw out some of the smoke.
‘How’d you feel?’ he asked.
And I thought, Oh, crap. Now I’m on a therapist’s couch? And then I thought, You really need an answer to that? Like you’re thinking I might say great? I watched it and felt great? But I knew it was just my exhaustion, and really not so much Larry’s failing. So I said nothing at all.
Larry took a long pull off the Marlboro, tucked high in the crook of his first two fingers.
‘Christ,’ he said. ‘That must’ve been something.’
‘Look. Sorry. I’m just really tired. I haven’t slept in days. I mean, maybe an hour once or twice, but nothing really. I’ve been on the road this whole time. We’ll get together. Catch up. I just need a couple nights’ sleep.’
‘Have to be soon, though. I’m shipping out.’
‘To …?’
‘Don’t know yet. We’ll see. I’m National Guard. I been National Guard six years, man. Nearly as long as you been gone. We been ready for six years. Three of us from Norville: me and Paul Kager and Vince Buck. You remember them, right? The National Guard Three. We’ll
be
the first to ship out. First, I think they’ll put us on defending some key US targets. But if we go to war the Guard’ll be the first ones over there. You know. Afghanistan. I hope so. I’d like to give ’em a fresh look at what they started.’
‘Sounds pointless,’ I said.
I didn’t mean the part about defending. I meant the part about what he wanted to give them. I actually hadn’t mean to say it at all. Any of it. I’d thought I’d only thought it. But then I heard it in my ears.
‘What?’ Larry asked. ‘What’d you say, man?’
It was clear, in the way he said it, that he’d heard me just fine.
‘Oh, crap, Larry. Look, I’m sorry. I’m just like the freaking walking wounded right now. I don’t know what I’m saying at this point.’
A long silence. Then I felt his hand clap down on my shoulder.
‘Yeah, well. Look. We got you home.’
I looked up to see him pull into the driveway of the house I’d lived in for eighteen years. From the day I came home from the maternity hospital to the day I went off to college, believing in my heart that I’d left Nowhere-ville for good and for ever.
I still refused to call it home.
I went first to the Jesperses, next door, thinking they had Ben.
I stood in front of their door with my oversize pack at
my
feet, and knocked, expecting Phil to answer. Instead I got his wife, Patty. She looked pretty ruined, not to mention more than six years older. Her long hair was uncombed, and she brushed it off her face with her hands. I was pretty sure I saw some gray I’d never seen before.
‘Oh, my God,’ she said. ‘Oh, thank God. You finally made it.’
‘Yeah. Sorry it took so long.’
‘Well, honey, it’s not your fault.’ She moved in and trapped me in a bear hug I’d have been happier without. ‘I mean, no planes. I heard all the rental cars in the country were rented out, even.’
‘Yeah. I heard that, too. From every rental car company I called.’
‘Well, we’re just so relieved to see you. And, first of all, before I say another word, we are so, so sorry about your mom. Poor baby, you must just be devastated. I didn’t want to miss saying that. But … and please don’t take this the wrong way, honey … we love Ben. No way we’d let him be on his own, even for a couple or three days. But, honestly, honey, we had no idea. We really don’t have the patience for it. Not at all. We raised two of our own, and that’s enough for the whole “Are we there yet?” thing.’
‘Yeah. How
is
Mark, anyway?’ One of the other guys I’d gone to high school with, not to mention a same-age next-door neighbor for eighteen years.
‘Oh, fine, but now he’s talking about enlisting, and I’d like to wring his neck.’
‘Lot of that going around,’ I said.
‘Well, I guess folks figure something needs to be done.’
That’s when it hit me that I had no energy for digressions. Even though this one was my own fault. I’d have to be more careful.
‘But … back to Ben. You told him about …’
‘Oh, sure, honey. We told him everything, as nice as we could, we even took him in to your mom’s doctor so he could explain to Ben all about what an aneurysm is. And then on the way home he asks, for about the hundredth time, when she’s coming back. We’re just about running out of … well, we just can’t take much more.’
‘Send him out, then.’
‘Oh, he’s not here.’
‘He’s not? Mr Jespers said—’
‘We tried, honey, God knows we tried. But you know how your brother is. Everything’s got to be familiar. Got to be his own little routine. So we’ve been putting him to bed in his own bed, and then the last few nights Phil slept on the couch over there, case he needed something in the night, or got scared. But tonight we figured, from when you called and all, that you’d be in soon enough. Ben goes to bed at eight. Every night. Eight. Not a minute sooner. Not a minute later. Wait, let me get you the key.’
She disappeared from the doorway, and I stood, shivering slightly. I looked up into the yellowish,
bug-repellent
porch light and squinted. I was so tired that just for an instant I lost track of my surroundings. Things whited out, the way they do in that split second just before you lose consciousness.
Part of me was wishing she wouldn’t come back. Because I didn’t have the energy for her. But that was stupid, of course. I needed the key.
A second later she reappeared, and pressed it into my hand.
‘You’ll have to take him to work in the morning. He goes in early.’
‘Ben has a job?’
‘Oh, yeah. Sure, honey. You didn’t know? Ben’s been bagging groceries for near on to two and a half years. It’s working out real good. Everybody likes him. Somebody has to drive him there and pick him up, though. He can’t ride the bus. Your mom tried to teach him to ride the bus, but he got lost every time. Every damn time. One time it took her half the day to find him again, even though the whole damn town was on alert to be looking out for him.’
Mom’s older son got a job bagging groceries right around the time ‘her baby’ got a job with one of the best ad firms in New York. Much as I was accustomed to Ben’s condition, this seemed weird.
I needed to get out of this conversation. I needed sleep.
‘I don’t have a car, though.’
‘Take your mom’s car.’
‘Oh. Right. Do you know where she keeps her keys?’
‘No. I don’t. Sorry. But maybe Ben does.’
Sure. Cling to that, let’s.
‘Well, goodnight,’ I said. ‘Thanks for looking after him.’
‘It was an emergency, honey, but thank God you got home. That’s all I can say. Phil and I are just too old for the whole Ben thing. Maybe you’ll do better, cause you’re young. Good luck.’
‘Thanks,’ I said.
‘You’re gonna need some luck.’
I didn’t answer that one. I just cut across the lawn to my childhood home, thinking, Don’t you really figure that last comment would have been better left unsaid?
All the lights were off in the house, but when I opened the front door with my key and stepped into the living room, I could see everything clearly. Too clearly. The room was suffused with a sort of ghostly glow. In my altered state of exhaustion, it seemed nearly supernatural. But it didn’t take long to figure out there was a night light in every room.
I wandered over to the mantel first, because the photos drew me.
My mom and dad at their wedding. My mom and dad with Ben and me, ages maybe four and ten. I looked at the sharp focus in Ben’s eyes, the slight glint of defiance and mischief. I’d known Ben that way for the first eight years of my life. Then I’d lived with the changed Ben for
ten.
I wondered if I was really sure who I expected to meet again in the morning, though my rational mind certainly knew what was what in that situation.
Then there was the photo of me winning statewide track in high school, and Ben at age twelve, holding a twenty-inch trout in a tippy canoe (the tippiness didn’t show in the photo, but I remembered) on Council Grove Lake.
I looked again at the photo of my parents, and was hit with a strange and disturbing thought.
I’m an orphan.
Then I shook it away again. Orphans were little waifs, dependant minors. I was a grown man whose parents were both dead. Lots of adults fell into that category. Granted, most were older than me.
Oddly, that chain of thought did not bring me dangerously close to tears. The next one did.
I looked at the mantel itself, and got a sudden flash of our family’s Christmas village.
Every year my mom would take down all the photos and knick-knacks and construct the village with decorations that spent the rest of the year hiding, boxed, in the attic, just waiting for their season to shine.
She used stacks of books for hills, then covered them with chicken wire and cotton batting. The little houses had holes in the back for the bulb of a Christmas light to be inserted, so the houses on the hills glowed with light, as though occupied. A little horse-drawn sled spent the whole season headed down a cotton hill
toward
a mirror lake it would never reach. On the lake, a tiny porcelain skunk ice-skated, and a family of inch-high deer drank from the silver water.
And that was the spot where I nearly lost it. But I held tight. I was too unguarded to let anything like real emotion happen now. It would flip me and pin me, and I would lose. Maybe permanently. I had to rest and be strong enough for that fight.
I wandered into the glowing kitchen in search of something to eat. But I only got smacked again. On the door of the refrigerator, held on with food magnets (an ear of corn, a strawberry, a carrot, an ice-cream cone, a banana), were all five of the postcards I’d sent my mom from New York.
First I was merely struck by their dullness and lack of imagination. The Empire State building. Rockefeller Center. The Statue of Liberty. The Brooklyn Bridge. Had I really put so little time and attention into my choices? Or had I thought my choices would seem appropriate from this end of the world? Now I stood on this end of the world with them, and they just seemed sad.
The fifth card was a photo of the World Trade Center. The Twin Towers. It zapped my body with a jolt of electricity. I could feel it buzzing for many seconds, eerie and slow to fade. I pulled the postcard off the fridge, dropping its ice-cream cone magnet on to the kitchen linoleum. I bent down and picked it up, feeling vaguely dizzy, and stuck the postcard back on
the
fridge with the photo side in. So I wouldn’t have to look at it.
Of course, that left the message side out.
It was dated 30 April 1999. ‘Dear Mom,’ it said. ‘Here it is, the job of a lifetime. I’m on top of the world. Wish me luck. Love, Rusty.’
Rusty? Why did I sign it Rusty? I’d left that name behind on my way to college.
Amazingly, none of that was the genuine zap I referred to.
It was the role reversal. The surrealistic role reversal. I’d sent those postcards from a place I viewed as the true world, the only important world, as if dropping them into a void. Almost as if the address on the card had never existed, or at the very least, was not entirely real.
Maybe that’s why I had signed it ‘Rusty’. What did it matter, in fiction?
Now I stood on the wrong end of the cards’ journey. And this place was all too real. And the place I’d believed in so strongly, invested in so fully, had crumbled like a house of cards.
I shook my head a little, and tried to clear away any stray thoughts and feelings. I told myself I’d feel better after something to eat.
To my surprise, the fridge was brimming with food. Casserole dish after casserole dish, some covered with foil, some with plastic wrap, some with their own matching Pyrex covers. And Tupperware. Tupperware abounded.
Then I realized I shouldn’t have been surprised. Family friends and neighbors had been bringing food for Ben. Of course they had. People do that when somebody dies. Even if the survivor is fully capable. Even if the grieving survivor isn’t Ben.
I rummaged through a few casserole dishes and settled on a noodle dish with some kind of ground meat in a creamy-looking sauce. It looked like a genuine stroganoff, and very unlike anything that could be purchased at a gas station mini-mart.
I heated a mound of it in the microwave. But I only ate two or three bites.
It tasted like something made from a mix, out of a box. The sauce tasted like chemicals. Like butter and milk stirred together with a packet of artificial flavoring. But that wasn’t the worst of it. It tasted familiar. It tasted like my childhood. My personal past.
I dumped it into the garbage and left the plate soaking in the sink.
I stuck my head into my old bedroom. It had been converted into a TV room, with two stuffed chairs, and Mom’s sewing machine on a table in the corner. But my trophy case was still there, my track trophies still on display.
The door to Ben’s bedroom was closed, but a spill of glowing light under the door told me his night light was brighter than all the rest. Maybe brighter than all the rest put together. I didn’t open the door. I let sleeping brothers lie.