Ask Him Why (3 page)

He didn’t answer for several beats. Then he said, “Is it not okay?”

“I’m not saying you can’t. Just . . . you know. You never did before.”

Another painfully long silence.

I was tempted to fill it. I didn’t give in to that temptation.

“I . . . ,” he began. Then he stalled again, for many seconds. “I know you heard what Brad said. I felt bad about it. You know. You all huddled under the bed listening to him say a thing like that. Not that it’s very surprising coming from Brad. But I just wanted to make sure . . .” Another brief stall. “. . . that you didn’t feel the same. Like he obviously does. Like I shamed you. I don’t want you to be ashamed of what I did.”

“I don’t even know what you did.”

Joseph sighed. The sigh seemed to collapse part of him. The area around his chest and shoulders. The part that should have held air, or at least been supported by a couple of lungfuls of it.

He pulled away from the dresser. Came and sat on the edge of my bed.

“I refused to go out on a raid,” he said.

“Oh,” I said. When he didn’t go on, I asked, “Can you do that?”

“No,” he said. “You can’t.” Then he laughed. But not the way people laugh when something’s genuinely funny. “Well, of course you
can
. I mean, nobody can stop you from doing what you’re going to do. But it’s highly discouraged. And that’s putting it . . . Well. That’s understating the case so much it’s almost funny. They make sure there’s a high price to pay for not obeying a direct order. But if you’re willing to pay it . . . I guess I was willing to pay it. I guess whatever legal action they had in store for me suddenly seemed like the less bad thing. Of two very bad things.”

I held the blanket even tighter to my chest. Felt the cold blades of fear slice my gut more deeply.

“So they’re going to discharge you?”

“Yeah.”

“But you got to come home. So that doesn’t seem so bad.”

“Except it won’t be an honorable discharge. Obviously.”

“But if that’s all they can do to you . . .”

But the minute I said it, I had a bad feeling it wasn’t.

“It isn’t. They can also court-martial me.”

“Are they going to?”

“Not sure. There’s an investigation going on. Depends on what turns that takes. What kind of stuff comes out.”

“And if they do . . . Then what? What could they do to you?”

“Let’s cross that bridge when we come to it,” he said. “
If
we come to it.”

We both sat for a moment, not saying anything. Over and behind my brother’s head, I could see my miniature patch of the universe. It looked like a view of actual space travel in the dark. Which was the point. I tried to look at it the way I usually did. Like I was an astronaut flying out into infinity. Feeling tiny in comparison to the cosmos around me. I thought it would make the problem in front of me seem fleeting and small.

It didn’t.

“Why didn’t you go out on the raid?”

“Because I didn’t think it was the right thing to do. Going into people’s homes in the middle of the night. Hauling families out into their front yards at gunpoint. I won’t go into a lot of detail, but if you can imagine a bunch of soldiers breaking through our door right now and doing the same to us . . . Let’s just say it was a very bad experience for everybody.”

“But they did something wrong, right? What did the people do?”

“Sometimes nothing. We were looking for insurgents.”

“Insurgents?”

“Rebels. People who wanted to fight us back. But part of the time, nobody in the house had done anything wrong at all. Anyway, it was a lot more complicated than just that. And I’m not going to dump it all on you, because I want you to get back to sleep. But I wanted you to know that I did what I did for a reason. I did what I thought was right. I don’t want you to be ashamed of me.”

“I’m not,” I said.

He sat a minute. Maybe taking that in. Then he rose to his feet.

“I’m glad,” he said. And moved toward my bedroom door. “I know you look up to me.” Then he seemed to scramble to verbally walk back a statement that hadn’t come out right the first time. “I’m not saying you
should
or anything. I know I’m no hero. But me being ten years older and everything. I guess it’s kind of inevitable.”

“You’re only nine years older.”

“Aren’t you twelve?”

“No. I’m thirteen.”

“Oh. I missed a birthday while I was gone, huh?”

“Yeah.”

“Sorry. I should have called.”

“It’s okay,” I said. Which was, at least on an emotional level, a lie. “You were busy.”

“Even if I’d remembered, I still would have thought it was your twelfth.”

I had no idea what to say to that. So I said nothing.

He moved toward the door again. Put his hand on the knob.

“Joseph,” I said. And he turned back. Waiting for it. “If you thought it was wrong, what they asked you to do, then I think it was wrong, too.”

“You don’t know the whole story yet.”

“I know
you
, though.”

He paused for a time with his hand on the knob.

Then he said, “Thanks. Now go back to sleep.”

And with that he was gone.

I didn’t go back to sleep. At least, not until nearly morning.

At school the next day, I got an early glimpse of what would follow. What our lives would be like in the foreseeable future. It was small. It wasn’t dramatic. But if I had been looking for clues, it would have been a good one.

I walked into the principal’s office to explain why I hadn’t given my parents the note.

She looked up from her desk. From a sheaf of papers she was scribbling on—writing in the margins, in blue pencil. Her eyes changed when she saw me. I can’t describe exactly how.

I held up the note.

“I didn’t show them this,” I said.

“Don’t worry about it,” she said.

I thought I must have heard her wrong.

“I’m sorry?”

“Don’t worry about it. I heard about . . . what your family’s dealing with. It’s a hard time over at your house. So I’ll overlook the acting out. This time. And this time only.”

With a tipping of her head she indicated the wastepaper basket beside her desk.

I put the note in it. Gently. As though it were fragile.

Then I walked out.

Of course, I hadn’t known anything about Joseph coming home when I “acted out.”

But what kind of fool would bring that up when he could just walk out of trouble? Just walk away.

Chapter Three: Ruth

The day after Joseph came home, I walked through our gate to find a stranger sitting in the sun on our blindingly white porch swing. He was wearing khaki pants and a khaki bag—like a messenger bag—slung across his chest. He was staring at an electronic device in his hands, some kind of Blackberry, I think.

Suddenly I wished Aubrey had gotten home first instead of me.

I was all the way up on the porch boards before he looked up.

He wasn’t too old. I mean, over thirty, but not old like my parents. But his hairline was already receding sharply above both temples, and you could tell he would be one of those guys with nothing but a ring of hair over his ears by and by.

He narrowed his eyes when he looked at me. I told myself it was just the sun making him squint, but to this very day I’m not sure that’s true.

“Hello,” I said, awkwardly, because he wasn’t saying anything, awkwardly or otherwise.

“Are you related to Joseph Stellkellner?”

“I’m his sister.”

“Are either of your parents home?”

“I doubt it.”

“You should get him to talk to me.”

“Why should I get him to do that?”

“Because I’m going to run this story in the paper one way or the other. And if I have to print accusations like this and then say I contacted your brother and he had no comment, that’s not going to look so good. He needs to get ahead of a thing like this, or it can get real ugly real fast.”

I sighed hard, brushed my bangs out of my eyes, and put on a prickly, irritated attitude, but it was all a big fake. Really I was scared.

“I just got home from school,” I said, in an attempt to deflect him. “I don’t know why you’re telling me all this stuff like I know the beginning of this . . . whatever this is. What story? What accusations?”

He flipped his head in the direction of the house. “Your brother knows,” he said.

That feeling of fear intensified. This time it felt like cold water running down the insides of my thighs. I think I was silent too long. I think I tipped my hand on the fear.

“Have you got a card?” I asked him at last. “I can talk to him, but I can’t make him do anything he doesn’t want to do. If I can get him to change his mind, or if he changes his mind on his own, he can always call you.”

He rummaged around in his khaki bag for what seemed like a long time. I gathered that things weren’t too organized in there. In time he brought out a card case that looked like sterling silver, which did not match him and his bag and his khaki pants and his faded polo shirt at all. He opened it and handed me a card.

I stared at it for a long time, but I’m not sure where my mind was, because thirty seconds later I couldn’t have told you the guy’s name. I could have told you the paper was the
Register
, but we only had the one around here. I mean, one
real
paper. We had that giveaway tabloid-size one that my dad said was left-wing propaganda, and some other lesser things, but only one actual newspaper that somebody would throw at the end of your driveway in the morning.

When I looked up, the reporter was on his feet, his chest not five inches from my left shoulder. I felt intimidated because he leaned in so close. Probably that was the point.

“You tell your brother he definitely wants to take this opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

Then he stepped off my porch and headed down the walkway to the gate. I didn’t turn around, but he was wearing big boots with heavy heels, and I could hear every step of his retreat.

I exhaled a breath I didn’t know I’d been holding.

I didn’t find Joseph in the basement, so I kept looking.

Finally I found him in my dad’s reading room. He was sitting in the big leather chair by the window, looking out over the street. It was my dad’s special chair, which nobody else was allowed to sit in, and the fact that he always kept it pulled over to the window should have been everybody’s clue that he spent more time staring out into space than reading.

Joseph was smoking a cigarette, which made me deeply uneasy, because it seemed against the laws of the house itself.

He had his knees drawn up to his chest, his sock feet tucked up against his butt on the leather seat of the chair. The hand that held the cigarette was gently exploring his head, mostly around one temple, barely touching skin, as if he desperately needed to touch his own head but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

“You okay?” I asked him.

He looked up at me, and his eyes seemed hollow. Almost not alive. His left eye twitched repeatedly, which made my own eyes water for reasons I couldn’t quite find my way around in.

“Migraine,” he said. “I need a little space. No offense, Duck.”

“I’m not sure Dad—”

“Is this where you tell me there’s no tobacco smoke allowed in this room? That’s a joke, don’t you think?”

“But when he does it himself, that’s different.”

“Used to be my room, don’t forget. So he talked to you, too.”

“Dad?”

“You know what I mean.”

I hadn’t, but I caught up fast.

“Oh. That reporter. Yeah. I have his card. You know. In case you change your mind and want to talk to him.”

“I don’t.”

“But if you change your mind.”

“I won’t.”

“He says he’s going to run the story one way or the other, and that it’s better for you to tell your side. He says you have to get in front of a thing like this or it gets really ugly really fast. But he didn’t say what kind of a thing it is. He just said, ‘Your brother knows.’”

A long enough silence that I thought the conversation might be over, that I might just have to slink out and leave him alone. Which, come to think, he’d asked of me the minute I walked into the room.

Then he said, “Let’s hope he’s bluffing.”

“What story?” I asked, even though part of me knew better, knew he didn’t want me to.

“Please, Duck. I’m begging you here.”

I quietly let myself out of the room.

That was the beginning, right in that moment, of the chronic heartburn and other digestive problems that would plague me for years. It felt unfamiliar at the time. Within days it would feel like my most steadfast companion.

Not two minutes later, I heard the front door softly open and close. I’m not sure how I knew it was something out of the ordinary, but I did. Maybe just because everything was, everything had been, since Joseph came home.

I went downstairs to see who was around. No one. So it must not have been anyone coming in—it must have been Joseph going out.

It would be the last I saw of my brother for longer than I could possibly have imagined at the time.

In the morning, after my mom dropped me at school, I waited until she drove away and then walked to the corner and bought a morning paper, a
Register
, out of one of those automated racks. I plowed through it on the way back to school, then spread it out on the concrete steps and kept plowing.

The bell rang, making me late, but I explored every page, even the sports section and the movie listings. There was no story about my brother.

I threw the newspaper in the trash on my way inside, with a deep conviction that the threat had passed, that there was no story, only a bluff, that Joseph had dodged a bullet, though it felt more like I’d dodged one myself.

There’s an art to not taking these things personally. I still haven’t perfected it. I hadn’t even scratched the surface at age fifteen.

Waiting outside that conviction was the sure knowledge that not every story makes it into the paper the very next day after the reporter stands on your porch. I knew it was there but I refused to acknowledge its existence.

I think I was peripherally aware of exactly what I was doing.

I was buying myself one more day.

The following morning I showed up in homeroom, the fourth or fifth person to arrive. Mrs. Blankenship looked up immediately and met my eyes with a look I couldn’t possibly understand. I can only say that nobody had ever looked at me with that exact set of emotions showing in their eyes before. I can only describe it by saying she seemed to view me as an unstable nuclear weapon, but one she felt deeply sorry for.

She silently called me up to the front of the room with the motion of one bent index finger.

My blood froze, and I almost couldn’t feel myself making the walk. The desks on either side of me registered in my peripheral vision as I moved by them, but they looked blurred. My whole life suddenly suffered from too much depth of field.

I stood in front of her desk with my textbooks held in front of my gut like a shield.

“You okay today?” she asked.

“Sure,” I said. “Why wouldn’t I be?”

I watched through her eyes as she backed out of the whole moment in her brain, like watching one of those big construction trucks try to take all that bulk into reverse gear. All that was missing was the irritating beeping noise.

“No reason,” she said. “No reason at all.”

“Okay then,” I said.

I walked back to my desk again, feeling numb. Everything tingled slightly. You know how your foot feels when you cut off the circulation to it by sitting the wrong way? Numb and dead but tingling at the same time? Like that. My whole body—my whole self—had gone to sleep.

I sat at my desk for a minute, or it might have been a second, or it might have been ten minutes. I wasn’t looking at the clock and it was hard to tell.

Then I walked back up to Mrs. Blankenship’s desk.

“Do you still have the newspaper?” I asked.

“No,” she said quietly. “I mean, not right here with me I don’t. I left it out in my car.”

“Maybe you can just tell me the gist of it. Because now I really feel like I need to get this over with.”

She looked past me to the kids filling up the room. I’d forgotten they were still coming in while I hadn’t been able to notice. I looked around, too, and saw that we were standing in a crowd now. Thirty-five students or so.

The bell rang.

Mrs. Blankenship tossed her head in the direction of the hall, so I walked out into it. For a minute or two she didn’t, and I wondered if I’d been wrong to expect that she would. I also wondered what I was supposed to do next.