Ask Him Why (5 page)

I tried to answer that. Nothing happened. No words came.

I stomped out into the backyard. Bent down and picked up the biggest pieces of gravel in the trim around the flower beds and hurled them one by one at the trunk of the giant oak tree.

After ten or twelve good hits, it came to me. What I wanted to say.

I stomped back inside. My mother hadn’t moved. Hadn’t so much as changed position or expression.

“If I do something you don’t like, am I out of the family, too?”

“Don’t be ridiculous, Aubrey.”

“Why is it ridiculous?”

“Because you’re a minor. A child. Joseph is a grown man.”

“So? We’re still his family. And he didn’t do anything bad enough to get kicked out.”

My mother took her gaze off the street for the first time. Leveled it on me. Then I immediately wished I’d never started with her.

“Didn’t he? Getting two of his fellow soldiers killed with his selfishness? You don’t think that’s such a bad thing?”

As she finished the last sentence, I was vaguely aware that I was backing up. Then I hit the big stainless steel fridge with my shoulder blades. I turned and ran up the carpeted stairs two at a time.

I opened the door to Ruth’s room. She was on her bed. Staring at the ceiling.

“Knock, will you?” she said.

“Sorry. Did Joseph do what Mom says he did?”

“Did she say he got two guys killed?”

“Yeah.”

“Well, that’s what they’re saying, anyway. That’s what it says in the paper. I don’t know if it’s true.”

I stood still a moment. Unsure what to do next. Then I walked closer to her. Sat on the edge of her bed.

“What are you doing?” she asked.

“I don’t know what we’re supposed to do.”

“Nothing, I guess. What
can
we do? Nothing we do will make any difference, anyway.”

“Joseph’s gone. I guess he ran away. But even if he hadn’t, Dad would’ve thrown him out. So how will we find out if it’s true?”

“I guess we won’t.”

“But I have to
know
, Ruth. I have to.”

“I don’t know what to tell you,” she said.

I wanted to ask her more questions. Dozens more. I wanted someone to tell me not only what the paper was saying happened, but what really happened. So I could judge for myself if they were treating us fairly. I wanted to know if the fact that my parents no longer considered Joseph their son meant that I could no longer have him for a brother. And, if so, what I was going to do without him.

I didn’t ask anything. Because it struck me, in a sudden wave of helplessness, that my sister had nothing for me. Or even for herself. She was as lost as I was.

I let myself out of her room. Shut the door behind me. I decided I would find the morning paper.

I looked everywhere except the kitchen. I really wanted to avoid the kitchen.

“What are you doing out there, Aubrey?” my mom called out after a time.

“Looking for the paper.”

“Don’t bother. Your father burned it in the fireplace.”

“Can I walk to the store and get one?” Later, I would realize that the paper could have been accessed online. But it hadn’t been available that way for long. And before this incident I could not have cared less about accessing the paper in any medium. So at the time it didn’t even occur to me.

“Is that a joke?”

“No. Why would that be funny?”

I stuck my head into the kitchen to better gauge her mood. She was leaning her forehead into one hand. When she lifted her head to look at me, her mascara was running. It jolted me. I had never seen my mom cry. It had never even occurred to me that she did. Ever.

“How are you going to get past that gang of vultures, Aubrey? Use your head.”

“Oh. Right.”

I ran back upstairs to my room. I turned on the TV that hung on a raised platform on the wall over my bed. Thinking I could get lost in something. I had a bunch of good shows digitally recorded.

An hour later, I couldn’t have told you a line from any of them. I couldn’t even have told you what show I’d just watched.

Later, I watched the news. I was relieved when there was no footage of my mom threatening to run anybody over with her car. Nothing about our family at all. I knew it wouldn’t last. I felt better all the same.

Dinner was pizza. We never ordered pizza. That’s when I realized that Isabella wasn’t around. And that in all the confusion, I hadn’t even noticed. I hadn’t even thought to miss her.

We were encouraged to take our slices to our rooms to eat. Actually, “encouraged” is the wrong word. Ordered.

Under normal circumstances, we’d have faced a firing squad for eating in our rooms.

Not only did Ruth and I do exactly as we were told, we didn’t even point out the irony.

To the best of my knowledge, my dad never came home.

Sometime in the night, I was wakened by voices. Male strangers’ voices. Quiet voices, so I’m not really sure why they woke me. But they did.

Maybe it was because my window looked out over the front yard. Because I was close to where they stood. Which, from the sound of it, was right up against the front of the house. Maybe it was their energy that woke me. Or the fact that the danger felt and sounded so close.

First I thought the reporters were back. Then I thought maybe someone was going to set our house on fire. Or bomb it. Or just throw a brick through our window. That would have been bad enough.

Or a Molotov cocktail.

But all I could hear were their quiet voices. And a slight hissing noise I couldn’t identify.

I crossed quietly to the window. First I saw nothing. Then I saw two dark figures running away. They didn’t even open the gate. Just vaulted over our low picket fence.

I ran to my parents’ bedroom to get my dad. To tell him there might be a bomb, or the beginning of a fire. He had to go see. I opened the door to their room quietly. He wasn’t there. Just my mom, fast asleep.

I took a big deep breath and decided it would have to be me. My family needed saving. And if my dad wasn’t home, I figured I was next in line.

A bit of patriarchal thinking, I suppose. But what do you want? I was young.

I tiptoed downstairs and found the big, powerful lantern flashlight in the kitchen pantry. Carried it to the front door.

I stood longer than necessary with my hand on the knob. I knew somebody could still be out there. I knew something could explode or burn me when I stepped outside. But I had to step outside. I needed saving, and so did my whole family. What else could I do?

I think I was scared but happy in that moment. Because suddenly the harm that faced my household was tangible. It could be bravely faced. Fought. I could save us from this, because it had a form. When I opened the door, I at least would know what it was.

I turned on the powerful beam of flashlight and threw the door wide. Every muscle taut, I stepped out onto the welcome mat. The bristles of it poked into my bare feet, hurting me. I swept the beam of the flashlight around, but saw nothing out of the ordinary.

I stepped off the mat and took a dozen steps down our paved walkway, hopping slightly from the cold. Then I realized the someone or something dangerous was probably behind me now. So I swung around fast, shining the light toward the house.

On the left-hand side of the house, ending at the porch, someone had spray-painted three enormous letters. They stretched from almost down to the dirt to up as high as a tall person could raise his hand. Seven feet or more. Uneven, dripping black spray paint on our neat blue house.

COW

“Cow?” I asked out loud. It made no sense, and yet it frightened me. I could feel the chill run through my gut. Someone had come to our house to slay us with a word. To insult us in a way the entire world could see. To mark us.

But . . . cow?

It took me several breaths to realize there might be more. I swung the flashlight to the right. Lit up the house on the other side of the porch.

ARD

I turned off the flashlight and ran back inside. I could feel my face flushing, angry and hot.

I didn’t wake up my mom. I didn’t tell her.

And I knew I wouldn’t tell her in the morning, either.

I used my last-ditch strategy: I pretended I hadn’t even seen it. I simply acted as though what was bothering me, the thing I couldn’t do anything to fix anyway, had never happened at all.

Needless to say, I never got back to sleep.

Chapter Five: Ruth

When I woke up the next morning, I knew it was bizarrely late. I could tell by the way the sun blasted through the curtains. Every weekday morning, my mom came in at six thirty and coldly rousted Aubrey and me out of bed for school. Except this morning.

I just lay there for a few moments, wincing into the light. I was still half-asleep and trying to remember why everything was different. When it came back, it hit me as something heavy and cold in my stomach, hard-edged like steel. I wondered for a minute where Joseph had gone and if he was okay. Then I began to focus on the noise that had wakened me.

It sounded like a generator in the front yard, irritating and loud. My guess was that it had something to do with the news crews—maybe they used a generator to run some of their heavy equipment. But my room looked out over the side yard, not the front, so I got up and crossed the room to my bedroom door. I checked out in the hall to see if anyone was around. Nothing. I slithered down the hall to my father’s reading room. The door was open, and I looked carefully to be sure no one was hiding in there, seeking refuge from the action out front. But there was nothing in there except a lingering stench of old smoke.

I’m ashamed to say I ran to the bathroom and washed my face and brushed my teeth and hair before I did anything else. I had this unfortunate mental image that involved sticking my head out the window and becoming a picture for the front page of the next morning’s paper, or footage that I’d see on that night’s local evening news—that
everybody
would see. Even as I was washing and brushing, I knew I probably wasn’t important enough to warrant all that attention. Still, the thing with Joseph was still new and unexplored, and it was almost impossible to know where the property lines fell. In fact, I had a strong sense that they had not yet been fully drawn, that they could re-form at any time, and without warning.

When I thought I’d made myself halfway presentable, I stuck my head out the window of the reading room. Two house painters in Jackson Pollock–like splattered overalls looked up. The generator in question was more like a big air compressor for a professional paint sprayer. They had apparently already done a weird, loopy, complex stretch of the bottom of the front of our house in gray primer, by hand from the look of it. Now they were covering it with an even coat of paint the color of the rest of the house, only not quite—just a little too fresh and shiny looking, a little too blue. At least, that’s what I gathered from that admittedly difficult angle.

One of the men raised a hand to wave to me, and I pulled my head back inside, humiliated for reasons I couldn’t quite sort out.

Aubrey’s bedroom door was closed, so I wandered down to the kitchen, vaguely aware that I was hungry.

My mom was talking on the phone. Well,
complaining
on the phone would be a more accurate description.

“No, it’s not that they didn’t bother to match it properly,” she said in a voice she only ever used against my dad. So I figured that’s who it was, but it was only a guess. Just because something had never been true before didn’t mean it couldn’t be so now—I knew that instinctively. All the rules were suddenly undependable at best. “I gave it to them straight out of the garage.” Pause. “Yes, we had it left over from last time we had the house painted, don’t you remember? Three gallons, and you were all mad because it was over thirty dollars a gallon. I said we’ll use it for touch-ups, or next time we have them come paint, but still, you grumbled.” Yeah. My dad, all right. “Do I really need to tell you that the sun fades paint? It’s been six years, Brad. The stuff they’re putting on just looks too new, that’s all.” Another brief silence. “Yes, you can see what it covers. I mean, not make out the letters or anything, because they painted between them, but it’s just this blotch. Any idiot could see it’s patched over something. And if you want them to do the whole front, they’ll have to mask all the windows and buy a lot more paint.”

In a brief silence, I watched her pull a pack of cigarettes out of her skirt pocket and slide one out of the pack, grabbing it with her lips. I was shocked. My mom had never smoked as far as I knew. To my further amazement, she lit one of the front gas burners on the stove and leaned over, drawing on the cigarette until the first little clouds of smoke began to fill the kitchen. My head spun with all the changes to my formerly solid world order.

“Yes, I know it’s a big headache, Brad, but you’re at the office and I’m here having to cope with it, so it’s
my
headache. And yet here you are complaining in my ear. Would you like me to wave a magic wand and make all the inconvenient things disappear, your highness?”

That’s when she looked up and saw me standing there. I could see it register, but not in any way she intended for me to see. More like workmen were moving lumber and accidentally slammed a two-by-four into her belly, but she didn’t want to let on that it hurt.

She covered the receiver of the phone with her cigarette-holding hand.

“This is a private conversation,” she said to me. “Scoot.”

“But I’m hungry.”

“Cereal in the cupboard next to the fridge.”

But she just stared at me, conversation on hold, while I rummaged in the cupboard, so I skipped the milk and grabbed some Fruity-O’s and took the box toward the stairs with me.

“You don’t want milk?” I heard her call after me.

“Not particularly,” I called back.

I stuck my hand in the box on my way up the spiral stairs and shoved a handful into my mouth, but it tasted much too sweet and made my stomach turn. Well, something made my stomach turn, and I guess the cereal wasn’t helping.

I closed myself back into my room and turned on my laptop.

In a fit of uncharacteristic bravery, I did an Internet search on my brother’s name. “Joseph Stellkellner,” in quotes. Fortunately, we had an unusually distinctive name—at least, I thought it was fortunate for a very brief moment that morning. It was never destined to feel like an advantage again.

I got five hundred and eighty-seven hits. Five. Hundred. Eighty. Seven.

I lost my appetite for the cereal.

I narrowed the search by choosing “News.” It returned sixty-seven stories from papers and news websites across the country, and some national—and, because they were sorted with the newest first, none seemed to be the original story. These were dozens of versions of a more recent update. They all had similar titles, and the titles were all about my brother’s mental health history.

I just froze there a moment, trying to think whether my brother Joseph had a mental health history, but nothing came to mind. He’d always been just like everyone else, as far as I knew. At least, as much as any of us were.

I clicked on one of the articles. Actually, over the next few minutes, I clicked on four of the articles. I was so wrapped up in my shock—almost literally from the feel of it, like being mummified in Bubble Wrap or cotton batting—that it took me four articles to realize they were all the same. Something a bunch of papers had picked up from the Associated Press or something.

They said Joseph had been institutionalized when he was twelve and that once upon a time that would have caused the army to reject him, or at least probably it would have been a deterrent to his making it into the army. But now, the papers said, it was wartime, and there was no draft the way there had been during Vietnam, and so the armed forces had lowered their standards to get new recruits, because who wants to volunteer when they know they’ll be shipped over to Kuwait or Baghdad pretty much straight away? I’m paraphrasing, of course. They worded it much more politely.

“Maybe somebody who wants to get away from Brad and Janet,” I said out loud, but quietly.

Then I read some more.

I had wildly mixed feelings about what I was reading. On the one hand, the rush to hold someone sickeningly responsible came through loud and clear. But now this new revelation seemed to take a tiny bit of the heat off my brother and direct it toward the army itself, for the crime of letting him join. And yet that was its own mortal insult: the idea that my brother Joseph was so deeply defective that they should have known better than to even consider letting him serve.

And there was another wild card thrown in: apparently, the army was also investigating the commanding officer to see why he sent soldiers out on a mission that was clearly undermanned.

It wasn’t much in the way of relief—still, it was a lifting that I could feel. They were saying that something bigger and totally outside our family was really to blame, and that helped me breathe a little more easily.

I heard the paint sprayer shut down out front, and I wondered if they had actually succeeded in covering whatever shame had been placed there, or if my mother had simply told them to give up and stop trying.

Then I finished the fourth article—or at least the fourth repetition of the same one—and made the mistake of reading down into the comment thread.

Now, any fool knows you never read the comments on an Internet article. It’s like one of the three modern rules for living a decent life, although I’d be hard-pressed to say what the other two are. Maybe “don’t feed the trolls,” but then I run out of ideas. But in this case, it felt inevitable, unavoidable. They were there, they already existed, and I couldn’t look away. I had to see what they said.

I sat reading for a few minutes with my mouth open, each new well-aimed statement a knife stabbing into my already bleeding gut.

One person was kind to my brother Joseph and suggested we wait and gather more information on what happened before rushing to judgment. One. The rest just piled on Joseph, and then, when the one nice person defended him, they all piled on that commenter.

I’m not going to detail what they said. I want to pretend I no longer remember specifics, but some of the things I saw are burned in, seared into my brain like the chandelier lights burning a pattern into the corneas of Aubrey’s and my eyes. But I won’t repeat them word for word, because they were ugly, and I feel like I’d only be helping to keep them alive.

I’ll just generally say that, according to their vitriol, Joseph had killed more than just two fellow soldiers. He had killed us all. He had emboldened the enemy, showing the weak underbelly of America, which wouldn’t be weak in the first place without the Josephs of America, thus signing all of our death warrants.

More than a few said he was a traitor to his country and should be put to death for his crime.

I’m sorry to say I’m not exaggerating.

Some not only took the blame and threw it back on my brother, but even on his family—which, I realized in my well-knifed abdomen, was me. People were saying things about what kind of family we were—
our family
—people who had never met us, never laid eyes on us.

All I could think was how I could correct them, every one of them. I felt like I had to fix everyone’s perceptions of us and argue back with everybody until they saw the light.

I sat another minute, half aware that my mouth was still hanging open, wondering what I should write to set the record straight. It would have to be something like the one kind commenter had written. I’d have to say they didn’t know Joseph, so they didn’t really know what they were saying, and they had no right to judge a person they’d never met, especially so soon, when all the facts hadn’t even had time to come out.

Then I went back and read the abuse that one person had taken for arguing against a rush to judgment.

The decision as to whether I was brave enough to jump into that fray made my head spin, quite literally. It made me dizzy, and when the knock came on my bedroom door, even though it was a soft knock, it made me jump.

“Who is it?”

“It’s Aubrey,” Aubrey said, sounding unusually cowed. He was normally a confident little brat. “Can I come in?”

“Um. I guess so.”

He came in and closed the door behind him. Then he walked over and sat on the edge of my bed, but he didn’t speak, at least not at first. He just gazed around my room as though this was the first he’d ever seen of it. He looked as though he hadn’t slept in a week.

“What?” I said, finally. I didn’t mean to sound harsh, but I might have anyway, accidentally.

“Was Joseph ever in a mental hospital?”

I wanted to say,
So you’ve been reading them, too
. I guess I could have, but I didn’t.

“Not that I remember. I’ve been trying to think. It said he was twelve. Which means I would have been five. So, I don’t know. It’s pretty hard to remember what happened when you were five, you know? I do remember he was gone a lot. Like all summer, every summer, and I don’t really remember where they told us he was going, or even if they did. But he couldn’t have been spending every summer in a mental hospital.”

“Why not?”

“Because they just don’t work like that, Aubrey.” Of course I had no way to know how mental hospitals worked, but, being the teenager I was, I spoke with absolute authority. “They’re not summer camp. If you have to go, then they just send you. Right then. Whether school’s out or not. And they keep you till they’re done with you.”