Ask Him Why (8 page)

“Oh, no,” he said. “I do.”

“You do? Where is he?”

“Back with the army. In pretrial confinement.”

I felt myself sinking. It felt like falling down the shaft of a well. One I thought I’d already been lying at the bottom of for a long time.

“They caught him?”

“He turned himself in.”

I wasn’t sure what I thought about that. I didn’t know if I thought it was stupid or brave, honorable or unimaginable. I just knew I wished like hell it wasn’t the case.

“Do you know where they’re holding him?”

“No. But it won’t be all that hard to find out. You’re family. You can do that without me.”

“Why are you not charging me for finding all this out?”

He held up the morning paper, which I hadn’t seen. Hadn’t known he had with him. Apparently, it had been folded on his lap.

“Not really fair to charge you for what I read in the paper over my morning coffee,” he said.

When I got home, I wasn’t in any trouble. Nobody had noticed I was gone.

I should have been relieved. I wasn’t. I was insulted and disappointed that nobody even cared enough to enforce my punishment.

I felt as if I didn’t exist in anybody’s world at all.

Chapter Seven: Ruth

I wasn’t surprised when one of the other girls started in on me, and I wasn’t surprised that it was Stacey Bingham. I was more surprised that it was between second and third periods, and nobody had so much as ruffled my feathers all morning. It almost felt good to get it over with.

She stood in the hall in front of me with her hands on her hips, her forehead all knitted up as though she could be fierce, with her anorexic body and her breasts that never got smaller no matter how much weight she lost. I always figured there had to be a surgeon involved in an equation like that, but the boys loved it, no questions asked.

I didn’t want any part of it, whatever “it” was, so I turned and walked back the other way, toward my locker. But that’s a bad strategy. It only draws them in, like when you back away from a mean dog. It only makes him feel more powerful and reminds him he’s winning.

A moment later, she was hovering near my locker with backup. Three of the girls in her group had materialized out of thin air to stand behind her and frown. These were the girls who had always treated me like I was nothing, after making it clear that I would never be welcome to join them, not anytime in this life or anywhere on this planet. So my sense of shame was on full alert before Stacey even opened her mouth.

There were many things she could have said that would have rolled right off me, and I was prepared for all of them. Any insult or negative judgment would have been tolerable or at least survivable, but I was not prepared to be told that she knew something I didn’t.

“Your brother is
where he belongs
.” She leaned forward and spat out the words near my ear like food she found inedible and refused to swallow.

“My brother is . . . where? How do you even know where he is?”

She laughed, which was the other girls’ cue to laugh, and they walked away, enjoying that nice laugh at my bruised and broken family’s expense.

I ran—literally ran—down to the principal’s office. I rarely showed up there voluntarily, but it was the only place in school where I figured I could demand information.

“I need to know where my brother is,” I panted, all breathless and scared, to the woman who worked behind the counter doing attendance.

“Your brother? He’s home. He got suspended.”

“No, not that brother. My other brother.” I was still oxygen-depleted, so much so that I could barely be understood.

“Your brother Joseph,” I heard another woman’s voice say.

I looked over to see the principal standing in her office doorway.

“Somebody just said to me, ‘Your brother is where he belongs,’” I told the principal. “But how would she know where he is?
I
don’t even know where he is, and he’s my brother. Was there something in the paper this morning?”

She nodded—gravely, I thought.

“Do you have a paper?” I asked her.

“No. But I read it.”

“Where is he? Please tell me right now.”

“The military is holding him in confinement. Because he’s a flight risk.”

I stood a moment, catching up on my breathing. Then I realized that fear had been the only thing holding me up, and I was now in danger of collapsing. I could feel the core of me, normally rigid, go floppy and unsupported.

I reached out for the nearest hard wooden bench, leaned wildly in its direction, and landed on it with a clunk. A moment later, the principal was sitting next to me, which was too bad, because I really wanted everybody to stay far away.

“What were you thinking that had you so scared?” she asked me.

Oddly, it was a question I hadn’t even considered, but when she asked, I found the answer was right there at my disposal, and not even very far under the surface at that.

“I figured everybody thinks he deserves to be in his grave,” I said.

“Not everybody thinks that,” she said, putting a hand on my shoulder.

My shoulder instinctively retreated.

“I want to go home,” I said. “Can I go home?”

A pause, during which my life was in someone else’s hands entirely, which more or less sums up the experience of being under eighteen.

“Yes,” she said, “you may go home. I’ll write up the absence so it makes sense.”

When I walked out of the office I felt my phone buzz once, so I pulled it out of my pocket and looked. It was a voice mail, and I could tell by the number that it was from Sean. It was also the second message from him in just the last few minutes. I guess I’d been too busy to feel the buzz of the first.

Before I could even listen to it, my phone went off again, but this time in that pattern it buzzes when someone is calling. I looked up to see Sean at the end of the hall, his cell phone to his ear, his back to me.

I waved, but he didn’t see me.

He wasn’t the most handsome guy in school, Sean, but the more I looked at him, the more I liked looking. His skin wasn’t perfect, to put it mildly, but he had intense gray eyes and shaggy hair that always looked like he’d meant every individual hair to be exactly in that wild and spontaneous place.

He was already starting to feel like someone I knew.

I walked up behind him and tapped him on the shoulder, and he jumped.

“You calling me?” I asked him.

“Oh. Yeah, I was.”

“I’m right here. Hang up.”

He seemed off balance, and his face was a little too flushed, so I should have known I was in trouble.

“I left you two messages,” he said.

“I know.”

“Have you listened to them?”

“Not yet.”

“So . . . listen to them.”

“Sean . . .”

“What?”

“I’m standing right in front of you. Just tell me.”

“Oh. Just tell you. Right.” But for an awkward moment, he didn’t. Then he did, and that was awkward, too. “I have to cancel Friday.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay.” A lot was going on in me, but none of it was good, so I worked hard to keep it inside where it belonged. “Well. Another time, then.”

“Um . . . ,” he said. And then he trailed off, and I knew. I knew everything. A brick wall didn’t have to fall on me.

“You said you wouldn’t do this.” I was already fighting back tears. They were old tears, I realized as I fought them. They’d been trying to get out for days. “You said I’m not my brother and you wouldn’t drop me just because everybody’s mad at him.”

“I
wouldn’t
,” he said. The bell rang, but we just stood there, ignoring it, alone in the hall together. Except it didn’t feel very together all of a sudden—it felt more like we were on two opposite sides of a dark and remote planet. “I swear,
I
wouldn’t. It isn’t me. It’s . . . They found out. That we’re friends. I mean . . . I don’t know if we’re friends, or . . . I don’t know yet what we are, but they found out.”

“They?”

“You know.”

“Sean. If I knew, I wouldn’t be standing here with this stupid look on my face.”

“The . . . you know . . . reporters.”

A long silence while I breathed that in.

“How did they find out?”

“I have no idea. But they’re on me now wherever I go. They want to know all about your family. Anything I know. I keep telling them I don’t know anything. But then they started coming around the house and trying to get to me through my parents. And now my mom says I can’t ever see you or talk to you again. I’m really sorry, Ruth.”

He stood there for a few seconds, probably waiting for me to say something. But I had no idea what to say.

“I’m really sorry,” he said again, over his shoulder as he walked away.

I erased the messages on my phone and then walked home, crying.

I got microphones stuck in my face on the last block, our block, because my mother wasn’t there to defend me, but I just ignored them and kept walking, and kept crying.

I heard a lot of questions, but I couldn’t really separate out the voices and I didn’t try. I just noticed the word “brother” seemed to appear in every sentence.

Of course it occurred to me that I might end up on the evening news, crying like a baby, but there wasn’t much I could do to change that, and besides, by that time I really couldn’t find a place in me that cared.

You can only save face for just so long before you wake up and realize you have nothing left worth saving.

My father was home.

Really, I just can’t tell you how out of the ordinary that is. I had to figure if it’s daylight, and my father is home, this must be
The Twilight Zone
. It wasn’t even lunchtime yet, and there he was, sitting on the couch drinking a large glass of something brown and quite obviously alcoholic, his face an impenetrable mask of nothingness.

He looked up at me as though I was no one he’d ever met.

“What are you doing home?” he asked. He wasn’t even looking at me anymore when he asked.

“I was just about to ask you the same question.”

I waited, but he never said more.

I looked in the kitchen, in case my mom was in there. She’d been hanging out in the kitchen a lot lately, which was unlike her, but it was a good spot from which to supervise the jackals out on the street—or the snakes, or vultures, or whatever disgusting animal she wanted to compare them to on any given day.

She wasn’t there, but Isabella was, cooking something that smelled absolutely wonderful. She looked up at me and her face morphed into a perfect look of utter maternal pity.

“Oh, honey,” she said. “You okay?”

I shook my head, and she held out her arms and I ran into them. She was a big woman, Isabella, which made her soft and comforting when she held me. It made her a full-fledged sanctuary of a person. That and the fact that she had a heart.

“Poor missy. Poor missy. Very hard time for your family.”

She rocked me back and forth for a time while I cried.

Then I pulled back out of her embrace and tried to cobble myself together. A fresh new pink tissue emerged from the pocket of her big apron as if by magic, and I took it and nodded and wiped my eyes.

“Thanks. Where’s my mom?”

“Out. She didn’t say where.”

“Why is my dad home?”

“His clients canceled.”

“He has clients cancel all the time. He never comes home in between.”