Crossroads (6 page)

“She's got friends near Pittsburgh,” Zap said, speaking for her. “When I decided to come home, she came along, right, Anna?” She nodded. He whispered to me, as I walked out on the porch, “Nothing serious.” He always had a woman but it was never serious.

Zap kept a hand firmly pressed to my shoulder as he led me over to where his motorcycle stood. “How'd you ever find me?”

He smiled. “Now how do you think?”

Anna went off to swing on one of the inner tubes on the old apple tree. He looked her way. “Mom told me.” Anna wrapped her legs around the tube, held on to the rope, and started to swing. She shut her eyes and threw her head back. The motorcycle Zap had bought in Sweden stood in the driveway, an enormous beastlike black bike, wet with dew, which shimmered on its chrome. The sun, starting to break the horizon, a pale violet morning light, shone in the rearview mirror.

I walked barefoot across the grass, little pebbles jabbing into my heels and the balls of my feet. The grass was wet and the air cool, and under my bathrobe I didn't have a stitch on. Zap patted the bike on its seat like a horse; he sucked in his lips, the way he did when a woman captivated him. “You weren't in New York. I wish I'd had a set of keys to your apartment. We could've stayed there. I called Mom when I finally figured it out that I wasn't going to find you there.”

“So I'll make you a set. How come you didn't call here before you arrived?”

He tweaked my nose. “What's the matter, sis, don't you like surprises?”

Tom had heard the motorcycle and was slowly making his way down the stairs in jeans and a ripped T-shirt. “Who the hell is that?” He bent down and peered from the landing. Zap laughed and waved. “Oh, my God, Zap. How'd you get here?” He barreled the rest of the way down the stairs, right arm extended. I stepped aside as they gripped one another in manly hugs. They hadn't seen each other in over eight years, though there hadn't been any hard feelings when Tom married Jennie. Zap once told me, “If I was hurt, it was by her. Not him.”

I hadn't seen my brother myself in nearly a year and we hadn't talked since just after Mark left me. He'd gone to Europe when he left medical school and said he needed to put his head back together. Zap had been flip-flopping between professions for years. When he wanted to be a vet, our parents weren't pleased but they knew it beat standing on a street corner, drinking beer—something he'd done for years. When he switched to medicine, they were thrilled. He told them he was going to be a famous cancer research scientist and they believed him. They told all their friends.

When he left veterinary school, I was understanding. He wrote me a letter, explaining his disenchantment. Some of the animals he treated had died. It was true, he'd once saved a boa
constrictor with gum trouble, but he'd also stood by helplessly as a collapsed giraffe languished in the St. Louis zoo. He knew, he wrote me then, that he just wasn't cut out to be an animal doctor.

When he left medical school, he didn't bother writing to me. Or to our parents. I think he knew what we'd say. He'd always been called a wayward genius and he probably didn't want to hear it again.

Tom and Zap walked over to the apple trees near the bird feeder. Anna joined them. He seemed taller to me, if that was possible. Perhaps he was leaner, older. His hair was thick, dark, not silky like our father's, and he'd never go bald.

Jennie opened the screen door and walked out. She was dressed in jeans and a flannel shirt. “Well, look who's here.” She smiled and, with great composure, kissed my brother hello on the cheek.

“I'm just passing through but I had to see Debbie,” he explained. “Mom said she thought it would be all right if I gave you guys a little surprise.”

“We're surprised,” Jennie said.

“Nice bike,” Tom said, walking over to the motorcycle. He flung his leg over the side and sat in the seat, ran his hands over the chrome handles, adjusted the rearview mirror. If Tom felt uncomfortable about Zap's sudden arrival, he didn't show it. The metal of the bike was hot now in the July morning and he pulled his hand back when he touched the handles, as if the bike had bitten him. It was a black Arrow, one of the best of the Oriental models, better than Yamahas or Kawasakis in its road tests. Tom straddled the bike and lifted its front wheels off the ground, even though it weighed almost three hundred pounds.

“Hey, sis. How about if we go for a little spin.” Zap walked toward Tom with his arm on my shoulder. Of course it was forbidden. We never were allowed on motorcycles, because our
father once saw a girl's head sliced off when she fell from the back of one. We were barely allowed in cars. “Come on,” Zap said. “You aren't going in your nighty, are you?”

“I guess not.” I couldn't think of any excuses, so I went into my room and slipped out of my bathrobe. I dug for underwear, a pair of jeans, a T-shirt. I brushed my teeth but I couldn't get them clean. My clothes itched and nothing felt right against my skin. I found a jacket. From the window my brother looked like a Hell's Angel. When he dropped out of school the first time, Mom threatened to disown him. She said he could never stick to anything. My father called. “You talk to him,” he begged me. “He listens to you.” I was, in fact, the only one he listened to, and he wouldn't listen to me, either.

All my life I've protected my brother. Someone told Mom she couldn't get pregnant if she was nursing, so she nursed me and had him eleven months later. Our sister, Renee, was four years older and, though we were awed by someone who at first seemed incapable of doing anything wrong, she'd never be our friend. I feel as if my life began with Zap; I don't remember life without him. My first memory in this world is of my brother, staring at me from across the playpen as if he were trying to formulate something to say. We were more than brother and sister and at times it seemed we were more than friends.

Tom, Jennie, and Anna waved at us as we zipped along the driveway, a bumpy, cratered road pocked with holes dug by the dogs and Tom's pickup. We were moving. Tom, Jennie, and Anna shrank to the size of shrubs, then to nothing at all. Birds became bullets, the wind slapped like rushing water, shafts of wheat melted into a flat shelf of yellow. The clouds were out of time-lapse footage of a gathering storm; the sprawling farms receded. The isolated farmhouses were no longer so isolated, as distances became half of what they'd been. I wrapped my arms tighter around Zap, and the bike shifted into some new gear
that seemed able to take us farther, higher. The bike groaned; pebbles shot out the back wheel. In the mirror I saw his face, his eyes squinting, lips sealed, as if he were performing some very private act.

We took the bends and twists of the bumpy road, meshed into the forks, and glided around curves. It was still a dawn light we moved through. The tiny vibrations began at the tips of my toes, eased their way through the balls of my feet, into my ankle bones, up my calves. It wasn't like being in a car, because you weren't in anything, and it wasn't like being on a horse, because you didn't vibrate like this on a horse. It was a little like love, closer to that, but I didn't want to think about that now.

It was amazing how things slipped away from you. Mark had slipped away just as all the houses and the trees were slipping away. It was almost six months, and in spite of myself, in spite of how much I wanted to hold on to him and not forget him, he was slipping away. Zap shifted again. Now we were soaring. We were children on an endless boat ride through the maze of the Fox River, our father navigating, telling us to mark seagulls “on right” and us laughing because we knew seagulls were bad markers and they flew away. Peeling oranges and letting the peels drop into the river, because in case Dad really was marking seagulls, like Hansel and Gretel we'd need orange peels to find our way home.

We passed a mall and Zap pulled the bike over and parked in front of a diner. We sat down in a booth and ordered. “I'm exhausted,” I said.

“Me too.”

“Are you going to stay long?” The waitress with lacquered yellow hair and a black skirt barely covering her wide, nearly perfect circle hips put down two cups of coffee with coffee sloshing around in the saucer. We put napkins down to soak it up.

“I'm just staying the day, maybe until tomorrow morning.” He toyed with the wet napkin dissolving under his cup. “So talk fast . . . how've you been?”

How've I been? I wasn't certain how to answer that question. I did take someone's dog home and got hysterical when the owner wasn't immediately appreciative. I did call Mark and Lila's number until they had it changed to unpublished. I have been silently plotting revenge. My heroes of late had become John Wilkes Booth and Lee Harvey Oswald. “I'm O.K.,” I said to my brother, starting to cry.

He reached across and held my fingers in his. “Guess that answers my question.” Then he let go, smiled, and in a gesture I could recite from memory ran all five of his fingers through his black hair and twirled his mustache. Then he patted me on the cheek. The truth wasn't easy to admit. If he weren't my brother, he'd probably break my heart as well.

The waitress brought me a Kleenex, smiled at me with great empathy, and gave Zap a scowl. “Men ain't all there is in this world, honey.” She walked away on those rotating hips.

“I'm innocent; don't shoot.” Zap raised his hands.

“And you.” I took his hands in mine. “How've you been?”

He shrugged. “I did a lot of soul-searching this winter. I'm going to give it one more try, if they'll have me.”

“You're going to finish school?”

“Oh, you know, the family needs a doctor. If only to disprove all the hypochondriacs.” While he spoke, he stared out the window, across the Delphia Mall, squinting as if he were trying to read something. I followed his gaze to a sign that read “The Home Safe Locksmith.”

“What're you looking at? You want me to make you a set of keys for my apartment?”

He nodded. “I could use them.” He looked back at me. “So what's next? Have you talked to Mark?”

I shook my head. “I know you never liked him. You don't
have to deny it. I know. Maybe you were right.” I told him how Jennie and Tom had thrown a cocktail party for me and I'd met Joe, whom I liked but who'd never called me, and Sean, whom I didn't like and who came by to see me all the time. “That's the way it goes, isn't it?” He agreed with me that it was often the way it went. “Anyway, I'm not ready to meet anyone, or else everyone I meet is awful.”

“Probably it's a little of both.” He laughed.

I had my keys on me, so when we left the diner we went across to the Home Safe Locksmith. Zap bought a little key chain of a running shoe that had “Run for Your Life” inscribed on it. When the keys were finished, he put them on the chain.

“You can stay there whenever you want,” I said.

“Thanks,” he replied. “I'll do you a favor sometime.” Then we got on the bike and sped back to the farm.

 

If I was ever jealous of Jennie, it was when Zap fell in love with her and when she led the high school marching band, twirling her baton in front of thousands of spectators who also envied her. Sometimes I silently prayed for her to miss, but her composure when she leaped on stage or into the middle of a football field was Zen-like, as if she didn't know anyone was watching her. Zap used to say he didn't fall in love with Jennie because she was head drum majorette, but in spite of it. He couldn't stand seeing her out there in front of all those people. “All those men are after you,” he'd complain. And he was right.

It was as drum majorette that Jennie crossed the lawn with the breakfast tray, strutting and erect. Her confidence at times was appalling. A tray of steaming coffee with cinnamon sticks as stirrers. There was hot toast made from her own home-baked bread, jams made from the blueberries and wild strawberries she'd picked the summer before. Strips of bacon and fried eggs in a little pile.

Zap, now in a pair of cut-offs and a T-shirt that read
“Champs-Elysées,” was planing wood with Tom in front of the barn. Anna and I played with the kittens. Everyone paused as the breakfast tray arrived. Tom looked at the tray and frowned. “It's almost noon.”

Jennie shrugged and proceeded to serve from a tree stump. “No one's had breakfast yet.” She passed a mug to Zap and their hands didn't even graze. Her hair was like autumn leaves and her face had the ruddy glow of a finely fermented wine.

Anna was back on the ground playing with the kittens when Sean drove up in his Datsun. The kittens had been born to a vagrant cat a few weeks before. “Good for the rats,” Tom said as he planed wood. The kittens prowled in the shade, eyes intent on the ground like little Sherlock Holmeses searching for clues.

Sean walked right up to Zap and shook his hand. “You must be Deborah's brother. You look just like her.”

“He does?” I doubted it.

“Around the eyes. So, you still fixing up the old rat's nest?” he said to Tom.

“Yeah, why don't you help?”

“Sure, I'll help.” He poured himself a mug of coffee and made an egg sandwich. “I'm no carpenter; you know that, though. But it doesn't matter . . . I got a job.”

“Falling off roofs?” Jennie asked.

Sean smiled. “Better than that. It's not definite yet, but looks like a real behind-the-camera job.” He sat down and leaned back complacently against the tree stump. “I've been trying to lift your sister's spirits with my charms. Any tricks I should know?”

Zap smiled. “Ignore her. She comes around if you ignore her.”

“Ah, I know the type.”

“That's not true.” I could see they were united against me.
I played with a white kitten that rested in my lap.

“So, are you going to tell us what kind of job you got?” I asked Sean.