Josie and Jack (10 page)

“Why are you doing this?” My voice was a hoarse whisper.

Jack didn’t even blink. “No, here’s a better one. Did you hear the one about the guy who had a sister—”

I tried to get up but he blocked me with an arm.

“And she was the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen, with pretty blond hair and pretty green eyes, and he couldn’t stand the thought of some asshole ever getting his hands on her,
hurting
her—”

“You told me to do it.” My hands were covering my face. He pulled them away.

“I told you to do it,” he said, his nose inches from mine, his eyes burning into me, “because I knew you were going to anyway and you had to know what it was like, because you didn’t know shit, little sister. And now you do, don’t you?”

“Yes,” I whispered.

He sat back and watched me. “There’s a gap between us and them and you can’t bridge it,” he said, his voice gentle now. He touched my hair. “You’re not like them and you’re not ever going to be. We’re different. We’re better. We don’t need anyone else. Okay?”

I nodded. “You didn’t have to hurt him.”

“He deserved it.”

“He wasn’t that bad.”

We sat together and watched the moonlight move across the walls. I was thinking of Kevin crying in the ashes. “He was going to hurt you eventually,” Jack said after a long while. “He was going to hurt you worse than I hurt him.”

“He might not have.”

“Well, he won’t now,” he said.

Not long after that, Jack and I were sitting on the porch swing on a warm evening, passing a bottle of wine back and forth and watching the moths fly at the porch light, when Jack said in an offhand tone that Kevin must not have been too badly hurt, since the police hadn’t shown up.

I shivered. I hadn’t thought about the police. I pulled at the cuffs of my sweater and asked if it had really been that bad. Jack shrugged.

“But I don’t think he’d have ratted us out, anyway,” he said. “If his parents squawked too much, he’d have made up some story. What else is he going to do? Say, ‘Mom, Dad, I’ve been sneaking out after hours to get stoned and fuck this girl, and now her brother’s gone and beaten the shit out of me, so call the police quick’? No way. He could never admit he’d been so naughty. Might ruin Mommy and Daddy’s good image of their little boy.” Jack grinned. “He could say he’d never had sex with you, but he couldn’t prove it, any more than he can prove that you’re not fourteen.”

“That I’m not—oh.” I saw what he meant. “But he wouldn’t expect us to do that.”

“Sure he would,” Jack said, “because that’s what I told him we’d do, right before I kicked him in the face.” He slipped an arm around my shoulder and handed me the bottle. The wine was bitter and warm in my throat.

We fell asleep in the parlor that night. Jack was stretched out on the couch and I was curled up in Raeburn’s chair under the ugly nude. I woke up sometime in the night. I was still drunk and my head was packed with steel wool. Rising from the chair, trying to be quiet so I wouldn’t wake Jack, I made my unsteady way upstairs to my bedroom. My window shade was up. There was enough moonlight in my room to see my way to my bed and to the battered wooden box wedged tightly between my headboard and the wall. Jack didn’t know the box existed; it was my only secret.

Carefully, I slid it out from its hiding place. The box held three things, treasures—relics, really—that I had found in the house when I was a little girl and hidden carefully away. There was a charm bracelet, heavy with tiny silver animals and keys and skulls and even a miniature crystal test tube, held to the chain by a thin silver band around its throat. There was a broken wristwatch, delicate and obviously intended for a feminine wrist, with a leather strap that still smelled faintly of the perfume, spicy and floral, that had been dabbed on the skin underneath it. There was a folded square of thick paper. The bracelet and the wristwatch had been my mother’s; the piece of paper was me.

Magee Women’s Hospital. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

The writing was fancy. The embossed seal was round and smooth under my fingers.

Father: Joseph Raeburn.

Mother: Mary Elizabeth (Chandler) Raeburn.

I’d found the box long ago, shoved carelessly into the bottom of a closet, beneath an old boot and some moth-eaten blankets. My birth certificate was inside it. It was after the social worker brought Jack home, but not long after, because the housekeeper was still there to slap my face when she found me with the certificate in my hands, to tell me that it was important and I had no right to touch it.

But I knew better. I was seven years old, and I could read English as well as Greek, and the name on the thick paper was mine. The paper was mine. The paper was me. I kept it under my bed; I knew it was there.

Josephine Leigh Raeburn.

That night was the last warm night of the year. Soon we had the last of the warm days, and then that summer was officially over. The snow fell early, and we never spoke of Kevin McNerny again.

4

A
S CHRISTMAS NEARED,
Raeburn grew secretive and distracted. The changes were small at first. Each week he came home a little later than he had the week before, and Friday afternoons soon became Saturday evenings. His eyes took on an unwholesome glitter, like marsh fire, and everything he did was infused with a horrible excitement, even when there was nothing in particular to be excited about. He began to grin.

He still left us piles of work, but didn’t seem to care if we did it or not, and had no interest in going over it if we did. The phone would ring late at night and he would jump for it, snarling, “Don’t touch it!” as if we were in the habit of dashing for the phone any time it rang; then he would take the phone into the study and lock himself away, talking for hours to whoever was on the other end. I asked him once, without thinking, who the calls were from, and he snapped that it was none of my business.

Soon all of his weekends were spent behind the closed door of his study, working at the battered manual typewriter he’d had since graduate school (“Computers, children, are responsible for the mechanization of human intelligence”). His wild laughter and the firecracker sound of the typewriter keys drifted through the heating vents.

Jack said it couldn’t mean anything good. He said it felt to him like the old one-two, that we’d somehow missed the one but he was watching out for the two.

It came, of course.

“The faculty family Christmas party is next Friday,” Raeburn said one night, during another interminable dinner. “It’s the sort of ridiculous function that I normally try to avoid, but this thing with Searles—I can’t afford to be antisocial.” He gave us one of his new grins, humorless and unpleasant. “We’ll all be very charming. I’ll find a motel room for the two of you somewhere in town. You can drive up in the truck.”

“I’m not going,” Jack said.

Raeburn gazed levelly at him. “That’s not an option,” he said.

“It is if I don’t show up.”

I stared at the hamburger patty on my plate. Discussions that began this way in our house rarely ended well.

Raeburn’s fork paused for only a moment in its journey from the plate to his mouth. Then it shoved a mouthful of peas between his teeth. “You have somewhere else to be?”

Jack shrugged. “Maybe I do.”

Raeburn laughed. “Do what you like,” he said. “But if I don’t see you at that party, I’d better not see you back here either.”

The big muscles in Jack’s jaw clenched tightly. I couldn’t have moved if I’d wanted to.

“Do we understand each other?” our father said.

“Go to hell,” Jack said. His voice was low and dangerous.

Raeburn smiled gently. “You sound like your mother, John. I hope you don’t end up the same way she did.”

Our mother had killed herself two weeks before my brother came to live with us. Jack said, “She ended up a long way from here.”

“Sure. Decomposing in a pool of her own vomit. Isn’t that what the social worker said?”

This was true. It was also one of my father’s favorite bedtime stories. It never lost its appeal for him.

“Dead in a gutter,” he continued, “with the rest of the creatures that float on the surface. A little more residue making life slimy around the edges. A terrible waste, really.”

“Speaking of slime,” said Jack, “fuck you.”

Raeburn pointed at my brother’s face with the tines of his fork. “Your mother never bothered to use her intelligence, either. She counted on the pretty blond hair and the ethereal bone structure and all of the other biological trinkets you two see in the mirror to make her way for her. You’d find yourself as lost in the real world as she did.” His fork moved to indicate the room around us, and the house, and, presumably, the world itself. “I’ve built you two a lovely little pond where you won’t ever become what your mother was. I’ve taken away that variable. And all that I ask of you is that occasionally you show up at a party and play nice for my colleagues.” He grunted. “You should consider yourselves fortunate.”

I watched Raeburn’s fork move from his mouth to his plate, again and again, while something there with us in the room formed a haze over the table, surrounding me, locking my muscles in place and forming a thin layer of ice under my skin. Jack, though—he was burning. I could feel the heat emanating from him. His hands gripped the edge of the table. The thought came to me dimly, through the icy fog in my brain, that he was using the table to hold himself down, that if he let go, the force of his rage would be all-consuming.

“Fortunate.” His voice was tightly controlled.

“I taught your mother and I taught you. There’s not a thought in your head that I haven’t put there.” Raeburn looked calm enough. But I saw the deliberate way he moved the food around on his plate. I heard the light, dangerous lilt in his voice. It was as if I were looking at a pressure gauge and the needle was trembling precariously at the farthest edge of the dial.

And on the other side of the table was my brother.

Don’t, Jack, I pleaded silently. Just leave. Don’t.

If it was a prayer, it was to him and for him, I guess; but more than that, it was for myself. At that moment, I didn’t care about my mother, or how she’d died, or anything else. An argument between my father and my brother meant an inevitable firefight; in that house, even when the bullets were aimed at Jack they always seemed to pass through me first, and my father’s temper terrified me.

Suddenly, without another word, Jack pushed away from the table, stood up, and left the room.

Raeburn’s eyes—which were almost as green as my brother’s, and had the same intensity—followed him. The fog drained away like thick liquid, and the sudden release of pressure made my ears ring. My stomach was still sick and twisted in knots, but I could move again.

Then the old man snorted. “Your brother spent nine years too long with that woman. He’ll always try to charm the world out of its basket and he’ll die angry because it doesn’t work, just like she did.” His expression now was indifferent. “Just like that asshole Searles, with his wacky ties and his motorcycle boots in the classroom. People like that are incapable of imagining that there might be something they weren’t born knowing.”

I stared down at my plate. The canned beets on it looked like chunks of raw meat.

Raeburn took a deep breath and let it out again. “Humanity will not survive as a collective unit, Josephine. It is too deeply infected with stupidity. The only way to survive is to isolate yourself from the diseased cells. Move away from them as soon as possible. Remember that.”

Wiping his mouth, he stood up and shook the crumbs from his shirt. “Maybe while you’re in town, you can meet Margaret Revolt. She wants to, and I think—” He paused. “She is a very clever young lady.”

Then he left. Distracted, heedless, he turned the light out as he went.

I pushed my plate slowly out of the way. Let my head fall to the table, my cheek against the cool wood. Sat like that, in the quiet. In the dark.

That night, around three in the morning, Jack woke me up when he stumbled over my shoes, which were lying in the middle of my floor.

“Just me,” he said, lifting up my blankets so that he could crawl under them. The burst of cold air made me shiver, and when he pulled the covers back over us I curled up close to his warmth.

He slid an arm around my stomach and laid his head on the side of my neck. His hair was damp with sweat.

Still half asleep, I said, “Okay?”

“Fuck him.” His breathing was heavy and ragged.

Jack had nightmares. Sometimes they were so bad that he cried out in his sleep and woke up drenched in thick, clammy fear-sweat. Meanwhile, I usually couldn’t sleep at all, and those were the hours that we spent together: when I couldn’t sleep and he was afraid to try. I never needed to ask him what the nightmares were about. Mary had been dead all night and most of a day before a neighbor knocked on the door—a night and a day that Jack had spent sitting next to her, waiting for her to wake up.

Now his arm was tight around my waist and his face was buried in my hair. I could feel the moistness of his breath and the prickly growth of his beard against my skin.

“Your dreams are about her,” I said.

“Josie, everything in this house is about her. Everything that happens.” His face turned, burrowed. “You, me, Raeburn, all of it.”

His breath was a slight tickle on my neck as he spoke, and his chest swelled against my back as he inhaled. I was waking up now, groggy and unsettled. I nestled closer into the nook of Jack’s body, closed my eyes, and wondered wearily if I would be able to get back to sleep.

Then I felt Jack’s hand on my hair, smoothing it into a soft pile on the pillow, lifting it from the back of my neck. He kept stroking even when the hair was out of his way.

It sent shivers over my scalp. I felt my eyes close with contentment and, drowsily, I said, “You never talk about her.”

“Sure I do.” Now his hand was buried in the pile of my hair, lifting it up and letting the strands fall through his fingers like water.