Life From Scratch (12 page)

Patricia didn’t call her back.

When Pierre got home from his trip, he called Mom a second time and told her she had to come to Atlanta to see Michael. He was matter-of-fact. Still, he wanted to wait until she arrived to reveal the details of what had happened—until they could speak face-to-face. But when Mom insisted he tell her right away, he gave in. She made flight arrangements immediately.

Pierre was good at handling tough situations. But as the day unfolded, his presence failed to calm Patricia, who continued to walk through the house in a fog. Though she fulfilled her parental obligations, something wild settled into her green eyes.

Although the neighbors brought casseroles over, Patricia continued to cook, almost out of nervous habit. She turned the radio on louder, laughed harder, and made more food than ever before. Sometimes she piled dozens of boiled potatoes on the table. Other times she made a five-eggplant ratatouille so big that we had to hold our plates on our laps to make room for the casserole. No one had much of an appetite, so most of her creations were left untouched. Still, she cooked.

I split those first shattered days between home, school, and the hospital. Every time I passed Michael’s room, I held my breath, straining as if I might hear his footsteps again. School days started late: Patricia brought me in later after homeroom. She never explained why, but my friend Alyona confided that the principal was giving updates about Michael over the intercom during morning announcements.

Anger bubbled under my skin. If they were going to be talking about my brother, I wanted to be there. I wanted to know what they were saying. But I never protested the late arrivals; it was getting harder and harder to talk to anyone. Patricia and Pierre argued all the time. But if anyone was still crying, they were now doing so behind closed doors.

After school, Patricia would pick me up and drive me to the hospital. Michael’s home was now behind those stale, sanitized walls. Tubes and wires threaded into his limbs like slack puppet strings. Every day, he looked the same: Eyes shut. Thin gown. Thinner sheets. Thinning body.

After a quick therapy session (which usually involved playing a few hands of “Go Fish” while the therapist made one-sided small talk), I’d ride the steel box up to Michael’s room, where I’d pick through my cafeteria dinner in silent vigil, waiting for the slightest flicker of movement in his face or a twitch of his hand. I’d offer him my Jell-O, and when he didn’t take it, I’d tell him about my day.

After a while, I’d run out of things to say. Then I’d lay my head on his shoulder, take his oddly cool hand in mine, and play him a cassette tape of Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” His girlfriend, also 14, had recorded herself playing it for him. The song gave me goose bumps (and still does) because it so perfectly captures the two sides of my brother.

He’s quick with a joke or to light up your smoke

But there’s someplace that he’d rather be

He says, “Bill, I believe this is killing me.”

As the smile ran away from his face

“Well I’m sure that I could be a movie star

If I could get out of this place.”

Michael never so much as fluttered an eyelid. Sometimes I wanted to pinch him or dig my nail under his skin, just to see if that would get a reaction, but I never did. I was irrationally afraid he’d pop up and get me back.

By the end of the first week, visitors trickled in from Boston: my cousins, aunt, and great aunt. Tim was stuck at work, and Grace had just had a baby. But Connor came two different times. Even with all the visitors, the only time Michael stirred was when Mom flew in to visit.

Two years is such a long time to a young heart. I could hardly believe I was in the same space as her again. When she’d left us with the Dumonts, Mom had said it was “forever.” Oh, but I was happy when she walked into that bleached hospital room. She was skinnier than ever, her worn clothes gaping at the waist and neck. Her eyes looked a bit beaten down, but her hair was just as big as before.

After exchanging a knowing look with me, Mom walked up to Michael’s side and said, “Hello, cutie pie,” as she had when he was little.

I could hardly believe my eyes. For the first time since he’d been admitted, Michael
moved
. His entire body started trembling, and his breathing became shallow and quickened, as if he were having an asthma attack. It was her voice that did it. His eyes even opened for a bit. But he was somewhere else, looking past the ceiling, to something much farther away. He never woke up, not even when she cradled his hand in hers.

Still, Mom stayed by his side. Every day she read him the same creased letter, around 15 pages long. In it she asked him what caused his “accident,” each possible explanation taking up one or two lines. She asked him if he was trying to get attention or if someone bullied him at school. Perhaps he was sad? Or was he seeking out some misguided thrill, as some of his friends had done?

I sat in the corner while she read, guilty at feeling content that we were a threesome again. Michael lay there with his eyes open. One day he began chewing his tongue until it bled and the nurse had to put a block in his mouth to keep him from hurting himself.

After that nothing much changed.

Between letter readings, Mom asked how I was doing. I told her about school, about missing her, about nothing and everything. I asked if she wanted to go to dinner, but she thought it best to keep our meetings at the hospital. She didn’t want to upset the Dumonts; after all, they were my family now. I pleaded to come home with her, but each time she quietly reminded me that the Dumonts could give me so much more than she ever could.

There were lots of meetings about what to do with Michael. His hospital bill was $4,000 a day. And though the doctors said he might come out of the coma eventually, he’d never be self-aware. He’d never eat again except through an IV connected to his arm. They said any eye movement was pure reflex. I wondered about Michael’s breathing when Mom had walked into the room: Surely that meant he was still in there somewhere. But no one else agreed.

Patricia and Pierre offered to put Michael in a home for invalids. Pierre even offered to set up a hospital bed in one of their many living rooms. But Mom shut them down, saying what only the doctors could admit: My brother was already gone.

She said it was inhumane to drag out the inevitable. The doctors took Michael off life support and moved him out of intensive care into a narrow room. The waiting game began.

By now Mom had used up all her vacation time. She flew back to Boston, but promised to come back the next weekend to visit. Before she left, she gave me a bear hug and whispered, “Just keep saying, ‘All is well. All is well.’ ”

Michael’s heart gave out a few days later, before Mom could make that next trip out. He’d been in a coma for a month. Out of confusion or perhaps fear, no one told Mom for three days that Michael had died. Patricia must have been gun-shy from their conversation earlier in the month; but secretly I wondered if anger was the real culprit. Most everyone blamed Mom for giving us up. But they didn’t know what we’d lived through all those ugly, tattered years.

Mom may not have always made the right choices, but she did her very best. She fought like hell for us. I had witnessed her fierce love. Felt it. Lived it. Sending us with the Dumonts was just one small part of her war—our war. It was a white flag of surrender, reluctantly raised for hope’s sake, for a shot at the peace we all so desperately craved.

Now 27, my oldest half brother, Connor, finally stepped up and gave Mom the news. He’d been the last person to see Michael before he died. Finding out after everyone else, Mom responded with all the fury of a cornered mama bear who’s lost a cub. She was snarling and crazed and confused, and under it all, just so … sad.

Michael still had to be buried. Patricia and Pierre wanted Mom to make that decision, but she couldn’t think straight, couldn’t decide what to do with him. Finally, she resigned herself to letting the Dumonts bury him in Atlanta. But as my great aunt told Mom, that would never do. My brother needed to come home—
all
the way home. After she offered to cover the expense to fly him back to Boston, Mom signed the papers. Her lost little boy finally made the journey back to where he’d wanted to be all along.

I expected to be on that plane with Michael—or at least, not far behind. I couldn’t wait to see my family at the funeral, to sink into their arms while I cried. But Pierre said I’d missed enough school while Michael was in the hospital. In the end, none of us went: not Pierre, not Patricia, not Lauren, Heather, or Toni. They held a small memorial service in Atlanta instead.

Mom wrote me a four-page letter describing the funeral. It was at the Holy Name Church, a few neighborhoods over from our old apartment in Jamaica Plain, where she still lived. Mom hired a harpist who plucked notes as delicate as dewdrops. It was spring, and the lilacs would have been blooming, fragrant and unapologetic. Connor, Tim, Grace, aunts, uncles, cousins—they were all there. Grace’s young daughter, Daisy, toddled and made noises all through the mass (“Michael would have liked that”). His old principal was even there (“and says hello!”).

Mom added that Michael’s baseball hat and karate belt were tucked in his casket with him. She laid a long-stemmed red rose, a small white rose, and a sprig of baby’s breath across his chest.

Mom ended the letter, “Patricia and Pierre gave Michael the best two years of his life. He got to do and try everything he ever wanted to do and try. They were very good to Michael. We all tried to help that boy—he had so much potential to be great. Don’t look back too much—just enough to figure it out. Look ahead. You have a future. Remember, you can write to me. There is nothing I want more than for you to have a real family and home and good life and be happy because—you may not believe this—I LOVE YOU. And that’s the whole truth, and nothing but the truth—so help me God!”

Then she cut her letter short: “But I don’t want to dwell on that now. Someday, maybe in 100 years, we can talk about it again.”

No one ever explained why we didn’t go to the funeral, but I later learned that Pierre had opted not to attend his own brother’s funeral years earlier. I suppose some people don’t need or want that sort of closure.

But missing Michael’s funeral made me feel that part of me was being amputated without my consent. He was gone, and there was nothing for me to do but stand in his sun-drenched room, watch the dust fairies swirl around me, and wonder at the impossible emptiness. The smell of life—his life—stuck to the room like a thumbtack; the little boy in wet slacks, mud-caked shoes tracked in carelessly, grass stains on every elbow and knee.

That’s when the tears finally came. I cried out of anger and out of deep, churning loneliness. I cried when his clothes were stripped off their hangers and heaped into bloated, black trash bags for a local boys’ home. I cried when his sneakers were thrown in the trash because they were too grimy to donate. I cried because I needed my mom. I cried because I didn’t know how to stop crying. And the more I cried, the more hollow I felt.

PART TWO

Another Me
n
u

“Life is bitter when there is no sugar at the bottom.”
—Boris Vian

CHAPTER 8