Split (4 page)

I should probably go all indignant, but I laugh. What’s the use in pretending? She’s not going to bust me.

I say, “I’m without my books. Just moved. If it’s all the same to you … ?”

“Dakota.”

“If it’s all the same to you, Dakota, I’ll start with
Flowers for Algernon
.” I reach for it, remember I’m broke, and turn the gesture into a point.

“I just thought you might relate.” She quick-wrinkles her nose and replaces
The Book Thief
.

“I relate better to Algernon.”

“The lab mouse they did all those experiments on?”

I glance at Mirriam, press my index finger to my lips, and whisper in my best Elmer Fudd voice, “Be vewy, vewy quiet. I’m being tested.”

Mirriam is leaning on the counter, the toe of her shoe bouncing against the floor. She lets out a big sigh.

“Oh, sorry to keep you waiting,” Dakota calls over to Mirriam. “We’re short-handed—looking for help.” She leans over to me, and I get that cinnamon-rain scent again, while she whispers, “Be sure to come back, okay? I’d hate to break up a chess set as gorgeous as this one.”

Oh, yeah? Everything breaks up. It’s called entropy
.

Dakota walks over to the counter and starts scanning the bar codes of Mirriam’s books. I watch her moving, lifting the books, bending them for their bar codes, and sliding them across the flat screen, her eyes on her work.

I begin reloading my bag. I’m not sure if she’s actually pretty, or if I just think that now that she’s saved my hide. When I pick up my camera, I figure I can decide later. I take off the cap, line up the shot, and adjust the aperture. The shot looks boring, so I wait until I can see her eyes flash or her head turn—something. She reaches down for a bag, and when she comes up, her hair swings, her lips puckered while talking, and I click.

chapter 5

a
fter we get back and I’ve showered,
I walk into Christian’s bedroom, hoping he won’t mind if I borrow some clean clothes. My jeans are covered in the dust of four states, my shorts in the sweat of an impromptu World Cup final.

A pile of
New England Journal of Medicine
s is stacked inside a wooden cube that doubles as a night table. His walls are empty: no framed pictures, no postcards stuck in the mirror’s edge, nothing. His dresser is decorated with only the practical: an empty money clip, a change jar that’s heavy on the silver, and a pocketknife. Who lives like this?

I find jeans and a black T-shirt with hot air balloons that says DUKE CITY MARATHON on it. The jeans are too big. I transfer my belt to Christian’s jeans and roll up the cuffs. My dirty clothes lie on his carpet like roadkill. Looking for the hamper, I open the closet. Something bangs against the inside of his door. I turn—his diplomas are framed and hung.

I stop. It’s the first thing of him I’ve recognized: his pride twisted up with his modesty. Yes, he puts them up, but where no one can see. He probably stares at them every morning for a second, marking the distance between here and Chicago, but I’ll bet no one knows they’re here.

When he was in ninth grade, a girl he was trying to impress came over and laughed at his room, at how all his awards were framed and hung on his walls—his boyhood immortalized. He boxed all the awards and stashed the box in his closet. But some mornings, I would hear him slide the cardboard across the floor, and I knew he was looking at them.

Now I toss my clothes in his hamper and pull his high school diploma off the hook. I slide my thumb along the glass that protects his printed name: Christian Emerson Witherspoon. The University of Chicago, Laboratory School. On the one from NYU: Christian Emerson Marshall.

He was supposed to go to Northwestern or the University of Chicago, stay in the city. NYU was his third choice. I pulled the bratty little brother routine, hiding the letter for a couple of days before I let him see it. But when I gave it to him, he just chucked it on his desk; he’d already been accepted to Northwestern.

“An acceptance, right?” he asked when I picked it back up and handed it to him.

“Yes,” I said, looking up at him.

“Good to have a backup, I guess,” he said, and I knew he was going to stay in Chicago, that he’d be around for another four years. At the time, I thought it was because of me. I never considered where he might go after he graduated from college.

Now I look at the NYU diploma and glance at the date.

Twenty-eight months ago. More than two years. Two years. What was I doing the day he graduated? It was the summer before I started high school, before I even met Lauren, but after my dad started in on me. The blister in my brain wobbles threateningly.

I want to prop the diploma on my fingertips like a waiter with a tray and then whip it over, slamming the glass against the dresser’s corner. Shatter it. Anger coils in my chest, and I hold it there, refusing to let it strike. No smashing of sentimental objects. Too much like my father. Carefully, I rehang the frame.

When I hear Christian’s voice, I jump and whirl around. But he isn’t in the apartment; he’s in Mirriam’s place, and the walls are thin.

I’m tempted to stay and press my ear to the wall, but I figure I shouldn’t add eavesdropping to my steadily growing list of crimes, bastard that I am. I start to back out of the closet, hoping a board won’t creak, when I hear Mirriam say, “You’ll have to think about it. I mean, he’ll need to transfer into a school, and I’m just saying I can help you guys look into them.”

“I can’t make any plans right now. I don’t even know if he’s staying.”

That stops me. I push through a row of shirts, step over to the wall, and lean against it. Cold plaster against one shoulder. I’m sandwiched between dress pants and a blue long-sleeved shirt. I push the sleeve out of my face.

“Wait, what? Isn’t he?” There is a pause. “He’s your brother, Christian. Family.”

“And that means something different to me than it does to you.”

There’s another pause, and I picture her putting her hands on her hips like she did in the bookstore. Even without seeing her, I know that they’re having a silence-off. I press my shoulder deeper against the wall and wait.

Wait.

Wait.

Finally, Christian caves. “You have a great family. You’re always around for each other.”

“So, tell me about it, about yours.”

I hear the bedsprings squeak. When Mirriam speaks again, her voice is coming from farther down, so I know she’s the one who sat.

“Tell me something, anything, about him.”

Christian’s voice is closer to me now. “He was a typical little brother. He was pesky and tagged along and … Okay, I remember something. One Halloween …”

Family legend time. I dressed up as a knight, and he bought me a sword with his own money since my mother wouldn’t hear of such a violent instrument in the hands of her son. Ironic? Why, yes.

He tells her about our neighborhood’s haunted house and the witch who lived there (really just a lonely widow, as we discovered later). For Halloween, she put cobwebs all over her gate, had howling ghosts that lurked in trees, and a mechanical skeleton in a coffin beside her door. But she gave out Mr. Goodbars, and not the fun-sized rip-off, but the real deal. We used to tell this one together to our family friends, each of us adding a part.

“Anyway,” Christian continues, “it was creepy, so I went with him. One year …”

I was six, and you were eleven
, I add my lines silently.

“… Paul, a friend of mine, had dressed up as a skeleton. He must have done something to the widow’s skeleton and climbed inside the coffin. So when we came to the door, this skeleton sits up and grabs my arm, its whole hand around my wrist. Paul starts to pull hard, so hard that I start falling in …”

And he’s yelling, “Your turn in the box, mortal!”

“… I’m freaked out, not just startled. Jace, who is beyond terrified, leaps
toward
the coffin …”

With my sword blazing
.

“… Plastic sword blazing,” he echoes, and I bask in my newfound telepathy. “Starts beating this skeleton’s hold on me, screaming ‘Die, die, die!’”

My hand covers my mouth, and I start whisper-laughing. I hear him laughing with me. Plaster wall or not, we’re together. Mirriam’s laugh is high and strange, foreign to our duo.

All three of us ran when the widow/witch came out screaming and swearing about her skeleton. Christian had grabbed my hand and pulled me with him. There was a time when he wouldn’t leave me behind.

“He obviously adored you,” Mirriam says.

I pick up the blue sleeve and run my fingers along the cuff, thinking about that October. He was already a runner, training for Boston one day, and I couldn’t keep up with him. So I would take out my bike and pedal along beside him, mile after mile, morning after morning.

Christian mumbles something that I recognize, even though I’ve caught only a few words. My mom used to say it to him when she wanted him to set a good example for me:
Every kid wants to be like their older brother
.

“What? Christian?” she asks. She waits. “Christian?”

“Yeah.”

“Where’d you just go?”

“No, it’s nothing. I was just remembering the skeleton.” His voice is quiet, and without a breath, he rushes on, louder now. “What do you think of him?”

That pattern of speaking, it’s a verbal tell. When someone would ask us how our mom was after she’d taken a good one from my dad, he would do that. His voice would get soft and hurried, sounding dismissive. “She’s good,” he would say, and then he would rush to another subject, always something spectacular like, “Did you know that [somebody or other’s] comet will be showing up soon?”

Mirriam says, “I’m scared for him. I think if you don’t let him stay, he will head into some real trouble.”

“What are you talking about?”

After she snitches about the bookstore, she says, “He is going to need your help.”

Silence.

She continues, “It’s isn’t like you to … Why not let him stay?”

Silence.

So she says, “Did your father start hitting him before or after you left?”

Did he tell you that?

“Did he tell you that?”

“Don’t you think I’ve seen enough abused kids to figure it out? He shows up here looking like that and suddenly needs to live with you?”

“Whatever happened to bring him here is his business. Even if he had told me, I’d keep it to myself.”

Damn straight. Fraternal loyalty, lady
.

“Okay, well,” Mirriam says, “what are you going to do? Hide out here from now on?”

I hear the bedsprings whine a second time; he is sitting down next to her. “I know he’s my brother, that I’m responsible for him. I just don’t know how to live with him and not …”

“Not what?”

“I left. All right? I left. If I were to dig all that back up, it would be an ugly sight,” he says.

“I’m sure. Why’d you leave?”

Here we go. I push hard against the wall, digging my shoulder in. I’m a student of Fightology.

“I’ve told you why. I didn’t get along with my dad,” Christian says.

“How about you tell me the whole story this time? You left because your father used to beat you, right?”

Fightology Lesson #1: Start with a loaded question.

After a pause, Mirriam says, “You know, this is what I’m talking about. Maybe
that’s
something that should have come up.”

“What difference does it make now? Or do you think that’s all that defines me? Not New York, not running, not med school.”

I start tugging on the blue sleeve.

“But that’s exactly what I mean, Christian. Choosing med school looks different to me now. Telling me you wanted your own space so we should move next to each other looks different to me now, too.”

“See,
that’s
why I didn’t say anything. Now you think that taking it from my dad is everything, as if it’s all I’m about,” Christian says, his voice escalating.

Fightology Lesson #2: Don’t be the first to yell or you risk being at fault.

“Not
all
that you’re about, but important, essential even,” Mirriam says, hurried and louder.

“It’s not that important,” he shouts. “It’s not. I doubt you’ll understand this—”

“Now I’m too simple to under—”

“It’s only as important as I let it be. I don’t think about it anymore. It’s over and done with.”

“Right, keep telling yourself that while you kick your own brother to the curb.”

Fightology Lesson #3: Fights have their own rhythm. Words accelerate until they start to run over each other—faster, louder. I’m expecting Christian to start swearing, name-calling. I’m waiting, but instead I get a silence. What the hell is this silence about?

“All right. Maybe I should have said something about it.” When Christian speaks, his voice is quiet.

“You shouldn’t have lied.”

I tug harder on the blue sleeve, and a white thread hangs off. I begin pulling it.

“I didn’t lie about it. I just didn’t mention it.”

“Let’s dispense with those semantics right now, okay? You’ve been
actively
covering it up. You’ve worked at it. An omission is an ‘oops, I forgot’; a lie is making someone believe something false. I have to be honest with you. I’m not sure that I can be with someone who lies to me.”

There’s a long pause. The bed squeaks again, and Christian’s voice sounds closer to me when he says, “Okay.”

“So, wait, you’re willing to let us go just like that?” she asks.

“You’re the one deciding, Mirriam. I will not stand here and persuade you. I’d never try to get a woman to change her mind about leaving me.”

I hold my breath. It’s the first thing we have in common. Undeniably in common.

“You won’t even … I’m not going to get … I don’t even get an apology?” Mirriam says.

Oh, okay, I get it. It was just a pause, a glitch in the fight; they’re back at it now
.

“I’m sorry that it hurts you that I didn’t tell you—” Christian says.

“Thanks. That was genuine.” In spite of myself, I admire her sarcasm.

“But I met you when you were getting out of social work. And I remember you said—the first night we slept together, we were in bed—and you said, ‘I’m not sure I can handle all that sorrow 24/7.’”

“I said that?” There’s a quick pause. “But those kids were hopeless, no future. They were broken.”

“That’s right. I’m not, and I wasn’t going to be lumped in with them, with something you had to get away from.”

Mirriam sighs and says, “See, now there’s a reason I can understand.”

I turn my back to the wall and lean against it.

“Are you all right?” Christian asks her.

“I’m all right; I’m just … I know it’s hard for you to talk … I know that kids protect themselves and shell up and … the worse it was, the less they talk … I’m hurt. I thought we were closer.”

“If it helps, this is the most I’ve said about it since I left Chicago.”

“Oh, honey. You know you can’t just keep it bottled up. You have to talk about it.”

“Not now, okay? No more arguing?” he says, his voice worn out.

“Not now.”

I wonder if I’m a broken kid. Was Christian ever broken? My mother would say,
No, too strong
, and would sneak a satisfied smile at her folded hands.

What about me, Mom?
I would ask.

And the smile would leave her.

She would be right.

I hear a shuffle of feet against the floor as Christian walks toward Mirriam. In my imagination, he is kneeling beside her, putting his head on her lap. She might stroke his hair and then, with her hands on his cheeks, lift his head and kiss him.

Through the wall, I hear Mirriam moan.

O-kay, if I stay in this closet any longer, I’m going to require therapy. That is, more therapy.

Is that what a fight is like for normal couples? Is this what people are supposed to do to make up? I remember Lauren and I making up after our first and second breakups. It was probably as loud as our fights. We were so driven about it. In our hurry, our teeth clanged against each other, and I backed her against a wall. I pressed hard against her while her teeth drew blood from my shoulder. Come to think of it, I’m not sure we weren’t still fighting.