The Half Brother (28 page)

Her back was to me; she didn’t turn around. She poured water into her mug, replaced the kettle with a new precision that said,
I know I’m a guest
. “Don’t you feel strange calling me that?”

“No. Because you’re here in my house. Nearly every day.” She
stirred the tea slowly. That little
clink
of the spoon. It reminded me of Anita, except that she didn’t drink tea, took her coffee black—so how was that? “Anita wants you here. You need to be here for Nicky. I realize that.” I cleared my throat. “I
am
grateful.”

“But dubious.” She finally turned, gave me a quick smile, and then went and sat down. It was an invitation, but I didn’t move. She wrapped her hands lightly around the mug, blew on the surface to cool it. Still I stood in the doorway. As always. Even in my own house. “She just tells stories,” she said.

“Oh, and I bet they’re good ones.”

“You’re so angry at her.”

“Not as angry as I used to be.”

“I don’t know what happened between you two, Charlie, but—”

“May. No.”

She was quiet a long time. “I think I will never understand you.”

“No, probably not.”

She drank her tea. Looked at her watch. “I don’t know where Nicky is,” she said. “He told me four.”

“I don’t know what she’s going to say to you,” I said.

“You’ve heard it all before,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

“You never know what mothers are going to say.”

She was picking up her mug again but her hand slipped, and the hot tea sloshed over. Just a few drops but she gave a little cry, and then she said, “No, you never do.”

HERE IS ONE THING
May told me, later.

How the first time she had visited and Anita had held May’s hand and said, Come back sometime, Anita’s voice had been strong, wry, unadorned, but May had felt it was a shell, that the animal inside that had once been strong was beginning to shrink. Something wavered in Anita’s eyes—a fleeting transparency, an absence. And her hand was encased in loose skin and seemed made of pieces of itself, no longer bonded into a strong whole. It chilled May when she felt it, and she knew what it meant.

Nick and I had been standing there and May had felt our eyes and knew we watched her hungry for information, but what? What did we think she knew?

The oddest thing though was that as May had held Anita’s hand and the chatter floated in and among us, everything rudderless, all of us anxious for different reasons, May heard a bird outside, making an insistent call. It cut through the white January cold and was a
bird
, alive in winter, was life, was notice that time was moving, joyously; that, hidden, things were preparing to grow; and May had known that early out-of-place harbinger bird was counterpart to the smoky absence that passed behind Anita’s gaze. Hints and guesses.

So she went back. Over and over. Sometimes she told Nick or me that she was coming by and sometimes she didn’t, although she didn’t hide it either. She saw that Nick was confused at first by her visits, that she did not chat about them to him, as she might have about buying her groceries or picking up her dry cleaning. She kept herself from saying
Why do you think your mother is an errand
and then realized that of course he didn’t think that, that he was trying hard to believe that his mother living in my house was a routine that would last. He wanted May to visit that reality and bring back sanitized reports.

One day she told Anita she would bring her lunch. Nick and I were both at school; she might have told us she was going; if she did, then Nicky surely would have beamed with a determined pride, and I would have said a clipped thank-you. Most likely. Anyway, she went, and as she opened the front door (she told me this particularly, the materiality of that day, how the midweek, midday world made her notice the
thingness
of things) she felt the heft of it in its swing, felt the smooth clicking of the doorknob and thought of me. Imagined me with my head bent, oiling and mending, taking care of my house as though it were my child. Then she replaced my bent head, in her mind, with Nick’s, Nick excited and earnest and a bit self-consciously clumsy, my calm competence (how much credit she gave me!) replaced by the pellucid concentration of a little boy, and Nicky’s hands filled not with the mechanism of locks and machinery but with something living and beautiful, a bird’s nest maybe with tiny speckled eggs.

She closed the heavy door as softly as she could behind her and
heard the
click
. And then listened to the silence; let the house’s familiarity and foreignness surround her, fill her, and come to equilibrium. Not hers, this house, it had never been. But somehow Anita’s presence mitigated that.

Anita wasn’t in the living room or kitchen. May went upstairs, humming a little to announce herself, then called, softly; she didn’t know why. But when she knocked and then pushed Anita’s door open, she saw that my mother was asleep. The TV was on but muted; the remote control was by her relaxed hand and her chest rose gently up and down. The warm arrested present of the sickroom. And in the peace the thought descended on May seemingly from the outside, a truth of her world, now come to light:
Oh Anita, I love your sons
.

May stood there in the column of her love. She thought the force of her mind might wake her. But Anita slept on even though May felt her self, her person, was shouting. She stood there and felt that Nicky was on her skin, but that I (oh yes she said this) was running through her veins. She could have stood there looking, picking each feature out of Anita’s face and matching it with her sons’, but she also knew she would see too many mysteries, too many people who were not hers, whom she would never know, that it would break her heart that they were both so alone.

Oh I love your sons
.

She willed the love to dissipate, or at least become ordinary. What was she doing? She was standing on the solid wooden floor of my house. My house filled with things, objects that were not hers, that had nothing to do with her but that nevertheless had a straightforward permanence she understood and could take refuge in, unlike this confusing transporting emotion—thank God Anita had not been awake to see it on her face, see it surrounding her like so many flapping wings.

“
ARE YOU VISITING?
” says the young priest, on the steps of the stone church, in the town of St. Annes. If he’s even a priest. His sash is diagonal across his chest like a boy scout’s. She’s confused, says yes, she is. “How long are you in town?”

She explains then that she’s both visiting and not. That she lives in a town nearby. He says she should come back sometime. He’s a visitor himself. A deacon—he points to the sash, as if she will understand—in seminary, here on summer assignment.

She thinks the collar means he can’t get married. She doesn’t even know. So it doesn’t matter that he’s handsome. That there’s something bare and hungry and essentially alone in his face, something she recognizes.

She will go back to the main street, and the girls from her hometown will be long gone. But even if they’re not, she could face them. Nod hello and keep going. That’s what they expect of Anita Spooner.

She says she will be there on Sunday.

Twenty-one

I’m in our kitchen, aged eleven or so, at the table with its plasticky fake-wood grain, with the salt and pepper shakers and the precise stack of paper napkins. The windows are dark but if I could see out I’d see only trees, in our little valley outside the guesthouse.

My mother’s at the counter, her back to me, and I watch the shifting of the double-knit uniform as she moves, her slender ankles rising in rebuking contrast to the thick white soles of her work shoes. Her elbow pumps up and down as she opens cans. Occasionally we have TV dinners but those are expensive, and tonight we will have green beans and spaghetti heated up in pots on the stove, and an iceberg-lettuce salad, which she will dutifully provide on its own plate and will make me finish, as always, because it is fresh.

I know that she’s an indifferent cook only from occasional dinners at friends’ houses, and I’m aggressively disciplined about not imagining, when I’m in our own kitchen, warm cakes on glass stands or roasts emerging from ovens, or fried chicken, or pans of brownies already cut into squares.

She sets down two heaped plates and the little, inevitable salads, and we say a blessing and I feel a satisfaction—hers, mine, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same—at how well the two of us are doing things.

Yes, I’ve finished my homework, and I got a hundred on the spelling
test and an eighty-four on the math test, and maybe that wasn’t my best but next time will be better.

Before long—tonight, or some night soon—she’ll ask if I still need a babysitter, or am I too old, what do you think, Charlie, and the long procession of Jennifers and Amys and Janets will end. Soon, also, she’ll tell me that Mr. Satterthwaite from church has invited her to dinner, and I can stay home by myself if I lock the door and don’t answer it if anyone comes and go to bed by nine, and of course the McClatcheys will keep an eye out like always.

But at this point there still is a girl from the neighborhood there in the afternoons, and as we’re eating she remarks that this Linda or Lauren has said that I spend all my time inside reading, and Charlie you need to go outside and get some fresh air, find some boys to play with, it’s not healthy.

And I say yes ma’am because that is what I always say and I am used to
Charlie get your nose out of the book
, but who would listen to such absurd advice? When a book is a time machine, taking me back and sideways to other minds and times and cities and planets but mostly forward, forward, to dinnertime, to when my mother would walk in the door and the unsympathetic girl would leave and I could re-emerge into my life, and it would be only the two of us again, my mother and me, and although I felt like I barely had her at least she was mine alone—who would give such magic away?

EVERYONE WAS SICK.
Every wastebasket was filled with used tissues. I noted this to Divya and she told me not to be disgusting, and then she said, “My God, you’re right.” Colds turned into flu and bronchitis. The infirmary was full. The buildings were germ incubators. I waited my turn, but stayed obnoxiously healthy.

Nick, however, missed a couple of days, then came back, then was out again. He looked gray. I asked if he was sleeping and he said he was fine. He didn’t come to my house for several days running, and then he went to Boston for the weekend, without May, to visit friends; then he was sick once more. Finally I said to May, “Look, I
know you’re lovebirds and all, but I think Anita needs Nick to come over and say hello.”

She gave me an odd look. “I thought he was sleeping at your house,” she said.

“No. Did he say he was?”

She looked miserable, and nodded.

HIS APARTMENT WAS DISGUSTING.
Fetid, dirty dishes, unflushed toilet, papers everywhere. “Do me a favor and call before you come,” he said, and picked up a few smeary glasses and carried them to his overflowing sink. He looked bad, but he sounded normal—no congestion. I insisted on touching his forehead. Clammy, not warm. “I’m getting better.”

“Why’d you tell May you were at my house?”

“I didn’t say that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said that. I’m here because I didn’t want to make Mom sick. Or anyone else.”

“What’s going on?”

“Nothing. Is May worried?” His eyes softened, color came into his face. “I’ll talk to her.”

He’d be in the next day. He was contrite. Yes, he knew, he was in trouble with the secretaries, he hadn’t been calling in and they’d had trouble getting subs, but he always thought he’d feel up to it until the last minute. “Nancy Beamer came after me today,” I said. Nancy was the ferociously efficient head school secretary. “And I told her it’s not my responsibility. Which it’s not.”

“Go away, Charlie, you’re breathing my germs,” he said.

He didn’t want anything. No groceries, he was fine. In the past I would have insisted, but one patient was enough for me.

I SAW MY MOTHER’S FACE
when Nicky came back: saw her delight. Together we heard the heavy front door opening, the rattle of the door knocker, Nicky stomping his boots on the mat inside. “He’s here,” she said to me, just as Nicky’s joyful voice came floating up the stairs: “Mama?”

I’D GOTTEN RELIGIOUS
about attending hockey games. I made all the home games and even a few away ones. It was for Zack, and then I finally had to admit it was for me: it was a relief to have a new imperative, a new ritual; amid the dry cold of the rink, the artificial smell of the ice, I didn’t have to think.

I grew used to its particular spectacle, the slamming against the thick Plexiglas, the girls sitting behind shrieking with fear and delight, like they were on a roller coaster. The players masked and padded, cartoonish, as they smashed expressionlessly into one another and the boards; I wondered if this was an aspect Zack appreciated—the disguise, the protection, how emotion became invisible because it was purely private. You couldn’t even see them sweat, unless they took off their helmets. Their bodies had no expression except for that urgency, that speed.

Maybe, for Zack, it really was the speed, only that. The closest thing to flying: imagine yourself across the rink and then, suddenly, you’re there, with the push of a foot. That’s what he’d told Nick, anyway.

The band oompahed. They’d play the school song, some Springsteen, and some Beatles, with glockenspiel, including “Norwegian Wood,” with the tuba taking the sitar part; our band director prided himself on his original arrangements. Then, maybe, something that might be AC/DC. With glockenspiel.

Once I was sitting in the front row and as Zack skated by after a whistle he waved at me. A very small wave, like a four-year-old, or a teenager.

Then, at the break, the shouts of “Book-er! Book-er!” as Booker Middleton drove out on the Zamboni. It was odd and endearing that he’d appointed himself Zamboni man, remarkable that someone, once upon a time, had thought of chanting his first name, even more so that he let them, and it had become tradition. Around and around and I’d watch with the usual mildly obsessive suspense, hoping he didn’t miss any slivers. He never did. He was predictably precise. The gleam of the new ice, the careful overlapping, beginning to be hypnotic until
he reached the center and then he lifted his blue squadron cap into the air; and then the wild cheers and whistles, the stomping feet.