The Little Brother (15 page)

“Gone,” he said. “Left this morning, back to Gina's.”

Gabe didn't get arrested that day. The hours passed and I waited and nothing happened.

Maybe, possibly, maybe, I thought, just maybe Tom L. found it in his heart to find another solution, one that I couldn't fathom, and all would be okay.

In the afternoon, our home phone rang. Still in his bathrobe, remote peeking from his pocket, and with cigarette in hand, Dad picked up the cordless phone in the kitchen, walking into the living room, where he muted the television, and where I sat on the couch eating a nectarine.

Standing, he gave monotone monosyllabic answers in his gruff voice (“Yes.” “No.” “Negative.” “Wrong.”), all the while staring at me while he spoke, and then he said, “You're wrong about that, sir. Gabe wouldn't do that.”

I set my half-eaten nectarine in its paper towel on the table, fear climbing the back of my neck.

“I don't know what you're expecting me to do,” he continued, “but it sounds to me like you've got enough to worry about with your daughter.”

As Dad paused to listen, I tried to calm my panic, understanding that most likely it was Ben Kagan speaking to him on the phone.

“No disrespect”—Dad paused to inhale on his cigarette—“but,” he exhaled his smoke, “let's think about this for a moment. She came here, to our house, and lied to you about it, and you're telling me she's lied to you many times before, and now she's claiming that she slept with my son, and you're telling me to keep him away from her?” He paused, as if to let this sink in, and then
he said, “How do you know she's not lying about this? Perhaps you need to keep
her
away from
him
.”

With that, their conversation ended. Dad hung up the phone and then he leaned over to smash out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table.

“Do you know much about this girl, Tove Kagan?” he said, reaching into his robe pocket for his pack of Newports.

“No,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “I had some classes with her in grade school. Why?”

“That was her dad.” He lit another cigarette with a Bic lighter. Exhaling, he stared thoughtfully at it. Then he looked at me and said, “Haven't I told you and Gabe to always wear protection?”

In fact, we'd not had that conversation, but I was so shocked that I nodded.

“What's Gabe thinking, messing around with this girl? Sounds to me like she has a bad reputation. Lies to her parents.”

“I don't know,” I said.

“The dad says that he knows you. Said he has respect for you.”

I felt a rush of claustrophobia, along with a sensation that the walls were closing in on me. “I barely know them,” I said, my face hot. “I had classes with her, and her parents volunteered a lot. That's all.”

He grimaced. “Kagan,” he said. “Sounds Jewish.”

“Don't know,” I lied.

He nodded. “Sounds like they can't keep a lid on that girl. A wild child.”

“What'd he want?” I asked.

He'd just taken a hit from his cigarette, and I waited for him to respond. “You've got to be careful,” he said at last. “You and Gabe. We need to have a talk.”

“About what? What'd he want?”

He sighed wearily. “Well,” he said, “the thing is, Even, you're a trusting boy, but people will try to take advantage. They know that I have money, and that you're my son, that Gabe's my son. Girls are going to go after you. They're going to want to get pregnant by you. So that they can get my money. They see it as an easy street, a shortcut. That's just the way it is.” He squinted at me shrewdly. “Do you understand?”

Surprised by his explanation and unprepared for it, I stared at him and didn't say anything.

“It's about money,” he said, sensing my disbelief. “It always is. The sooner you learn this fact, the better.”

“How do you know he wants your money?” I asked.

He leaned forward to ash his cigarette, his face thoughtful. “I'm not sure,” he said. He cleared his throat, and then he said that most people always wanted something from him, and that it came down to money ninety-nine point nine percent of the time.

18.

JULY 7

A
FTER TURNING OFF
our home answering machine, I went to my bedroom with the handheld cordless kitchen phone and lay down on my bed, trying to make sense of it all, startled by my dad's lecture, and by his conversation with Ben. I still thought of him as Ben, and not Mr. Kagan, since he and Luanne had insisted that we students call them by their first names. A flash of a memory came to me: Luanne leaning over to help me paste glitter on a paper-plate holiday wreath, her hand on my shoulder, my sense of pride. “Beautiful, Even. Look at those colors.”

I planned to keep the phone from Dad's reach, and I put the ringer on mute. As if by kidnapping our home phone, I could ward off the future.

Did Ben know what had happened? What had Tove told him? What did Tove know? I imagined the Kagans sitting at their dining room table, Ben and Luanne interrogating Tove.

I opened a book—Robert Penn Warren's
All the King's Men
—but set it down almost immediately and went over and sat in my desk chair by the window. I thought, or rather tried not to think,
about the Kagans, while staring through the crack in my curtains at the fat palm tree in our front yard, the sun glittering on its fronds.

I remembered the inside of the Kagan home, and how a breeze would come through their open window. One wall composed entirely of a bookshelf, and flowers and plants everywhere—dead, dying, and fresh—on desks, tables, windowsills, and counters. Fragrant, and another scent heavy in the air, one that I now know must have been sandalwood incense. Everywhere I looked, something unusual to see, something that wanted to be touched: porcelain figurines, knickknacks, strange-looking clay sculptures, pieces of dried-out wood and rocks and seashells.

In third grade, Tove and I watched musicals in the late afternoons at her house, and when we finished, the light outside the windows would be darkened to a day-ending blue.
Grease; West Side Story; Hello, Dolly!; Guys and Dolls; Oklahoma!; The Sound of Music; Singin' in the Rain; Mary Poppins.

I'm not a musicals type, but at the time these strange hybrids of forced optimism and story lines, with accompanying soundtracks and lyrics, fascinated me. I couldn't believe things like musicals existed without my knowledge, and I wouldn't have been exposed to them if not for the Kagans.

“I'm agnostic,” Ben told me once, around the time I was in fifth grade. “That means I have no idea,” he added, “whether there's a god or not.” He owned a watch-repair business called Tick-Tock, but he fixed other appliances as well.

“What about your religion?” I asked.

“Religion,” he said, “is the opiate of the masses.”

For a few long seconds, I tried to wrap my head around what he'd said. It's one of the most paraphrased statements of Karl Marx's, but I'd never heard it before, and I thought he'd simply come up with it.

“You're Jewish,” I said.

“That's right,” he said. He smiled. “I'm Jewish. Luanne isn't, but I am.”

I didn't say anything.

“Know any Jews, Even?”

“None,” I said.

“You do now,” he said. “You know a Jew now.” And in my head, I repeated: I do now; I do now; I know a Jew now.

“For me,” he said, “it's not a religion. It's about culture.”

I wanted to tell him that I was also an agnostic. As soon as he'd explained, I'd decided. But I wasn't sure how to pronounce the word, so I said nothing.

My comforter jiggled, startling me, the phone vibrating beneath it, and I rose and picked it up. The area code from caller ID showed that it was from Rancho Cucamonga, and I let it ring at least twenty more times.

I've thought about it—why'd I answer when I knew that it was probably Ben? How stupid. What could I have been thinking? And I've never come up with an adequate explanation, besides Ben's persistence in not hanging up, and my curiosity.

“Even,” he said, his voice tinged with affection when he heard me on the phone and not Dad, “what a nice surprise. So good to hear your voice. It's been years!”

“I shouldn't be talking to you,” I said, terribly upset, understanding immediately my mistake in answering. Unthinkable that I should betray my family more than I'd already done.

“It's okay,” he said in a pleading tone. “Don't hang up. Please.”

I said nothing, feeling myself break into a sweat.

The line went silent, and then he said, “Are you still there?”

“I'm here.”

“Listen,” he said, “I'm sorry to bother your family. I really am. I wouldn't be calling if it weren't so important. We've been having trouble with Tove. I'm trying to figure out what's going on.”

I didn't know what to say.

“Maybe,” he suggested, “I can tell you what I know, and then you can tell me if you have anything to add?”

When I didn't respond, he said, “It's like a puzzle. Your dad thinks I'm accusing him of something. I'm just trying to figure out what's going on.”

“I don't know anything,” I said.

“That might be,” he said, “that might very well be.”

“I should go,” I said.

“The thing is,” he said, “we found out that she lied to us about her Fourth of July weekend. She said she spent the night with Crystal and another girl, but we found out later that she didn't. We know she spent the Fourth at your house. We contacted her friends when she didn't come home and we found her car outside her friend's house. She wouldn't leave.” He paused, took a breath. “I couldn't get her to come out until I threatened to call the cops. That's how bad things have gotten, Even.”

He paused again, in case I wanted to respond, and when I didn't, he said, “Anyway, she finally came out, and I took her home. She admits that she spent the Fourth at your house”—his voice took on an embarrassed, discreet tone—“and that she and your brother”—he coughed—“got together,” he finished. “But that's all we know. I'm trying to piece the rest.”

“I spent the Fourth at my friend's,” I said.

“She said that she didn't see you.” He laughed in false merriment. “Hey,” he said with sarcasm, “she told us the truth!”

It wasn't funny, and I didn't respond.

“Sorry to bother you and your family, Even,” he said in a gloomy tone. “I'm just trying to figure out what's going on.”

“That's okay,” I said. “I have to go now.”

“All right,” he said.

We said our good-byes and I didn't speak to him again until over a year later, when we happened to be in the same courthouse bathroom during a break at the trial.

A ridiculously inane and brief conversation that did little to mask our deep discomfort: a mutual, agreed-upon complaint concerning the lack of paper towels. That he spoke to me at all was, I realize now, significant.

G
ABE ARRIVED LATER
that afternoon in a foul mood. “Even,” he said, kicking at my legs outspread at the couch, “get out of my way.” He took the remote from me and switched the channels, sitting in Dad's recliner.

I'd been watching Hitchcock's
Rear Window,
and though I'd seen it before, I got rather involved at the midpoint. But I felt
exhausted and guilty and not prepared to fight him for television control.

So we watched what he wanted,
The Anna Nicole Show,
a depressing reality series—every ten minutes or so deluged by commercials—depicting the drug-induced downfall of a plus-size model.

“She's so hot,” Gabe commented, when Anna wobbled into her kitchen, high as a kite, lipstick smeared around her mouth, and sat in a chair. A close-up of her globe-like breasts, and then her staring-into-space face, lips parted with lipstick-flecked teeth, her cheek on her closed fist, an elbow on her kitchen table.

“Gabe.”

He glanced up absently.

“Gabe, change the channel. This is stupid.”

He stared back at the screen. “Fuck you,” he said, waving me away with a tired hand. “Leave me alone.”

I saw red. I did. A blazing red as I went for him, tackling him, slinging him to the floor, where we wrestled, my thigh grazing the edge of the coffee table. “Fuck you,” I said, feeling the spittle fly from my mouth, “you fucking dick piece of shit!”

“Fuck!” Gabe said. “Jesus, Even, calm down.”

He loosened my grip and crawled a few feet from me. Squatting and staring at me, he breathed heavily. His hair looked like the feathers on the back of a turkey, standing straight up, as if also wondering what to make of my outburst.