The Things a Brother Knows (16 page)

“I won’t be alone.”

I’m not even sure I believe what I’ve just said but we let it hang there in the air between us.

“I think maybe Richard is right,” Pearl says. “And you know that’s saying a lot if I’m willing to admit when Richard is right.”

“You guys. Thanks. Really. For everything.”

I open the door.

I grab my pack from the trunk. I come around the side and lean in Zim’s window.

“I feel like we’re dropping you off at college or something,” he says.

“Yeah, and he’s totally embarrassed by his dorky parents so he’s making us leave him a few blocks away,” Pearl adds.

I stick out my hand and Zim slaps it.

“Peace out,” he says.

I walk around to Pearl’s side. She jumps out of the car and throws her arms around me. She squeezes hard. Then she hops back in.

“Try and avoid killing each other on the way home,” I say.

“Try and avoid chafed balls,” she shoots back, and then she peels out, because Pearl has never let an opportunity for drama pass her by.

I’m standing in the middle of the road.

It’s one of those moments that feel like a big metaphor. You know those moments. The kind where the hero, not that I’m calling myself a hero, because if there’s one thing we all know, I’m no hero, but in these moments the “hero” stands in the middle of the road. He can walk one way, toward the
unknown and toward his fear. Or he can turn the other way and walk toward home and everything familiar.

But the thing is, this isn’t a big metaphor, because in those moments there’s a choice.

The hero must choose his path.

And for me, right now, there is no choice at all.

I walk the three blocks to the address Loren gave me. And I do what I know. I wait.

I sit out on the curb.

I’m facing what could be any house on any street in any town in America. Neatly trimmed hedges. Manicured lawn. There’s an American flag hanging limp from a flagpole. In this perfectly still air it’s got no place to go.

I wonder if there’s a son in this house, another son who didn’t join the army, a son whose job it is to mow this lawn. I wonder if this son still mows this lawn so that his mother doesn’t have to hire the kid across the street.

I can’t tell if Boaz has arrived already. If he’s eating a home-cooked meal. Talking and sharing stories with a table full of strangers.

Or if he’s still on his way. Still walking. Somewhere on the streets of New Jersey.

There is only one way to find out.

I ring the doorbell. A woman answers. She’s got fire-red hair and a face like a slab of white marble.

“Bo,” she says, and she reaches for my backpack. “I’m so happy to have you here. Let me take that from you. You must have had a long day.”

I think back on the movie. The total lack of a plot and—except for a fantastic naked breast or two—the absence of any memorable moment. But that’s not what she means by having had a long day.

I guess I can forgive her the mix-up. After all, I’m a complete stranger showing up on her doorstep with a backpack and hiking boots. But still. I don’t look much like a marine. First there’s the issue of my hair. And then, my less than worthy biceps.

I tell her I’m his brother. That I’m meeting him here. I offer to wait outside but she’ll hear nothing of it. She whisks my backpack off someplace and returns with a can of Coke and a plate of cheese and crackers.

I learn that her name is Maria. That her son’s been in three and a half years now. He enlisted on his eighteenth birthday. She’s got pictures of him in uniform on every horizontal surface of the living room. There doesn’t seem to be a father anywhere, but it’s not my place to ask. Just photos of her son. Chin forward. Serious. Determined. The kind of face that’s stock for these sorts of pictures, except for the galaxy of freckles scattered across his cheeks.

She tells me how lucky we are to have our soldier back.

I tell her I know.

Then the doorbell rings.

I try to keep a calm face. I try not to give away any of my panic. I don’t want to be the cause of a scene inside this woman’s house. She seems kind of fragile, and she’s a good person. Just look at this cheese plate.

She goes to the front door and welcomes him with a hug. She leads him inside, over to me and the plate of cheese, and when he sees me he says:
Hey
.

Just
hey
.

All casual, like it’s the most natural thing in the world to see me sitting here in this woman’s living room. But in this
hey
there’s a glimmer of respect. I’ve found him again, far away from where I found him last.

I say
hey
back.

She asks him what he’d like. He says he’ll take a Coke too. She goes to the kitchen and he sits down next to me.

“You’re persistent.”

“I am.”

“What do you want?”

What do I want?

What do I want?

I want to rewind the clock three years. I want him sitting on the couch watching movies with Christina. I want to hear his easy laugh. I want him to have done what every other high school senior at Bay State does—I want him to have chosen where to spend his next years from a list given to him by the sour-breathed college counselor, Mr. Hayes.

Or if not that, if he really had to become a part of this war that every sane person knew was a losing proposition, I want him to have gone and not lost himself someplace along the way.

I want to stop being angry at him for disappearing. I want to love him again. I want to help him.

“I want you to come home,” I say.

“I can’t do that now.”

“Then I want to go with you.”

Maria returns with his Coke.

“Suit yourself,” he says under his breath.

She feeds us. She tells stories of her son. She’s baked us a cake and I remember the night Boaz came home and how part of me thought we should have had one then, and I think of this cake as the negative image of that imaginary cake. This cake marks the beginning rather than the end of a journey.

She shows us her son’s room, which has only a single bed, and she apologizes but says she was only expecting one, and anyway, it’s all she has, and Boaz, in a voice so sweet I think maybe there’s a ventriloquist hiding somewhere behind the curtains, tells her it’s okay. He prefers the floor anyway.

She says good night. But then she stops and turns around and comes back into our room. She says she has one last thing to ask us.

“Will you pray with me?” she says.

And before we can answer she’s dropped to her knees. We kneel beside her. She asks God to watch over her son. To watch over all the brave men and women who are so far away from home. To see that the troops successfully complete the mission on which they’ve been sent. She asks God to watch over the families who are waiting for them to return.

I’m not someone who prays. I’ve never asked God for anything, because I sort of figure there’s no point. The only thing I got out of Hebrew school was Pearl.

I look over at Bo. Either he’s praying hard too or else he’s
used to being around people who pray and he knows how to put on a good show.

I close my eyes and I give it a try. I don’t know what to think about the mission. I’m not sure I know just what it is, so I can’t go ahead and pray that the troops complete it. But there are other things I can try to pray for, I figure.

Please
, I think.
Please let Maria’s son come home safely. Let him come home the person he was before he left. Let him not close his door on her
.

She gets up again. Says good night for the second time. But this time she hugs Bo before she leaves.

I ask him if he wants to play some cards.

He ignores me. Not that I can blame him. It’s a strange question to lead with after what just happened in this room, but I’m not so great with transitions.

He pulls a radio out of his backpack, plugs it in and sets it in between stations so that it plays only static. He takes the comforter off the bed and spreads it out on the floor.

We shut out the lights and in the darkness I want to talk to him and ask him one thousand other questions, but I don’t.

I’m here.

He’s allowed me to be here. I don’t want to do anything that might disturb the magic of the words:
Suit yourself
.

When I wake up he’s already packed and dressed and I’m pretty sure he’d have given me the slip if it weren’t for his tripping over the cord of the radio and causing a clatter so loud it yanked me right out of a dream.

“Where to?” I ask.

“Get up and maybe you’ll find out.”

Maria gives us egg sandwiches for the road. From her front stoop she wishes us luck.

Wishing somebody luck implies there’s something they’re headed toward—a place, a situation, somewhere luck might come in handy.

Wishing somebody luck implies there’s a destination.

A plan.

That unlike in the movie from yesterday, there’s a plot.

We thank her for the food, the cake, the room with its single bed, though nothing we say strikes me as enough, and we say goodbye and we begin to walk.

Bo breaks a four-hour silence to ask me if I’m hungry.

I’m pretty much always hungry. You wouldn’t necessarily know it from looking at me. But if you put food in front of me, no matter what it is, you can be pretty sure I’ll eat it.

Zim is the same way.

We’ve talked about starting a reality show where we travel all over the world, to every obscure corner of the globe, and we eat whatever food people make us. We call our show
We’ll Eat Anything
. Obviously there are kinks to work out. We could use a better title. And there’s the matter of Zim’s sensitive stomach. But the show would seriously kick ass.

So yes, I’m hungry.

We go to a diner. The sign just says
DINER
in red neon that looks like it’s about to short out.

It feels great sitting down, even though I’m in the best
shape I’ve ever been. Some days I’ve run farther than we’ve walked, but something about the backpack, or the silence, has worn me to the bone.

We order burgers and milk shakes from a waitress who’s insanely cute. I mean, crazy, crazy cute. She’s got these shimmery lips and sparkly eyes. Her hair is held up on top of her head by a pair of chopsticks in a feat that seems to defy basic principles of gravity.

And yes, her tits are spectacular.

I invent a history for her on the spot. Home for the summer from a fancy college where she’s on scholarship. The quiet type in high school. She’s studying to be a molecular biologist. A poet, maybe.

“Anything else I can get you guys?” Her smile’s a killer.

“No thanks,” Bo says.

“All right then.” She stands a minute, watching Bo, waiting for him to say more, to give her a reason to linger, but he’s too lost to notice. She turns around and takes her order pad through the swinging doors into the kitchen.

Bo stares out the window. The gravel parking lot. The occasional car driving past. A crow on a fence.

It’s hard to avoid talking when you’re the only two people sitting in a booth.

“She’s smoking,” I say.

“Who’s smoking?”

“No, I mean our waitress. She’s hot. Don’t you think?”

“Sure.” He goes back to the window.

My cell phone rings. I hit ignore when I see it’s Pearl. She’ll be full of questions.

I shove the phone in my backpack and take out a deck of cards.

“Wanna play something?”

“Nah.”

I start shuffling them. I do a bridge. Dov taught me how. We used to play this game called Knock-Knock, but it’s been a long time. I can’t remember the rules. All I know is Dov used to clobber me. He claimed to have the luck of the elderly on his side.

The crow on the fence has turned into a dozen crows. Loud and excited. Something heavy is going down in Crow Land.

Bo isn’t even watching. He’s looking someplace else.

“Check out that flock of crows,” I say. “They’re seriously pissed.”

“It’s a murder.” Our waitress is back with our burgers. She puts the baskets down in front of us and takes a bottle of ketchup out of her apron pocket. “A murder of crows.”

I think I’m in love.

“Right,” I say. “I knew that. Like a gaggle of geese. Or a pride of lions.”

“A sleuth of bears,” she says.

She smiles at Bo again. This time he smiles back.

“So where are you guys headed?” She gestures to our backpacks propped up next to us in the booth.

“Ask him,” I say.

“Where you headed, soldier?”

“Someplace,” he says.

“Someplace like where?”

“Just someplace.”

She still smiles but she turns the wattage way down. “That so?”

“Yep.”

“Thanks for sharing.” She drops the check on the table.

Maybe it would be better if Bo would just keep quiet.

F
OR TWO DAYS WE DON’T DO MUCH
other than walk. We have very little interaction with each other, or with anybody else—only the people who take our money in exchange for food, bottles of water and a dingy motel room with threadbare sheets and ugly art.

When Boaz goes off to go to the bathroom or to take a shower or to run his electric clippers over his head, I take a look at my maps. It’s useless. There’s no answer in there. All roads lead to Washington, DC, or someplace near it, but I knew that already. What I still don’t know is why.

I sneak a call to Pearl. I tell her I need her help.

She conferences in Zim, who’s on the job at Videorama, which means he’s sitting behind the counter not doing much of anything. She usually goes out of her way to exclude Zim, so there must have been something desperate in my voice.

While Zim’s phone is ringing I ask Pearl how things are going with Il Duce.

“Whatever,” she says. “I’m so over him.”

“Hey, sugar,” Zim answers.

“Hey, yourself,” I say.
Sugar? Really?

“Levi!”

“I thought I was sugar.”

Is this really happening? Pearl and Zim?

“Okay, you two. Stop flirting,” Pearl says. “Levi called because he needs our help. And as we know from all the great books and TV shows about dynamic trios, the job of the others is to drop everything when one espouses that particular sort of need.”