Tuesday Nights in 1980 (39 page)

“You'll be spending Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays with me,” the Brother had explained then, while the snow fell sadly behind him and on him, as if he didn't matter. “Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays here.”

“But those are all the days,” Julian had said, standing in the doorway, watching one particular snowflake that had made a crash-landing into the Brother's black hair. They'd learned the days in school that year: each day went with a color, until the week made a rainbow.

“Yes they are,” the Brother had said.

“What days does my mom have me?” Julian had said, though he feared he already knew the answer.

“No days,” the Brother had said. “For now, no days.”

Things his mother had not told him about the Brother: that he had a piece of pointy skin at the end of his arm that looked like a sea lion, that he had hairs on his chest, that he had a black spot on his face that might jump out at you, that he smelled like smoke, that he didn't look very magical at all; he had too many hairs on his face.

Things his mother had not told him in general: that she would have him for no days.

Now he doesn't want Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays. He doesn't want Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays, either. If his mother has no days, that's what he wants:
no days.
He doesn't want this whale's back, heaving and black in front of him on the bed. The Brother in the bed with him is scary. He wants the Brother from the story.

This is the story: There were a brother and sister who loved each other as much as was humanly possible. The sister loved her little brother so much that every night, when he was asleep, she baked him a hundred cakes. The little brother thought the cakes just appeared there every morning, as if by magic, and though he loved them at first, he began to take them for granted. He stopped jumping for joy when he saw them. He stopped tasting every single one. He stopped grinning when he woke up to the smell of frosting.

At this part in the story, Julian would be panting with anticipation. He would always say the same thing. “
But it was his sister!”
he'd say. “
It wasn't magic, it was his sister!”

“Shhhhh,” his mother would say. “Let me finish the story. It was only when the little brother saw a fleck of batter on his sister's face one morning that he knew it had been her. His own sister, staying up through the night to make him the most beautiful cakes. He couldn't believe it. Meanwhile, his sister had become terribly sad, thinking her cakes were worthless.”

“And so he wanted to give her something back!” Julian would nearly shout.

“Quiet now,” his mother would say. “You'll wake your dad. Yes, he wanted to do something for his sister in return, to show her how much he loved her back. So he did what he did best. He began to draw.”

“A hundred pictures every night!” Julian would say in a loud whisper, his eyes wide.

“A hundred pictures every night,” she would say. “Pictures of all the people they knew. The butcher, the guy who owned Café Crocodile, the man who played the guitar in the park—everybody from around town, all their friends.”

“And did the sister like the drawings?”

“Yes, she did, very much. She loved them. She hung them up all over the house.”

“So why did the brother leave?”

“How do you know that the brother left? I haven't gotten to that part of the story yet.”

“Because you told me the same story last night,” Julian would say, grinning and burying his head in the sheets.

“Well tonight is a different night,” his mother said. “What if I told you that the brother was still making pictures for his sister? Or that he never left at all?”

“Well, then, that would be a different story,” Julian said.

“It would be,” his mother said, with a wink.

“How would it end?”

“It wouldn't have to end,” she said. “It would still be going. The brother would grow up to be a man, with a big voice. He was a magic man, you see, who could see into people's heads and hearts. And he would find a wife who was also magical, and they'd have a magic child, move into the house next door to his sister, who also had a child. Their two children would learn how to make cakes and make pictures, and they would stay up all night, making things for each other and then calling each other with tin cans from their bedroom windows.”

“Tin cans?”

“Tin cans. With a string between them, to carry the vibrations, which turn into sound.”

“But that's not the real story.”

“How do you know?”

“Because the sister is you!”

His mom would ruffle his hair and smile. “And how do you know so much, little man? How on earth do you know so much?”

“I just
do
know,” he would say, nestling his head in the place between her chest and her arm. And always: “If I draw one hundred pictures, can I be like the brother?”

“Sure,” his mother would say. “But you'll have to do it in your head, because it's time for sleep. You can use your imaginary pen. Take it to bed with you. Draw up anything you want to dream about, anything you need.”

Now: He wants to dream about her. He needs
her
. He needs her teakettle voice and her soft hair. He needs her cake smell and her lotion smell. He needs to go to the window and yell for her. But if he moves he might break the spell of the Brother's sleep. Plus, it's snowing out, and if he opened a window, some might get in.

A truck kabooms down the street outside, tossing Julian's heart into the air. He has to find his pen. Should he wake the Brother up? Could he? Or would the Brother yell? Would the Brother have a mean face on?

Julian's eyes land on something scary in the corner of the ceiling: something with wings, as big as a baby bird. It waits like an evil stain with two white eyes.

Wake him up,
whispers the creature. Julian plugs his ears. He doesn't want the creature to talk to him.

I said wake him up, pea brain!
says the creature. Julian scrunches up his nose, sits up, looks straight at the creature, whispers:
Okay! But be quiet or you'll wake him up yourself!

With his littlest finger, Julian touches the Brother's shoulder. The Brother doesn't move. With his second littlest finger, he touches the Brother's bicep. Nothing. With his third littlest finger, he touches the very tip of the Brother's arm: the sea lion's nose. Suddenly the Brother jolts up in bed, swings his head from side to side, and lets out a gruff yelp.

Julian scrambles off the bed and onto the floor. He peeks his head just up over the mattress.

“What the hell?” the Brother says, his eyes bobbing with sleep. There is his mother, right there in the lightest parts of the Brother's eyes; what a relief.

“I mean, I'm sorry,” says the Brother. Eyes up a little bit, just enough to see the Brother wiping at his forehead with his one hand. His face is lit up from only one side, where the kaleidoscope is coming in, and Julian can see the little hairs coming out of his chin, like a bad cactus.

“What's happening?” the Brother says. “Why are you waking me up?”

Julian stays put and stays silent. He wants to tell the Brother about the creature in the corner, but doesn't think he's allowed.

“Come back up here,” the Brother says, patting the mattress and yawning. “Come on. I won't bite.”

Slowly, Julian crawls back up to the bed. The Brother tugs on the cord of the lamp and a big circle of light swallows the Brother's side of the bed. Julian sticks his foot out into the light and wiggles his toes. Then he looks up at the creature, who he now sees looks like a brown butterfly.

“That's Max the Moth,” the Brother says. “He's harmless.”

Julian flashes his gaze away from Max and back to the Brother. He looks at the scary sea lion of the arm, its twisted nose.

“And this,” says the Brother, “is my messed-up arm.” He lifts the arm into the light and the sea lion's face looks less scary. A cakey line of black blood runs over it. “Do you want to touch it?”

Julian moves closer on the bed, touches the tip of the animal with his little fingertips. He looks at the Brother for confirmation. “It's okay,” the Brother says. “It doesn't hurt.”

With the boy's little fingers on his arm, Engales suddenly sees it differently. Like the hand is not a part of him but simply an object, something that exists in the world that he can observe and assess. He thinks of the Chinese woman's sagging cheek, of Señor Romano's massive stomach. He thinks of the little wart that poked out of Lucy's armpit, of the constellation of scars she had under her chin, from when she fell into a tree branch as a kid. For the first time since the accident, his own appendage, with its hideous scar, does not frighten him. Suddenly it's like all the other things he's ever found interesting. It's a scratch.

“Pretty ugly, huh?” the Brother says.

“Yeah,” says Julian. “Looks like a sea lion face.”

Engales laughs a little. “Now tell me,” says the brother. “You can't sleep?”

Julian shakes his head.

“I know how you feel,” the Brother says. “I couldn't sleep when I was a kid, either. Too much fun stuff to think about.”

“And scary stuff,” Julian says.

“And scary stuff,” the Brother says.

With this, the Brother reaches for a bottle on the floor. Julian watches the arm without a hand as it raises into the air while he turns, like an airplane's wing. The Brother drinks from the bottle and the room smells bad.

“I couldn't find my pen,” Julian says, in his smallest voice.

“Your pen?”

“Yes.”

“Why do you want a pen in the middle of the night?”

“It's imaginary.”

“Why do you want an imaginary pen in the middle of the night?”

“To draw a hundred pictures.”

“You're a weird kid, you know that? Did your mother ever tell you you were a weird kid?”

Julian looks down at his hands.

“And why would you do that? Draw a hundred pictures?”

“It's what you do when you want someone to know you love them more than the rest of the things in the world combined.”

Engales chuckles. The boy's eyes are so large and intense, and his little voice so serious, that the whole thing seems almost comical. But then there is Franca again, living in the little wrinkle between the boy's eyes: so serious, just like his sister.

“I see,” Engales says. He scans the room. Tacked on the wall by the bed are two copies of the Jacob Rey flier, the one he'd gotten from the bearded man on the morning of the accident. Lucy must have tacked them up. But why? And why are there two? Engales pulls one down and flips it over, hands it to Julian. “There's some paper,” he says. “Let's see if I have a pen.”

While Engales searches for a pen, Julian flips the paper back over, looks at the picture of the little boy. “Who's this guy?” he says.

“It's a boy who's missing,” Engales says distractedly, as he rummages unsuccessfully. No pen.

“If you can believe it, I don't have a pen, Julian. You know I'm not that good of a grown-up yet. But I have something else probably.”

“But why is he missing?” Julian says.

Engales pushes himself up off the bed and gets to searching beneath it. The light doesn't reach underneath, so there is an expanse of black, probably a few mice, all his painting supplies. He feels the whiskey course through him as he paws the floor with his one hand.

“Because no one can find him. Here. Here are my old paints.”

He plops the case that Señor Romano had given him so long ago onto the bed and a smooth wave of nostalgia breaks within him. He sets the case on the bed, opens its little gold lock.

“But is anybody going to find him, though?” asks Julian. His eyebrows scrunch in a pointy state of worry.

“Yes, someone is going to find him. In the meantime, you can draw on his back. Now look, you can use this brush here.”

Engales pulls out a skinny red paintbrush and a tube of yellow paint. He sees Señor Romano's big face, his paisley tie, his wide, kind mouth. He is a boy again, sitting on the floor of his dead parents' room, painting the wrinkle in his sister's forehead over and over.
Hey, pea brain,
she'd say.
Do you need to do all the bad parts of my face?

They're not the bad parts,
he wants to say now. He wants to say other things, too. He wants to say everything.

He wants to tell Franca what happened to him at the gallery on the night of James's show: how his body had betrayed him, how he had not meant to leave Julian, but how once he had left he could not undo it, the leaving was part of him, something engrained in his body. He wants to tell her what happened at Telemondo's, how Jean-Michel had made him rethink everything, made him see there were still things to be saved. He wants to tell Franca everything, everything she's missed.

This is him saying everything: he squirts the yellow paint right into the lid of the box. “There you go,” he says. “Start your pictures.”

“But I don't want to put it on the boy's back because it might camouflage him and then people won't find him and he will still be missing forever.”

“Well you sure are a picky one, aren't you? Okay. Hmm.” Engales grabs one of the smaller of his old canvases, an unfinished painting of the Telemondo guy, smoking ten cigarettes at once. He sets it down in front of Julian.

Julian looks up at him with those huge Franca eyes. “But it is already full,” the boy says.

“If you're going to stay with me,” Engales says, “you're going to have to learn to live a little. I don't want this painting anymore, okay? Just go right over the top of it, like this.” He holds his hand over the boy's and dips it into the paint. He feels the satisfying goopy grip of it, then the release as it presses into the grain of the canvas. A line emerges.