When You Were Older (28 page)

He turned suddenly, lunged for the toilet again, and dry-heaved for a painful length of time.

I waited.

Ben said nothing on the way down to the police station. Nothing. Not one thing.

I’d been prepared for almost anything he might have said. I was only unprepared for nothing.

I looked over at him several times on the drive. His
face
was ghostly white, and he hunkered over his own knees, hugging them, rocking softly.

I didn’t go by the bakery. I took the long way around. I didn’t tell him Anat had been sleeping over the shop. Sooner or later I would have to tell him. Right now he was scaring me. Even without the added information.

Once, about six blocks from the station, he made a noise that sounded like something trying to come up. So I pulled over. Reached over him and pushed his door open. Then I looked the other way until he was done.

Michelevsky asked if I wanted my brother to have an attorney present during questioning.

I said no.

I said, ‘Ben has nothing to hide. He’s just going to tell you what he saw. But be patient with him. Please. Because he gets confused and has trouble remembering. And the more he thinks you’re mad at him, the more confused he gets. I might be able to help with that.’

‘You’ll be waiting out here,’ he said.

He didn’t elaborate. And I didn’t ask any questions. Sometimes I wonder if I should have asked questions. Made demands. But none of it seemed terribly important. At the time.

They’d take Ben into a room. Ask a lot of questions to establish that he’d really been there. He’d implicate Mark and Chris. He’d come out of the room. We’d go to the hospital and see Anat. We’d survive this day. We would. Life would go on. Maybe not smoothly, certainly
not
as if nothing had ever happened. But life would know enough to go on.

This day would be over.

I had to keep talking to myself like that. I had to keep telling myself those simple, comforting lies. It was survival one minute at a time.

I’ll never forget the look on Ben’s face as they led him into that room. Never. He looked over his shoulder at me the whole time. They had to more or less drag him. Lead him along by one arm.

Meanwhile Ben looked at me the way your dog looks at you when you give him over to the vet assistant for surgery. That awful moment when they have to drag him by the collar, his legs spread for traction. Looking to you for salvation. No capacity for words, but his eyes clearly saying, ‘Don’t let them take me. I want to be with you.’ And you can’t even explain that part about how it’s all for the best.

‘Go with them,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

It didn’t sound like the kind of statement that would come back to haunt me. So I guess you never know.

I looked at my watch. Ben had been in that room with three cops – did Norville really have three cops? – for half an hour.

Now what had I been doing wrong? All I ever got was two sentences of information at a time out of Ben. The third usually being, ‘I told you already.’

I paced. I needed to get to the hospital. I needed to
ask
somebody if I could just go. Just go to the hospital. Pick Ben up later. But there was nobody in the outer office. There was nobody to ask. So I had to stay. And pace.

At forty minutes, Michelevsky emerged, walked straight to a water cooler, and poured himself – or somebody – a paper cup of water.

‘Are we done?’ I asked. ‘Can we go?’

‘
You
can,’ he said. ‘You can go any time you want. Your brother will not be accompanying you. Your brother is in custody.’

I sat down on a wooden bench, sorting through all the things I could potentially think, say, feel. All of some merit. But sometimes you just have to weed things down. Not everything makes the cut.

I didn’t panic, though. It was a mistake, and we’d get to the bottom of it. My best guess was that Mark had lied and put the whole thing off on Ben. But it would never stick. How could the crime have been masterminded by a guy who couldn’t learn to walk two blocks to work from the bus stop?

‘What did Mark say about him?’

I was calm. I was proud of myself for that. Why bait the cops? Be the voice of reason. Work with them. Be somebody they can talk to. That’s best for Ben in the long run.

‘It’s not what Mark said. It’s what Ben said. Your brother confessed to throwing the match.’

I opened my mouth to argue. To tell him how
ridiculous
that was. How he must have confused Ben, or not understood him. How easy it is to put words into his mouth. How he’ll say anything when he’s scared.

But I didn’t.

Sometimes a photographic memory is not such a good thing. Sometimes I’ll remember something someone said to me word for word, and I’ll wish to hell I didn’t.

‘Like there was just this tiny little bit of fire in my hand, and then it was really fast. Everything burned really fast.’

That’s what Ben had told me about his ‘dream’.

This tiny little bit of fire. In my hand. Now, how had I forgotten that so completely? I can remember anything I want. Then I realized. It was so obvious. It has to be something I want.

‘Can I see him?’ I asked. Or, anyway, somebody asked. Must have been me. Michelevsky didn’t. And there was nobody else who could have.

‘We’re taking him over to the county jail this afternoon. You’ll want to call and get visiting hours from them.’

The hospital building was a long rectangle. Long on one side, short on the other. When I got off the elevator and looked down the hall, it looked like it stretched to infinity. Like I could walk all day and never get there. When I finally reached the end of the hall, following the room numbers, I turned left, the only way I could turn,
and
the hall ahead of me was very short. At the end of it was a sort of informal waiting area, a corner with two couches and two lamps.

And Nazir.

He was standing, pacing, talking to someone on his cell phone.

He looked up and saw me. I forced myself to keep walking. Two steps later, he reared back and hurled the phone, which whizzed by my ear, so close I could feel the displaced air of it. If I hadn’t ducked to my right, it would have hit me, as I’m sure he intended. I heard it shatter against the wall behind me, and someone, maybe a nurse, say, ‘Hey!’

I never turned around.

I just kept walking.

‘You have a nerve,’ he said. He spoke to me quietly. With a measured calm. It was unsettling. I remember wishing he would just yell. I had no idea how soon I would get my wish. ‘You have a nerve to show up here. After what you did. After what your brother did. First you ruin her reputation in this town. Then your brother tries to kill her. And you think she will want to see you? And you think I will let you go in there and see her? Think again, my friend.’

‘Ben would never do anything to hurt Anat.’

‘He already did!’ Nazir roared. Roared. There was no other way to describe such an outburst. Nazir had found his inner lion. ‘And I hold you responsible! He is no more than a child! He has a mind like a four-year-old!
You
are responsible for all that he does! You should have kept your brother on a leash!’

At no point did he temper his volume.

I stood and took it in the face, blinking, as if being hit by a hurricane. Which wasn’t much of an exaggeration.

By the time he finished his diatribe, three white-uniformed employees – a nurse and two orderlies – had arrived to try to tell him he couldn’t make so much noise in a hospital. But when they saw the look on his face, they stopped cold. They did not attempt to approach him. Nor did I blame them.

I heard the nurse say, ‘Call security.’

Nazir heard her, too.

‘Yes, call security,’ he said, ‘and have this man escorted out. He is not family. And he may not see my daughter.’

‘I am her fiancé!’ I shouted. I tried for the lion roar. I tried to be strong like Nazir. But I fell well short. I just didn’t have his capacity for rage.

‘You are not! You are not her fiancé! You are only her fiancé if you ask me for her hand in marriage and
I say
you are her fiancé!’

I wondered if Anat could hear us from wherever she was. I listened for her in the brief silence, but heard nothing. And Nazir wasn’t done.

‘I brought Anat here to be safe. People say, go to a small American town. You will be safe in a small American town. They just forgot to tell me that a small American town is only safe if you are a small American.’

He looked right into my eyes as he bit off those last two words.

I opened my mouth to speak, and was tapped on the shoulder by security.

‘Come with me, sir,’ a youngish man said. Not much older than me.

‘I’m not the one causing the trouble. I just want to see her.’

‘He’s family, sir. You’re not family.’

He put one hand on my arm. As if he was about to eject me. Physically escort me out. I shook him off. Violently. So violently that he reached for his nightstick. Placed one hand on it.

I raised both hands in a gesture of peace.

‘I’m not looking for a fight,’ I said.

His hand relaxed to his side again.

‘Sir,’ he said. More firmly this time. ‘Come with me, please.’

I looked past Nazir. Thought briefly about making a run for it. But what good would that do? They’d catch me before I could even find her room.

‘I just want to see her. I just want to know she’s OK.’

‘She is not OK!’ Nazir roared. ‘She is hurt! She is burned!’

‘Sir!’ the security guard said, this time to Nazir. ‘You need to keep your voice down.’

‘Why should she want to see you again?’ he asked, only about a notch lower. ‘What has come to her from knowing you, except trouble? She will never
want
to see you. Not after what has happened.’

Humiliatingly, I had to put almost all of my energy into fighting back tears. I couldn’t say much of anything without running the risk of crying.

‘This
is
not over,’ I said, clamping down hard on my own frazzled emotions.

‘This
is
over,’ he said.

But more quietly. And to my back. Because the guard was already escorting me toward the elevator.

I sat for a time in my car, wrestling with myself over what he’d said. My mind tumbling over and over itself, trying to know whether to believe it. Or whether it was a lie. Had she told him she never wanted to see me again? Would she decide that? Could she?

No. It wasn’t possible. Not after what we’d shared. All that emotion couldn’t disappear. She couldn’t just unfeel everything.

Then, for the second time in one day, I had a moment in which I regretted my photographic memory.

It was sudden. It hit me suddenly. The full text of the message I left on Kerry’s phone. Every word. But there were a few relevant sentences that went through my head a good three or four times. I just sat there, gripping and ungripping the steering wheel, pressing my back up against the seat, watching them go by in my brain.

I’d said, ‘I know what happened isn’t your fault. But I can’t get over it. I can’t get around it. I’m sorry. I can’t.
It’s
like all my post-traumatic stress is wrapped up with your voice and your name now.’

And then, so long as I was torturing myself, I also remembered what I’d said to the older man who had given me a ride through Illinois. The one who’d overheard my conversation with Kerry.

‘I just have this … aversion … to her. Since … you know. After what happened. It feels like one of those places you go to stop smoking, and every time you reach for a cigarette, they zap you with electricity. No. That’s not a good analogy. Because that’s a lot of little things. This is one big thing. It feels like when you eat a whole bunch of a certain kind of food and then get sick. And maybe the food didn’t even make you sick. Maybe you ate three plates of fettuccini Alfredo, and then got the stomach flu. And all night you’re up, throwing up fettuccini Alfredo. You’ll never eat it again. Guaranteed. It’s knee-jerk.’

So maybe it
was
possible. To unfeel. Just about anything.

I got out of the car and walked back toward the hospital entrance. But the guard was waiting just inside the first set of sliding doors. He shook his head at me.

So I drove back to the house.

What else could I do?

I WAS LET
into a room with about ten small wooden tables.

Ben was on the other side of one.

He sat curled over himself on a chair, arms locked around his knees, rocking. Rocking.

The guard indicated the chair across from him, and I sat.

‘Hey, Buddy,’ I said.

A long silence. Maybe more than two minutes. I thought maybe Ben had gone fully mute. Maybe permanently.

Then a tiny, thin Ben voice. ‘You lied to me, Buddy.’

‘When did I lie?’

‘You said everything would be OK.’

‘I didn’t lie. I was wrong. I thought everything
would
be OK.’

‘Well, it’s not. So you lied.’

‘Look. Ben. I was going on the assumption that you
didn’t
do anything wrong. But if you threw the match that started that fire, there’s nothing I can do to help you.’

He raised his head as if to look at me. But, in typical Ben fashion, his gaze missed my face by about thirty degrees.

He didn’t answer.

‘Tell me what happened, Buddy.’

‘I did tell you.’

‘You told the police you threw the match. You didn’t tell me that.’

‘You were yelling at me. I couldn’t think.’

‘Who gave you matches?’

‘Mark.’

‘Mark gave you a book of matches?’

‘No. One.’

‘He just handed you one match?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What did you light it on?’

‘What?’

‘How did you get the match to light?’

‘I didn’t.’

‘It got lighted somehow, Ben.’

‘It was already on fire when he gave it to me.’

I looked down at myself, vaguely noting that I’d gotten to my feet without any real awareness of it.

‘Mark handed you a lighted match?’