Breathless (2 page)

The kaleidoscope twists; the sun makes a slow tumble behind the clouds, into the hot shade. This is what always happens, every time my brother comes home: in the hospital, they get him on a steady dose of the right medications. They get his head on straight again, and once he’s doing better, they send him home. After a while, he feels so good that he decides he can manage life himself, that he doesn’t
need
to be medicated. So he stops taking his pills, and then everything starts all over again. The Ghost has told me this is typical of people like Will, that this very kind of thinking is why it’s so hard to help them.

I know we shouldn’t be getting high. But Will is right—what else is there to do? I don’t have many friends in town, and Will doesn’t have any. He almost never leaves our property when he’s home. When I do spend time with my friends, leaving him alone here—especially to hang out with Hillsburg people—it always feels like I’m turning my back on him.

Will’s face is badly sunburned, peeling by now from too many afternoons passed up here this season, gazing contemptuously at the town. Little Hillsburg—we call it Hellsburg. But on the roof of the biggest house in town, we are bigger than the whole place. I sometimes feel like, with only the flick of a finger, we could make the town disappear and we could stay here forever, undisturbed by the trash surrounding us. We are alone up here, masters of the afternoon, at least until our father gets home.

If it weren’t for this town, and everything the people did to him, Will might not even be sick. He was smart as a kid—he still is—and it was too much for people here to handle. I think that seeing how smart he was, how successful our parents were becoming, made them realize how tiny and sad their own lives were.

Hillsburg is a network of cousins: everyone in the whole town seems to be related to each other. They are poor. They go through people’s garbage. They don’t do things like go to college or look at art or read books or understand that not everyone is like them. Instead, they go to field parties and rebuild cars in their front yards and have their babies young and stay in Hillsburg for their whole lives. They hate us for being so different, for having so much more. I’ll never understand why my parents stay here, especially after all that’s happened to my brother.

Right now, we both watch in silence as the man who feeds the fish strolls away from the house. On his way out, he bends over to pet the cat we’re talking about.

“How long has he been coming?” Will asks.

I shrug. “Maybe a year. Why?”

Will doesn’t say anything.

“Why does it matter? He’s hardly ever here.”

My brother looks at me. His expression is so deadly serious that, when he speaks, I feel a tingle of electricity move through my spine. “Have you ever thought that maybe he’s a spy for Mom and Dad?”

Things started to go really wrong for Will around junior high. He was on the basketball team—he loved basketball, and he was good at it. One night after practice he didn’t come home. I was only in the third grade, but I remember how frantic my parents were, how once it got dark out, the local police went up to the school to look for him.

They found him in the locker room, alone, naked. For a few days he wouldn’t tell us what had happened—he just refused to go to school. Finally, maybe a week later, our house keeper showed up at our front door unannounced. Her son, Craig—who was on the basketball team too—was with her. The two of them sat down with my parents in our living room. Will stayed upstairs in his bedroom. I listened from the hallway as Craig explained how his teammates had locked Will in a bathroom stall after practice the night he disappeared. Then they’d stolen his clothes, done their best to make sure there was nothing else for him to wear—not even a towel—and had gone home. They’d thought it was hilarious.

My mother cried without making any sound, her shoulders trembling, the whole time Craig talked. Will didn’t play basketball anymore after that. He didn’t go back to school for the rest of that year—he stayed home, and my parents hired a private tutor. When he did go back, he started using whatever he could get his hands on—anything he could smoke or put up his nose, or whatever pills people would sell him—and that’s when he started to fall apart. I know there’s a chance he would have gotten sick anyway, but of course we’ll never know for sure. What’s wrong with Will, according to every doctor who’s ever seen him, is
drug-induced
schizophrenia. Without all the bullying, he might never have gotten into all the drugs.

It took a few years before what was happening to him became clear; typically, schizophrenia doesn’t begin to show itself until later in a person’s adolescence or early twenties. But Will has never been typical, and people in this town were unusually cruel.

I puff on my cigarette now while he watches. “How am I doing?”

He takes a long, contemplative drag of his own smoke, shaking his head. “You’re inhaling okay, but you have to get used to keeping it in your mouth. Like this.” He demonstrates, keeping a loose hold on the cigarette between his dry lips. “So you look tough and nobody messes with you.”

“I don’t want to look tough. I want to look sexy.”

Will rolls his eyes, annoyed. “Why?” His gaze turns to the cat again. “So all the Hellsburg losers will want to take you out on the town?”

“No!”

He nods to himself, disgusted by the idea, determined to believe it. “Yeah, that’s why.”

“I’m a girl, Will. I want boys to like me.”

“All right. Well, you’ve gotta quit calling them cigarettes, for one thing.”

“Why?”

“ ’Cause they ain’t.” He removes the cigarette from his lips, holds it between stained fingers, stares at it. “They’re fags.”

“I’ve never heard anybody call them fags.”

“That’s what they call them in the city.”

I snort. “Right.”

“Shut up, Katie.”

“Is that what they called them in the hospital?” Right away I know I shouldn’t have said it. He bares his teeth at me, and even in the shade I can see the heat rising from the tarred roof, willowing around his slight figure. Behind his braces, his teeth are yellow and mossy, stubbornly crooked. Our orthodontist says Will is the worst patient he’s had in thirty years of practice. Anytime his braces start bothering him, Will pries them from his teeth with a pair of pliers he keeps stashed in his room somewhere. My parents try to do sweeps of his bedroom every couple of weeks, looking for things that could get him in trouble, but somehow he manages to keep a lot hidden—random prescription pills; cigarettes by the carton; short stories that he writes about all kinds of awful, crazy things, scribbled on yellow legal paper; and his pliers. As a result of his stealth, he’s had braces on and off for something like ten years. Which is funny when you think about it, because what’s the point anymore? It isn’t like they’ll ever get him to wear his retainers.

He flicks his cigarette into the gutter and we both watch while its cherry eats at a dead leaf. Then Will leans forward on his knees and hocks a wad of spit onto the burning edge, turning the leaves over with his hand to hide our evidence. We’ve learned that we have to be careful, that in many ways our parents are better sneaks than we are. They pretend to be clueless to what’s going on for a while, and then they seize on you.

The Ghost is the worst. He is a big fan of procedural television dramas and forensics. He takes sick pleasure at family meetings from producing Ziploc bags of evidence, sealed and labeled, displaying the paraphernalia he’s discovered hidden around the house. Then he acts like he doesn’t know what’s going on until we get too bored or embarrassed and finally confess what we’ve been up to on the roof. He is good at almost everything. As far as I know, he’s never failed once.

Well, maybe once. My mom says he’ll never know how to take care of himself; he eats too much junk food. “Healthy eating and raising kids,” he likes to say. “Those are two things I could never seem to get right.”

At family meetings, he sits in an overstuffed recliner with a glass of wine at his side, obviously enjoying our misery. He clears his throat before speaking, holding up a bag so we can all get a good look at the evidence. “In the past week, I collected three handfuls of cigarette butts from the gutter, some of which had lipstick on them—Katie? There was also an empty bottle of crème de menthe. Anybody want to take credit for this?”

He’ll look at my mom while she’s furiously taking notes on a legal pad. We have a whole filing cabinet filled with minutes from family meetings, dating back, like, ten years, all of them in my mother’s gorgeous cursive handwriting. While she writes, she keeps her head down, her ears trained to get all the highlights, her knuckles clenched white.

“Sweetheart?” he asks my mom. The Ghost is at his most intimidating when he’s being sarcastic. “Were you drinking on the roof again? Because I can’t imagine it could have been our children.”

“Unthinkable,” my mother says. She looks up for a moment, bats her eyelashes at him. “It must have been somebody else’s children,” she adds, as though she feels sorry for somebody else’s long-suffering parents. “Those bad kids.”

Even after two children and everything she’s been through, everyone knows my mother is still a real beauty, soft and calm in contrast to the Ghost’s harshness. Somehow she always seems
blurred,
as though to focus on anything that exists beyond a canvas might prove too difficult for her tiny frame to handle. When I was a very little girl, whenever she made me angry, I would imagine a strong wind simply blowing her away.

“Yes.” The Ghost nods in agreement. “That must be it. Somebody else’s children wouldn’t care if they created a fire hazard on our roof that could incinerate us all, would they?”

My mother and father have a secret language that I have never understood. They have been married since college and are still madly in love. I can’t imagine why, since they have nothing in common besides me and Will, and all the two of us ever do is cause trouble.

As a result of these meetings, Will and I have learned that we have to be extra careful. We usually come up to the roof when our parents aren’t home, which is often, or else late at night when they’re asleep. This place has become the only place where I feel like I can know my own brother. I have never felt afraid as we lie beside each other, murmuring so as not to make too much noise. As Will says, “We wouldn’t want to rouse the Ghost.”

Sometimes, when we’re sure that our parents aren’t home and the neighbors aren’t paying attention, we climb around in the pine tree that bows against the house on the farthest corner, over the living room, its branches thick enough to hold us as our bare feet sting from splinters and sap.

Even as I’m living it, something feels important about this day in particular. We’re climbing around in the tree, hopping back and forth between its thick branches and the hot roof, when it occurs to me that I never feel too close to the edge, even with my brother right behind me.

“Willie,” I say, turning around to face him. “It’s too hot up here. Let’s go swimming again.”

“Don’t call me that,” he says. “I’m not a kid.”

Will, Willie, William—our father’s name. But the one thing we all know about Will, the one thing we’ve known right from the beginning, is that he will never be like our father. Not even close.

Even for a Ghost, our father isn’t around much; he works eighteen-hour days. When he is home, he spends most of his time locked in his office. I notice him mostly late at night, when I’m not sure if I’m asleep yet, and the murmur of his voice dictating psych reports filters up through my bedroom radiator. But always he is white, white, white: he has fine, grayish white hair that puffs along a tired ashen face and deep-set white eyeballs. He is wise and disappointed and so much older than he ought to be.

When I was a little girl, still in single digits, I’d sit on his lap in my pajamas and sip watery hot chocolate while he smoked a Marlboro; picked tobacco from his beard, which is full and also white—although he’s no Santa; and held a flabby arm across my belly. We used to have an easygoing relationship that made me feel so loved, so precious to him, it seemed impossible that anything could ever change.

Despite all the golfing, which he does on the weekends, my father has always been out of shape, too much fat accumulated over muscles that have long since softened from his days as a college football hero. When I was a little girl, this didn’t keep him from being godlike.

The Ghost is a psychiatrist. He calls himself a masseuse of the soul. His clients, stretched over a long career, number in the thousands. His ability to sympathize with strangers, to help them solve all their problems, has made him a wealthy man. So how is it fair that, within his own home, he became mostly quiet and unsympathetic? I know he is kind and loving and gentle. He spends his days chin-deep in other people’s trauma, and you can tell it has hollowed him, made him brittle from endless days of drinking too much coffee while he sits in an overstuffed chair, listening.

For so many years I was his little girl. “What are you doing today?” I used to ask, peeling his grapefruit for him. All day after he’d gone, I used to sniff my hands and reconstruct the memory. I missed him constantly. Even when I was ten, I would still fit like a bundle on his lap, my toes barely touching the floor.

He leans his head back and squints at the ceiling. “Let’s see, Kathryn.” My father is the only person who doesn’t call me Katie. “I’m at my office until noon, and then I’m having lunch with your mother.”

“Can I come?”

“No. You’ll be in school.”

“Tuesday I go to the dentist. Can I come then?” And I burrow my head into the folds of his sweater to remind him that, wherever he goes, he belongs to me.

“Tuesday I’m in court all day.”

“But
Dad
. . .”

“We’ll see.” He winks and touches a tar-stained fingertip to my nose. “Maybe I’ll finish up early.” He coughs, rearranging the contents of his chest, leaning away from the ashtray. I pat him on the back. “Cough it up, Dad. You have to stop smoking.”

“Enough, Kathryn.”