Josie and Jack (11 page)

“Almost never.”

“He likes it when I talk about her. It’s his favorite fucking subject.”

“I like it when you talk about her.”

“You don’t know the difference. You never had her to lose.”

But he didn’t say it unkindly. I said, “I have you,” and felt his lips curve against my neck in the darkness. Soon he was asleep.

I woke up alone, with the bleak winter sunlight streaming through my windows. I listened to the quiet house and heard nothing: no music, no movement, no life.

I knew if I went to Jack’s room, his bed would be empty and his jacket gone.

I hated days like this.

Sometimes Jack vanished. He’d be gone for a few hours, or maybe more than a few, and then he’d reappear, usually bearing a bottle of something or a stack of magazines for me. I didn’t really care about the magazines, but when he brought them to me I always read them, because I was so glad to have him home.

Once, when he was gone nearly every night for six or seven hours at a stretch, it turned out he’d been working at the record store. After that I paid more attention to his disappearances, to see if they fit into a schedule, but they never did. There was no pattern to them. Sometimes something had happened beforehand that depressed him; sometimes nothing had happened, and he was depressed anyway; sometimes everything seemed fine, and I never suspected a thing until I woke up to an empty house. There was just the vanishing act, and then his return, bearing gifts.

In the morning it was all right. In the morning I could pretend that the silence was actually peace and sit with my cup of coffee thinking calm, pleasant thoughts about the sheer freedom of getting to do exactly what I wanted. While the coffee brewed, I went upstairs for a book of word puzzles, which were more mind-numbing than any drug I’d taken. I spent two hours bent over the table, filling in little black and white boxes and breaking words apart. I smoked cigarette after cigarette, ate dry toast because we were out of butter, and drank coffee until my heart pounded and my nerves sang. When I’d exhausted the range of comfortable positions that the hard kitchen chair had to offer and the walls started to close in, I jumped up and began to clean: wiping down the counters, scrubbing the stove, cleaning the sink with scouring powder until my hands felt raw and chemical-soaked.

Then the kitchen had nothing else to offer me. I drifted from room to room, never spending more than a few minutes in any one, touching things, picking them up, putting them back down. From the front porch into the parlor and then into the study, the basement, the downstairs bathroom, the dining room that we never used. I climbed the front staircase, also little-used, and stood in turn in the doorways of the upstairs bathroom, the first spare bedroom (where most of Crazy Mary’s few remaining possessions were kept under a well-picked lock and a badly hidden key), and then Raeburn’s room, with its reek of stale laundry and after-shave. In each new room I felt more and more like an intruder.

I sat in Jack’s room for a while, perched at the foot of his unmade bed and flipping idly through a science-fiction paperback that I found on the floor, but I couldn’t read. I put on his Coltrane album, but that wasn’t enough to distract me either, so I went back downstairs and did it all over again.

Then it was almost six o’clock. The sun was starting to set. Jack still wasn’t back. I started to catch odd movements out of the corners of my eyes and feel breezes in still air. Strange voices seemed to be having low conversations in other rooms, out of my range of hearing. The house was full of peculiar odors: unfamiliar cologne, cigarette smoke.

I didn’t deal well with being alone.

Eventually I fell asleep on my bed and dreamed that I was in a river, swimming. I didn’t want to be in the river, but I was trying to get somewhere and the river was the only way to get there. The world on the riverbank grew more alien every time I climbed on shore until I couldn’t climb out at all because I knew that nobody would know me, that nobody would even be able to see me.

By the time I saw the twin beams from Jack’s headlights shine through the front window, sometime close to midnight, I’d finished crying and thrown up twice. I flew down the stairs and was at the door, near tears with relief, when he came in. His face was tired and he was holding a paper bag that smelled like Chinese food.

“Hi,” I said and threw myself at him.

He caught me, but only just, and then he pushed me lightly out of his way. His eyes were impatient.

I brushed at a stray piece of hair that had fallen in my eyes, rubbed my cold cheeks, and tried to look normal.

“You’ve been chewing on your fingernails,” he said.

“No I haven’t.”

“They’re bleeding.” He handed the paper bag to me and went upstairs.

I took the bag into the kitchen and unpacked the food. There was lo mein and sesame chicken and fried rice: he’d gotten me my favorite foods. I took two bottles of beer from the fridge, grabbed some forks, and carried it all into the parlor. His jacket lay across the couch where he’d thrown it. I took a packet of cigarettes out of the pocket—I’d smoked all of mine—and sat down to wait for him. By the time he came down in a pair of jeans, drops of water still clinging to his bare shoulders, I had pretty much stopped shaking.

He ate quickly, shoveling the food into his mouth. I wanted, as always, to tell him about how much the house scared me when there was nobody else in it, about the terrible silences, about the way I couldn’t seem to stay still without the walls closing in on me, but—also as always—he never gave me a chance. He never even looked at me. It was as if I wasn’t even there.

Until he said, “You know, Josie, at some point you’re going to need to be able to be by yourself.”

I tried to smile. “I’ve got you, haven’t I?”

Now he looked at me. The set of his mouth was hostile. “You think I’m going to be here forever? You think I’m going to waste my life sitting in this house holding your hand?”

Never, never had Jack spoken like this to me. There had never been any mention of leaving me, of wasting his life. I didn’t know what to say; for a moment I sat in stunned silence.

Then I stood up. “Fine. Don’t, if it’s such a waste of your time. ” I turned my back on him and left the room.

Upstairs in my room, with the door shut against him, I stood in the middle of the floor, among the piles of clothes and textbooks and half-done pages of math problems. I was so angry that my body felt like it was going to implode, or spontaneously combust, or draw lightning from the sky. I wanted to fight him, hit him, tear at those smug green eyes of his—but the house was no longer lifeless and empty. My room was bright with rage, but it was familiar and comforting.

An hour later, I was reading when he knocked on my door and came in.

He sat down on the edge of my bed. “I’m an asshole.”

“Perceptive.” I didn’t move over.

He lay down anyway, laced his fingers behind his head and said, “What are you reading?”

“Ray Bradbury.”

“Deep.”

“It’s yours.”

He smiled a little. “Martians?”

“The end of the world. ”

“Is that all,” he said and was silent for a while.

Finally, he spoke. “This morning, when I was going back to my room, I pictured myself doing the same thing in twenty years. You and me and Raeburn, all still living here, everything the same, except now we’re older. Can you picture that? Everything the same, except we’ve lived our whole lives here, in this house. With him.” He turned over on his side, propped his head on his elbow, and looked at me, his expression grave. “I started thinking about what Raeburn always says, that nothing anybody does matters because we’re going to blow ourselves to kingdom come anyway, and so forth.”

“So?”

“So?” Jack repeated and let his head fall wearily to my stomach. “So, I don’t know.”

“If he’s right, it pretty much lets us off the hook, doesn’t it?” Jack’s face crumpled. He looked tired and sad and very young. I touched his back and said, “It’s not that bad.”

“It’s hell,” he said. “We’re in hell.”

Then he wrapped his arms around me and pulled me down, burying his face in my hair. We lay like that for a while. Eventually he lifted his face and said, “But I have to admit, if I’ve got to be trapped here, I’m trapped with a pretty exceptional sister. Even if she is a weakling sometimes.”

“Thanks,” I said.

His finger traced my collarbone. “I think I’d go crazy without you.”

It was as if my muscles had been clenched for hours and relaxed when he spoke. Forgiven; forgotten.

The year’s first snowstorm began the day before the party. Jack, who’d been sullen and withdrawn for days, drove us to the college on roads frosted thick with a mixture of salt and ash, and, in places, with patches of treacherous, gleaming black ice. As we crossed the mountains, the snow came down in vicious little flakes. My dress and Jack’s tux were in garment bags in the back of the truck. When the snow didn’t stop we pulled over to the side of the road and covered them with the emergency blankets from behind the seat.

As we fought with frozen hands to push the seat back into place, the sky darkened above us. I didn’t know if the darkness had fallen because of the time or the weather, and neither of us had a watch. I said, “I think we’re going to be late.” When we got back on the road Jack drove faster. He turned on the radio, but there was no reception: not in a snowstorm this high in the mountains. “You try,” he said, and so I turned the knob back and forth. There was nothing to hear but static.

Meanwhile, the snow outside had turned to flashing, glittering shards of hail in the truck’s headlights. They hit the windshield and ricocheted off into the darkness. The sound was like driving over gravel. There was an embankment to our right where the road had been blasted into the side of the mountain; on the left was only blackness and the pale trunks of the bare trees that covered the steep slope.

I looked at Jack. “Storm’s getting worse.”

“Try AM.”

I hit the button just as the rear wheels hit a patch of ice and the tail end of the truck lurched across the yellow line that was barely visible in the road ahead.

Jack twisted the wheel calmly in the opposite direction and we were straight again.

“Maybe you should slow down.” The words felt stupid coming out of my mouth.

“First I’m too slow, now I’m too fast. Make up your mind. What do you want?”

“To get there alive,” I said, and then the truck seemed suddenly to
lift
and was sliding above the pavement in a soft frictionless glide that for the briefest of instants was actually gentle and easy. Jack swore and wrenched the wheel to one side. There was nothing calm about him this time, and all at once the road in front of us was gone and we were looking at the pale dizzying forest and then more road and more embankment and the terrifying black drop behind the thin white trees, spinning around and around us like some kind of nightmare kaleidoscope. The force of the spin was pushing me against the door and I was clutching at anything I could. Jack was still swearing and fighting with the wheel. His voice and his motions were desperate and then the wheels were spinning in the gravel of a sudden rare shoulder on the embankment side.

We’d stopped.

In the abrupt silence I could hear the truck’s motor purring like a contented cat, and Jack breathing hard, and myself breathing harder. He was staring straight ahead of us, out into the swirl of ice crystals in the headlights.

Centripetal force, I thought, bizarrely. Not the spin pushing against the truck, but the truck pushing against the spin. One by one, I unclenched my fingers from the door. I’d been bracing myself against the floor of the truck so hard that my knees ached.

“Slick patch,” Jack said. When I didn’t respond he said, “I wouldn’t have let anything happen. I’d never let you get hurt.”

“Just get us there,” I said.

“Your wish is my et cetera.” He drove slowly the rest of the way.

We went straight to the address Raeburn had given us for the motel, which turned out to be one of those places that rented rooms for thirty dollars a night or fifteen dollars an hour. Our room was squalid. When we turned on the light, the walls were crawling. Brushing my teeth in the bathroom, I took one look at the shower stall and decided that I was clean enough. Nobody had ever intentionally made a bathroom fixture that color.

Jack was whistling as he dressed. For tonight, at least, the impenetrable melancholy that had been on him since his disappearance seemed to have spun itself away on that mountain road. “You know what would be funny?” he said as he put on his tie in front of the spotted mirror. “If Raeburn came by tomorrow and neither of us was here. Say, for instance, you were to catch the eye of our favorite up-and-coming physics professor and he were to invite you back to his charming little apartment for a quiet evening of gravity-testing.”

“What about you?”

“I hide in the closet and film it.”

I gave him a hard look. “I think you’re getting sicker.”

He grinned at me and stepped away from the mirror so that I could use it. “Speaking of getting sick, if either of us tries to sleep in this room, ten to one we end up with dysentery.” He kicked the bed. The iron feet made a ghastly squealing noise against the dingy linoleum and I heard—or imagined—the skittering of a thousand tiny cockroach legs. I shuddered and turned to the mirror to put on Crazy Mary’s pearl earrings.

Jack grabbed me from behind.

“Your mission,” he whispered into my ear, his breath hot, his hands on my waist, “should you choose to accept it: use those deadly feminine wiles to seduce one Professor Benjamin Searles, soon to be tenured, and thereby secure a halfway decent place to sleep tonight while your lowly brother hovers outside the window with only the soulless mechanical hum of a video camera for company.” As he spoke, his hands slid up my sides to my bare shoulders.

I brushed him away. “No, thanks.”

Jack dropped his hands and stepped back from me. “Failing that, we can always drive home after the party if neither of us is too plowed.”