Josie and Jack (15 page)

After a while I began to lose my brother.

He became a mythical figure. I had trouble remembering the days when he had been a living, breathing, talking entity in the room next door to mine; they seemed like a dream. Instead, I imagined him in scenes from the movies I watched: sitting in the corner of a bar full of glamorous people, smoking enigmatically and staring into his drink. Wandering the streets in the rain, looking for something he couldn’t find. Hauling lobsters in the North Atlantic, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his brow and stare wistfully at the horizon—thinking, perhaps, of the sister he’d left behind, long ago and far away.

It must have been in early May that Ben Searles called, because when the phone rang I was standing on the porch, watching the rain falling on the elms, and the rain was warm. The phone was loud and shrill in the empty silence of the house. For some reason I thought, It’s Jack, and my heart surged. The sudden wave of wanting my brother hit me viscerally, making my chest hurt and my eyes water. I think I flew into the house without once touching foot to floor; I grabbed the phone, took a deep breath, and couldn’t say anything because I wanted it too badly.

“Raeburn?” a voice said. It was Ben Searles. I had forgotten about him. I slumped down to the floor, taking the phone with me.

“Josie,” I said finally.

“Josie, let me talk to your father.” He sounded cheerful and excited.

I stretched the phone cord out and let it snap back. “He’s not here.”

“Will you give him a message for me?”

I didn’t answer.

“Tell him Margaret Revolt confessed,” he said. “Taking my class, writing the letter, everything.” He started to laugh. “She confessed. It’s over.”

“No,” I said.

“What?” He sounded confused.

“I won’t tell him that. He’ll kill me.”

There was a pause. When Ben spoke again, his voice was kinder. “I heard your brother is gone. ”

I didn’t answer.

“Why didn’t you leave with him?”

I opened my mouth to tell him it was none of his business, and what came out was, “He didn’t want me to.”

There. There it was, lying baldly on the kitchen floor in front of me like a shattered mess of egg and orange juice and broken china. Jack didn’t want to take me; he didn’t want me to come; he didn’t want me.
He didn’t want me.

Another pause. Then Ben said, “This isn’t the way the world is. People acting like this. You know that, don’t you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Nothing does.”

“Is there something you need?” Ben sounded confused and helpless. “Is there anything I can do?”

I reached up and put the phone into its cradle.

Summer came and the semester was over. Nonetheless, every Monday morning Raeburn threw a pile of clothes and books into the back seat of his car and drove away, just as if the college were still in session. He said he was teaching a summer class. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t care.

One day, I tried to climb out onto the roof, but the vast expanse of shingles was too wide, the slope was too steep, and I was too scared. After I crawled back through the dormer window into the room on the third floor, I spent a while picking desultorily through the boxes in the room. Below a layer of thick, inscrutable critical-theory texts I found a pile of composition books full of lecture notes written in a precise, delicate hand.

Mary was a margin jotter. The edges of the pages in her notebooks contained her response to the entire education process in general, and each class in particular. “WASTE of my time. Shut up, for the love of God.” Once she’d filled an entire margin by keeping careful track of how many seconds were left in the class. She hadn’t managed to take any notes on the class itself, beyond the date at the top of the page and a few cryptic scribbles.

The ink of her downstrokes was thick and assertive. She’d used a fountain pen. Raeburn used one, too. I turned to another page. This was a philosophy class—part of it was about Aristotle—and it looked like she’d made it through at least half the class this time before getting bored. From that point on, the page was covered in doodles, swirls and skulls and musical notes. Except at the bottom, where she’d written “Mary Chandler Raeburn” and then crossed it out, as if it embarrassed her.

The class notes filled a little over half the book. I didn’t find any other references to my father among them. With my thumb I sent the remaining pages by in a yellowing, college-ruled blur. A musty smell rose from the pages. The paper was slightly stiff with age.

As the pages turned by on my lap, I saw a flash of blue. Quickly I flipped through the book until I found it: a page mostly ripped out, wrinkled and torn, with only a few inches remaining at the top. The preceding page had been ripped out completely; it looked very much as if someone had seized the two pages in an angry fist to tear them out, and hadn’t noticed that they’d missed part of one. There were a few lines of blue ink still legible at the top of the torn page, written in a messier version of Mary’s hand with a cheap ballpoint pen.

look at her I think about how she’ll grow up and meet some man who’ll eat out the middle of her like a sandwich and leave the crusts to rot on the plate and

I shut the notebook. I didn’t want to read anymore.

Around the Fourth of July, I found a pink flier tacked to our front door, asking us to join the Citizens’ Watch program “to help combat the crime wave that has hit our hitherto peaceful neighborhood.”

“The police are doing nothing,” the flier read. “It is up to Hill residents to patrol our own streets, to look out for each other, and to continue to foster the sense of community and belonging that has always set us apart from the crowd.”

I threw the flier away and started locking the doors.

Not long afterward, Raeburn went to the campus to meet with the board of trustees, who were going to let him know the conditions they’d decided on for his return in the fall. I spent the evening in the parlor, reading a copy of
Wuthering Heights
that I’d found in one of Mary’s boxes and listening to Jack’s Wagner. The music was loud and encompassing and kept my attention away from the silence that had rushed like water into every part of the room.

At three o’clock in the morning I heard a noise on the front porch. I stiffened with fear. Then I heard muffled swearing and the jingling of keys at the lock.

It wouldn’t be him, I told myself. It would be Raeburn in the doorway, glaring, home and drunk because the meeting had gone badly. He wouldn’t explain and I wouldn’t ask. I’d turn off the Wagner and go back to my book and the silence, and later on I’d go to bed, and time would continue to pass. When I woke up, my book would be sitting next to my bed and the day would be half over. Maybe I would walk to the pond.

The door opened. A single set of footsteps made its way down the hall.

And even if it was Jack—what did he think, that he could vanish, abandon me, and then drop back into my life six months later like a summer cold? That he could walk in the door and ask for a drink and a sandwich and that would be the end of it?

God, how I hoped it was him.

When Jack walked into the parlor, he was thinner than he had been—so was I, I guess—and he was wearing a navy blue shirt that I’d never seen before. His hair was longer, long enough that it fell softly behind his ears, which were now pierced with small silver hoops.

For a moment we neither moved nor spoke. Looking at him was like looking at a stranger who’d somehow stolen my bone structure. There was an expression on his face that I couldn’t identify, part wariness and part surprise. Who was he to be surprised? Where did he expect me to be?

And, of course, I loved him again immediately. I didn’t seem to have a choice.

“Hey,” he said.

I heard myself say, “Hey yourself.”

“Came back to get some things.” He took a step into the room and stopped. Now his face was carefully blank. I tried to remember when I’d last washed my hair.

“Oh?”

“Upstairs.”

“Oh.”

When I didn’t say anything else, he said, “I guess I’ll go get them,” and turned away from me. I followed him upstairs and we stood at the door of his old room, staring through the doorway. The room was empty. The furniture was gone. A few dustballs gathered in the corners.

“Jesus,” he said. “Guess I’m out of the family for good, huh?”

It hurt me to be so close to him. “I saved your books,” I said. “And some of your albums. He threw everything else away. I think some of your clothes are in my room, if you want them.” I tried a smile, to see how it felt.

It felt strained, and Jack didn’t smile back. He pushed past me angrily and walked down the hall to the room where Raeburn stored most of Crazy Mary’s things. The door was locked. Jack tried to kick it in, but it didn’t budge.

“It’s locked,” I said.

“I see that.” He pulled a pocketknife out of his jeans. In a moment he had the lock jimmied and was inside the room.

Every surface in the tiny room, which had once been our mother’s sewing room, was covered with leaning piles of boxes and old clothes. Jack went straight to the box on the table that held what was left of Crazy Mary’s jewelry. He pawed at the contents for a moment. “Do you have those pearl earrings? The ones you wore at that party?”

“They’re in my room.”

“Get them for me.”

“Why?”

“Because,” he said, “that’s all we have that’s worth anything. I think she took all the good stuff with her when we went to Chicago.”

My chin went up. “They’re mine. If you wanted them, you should have taken them with you when you left.”

He stuffed a handful of cheap jewelry in his pocket. “That won’t get you anywhere.”

“What won’t?”

“Trying to make me feel guilty. You think I wanted to leave you here alone?”

“You must have,” I said, “because you did. You left me here.”

After all the long months, after all the times I’d rehearsed this conversation in my head, that was all I could say. But he was there; he was finally there. He was looking at me. He was listening to me. So I said it again: “You left me here.”

“Josie—”

“You left me here.”

He dropped the box lid and came over to me. He tried to take my shoulders. I shook him off.

“Would you just—”

“You left me.”

“Listen to me for a moment.”

“No,” I said. “You left me.”

“Shut up!” He grabbed my upper arms, hard. “Shut up! For God’s sake, Josie, be quiet!” With each word he gave me a hard, quick shake. I let him. My head was rolling and limp.

He let me go.

“Jesus.” He frowned. “What the hell is wrong with you?” There was a lost, confused look on his face I’d never seen before.

I shook my head.

There was a mirror over what had once been Crazy Mary’s sewing table. He grabbed my arm and pulled me roughly over to stand in front of it.

“Look at yourself,” he said.

I looked at the pale skin, the greasy hair, the deep circles under my eyes. It was the same face I’d been seeing for six months.

“Look at yourself,” he said again. “You look like a corpse and you’re acting like a lobotomy patient. What the hell happened to you?”

The man standing next to the wan girl in the mirror was touching her face just as Jack was touching mine.

“Time and space,” the girl in the mirror said. The man’s arm crept around her waist and his body curled against hers.

“When I was here, you were always beautiful,” he said. “You’re the only girl I’ve ever known who could be beautiful and hung-over at the same time.”

I watched the wan girl smile slightly.

“You were alive then.” He was crooning now, his voice low and smooth and rich. “You were amazing. We were amazing.”

“It wasn’t ever me.” My voice seemed to come from someone else.

Jack’s mouth was close to my ear, against the soft place beneath my earlobe; and when he spoke, his words and his lips were like kisses. He was kissing me.

“My poor little sister,” he said. “Poor, pretty little sister. What happened? What happened to you?” His hands were on my stomach, under my sweaty T-shirt, stroking the skin and my thin ribs, and I was shivering, tensing, with each touch. I turned toward him, feeling the desperation in my face and hating it.

“You did,” I said.

During the long six months that we’d spent apart, I had often lain curled in my bed at night, imagining the warmth of his body wrapped around mine—of any body wrapped around mine—trying to remember what it had been like to be a person touched by another human being. The feel of hands on my skin. The warm pulse of another heart, my ear pressed close to hear it. A body protecting me from the rest of the world.

It was a simple thing. At that moment, it was all that I wanted.

I was crying. Sitting on the floor of the hallway crying.

“Stop it,” he said.

“I’m sorry.” I wiped my running nose on the back of my wrist.

“Don’t be sorry. Just quit crying.” He shook his head and stood up. “I hate it when you cry.”

“Then quit making me,” I said softly.

He didn’t answer. He ran his hands through his hair and then held them out to me. I took them and he pulled me to my feet.

“You’re starting to look like you again.” He kissed my forehead absently and started checking his pockets, methodically. “Listen, Jo, do you think you could get me those earrings?”

“Earrings?”

“The pearl ones.”

Numbly I went to get them. Jack had taken them out of my ears when I was passed out after the Christmas party. He’d left them on the dresser and I hadn’t touched them since. I stood for a moment with them in my hand. Then I reached behind the headboard and took the charm bracelet out of its box.

When I came back out into the hallway he was gone and my breath caught. Then I heard the Wagner playing downstairs, in the study.

He was going through the books on the shelves, making a pile on the couch of the oldest ones with the most elaborately tooled covers. They were Raeburn’s first editions. “Thanks,” he said when I gave him the earrings, and stuck them carelessly in his pocket without looking at them or me.