Josie and Jack (2 page)

We were alone a lot, but we had always been alone a lot, and Jack said that we were the sort of people who always would be. Crazy Mary—which was what we called the mother we’d briefly shared—left my father when I was two and my brother was four, and took Jack with her. I didn’t see him again for four years.

But then one morning when I was six years old, a strained-looking social worker showed up on our doorstep with one hand holding an inch-thick stack of paperwork and with the other holding—barely—my squirming and fighting brother. I hadn’t even known that I had a brother—I only vaguely knew that I had a mother, and still wasn’t entirely clear how I was related to the man who called himself my father—and now there Jack was, in the flesh, and he was the first person I’d ever seen who was even close to my size, and besides, he
looked
like me. He had the same wide, smooth forehead, pointed chin, and tawny hair, although his hair had been cut brutally short somewhere along the line. There was an ugly gash near his left ear that had been stitched up with spiky black thread. He looked straight into my eyes and I looked straight into his, which were strikingly green, and we knew each other instantly.

Later, when we were left alone together while Raeburn went through the paperwork with the social worker, eight-year-old Jack reached out and took a lock of my hair between his fingers. The housekeeper Raeburn paid to take care of me had long since given up on my hair; it was snarled and matted and it hadn’t ever been cut, but Jack didn’t seem to notice. He looked at the greasy golden hank as if it were something miraculous.

“You have hair like Mary’s,” he said, his voice full of wonder. Then his expression changed, became firm and efficient. “But you need to brush it.”

“I don’t know how,” small Josie said. It’s the first sentence I can actually remember speaking.

“I’ll show you,” Jack said, and he did. Ten years later, I was probably the only sixteen-year-old in America who still gave her hair the legendary hundred strokes each night, and sometimes during the day, because Jack loved to watch me do it.

Raeburn told me that Jack had come to live with us because my mother was dead; it was Jack who filled in the blanks by telling me that my mother and his mother and Mary were all the same person. “We’re on our own now,” he said. “Just you and me.” The world I lived in was a third again as big as it had been a week before; I no longer felt alone, but I read the solemn look in his eyes and nodded soberly.

Not long after that, the housekeeper was fired—I’d hated her anyway, and much preferred spending time with my new brother—and the stacks of schoolbooks began. By the time Jack and I were teenagers, we had come to a silent understanding with Raeburn: as long as we spent the weekends pretending to pay attention, Raeburn couldn’t have cared less what we did with ourselves during the week. And what we did, left alone in our decaying old house, was this: ice skate in winter and stargaze in summer, get stinking drunk on cheap whiskey and cheaper wine, smoke cigarettes in bed, smoke pot on the front lawn, climb trees, walk in the woods, daydream, sleep, fight, scream, laugh, and do whatever else we wanted to do. I used to think that was all we’d ever do.

“Take functional relationships,” Raeburn said, his mouth full of half-chewed chicken wing. “We design the experiments that define them, we give them names, we spend centuries proving and re-proving them; but we don’t
create
them. They are entirely separate from us. They’re like invisible machines, but far more intricate and fine than anything we could ever build. I am talking, children, about
constants
.” He brought one hand down hard on the table, making the silverware jump. “John.”

Jack, on my left, was staring blankly at the table. He looked up when our father spoke. Raeburn liked us to dress for dinner, so he was wearing a jacket and tie despite the heat. His eyes, the same green as the beer bottles we’d buried in the trash that afternoon, were shielded and cold. They might as well have been closed.

“Give me an example of a constant.” A piece of breading from the chicken fell onto Raeburn’s shirt as he spoke. He didn’t notice.

“Gravity,” my brother answered.

Raeburn shook his head. “You might have been half right sixty years ago, before space travel and experimental antigravity aircraft. The U.S. government has successfully defeated gravity. Bully for it.” He belched and dropped the chicken bone, picked clean.

I kept my eyes on my own plate, with its untouched drumstick and soggy heap of broccoli. When we’d returned from the drugstore, Raeburn was already there, even though we hadn’t expected him for another couple of hours. He’d brought a whole chicken home with the regular groceries. Jack had cut it into pieces and I had fried it at the stove, despite the summer heat. It didn’t take long, in the full stench of cooking meat and hot grease, for my hangover to resurface. By the time I put the frozen spears of broccoli in a pot of water to boil, my legs were shaky and the hair at the back of my neck was damp with sweat. I’d wiped the sweat away with a cool rag when I was upstairs dressing for dinner, but my stomach rebelled anew at the sight of the separated chicken leg on my plate, the white knob of bone glistening through the cooked tendons. It didn’t look like food. It looked like a piece of a dismembered corpse. Eating it, I knew, was a practical impossibility.

And yet somehow I couldn’t look away from it. Maybe I was making sure it didn’t move.

“Josephine,” Raeburn said. “There are many wrong answers and only one correct one.”

There are actually over a dozen universal physical constants, but it didn’t matter. There was never more than one correct answer with my father. I knew this one; if Jack hadn’t convinced me to do his physics for him, he would have known it, too. I tore myself away from contemplation of the thing on my plate and said, “Hooke’s law.”

“Which is?”

“The ratio of a weight on a spring to the elongation of the spring.”

Jack’s eyes flickered at me.

“The relationship of weight to tension. Good.” Raeburn picked up a fork, speared a limp piece of broccoli, and stuffed it into his mouth. “Always constant. Always the same. Nature makes sense, children. Logical, concise, direct. It’s humanity that’s fucked it all up.”

“Gravity is a natural constant,” Jack said.

“Not once we’ve violated it. Then it becomes another part of the universe that we’ve irrevocably destroyed.” My stomach lurched dangerously. “We’ve made all the technological advances we can make without dooming ourselves; all that’s left to us is destruction. This is our dusk, children. This is our twilight.” He paused. His eyes were sparkling and his cheeks flushed. Our father liked nothing better than contemplating humanity’s imminent self-destruction. He gloried in it.

One of Jack’s hands fell casually beneath the table and I felt a light pinch through my crisp wool skirt. I grabbed for his hand. The tips of my fingers brushed his skin as he pulled it away.

Raeburn looked from Jack to me and back again. He grunted and took the other chicken wing. “One of my students—an exceptionally perceptive young woman—she used the most wonderful phrase in her final paper last term. ‘Anything that humanity does from here on out,’ she wrote, ‘is a wave at the band as we leave the dance floor.’ Brilliant,” he said and tore the wing into two pieces.

Under the table, Jack’s hand crept back into my lap and found my hand.

“Josephine,” Raeburn said, “you’re not eating.”

I tried to pull my hand away. Jack wouldn’t let go. “I know. I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not feeling very well.”

My father stared pitilessly at me and said, “Will starving yourself make you feel better?”

I didn’t answer.

“Eat, girl,” he said.

The dismembered chicken leg lay, lifeless and greasy, on my plate. I picked it up and began to eat.

After dinner Raeburn sent Jack to put gas in his Buick and went to bed early with a bottle of brandy and a hand-rolled cigarette. I stayed downstairs to clean the kitchen. I moved slowly; my stomach felt swollen and hot and I could still taste the grease from the fried chicken. I could still feel the squeak of the meat between my teeth.

Eventually all the dishes were dried and put back in the cupboard, the table and countertops were wiped down with a wet rag, and the garbage was bagged and placed outside on the back porch, where it would ripen in the heat overnight. By Monday night, when Raeburn left, the kitchen would reek of rotting chicken parts. I tried not to think about it and crept upstairs to bed.

I hung my blouse and skirt carefully in the closet, where they wouldn’t be wrinkled, and let my bra fall to the floor. Raeburn didn’t care what our bedrooms looked like as long as the rest of the house was clean. One of Jack’s T-shirts was balled up on the floor next to my bed and I put it on. I turned off my light and stretched out on my unmade bed, pulling the sheet over me so that I could feel the cool cotton against my legs.

My stomach moved inside my gut. I lay without moving and waited for it to decide what it wanted to do, either throw up or calm down or leap out of my body in one sick, throbbing piece. At some point I must have fallen asleep, because when Jack pulled back the sheet and put an icy bottle of beer against my bare leg, I woke with a start.

“Drink this,” he said. There was no moon outside and all I could see of him was the glimmer of starlight picking out his profile. “You’ll feel better.”

My stomach was still queasy. I shook my head.

“It’s cold,” he said. “Come on, Jo. Hair of the dog.”

“More like feather of the chicken,” I said, but I took the bottle from him anyway.

“Move over,” he said.

Carefully, I sat up against my wooden headboard, which was blissfully cool, and pulled my knees up to my chest. Jack stretched out with his head beside my ankles and his boots hanging off the edge of the bed. I took a tentative sip of the beer. When my stomach didn’t immediately object, I took another.

Jack reached up, took my ankle in one of his hands, and moved his head into my lap. His hair was soft and clean and tangled and it smelled of the night air. He’d driven to the gas station with the car windows open.

After a while, he said, “Three days left.”

“Two full days, one morning.”

I felt his head move in my lap as he tilted it back to look at me. “I think you should make friends with that kid from the drugstore.”

I stared at him in surprise. “A town kid?”

“The
pharmacist’s
kid,” Jack said. “Josie, do you have any idea what’s behind the counter in the back of that store?”

“Allergy medicine and antibiotics?”

He squeezed my ankle. “All I’m saying is, the pharmacist’s kid might not be such a bad person to have on our side. We should go back there.”

“How about the next time we’re out of aspirin?”

“Sooner than that. This week, maybe.” I felt his head move again and he said, “And maybe you, my sister, could try your hand at flirting.”

“You must be joking,” I said.

“Why?”

“I can’t flirt with him. I don’t know how.”

He grinned and said, “Sure you do.”

“Jack,” I said. “The only boy I’ve ever talked to is you.”

“O ye of little faith. Don’t worry, it’ll come naturally. Besides, I’ve talked to town kids. I promise you that either one of us is smarter than that kid’s entire family put together. You can talk circles around him, Josie my love.”

“Talking and flirting are not the same.” And I can’t do either, not with a town kid, I almost said. But instead I concentrated on my hands working in his hair, unknotting it.

“For you, they will be,” he said. “You had him the moment he saw you.”

But first there was the weekend to get through.

Jack and I sat with Raeburn in his study, a dark, book-lined room with one small dirty window and a stale, claustrophobic smell. A sepia-toned globe lay pinioned in its wooden rack before us like a giant egg waiting to hatch. Long outdated, it had originally belonged to my grandfather; ostensibly we were studying geography, but the point had long since been lost, which was the way Raeburn’s lessons usually ended up. It’s a wonder either of us ever learned to think coherently.

My brother, bored, slouched next to me on the couch, digging at the engine grease under his nails with the point of a compass. I was staring out the open window. It was raining outside and the air coming through it was moist and warm and clean-smelling.

“There is history here,” Raeburn said. “Rhodesia. Persia. The Ottoman Empire. All false constructs, created by the human urge to carve, to parcel, to own. Even our United States is a construct—and a recent one at that.” He gave the globe a desultory spin. “All of the creations of man are ephemeral. They’d pass away in their own time even if we didn’t do our best to destroy them.”

His dry, droning voice choked the room like a noxious cigar. I thought drowsily about wet leaves: not old, moldering leaves like the ones that rotted beneath our porch, but fresh, supple, green leaves, washed and shining with rain.

“Fascinating,” Jack said.

Raeburn took off his glasses and stared at us, his watery eyes narrow and annoyed. “The point,” he said, “is that you may as well learn the capitals for a country that no longer exists as for one that does. Does it matter to the peasant whether he lives in Persia or Iraq? Does the government that rules the city help him find food in the country?”

Jack made a noise of disgust and resumed cleaning his fingernails. Raeburn’s lips went thin and tense.

“I want you to learn these things—all things—so that when you go out into the world, you aren’t at its mercy,” he said. “So that you will be armed with information, and able to defend yourselves.” The narrow line of his mouth grew tighter as he watched Jack dig under his thumbnail with the compass.

“Put that damn thing down,” he burst out finally and knocked the compass out of Jack’s hands. It hit the dingy wooden floor with a clatter. I jumped. A drop of blood, rich and dark, welled up from Jack’s thumbnail.

Jack wiped the blood onto his white shirt, leaving a rusty smear. “How much use do you think your peasant would have for all of this information you’re arming us with?”