Life From Scratch (11 page)

Michael had tears in his eyes. When I opened my mouth to speak, he brushed past me and disappeared into his room. Toni slipped into hers. I stood there a moment and stared down at the breakfast tray before retreating with my blanket and teddy bear into my closet.

In the morning, I woke certain that Patricia and Pierre would see we’d meant well. I waited for them to tell us how good the breakfast was, or to thank us for thinking of them, or to hug us and say it’d be OK. No such luck. Patricia was stony faced, and Pierre was already at the office.

No one ever mentioned it again.

Michael’s best grades were D’s. One fall day as we walked home from the bus stop, he confided that he didn’t want to show Patricia and Pierre his report card. He was 14, in eighth grade. I was 12, in seventh grade.

“You’re lucky,” he said, kicking a few stones into the gutter, “Yours is probably covered with A’s and B’s.”

It usually was. I slid my card farther into my coat pocket, not wanting him to find out that this time I’d managed straight A’s. Gingerly, I reached for his card and looked over the markings, the red ink laid out like hundreds of small knife cuts.

“But you got a C in English class,” I said, smiling up at him. “That’s way better than last—”

“It’s not going to matter. You’ll see.”

“They’ll see it—they will,” I assured him, even as a sick feeling lurched in my stomach. The Dumonts had high expectations. “You have to make the most of your education,” Pierre often said. “No one’s going to do it for you.”

Michael slowed his walk to a near crawl, dragging out the inevitable as long as possible. By the time we climbed the steep drive, he was primed for a fight. Pierre came from around the side of the house and asked about our report cards. I looked up in time to see Michael take a real swing at Pierre, then a high kick, the kind he’d learned in karate. The scuffle ended up in the dirt, Michael’s balled-up report card blowing down the drive.

Michael didn’t come out of his room for dinner. The tension boiled over again at bedtime. Michael was right: Going from a D to a C wasn’t good enough. After all, Patricia and Pierre had raised a Ph.D. and a soon-to-be doctor.

I thought about sneaking over to Michael’s room after bedtime, but when he retreated, he’d slammed his door so hard it shook the walls in my room.

After his 14th birthday, Michael’s physical outbursts and quick-trigger temper increased. It was a perfect storm, fed as much by his raging hormones as by our unique family situation. He got in fights at home, at school, with me. He was a volcano, molten emotion always trembling below the surface.

Things went from bad to worse when Michael started stealing again. Instead of swiping morsels of candy, as he had in Jamaica Plain, he went on bigger heists, taking department store jewelry for his girlfriend or bags of chips he’d later sell out of his locker. He even sneaked out at night, despite my desperate pleas for him to stay home.

In the spring, he brought a cemented-up gun to school, got suspended, and was scheduled for his first trial in juvenile court. He hardly looked me in the eye anymore. His once boyish humor became scathing. Looking back, I can see that the split from our old life wasn’t as clean as he’d made it look. The girlfriends, the bands of buddies—they weren’t enough. A shadow floated over the peace this new life offered. We never spoke about his sadness: Whenever I tried, he shut me out.

I knew he was hurting, but I never guessed how much.

CHAPTER 7

White Flag of Surr
e
nder

O
NE
F
RIDAY MORNING IN
A
PRIL
, almost two years to the day after we moved in with the Dumonts, my brother succumbed. He was 14.

Pierre was on a business trip in Paris. The only other people at home were me, Patricia, and Heather, who was still living at home as a first-year medical student. It was time for school, but Michael didn’t come down for breakfast. We waited in the car, the engine idling. After checking the clock on the dash for the third time, Patricia sent me up to his room, where I knocked and knocked without an answer. My heart was in my mouth when I told Patricia.

“Did you try his door?” she asked.

“Yes,” I whispered, my eyes staring down at a crease in my sneakers, “It was locked.”

She went into the kitchen and fished a paper clip out of the junk drawer. “Here, wiggle this around until the lock pops out.”

As the door peeled back, I saw my brother leaning awkwardly up against the top rail of his bunk bed, legs curled and feet pointed behind him. A line of spit had bubbled out of his mouth and down his chin. I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing, but I knew it wasn’t right.

I ran to the stair railing and shouted down, “There’s something wrong with my brother.”

Patricia came running. After a horrified “Oh, my God,” I heard, “Sasha, get some scissors.”

I didn’t yet understand why she needed scissors, but my gut told me I’d better do exactly as she said. The kitchen was so far away compared to the one in Mom’s little apartment, where it had been just a half step from Michael’s bed to the stove. I banged open drawer after drawer, finding towels, knives, forks, and tinfoil—but no scissors. By this time, Heather had heard the commotion from her basement apartment and came running.

“Where are the scissors?” I asked.

Without a word, she pulled open the junk drawer that held the paper clips and pointed. I followed as she sprinted up the stairs.

When I gave Patricia the scissors, she was propping up Michael’s body. I thought I saw something threading between his neck and the bunk bed. Patricia took the scissors without turning around. “Call 911,” she said, her voice high and thin.

There was a phone on a little wooden table in the hall right outside Michael’s room. I dialed the number, but when the operator asked, “What’s your emergency?” I didn’t know what to say. When the question was repeated, I hung up.

As though in a trance, I hovered near Michael’s doorway just as Patricia pressed the scissors together and his body fell to the floor. His face and neck were ash-gray. A deep red line divided the grayness from the rest of his body. His skin was dull and waxy, like one of my dolls. Heather tried mouth-to-mouth. Patricia knelt on the floor and pounded Michael’s chest. It sounded hollow. I stood there staring at the cut edges of the thick, hay-colored rope on the floor. It looked like a dead snake.

That’s when I realized he’d hanged himself. I hadn’t been able to tell at first because he was too tall for the bunk bed. His back had been arched in a failed swan dive, face pressed against the bed, feet stretched behind him toward the wall, still touching the floor. His head had hidden the rope.

Patricia yelled again, “Where’s 911?”

Silently I pressed myself closer to the wall. Someone must have called them back, because a few minutes later, lights and sirens clamored up the steep drive. EMTs swarmed around Michael with plastic tubes and beeping devices. They were able to get him breathing again, but he’d clearly spent a significant time without oxygen.

The police wanted to know why there was a woman’s shoe next to Michael. As it happened, Patricia’s had come off as she cut him down. Eventually the misunderstanding was cleared up; Patricia was assured that the questions were just standard procedure. But for hours after the inquisition, her face was redder than her hair.

We stood in the dingy hospital waiting room while the doctor gave us the news: Michael was trapped in a coma. He was brain-dead.

Brain-dead. Brain-dead. Brain-dead:
The words clattered around in my head.

“What does that mean?” I finally managed. There was a pause while the doctor looked from me to Patricia. In the silence, my heartbeat hammered in my ears. Patricia stared blankly at the doctor.

It turned out that Michael had been deprived of oxygen too long, which had starved his brain. The doctor said Michael wouldn’t be able to think or even walk again. When he compared him to a vegetable, I pictured a giant carrot in a hospital bed. It would have been funny if I weren’t so hopping mad.

When the doctor walked away, I asked Heather for her professional opinion as a first-year medical student.

“Do you think he’ll wake up?”

Heather opened her mouth to speak, but crinkled up like a paper bag, dropping her head onto my shoulder. Even as she squeezed me tight, her shoulders started to shake. I wondered if maybe I should cry, too; it seemed strange that I hadn’t since finding him. But I felt empty, all dried up. The only thing I
could
feel was a twisty sort of feeling in the pit of my stomach, as if I’d swallowed an octopus.

I ran to the bathroom and threw up.

Though Pierre cut his work trip short, it still took him another day to get a flight home from Paris. The first person Patricia contacted was Mom. Mom later told me that Patricia was crying so hard Mom could hardly understand her.

Over and over again Patricia apologized: “I’m so, so sorry. Michael had a terrible accident.”

The more she apologized, the more alarmed Mom grew. Before Patricia could tell her what happened, Mom hung up. She was about to leave for her new job at the Boston Trial Court, where she did data entry. She could tell that the news, whatever it was, was going to be bad—really bad. She says now that she couldn’t face hearing it because once she did, she could never unhear it.