Split

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2010 by Swati Avasthi

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Split / Swati Avasthi. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
Summary: A teenaged boy thrown out of his house by his abusive father goes to live with his older brother, who ran away from home years ago to escape the abuse.
eISBN: 978-0-375-89526-5
[1. Child abuse—Fiction. 2. Family violence—Fiction. 3. Brothers—Fiction.]
I. Title.
PZ7.A931Sp 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009022615

Random House Children’s Books supports the First Amendment and celebrates the right to read.

v3.0

This book is dedicated to my parents,
Pushpa and Pratap S. Avasthi.
All my life, they’ve given me seeds, water, and sunshine.
Then they waited patiently to see what I might grow.

chapter 1

n
ow I have to start lying
.

While I stare through the windshield at the building my brother lives in, I try to think up a good lie, but nothing comes to mind. “I was in the neighborhood”? Yeah, right. It’s nineteen hours from Chicago to Albuquerque. If you drive all night. If you only stop for Mountain Dews and KFC extra crispy. By the way, KFC closes way too early in Oklahoma.

Maybe I should try “I’m just here to borrow a cup of sugar.” Pathetic. How about “One more stop in the eternal quest for the perfect burrito”? Unless Christian has gone blind in the last five years, no lie is gonna cut it. My split lip might tip off Clever Boy. I run my tongue over the slit and suck on the blood.

My face will tell half the story. For the other half, I’ll keep my mouth shut and lie by omission. Someday I’ll fess up, tell him the whole deal, and then he can perform a lobotomy or whatever it takes. But right now, I just need Christian to open his door, nudge it wider, and let me stay.

When I open the car door, a
ding-ding, ding-ding
sound makes me pause. I search the dashboard for clues. Oh—headlights. I’m not used to driving at night. My license is only a couple of months old, but after making it here despite pissy Missouri drivers, tired Oklahomans, middle-finger-saluting Texans, and clueless New Mexicans, I’ve got the mileage, if not the age.

The entrance glows under an outdoor light. Inside, the lobby is cramped, and the once-white walls are striated with grime. I scan the list of names next to the buzzer buttons.

There is no Witherspoon. Our last name is missing.

I curl a finger, rest my knuckle against the buzzer box and slide it down, stopping at each name to be sure. Gonzales, scribbled in blue ballpoint; MARSHALL in black Sharpie; Ngu in looping red ink; and a name that reminds me of G-rated swearing, SI#*%

I yank my camera bag off my shoulder and crouch, setting it on the floor. The zipper grinds open, and I unload my camera and flash, searching for the envelope that my mom handed me before I left. I recheck the address. I’m in the right place, but I notice, for the first time, that the letter was postmarked a month ago.

I taste copper. If Christian has moved, how am I supposed to find him? The envelope says 4B. Even though 4B is labeled MARSHALL, I press the button, and the buzz echoes in the tiny foyer.
Answer. Be home and answer
.

Outside, a FedEx truck roars, pauses, and roars again. Its white profile steals away, leaving only a gasp of gray exhaust. A shrunken man drags the door open and holds it for his shrunken wife. Before they even step over the threshold, they see me and stop.

I
am
quite the picture. The split lip isn’t the only re-landscaping my father has done. A purple mountain is rising on my jaw, and a red canyon cuts across my forehead.

They stare at me, and I suck in my lip, hiding what I can.

At that moment, a distorted voice comes through the speaker: “Who is it?”

Can I really have this conversation over a speaker?
Remember me? The brother you left behind? Well, I’ve caught up
. Even in my imagination, I stop here. I leave out the rest.

“Um,” I say, “FedEx.”

The couple unfreezes. The man grasps his wife’s elbow, tugs her outside, shoves the door closed, and helps her hobble away. Great way to start my Albuquerque tenure: scaring the locals.

The buzzer sounds. I grab the handle, turn it, and climb the steps. On the second floor, I have to stop. The red shag carpet has been accumulating odors since the 1970s and is going to take some getting used to. I block up my nose as if I am swimming and breathe through my mouth. Even worse. Now I can
taste
the miasma of hash and cat piss. At least, I hope it’s cat piss. I close my mouth, wishing I didn’t have to breathe as I take the steps two at a time to the fourth floor.

Gold numbers against a dark wood door. I press my palm against it, as if I can befriend the door, get it on my side. I knock and wait. I know some people go all deer-in-the-headlights when they panic. Their lungs stop, their muscles freeze, even their brains silence. Me—my foot’s on the gas and the map’s flapping out the window. My imagination creates scenes in rapid succession:

He’ll throw open the door and hug me until I can’t breathe. There’ll be a pizza feast laid out on a banquet table: four pies, all pepperoni and pineapple. (Okay, this part might be influenced by the fact that I haven’t eaten in ten hours.) He’ll wrap an arm around my shoulder and say, “I’ve been looking out for you, even from here.”

Or maybe I’ll be overwhelmed by the sweet smell of pot, and his hair will be sticking up wildly, and he’ll mug me for the $3.84 I have left
.

Or maybe he won’t recognize me
.

The door swings open, and a rush of ginger and garlic overtakes the hash/piss scent. My stomach lurches, as if it wants to go inside all on its own.

An Asian woman, maybe late twenties, is standing at the door. Her hair is pinned up, and she is wearing a little black dress. Her eyes travel me north to south and back north again. She slams the door.
Crap
.

Through the wall, I hear a voice approaching. Unmistakably Christian’s tenor. It makes my scalp tingle.

“What’s the problem, Mirriam?”

“That’s not a FedEx guy.”

I slide the envelope under the door.

“Oh God,” he says.

The handle rotates, and Mirriam says, “No, don’t. There’s something wrong with him.”

I snort. She doesn’t even know my name, and she’s nailed me in one shot.

“Christian?” I call through the door. My voice wavers.

On the carpet, a triangle of light widens as the door opens.

My brother. Still taller than me. A good four inches. His face has elongated and thinned. The sinew in his neck tells me he’s still a runner. Incongruously, I wonder if he has made it to the Boston Marathon yet. He’s only twenty-two, but crow’s feet lightly scratch his skin. He wears a black suit. The knot in his tie hangs below his collarbone, and his top button is undone.

Mirriam stands behind him, a baseball bat perched on her shoulder.

“Jace.” He exhales it all at once.

He doesn’t look me over, doesn’t stare me down, but he doesn’t hug me, either. His lips curve, but I can’t read his smile. He cranes his head around the door, looking for Mom.

“Just me,” I say.

He begins to close the door, but then it stops, half open, while he collects some stuff off the hooks and floor. Mirriam is still in her batter’s stance, watching to see what kind of pitch I’ll throw.
Lady, I don’t have enough juice to get it over the plate
. When he pushes the door back open, he is carrying a jacket, and a pair of black high heels dangles from his fingers. He hands the shoes to her.

“Oh,” she says. “Am I … should I … ?” She slides her panty-hosed toes into her heels.

He presses his lips to her cheek. “I’ll try to make it up to you. I promise.”

His voice is so quiet, so mild I have to hold my breath to hear him.

“It’s no problem,” she says. “This seems more important.”

“More immediate,” he corrects her.

Ouch
.

“Come over later?” she asks.

He says yes, and his gaze takes a long road to find her face; he has no idea what he’s going to say.

She smiles and presses up on her tiptoes to return the kiss on his cheek. “As late as you’d like. I’ll be up.” Her eyes take one more appraising trip over me. “As long as you’re certain.”

He nods but doesn’t introduce us. She sidesteps me and heads down the hall, disappearing into 4C.

Christian strings his arms through his jacket sleeves. Outside, the temperature is dropping, and my coat is in Chicago. I stare at Christian so long that he gets me a Wind-breaker. When I slip my arms in, I can’t reach the cuffs.

“If you’re still here, we can get you a jacket of your own tomorrow.” He fishes in his pocket and gets out his keys. “Do you still like breakfast for dinner? Should we go out for pancakes?”

I say yes. He tries to ask me something, doing a fish-mouth move, but can’t get it out. When we reach the bottom of the stairs, he turns around and looks at me. I wait for him to unload his questions, but he says nothing, crosses the foyer, and opens the door.

When he turns back, he says, “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure,” I say.

“Did he kill her?”

“Not yet.”

chapter 2

h
e gives the front door
an extra push for me so I can slip out. The sky is freckled with stars. A gust of wind spits dust at my jacket.

“My car’s over here,” Christian says.

I follow him to a mostly red Pontiac Sunbird. (The passenger-side door is white.) It is missing a wheel trim, and the rust is winning.

“We could take mine,” I say, before I remember the mess—bled-on napkins, crumpled Mountain Dew cans, empty venti Starbucks cups. Lauren, my girlfriend (I mean, my ex-girlfriend) used to stick her hands on her hips while waiting for me to clean it out. It was bad enough doing it in a car, she said. She drew the line at a garbage pit disguised as a two-door Golf. I recoil from the memory of Lauren. What was once—I don’t know, maybe call it comfort? excitement? love?—something, all of those things—has bubbled up like a blister in my brain that I don’t even want to touch.

Unlocking the door to his car, Christian says, “you look like you’ve done enough driving for one day.”

I clear a couple of newspapers out of the footwell, chucking them behind me as I sit down. He closes his door and stares at me, squinting and tilting his head from one side to the other.

“What?” Is his vision sharp enough to discern the bastard that I am?

“It is. Un. Canny.”

“What is?”

“The resemblance between you and Dad. I always knew it was strong,” he says.

I tap my foot against the floor and wish he would turn his radio on.

“Could you, maybe, stop staring at me now?” I say.

“Right, sorry.”

He looks away fast and turns the ignition key. As we pull out of the parking lot, I look at my reflection in the window, trying to distinguish my features from my dad’s. His blond hair, straight nose, and quick-to-anger eyes are all replicated on me. When I was little, grown-ups marveled, “A carbon copy.” I didn’t mind it then. I liked it. What was my alternative? A mousy mother who quivered at her own shadow.

Maybe I should dye my hair. Black like Christian’s. Get green contacts and look like my brother. I roll down my window, erasing my face, and the cool air rushes in. A parade of one-story strip malls slides by, giving off a tour of smells: BP’s noxious gasoline mixes with McDonald’s French fries and baked butter from a dessert place.

Christian keeps his eyes on the road, not glancing at me, not saying anything.

“So,” I say, but that’s all I’ve got. Five years to explain. Words are flowing through my brain like logs down a river. “Sorry I couldn’t give you any notice.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Really? ’Cause you don’t seem so … I mean, it’s good to see you.”

He exhales and runs a hand through his hair. “Oh, Jace. I’m sorry. It is good to see you, too. I’m glad you’re all right. Well, for the most part. You know what I mean.”

I do; taking a beating isn’t that remarkable in our family. It’s not as if the earth shatters or time stops. You get up the next day and go to school. Maybe you work a little harder to keep up the everything’s-fine-we’re-perfect image, but overall, you just keep moving at the speed of your life.

He says, “I’m just … I was surprised is all.”

With his eyes glued forward and no prodding, no questions, I can’t talk. I don’t even know if he wants me to start. How much has he thought about me since he disappeared one night, out of school, out of the house? He left a note in the mailbox for our dad in his meticulous handwriting.
If you try to find me, I’ll testify
.

I try to think of something to say. Over the years I’ve collected question after question, but I can’t seem to find them now. We’re not ready for them, anyway, so I go for the easy ones.

“So, Mirriam’s your girlfriend?” I ask. “How long have you been dating?”

“A year.” He slides the knot in his tie farther down, slips the tie over his head, and puts it on his lap. “Today, actually.”

“Oh.” I remember Mirriam’s little black dress that was cut above the knee. “You were celebrating.”

“It’s not a problem.”

“She’ll be mad?”

He shrugs and glances in the rearview mirror—that move: shrug, glance—he’s about to lie. “She’ll understand.”

“You’ve been dating the girl next door for a year?” I say.

Mirriam has gotten on my bad side. Maybe it was the baseball bat.

He laughs and tells me that he moved next to her a month ago. I remember the envelope my mother handed me, stripping the letter out and holding it against her chest. Now I know why she double-checked the address.

Christian continues, “We were thinking about moving in together but … it felt … I thought this way we could each have our own space and still see each other.”

“You live alone?” I ask.

When he nods again, I ask him why “Marshall” is on his buzzer.

“It’s, uh, my last name now. I changed it during college.”

He grins for a half second, and I get his irony. My father’s a judge, which is ironic all by itself, I suppose. He idolizes Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan—framed picture in the study, a shelf of biographies—the works. At dinner, he’d read us Harlan’s opinions dissenting from the Warren Court while we weighed if listening was worth staying for chocolate cake.

“That’s funny,” I say.

His eyebrows furrow.

“I mean, the name thing. Remember the—”

“Does Mom share my letters with you?”

“Yeah.” I lie because I want a part of him.

My mom has had letters, Mirriam got twelve long months, and for me—twenty minutes.

“Really?” His voice changes, suddenly remote.

Busted.

“Oh, you mean the actual letters? No, she just handed me the envelope.”

He is silent. I look out the windshield.

“You never wrote me, did you?” I say.

“I didn’t know what to say. You
were
only eleven.”

“Sure,” I say, as if that’s an answer. Last time I checked, eleven-year-olds can read. And tend to grow up.

He never wanted to know a thing about me, never Googled me, or stuck a candle in a cupcake on my birthday. I stare out the window, counting the oncoming cars as they pass us.

All my logjammed words evaporate.

The place is decorated in “Aren’t-you-hungry?” red. Somewhere, someone did a study and found out that red makes you feel hungry, and suddenly you can’t find a restaurant without red walls or booths or chairs, or at the really cheap places, all three. As if I need anything else to stimulate my stomach. The restaurant is empty, save for a woman at a four-person table who is examining the ice in her water.

I pick up my fork and bounce it off the table. On the wall, I spot a clock that is outlined in red neon. I watch the second hand spin. In half an hour, we haven’t said one important word to each other. I have discovered that he is a med student, which gives him screwy hours and means that he sees patients (“As a med student?” I asked, “That’s the way it works,” he said), and that he came to Albuquerque for med school because UNM has a good clinical program. But that’s about it.

We’ve talked more to the waitress—we placed our orders and Christian asked for a bag of ice for my face—than to each other. The fifty-something waitress drops the bag on the table and puts down my hot chocolate. When it sloshes, Christian uses his napkin to clean it up. Then he starts tearing off little pieces of the napkin, which he then rolls between his thumb and forefinger, turning them into tissue-rice. Rip, roll. Rip, roll. I pick up the ice bag, hear it rattle, and press it to my cheek. I keep the pressure light and begin to freeze my face.

“Jace,” he says finally, “I’m sorry that I left and couldn’t take you with me.”

He continues his onslaught on the napkin.

I clear my throat. “Where did you go?”

“Do you remember Paul Costacos?”

He was Christian’s best friend in high school and knew everything about the animal kingdom. He had a fish tank filled with hermit crabs whose shells were painted like NFL helmets. I always liked the star for the Cowboys.

“I was at his house, and I started coughing up blood. His parents took me to the hospital, warded off the police, and never asked me any questions. That’s probably why I told them everything.”

I have an “Aha!” moment; he thinks he
shouldn’t
ask why I’m here.

Rip, roll. I’m starting to pity that napkin. When he sees me staring at it, he stops and continues in a straightforward voice. No emotion clouding the facts, but not like it happened to someone else. He owns this story; I can’t even formulate mine. I lean forward to hear him better when he continues.

“Over the next few weeks, we planned how I was going to disappear. I lived in Hyde Park with Paul’s brother. Paul’s mom worked in the administration at the Lab School. She helped me transfer there to finish my senior year. His parents even took out a loan on my behalf, so I could pay for tuition. They found me a job, bussing tables in Greektown. I saved everything I could to get a plane ticket to New York and collect on my scholarship at NYU.”

He has explained everything and nothing at the same time.

“If you could plan all that,” I say, “why couldn’t you come up with a way to swing by and tell me about it?”

“He had never hit you. I thought you’d be okay.”

His napkin is shredded, and he reaches for mine. I push the ice harder against my face until it hurts just right.

The waitress brings the food. I go for the maple syrup, drench everything, and then attack. I hate the flat taste of these pancakes, but I keep going, too hungry to be picky. I don’t talk. I just eat and think.

Our family was divided up into two camps: Christian and Mom, me and Dad. I know that’s why Christian thought that Dad wouldn’t get started on me. Maybe because I was Dad’s favorite, I never had it as bad as Christian. Christian had to go to the ER for broken fingers, one by one (a bar fight was the excuse, even though he was only sixteen); repeated vomiting after a concussion (excuse: he fell down the steps); and even had some skin grafted on his arm when Dad held it on an electric burner (can’t remember the excuse for that one).

Three pancakes and an entire ham steak later, my stomach quits nagging me. The blood leaves my legs and arms, rushing to my stomach. I’m slow to get up, pushing my hands into the squishy vinyl seat to haul myself out of the booth.

On our way back, the billboards begin to blur, and I close my eyes, listening to the hum of the engine and Christian’s peaceful breathing. I’m half-asleep when we pull into his lot, and even when I know Christian is getting out of the car I stay put, telling myself that I’ll move in just another minute. He has to prompt me out of the car. When we get to the flat face of the apartment door, I’m still unsure which side of the door he wants me on.

“So, am I staying here?” I ask.

“Do you want to?”

I nod.

“Sure. It’s cheaper than a motel,” he says, and grins.

I’m too off-balance to respond. He’s thinking one night, and I’m thinking forever. Before I can figure out how to ask him to take me in, he says, “But Mirriam doesn’t know about Dad. So, could you just …”

“Of course,” I say. “I wouldn’t.”

“You can take the couch. You look exhausted.”

I nod. I’m so tired that it feels like my head is detached from my body and floating above it, like a balloon.

He looks at her door. “We’ll talk tomorrow, okay?”

“Sure, okay,” I say.

He lets me into his apartment. I walk over the threshold, but he doesn’t follow. He stares at Mirriam’s door, his face taut.

“What are you going to tell her?” I say.

“I don’t know. I guess I’ll start with, ‘I have a brother.’”

My face melts; my eyebrows and mouth droop. She doesn’t even know I exist?

He runs his hand through his hair, still looking at the door. Even though I barely know Mirriam, I know that an omission this big is breakup material. Maybe that’s why he’s being so not-Christian-like. He used to be so protective of me; he’d take the blame for my mistakes or argue with Dad until he’d flare at Christian instead of me.

“Christian, I’m really not trying to screw things up for you.”

“Yeah, I know. But if Dad is … Depending on how far … Trying might not have anything to do with it.”

He closes the door behind him, and I’m in his apartment, staring at the other side of the door. The right side of it. Technically.