The Half-Life of Planets (18 page)

“Hello?” I say, softly at first, in case his mom's home, and then once more, louder, in case Hank's playing music.

“Up here!” A muffled reply lures me upstairs.

This is it. With each stair I come closer to breaking my pattern. No bolting. Just moving forward. I check Hank's room, but it's empty. Instinctively, I go to Chase's room, knowing how much time Hank spends in there. This room, too, is vacant. I sigh, feeling my shoulders slouch. It's all buildup and no show. Like when I'd rented an observatory-level telescope to watch a meteor shower last winter, only unpredictable weather moved in and blocked any and all views.

“To what do I owe this honor?” Chase asks me from the doorway.

I put my hands in my pockets, feeling small again. The Twizzlers rustle in my jeans. “Have you seen Hank? I need to…I just wanted…” I search the floor and walls as though they can provide answers.

Chase nods. “I got ya. Rough day, huh?” He wrinkles his mouth in a show of understanding. I nod back.

“You saw it, right? I mean, I couldn't…”

Chase wipes his face on the blue towel in his hands and flings it onto his bed. Only then do I realize he's in his boxers and nothing else. I look away, suddenly fixated on my watch. “God, it's late. I didn't even realize.”

I stare at the wall again, looking at one of the lame tin signs Chase has nailed over his bed. line forms here. With a big blush I notice I am directly in front of it. Chase notices me notice this, and cracks up. “Looks like you're next!”

“Ha-ha. Very funny.” I start to relax when I remember we're in this together, that Chase was witness to the scene at the party, that unlike Hank, he is capable of comprehending what it was like for me. I think of my tattoo, that colored skin hidden under my shirt; how I wish I could curl up that small. “You think I overreacted?”

Chase swipes his hands through his wet hair, the blond marigold-bright even in the dimly lit room. “He doesn't mean it, you know?”

I stare at an old photo of Hank, one of those school-issued five-by-sevens that comes in multiples of ten. Chase walks toward me. “All the kid liked was maps, right? Everything maps. And directions. Give the kid an atlas or a gas-station-quality road map and he was all set for a whole afternoon.”

I cross my arms over my chest. “And now it's music.”

“Pretty much right after Dad died, yeah.” Chase sits on his bed, the photo of Hank face-up, still staring at us. “He just switched.”

I swallow hard. Maps. Music. In the pamphlet my mother gave me I remember the list:
menus, buttons, glass doorknobs, computer games, bathrooms, Victorian parasols. The Asperger's mind can latch on to anything and find it fascinating and comforting. And then just as quickly, let go.
“So where is he anyway?” I turn my back to Chase and look in the hallway for signs of Hank. I stand like that for a while, then pivot. “Should I wait?”

Chase stands up. Without thinking about it, I walk back toward him. We're maybe a few feet apart, but I can feel heat radiating off his chest, see beads of water trickle from the back of his hair down his spine. “You might have to wait a long, long time,” Chase says, and it comes out in an almost-whisper. When he stands up and leans closer to me, I can smell the liquor on his breath. I don't know what kind or when he consumed it, but it doesn't really matter. What matters is I look at him and think of how easy it is to be with him and tell him how his brother doesn't know what he's doing in a group, how I want it to be simple, but it isn't.

“You sticking around or what?” Chase asks. His feet are in between mine now; one of his hands finds the Twizzlers in my back pocket. My skin ripples when he takes the package out and tosses it on the floor. Confident I won't go anywhere, Chase asks again. “You think you can wait?”

But I can't. I can't wait right now. All the words I had to say to Hank come rushing out in one long, intense mouth-to-mouth kiss with Chase. Chase pulls my hips into his, palms the back of my head, and we kiss hard, the sting of whiskey or scotch or whatever it is on my tongue from his, and my lips respond as though I'm suddenly quenched. I drink it in, wrapping my arms around Chase's bare body, caught out in space where I know I can't be doing this, but knowing it's happening. And it keeps happening, our mouths together, until we are broken by the sound of a guitar being chucked onto the floor and Hank standing in the bedroom doorway, his face the saddest song.

So this is what the end of the world
looks like. No mushroom cloud, no four horsemen thundering through the sky. Just your girlfriend kissing your half-naked brother.

This sight is odd in that it hurts far more than the blows to the head I received earlier. I feel as if a young, vigorous Pete Townshend has decided to smash a Les Paul on my midsection. It is difficult to breathe, and I am nauseous again. Liana looks at me, tears beginning to form in her eyes. “Oh, Hank,” she says. “It's not…I didn't…”

Miraculously, I find breath enough to whisper, “I hope you'll at least have the decency to run away now.”

Liana opens her mouth as if to speak and then obediently runs from the house.

I turn to Chase, and the paralyzing, breathtaking sadness that filled my stomach only seconds ago is replaced by rage stronger and deadlier than anything I've ever felt. My heart pounds, my fists clench, and my conscious mind turns off just as surely as it does when I'm lost in a guitar instrumental. Chase stands there with a stupid half-grin on his face that he often uses when trying to convince Mother not to punish him for something. Since he is clad only in boxers, it's difficult for me to avoid noticing the fact that he has half an erection. An erection that was caused by Liana's warm softness pressing against him. An erection caused by the taste of Liana's saliva in his mouth, by the feel of her lips against his, by the kiss that should have been mine.

I master my anger and deliver a speech that will surely devastate Chase, convincing him of my nobility and his own degeneracy: “You have everything. Everything. You have the normalcy and the athletic ability and the endless parade of girlfriends, and the one thing I've ever had in my life that was not yours, that was better than anything you've ever had, you had to take from me. You hate me so much that you had to destroy my happiness just because it wasn't yours.”

As I'm going over the speech in my mind, I hear a strange noise. Upon closer examination the noise appears to be coming from my mouth. I'm bellowing and shrieking and kicking wildly at Chase, who is crumpled on the ground in the fetal position after I apparently drove my fist into his testicles. I am doing this. I am not calmly delivering the guilt-inducing speech.

I feel hands on me, and I wish I could stop making that horrible sound.

Mother grabs me and shouts, “Jesus, Hank! What are you doing? Stop! Stop it right now!”

At last the noise stops. I give Chase one more kick, and then I'm done. I'm really not myself. I'm a demon of burning rage. I am the fire demon. “‘Stand for the Fire Demon,'” I say, and Mother looks at me like I'm completely insane.

“What? What the hell are you saying? Why won't you tell me what's going on?”

“‘Stand for the Fire Demon' is a Roky Erickson song. It was produced by Stu Cook from CCR.”

Mother looks at me again. “Hank! Who the hell cares! Why the hell are you trying to murder your brother?”

“Ask him,” I say. “He knows. He knows what he did.”

“Freak,” Chase croaks out. “He needs a goddamn straitjacket. Freak!”

“And you need a twelve-step program and a conscience,” I say. “Tomorrow I will no longer be in a violent fugue of rage, but you will still be a drunk who betrayed his only brother.”

“Betrayed?” Mother says. “Will somebody please tell me what the hell is going on?”

“Perhaps Chase will explain himself. It's bad enough I had to see that—I can't bear to relive it by telling you the story. Good night, Mother.”

I walk down the hall to my bedroom, and suddenly the prospect of sleeping on the same floor as Chase is hateful to me. I grab a blanket from my bed and head to the basement, where I am surrounded by guitars. I lie down on the cold floor and do not sleep.

My phone rings. I look at the screen, though I know who it is. “Liana” it says. I push a button to silence the ringer and turn over.

I fail to sleep, and I check the time. 1:17 a.m. 2:01 a.m.

2:30 a.m. It goes on like this, though there is a jump between 5:53 a.m. and 8:20 a.m. during which time I suppose I was asleep.

I get up and leave the house. I sit on the beach for an hour, trying and not succeeding to not think about Liana. The shock and anger of last night has turned to sadness and self-loathing. I wish I could reclaim the anger. Anger at least is a powerful emotion. Sitting here on the damp sand, feeling sad, I don't feel like someone who finally got the best of his older brother, I don't feel fearsome or strong, I just feel pathetic.

I hate myself for deluding myself. For believing that Liana and I could ever be more than friends. She is a girl. Girls prefer Chase to me. All girls. Always. Those who enforce the code of conformity in my school are given to calling me a number of creative variations on “homosexual.” This morning, I am wishing they were right. Girls prefer Chase, but guys might not. I personally find him repugnant.

I get up and walk to Planet Guitar. Though we're not scheduled to open till 10 a.m., the door is open now, at 9:45. I enter the store and am greeted by the unmistakable sound of KISS's “Black Diamond” as being pounded out by three middle-aged men without a lead guitarist.

“Oh, thank God you're here. I called you like three times!” Stan says. “Why aren't you answering your phone? Jesus, you look like hell. Did you sleep outside?”

“To answer your questions in order,” I respond, “one, I have not been answering my phone because someone I do not wish to speak with has been calling me.”

“Girlfriend!” Al bellows at me, pointing and laughing. I give him a glare I hope is withering. “Geez, kid, lighten up,” he says. “You called me portly last night. You can't dish it out like that if you can't take it.”

“Fair enough,” I reply. “You may now have some time to tease me about the fact that I caught my girlfriend kissing my brother.” I am sincere in this offer, as Al's argument was logical and convincing. But my declaration is met only with silence.

“Oh. Oh, I'm sorry,” Al says.

“Thank God he wasn't in the band,” Stan adds. Mike, the drummer, is silent. I'm told this is characteristic of drummers, with the obvious exception of Keith Moon. “So, uh,” Stan says, “did you kill him?”

“No, and I am actually relieved about that. I actually felt somewhat bad after punching him as hard as I could in the testicles”—all three of the men reflexively wince as I say this—“and kicking him while he lay on the ground.”

“He deserved it,” Mike says. “So are you ready to rock, or what?”

“I am always ready to rock, provided that Stan is willing to supply the equipment.”

“I got you covered,” Stan says. “Now, if we're going to play Beachfest at the end of the week, we've got to practice our asses off.”

“But what of you gentlemen?” I say to Mike and Al.

“Surely you haven't been able to eat yourselves into that shape without working. Do you not have jobs to go to?”

Al looks at me for a long moment before smiling. “We took a couple of days off. The good thing about being old and portly is that either you own the store or you have enough juice in whatever organization you happen to be in that you can take a couple of days off on short notice. So when your good looks are gone, just hope you've worked enough to accrue some seniority.”

I am puzzled by Al's reference to my good looks. I wonder if he's being sarcastic. I decide not to pursue the point any further.

Stan hands me a Les Paul, and I spend the next several hours as Ace Frehley. Today I like it better than being me.

I wrap my arms around my body
as though I can hug myself. The air is colder now, hinting at fall's looming presence, but I only know it's cold because I have the chills from being kicked out. For once, I wanted to stay. For once, I knew what to do, what to say. I wanted to slam Chase and the me that kissed him back, ram both of us out of the way and rush over to Hank. To grab his hand and have him chord into mine.

Yet again I went for the easy thing. The kiss. And never got to the other stuff. So while it's beachside chilly now, I don't feel the air. All I feel is my kiss-swollen lips, my mouth—just the open space where words should be, not tongues.

I drive the way you're not supposed to—way emotional and with blurred vision due to tears that refuse to fall—but I know the roads well and skip a coffee in town in favor of going home. For once, what I want to do is tell my parents what happened. Some of it, anyway. Actually, what I want to do is tell Hank, but due to the fact that he is one of the parties involved, I can't. And Cat's away. And the lab's locked, so I can't lose myself in outer space. Like it or not my parents are last on the list.

The glass door slides open and I'm prepared to breathe in through my nose to sniff up whatever my mom's got in the oven. I wonder suddenly if Jenny were alive, if she'd lived somehow, if she'd be the one I'd go to now, tap gently on her bedroom door, and sit on the edge of her bed. If she'd listen. If she'd understand. Jenny's absence has never really felt like one, I guess. As I come into the kitchen's half-light and there's no scent—no honey whole wheat bread or caramel-chip cookies and no phone ringing and no ambient clatter that makes you know someone's awake and waiting for you—in the quiet, I miss her.

I check for signs of life in my parents' office, but it's dark. Their bedroom door is closed so I do a soft knock to see if they're awake, if Dad's watching late news or checking weather for his flight out.

“Hello?” I swing the door open. A wash of worry moves over me when I find their bed, bathroom, study, vacant.

I take the stairs two at a time and head back to the scentless kitchen. Sure enough, there's a one-word note:

Hospital.

They've never left a note before. Never had a need. The trips to the ER have been casual, almost, and we've gone together or texted and said “no big deal” as a disclaimer. Zooming through traffic lights and swerving left on a no-left turn, my heart flares as loud as the ambulance sirens outside Westwood-Cranston. I jump out of the car and slam the door shut, still clutching my mother's note in my right hand. One word. She even put a period at the end as though it were a whole sentence. My shoes echo on the smooth emergency room floor. Maybe
hospital
is a whole sentence, a story—beginning, middle, and end. Just like my other note.

“Mom!” I run to where she stands, brows furrowed, half hidden behind a curtain. Before I can hug her I turn to look for my dad—draped in a gown as per usual—but the hospital gurney is empty. Just wrinkled sheets are left. I start to cry. “What happ…Oh my God!”

My mother puts her hands firmly on my shoulders, makes me look in her eyes. “He's okay. Or…he will be.” Her eyes are puffy from crying, and her forehead is deeply creased with worry.

“It's not just tests?” I swallow hard, my pulse's velocity hitting overdrive.

She shakes her head and leads me to the empty bed, where I sit down. But I feel as though I'm sitting on a sickbed, a bed where my healthy but neurotic father should be, so I stand up. “Tell me what's going on.”

We leave the eerie bodiless bedroom and sit in the waiting area with other hushed and sad people. My mother sips water from a Styrofoam cup that squeaks when she puts it to her lips. “Here.” She hands me the cup even though I haven't asked.

I take a sip of tepid water, watching my mother's chest rise and fall rapidly, her own quick breathing matching mine. “So tell me already,” I say, because the suspense only makes me more frantic.

“He's in surgery. But wait—before that—we were sitting there and he went very pale and—” My mother is calm as she says this.

“He was really sick,” I say, and think back to their conversation in the study. How my father had said he wasn't leaving so soon. My mother puts her hand on my forearm, her palms cool. “Those last tests, they were for real.” She watches my face.

“I can't believe this!” I try to keep my voice down, but I can't. No one else in the family waiting area seems to care. Probably there've been huge fights, sobs, tears of relief here. I am not the first.

“You guys should've told me. Outright. Not hinted. What does it take, a pamphlet?” I stare at the patterns on the floor. “Do you know how many boys I've kissed?” Now I stare at her. She waits, every part of her dreading a double-digit number I don't deliver. “But do you know why?” I sigh and wipe the tears off my face, thinking of Hank. Of his eyes when he saw me with Chase. “Because I can't talk…I don't speak enough…” I stop short. My mother waits. She'll keep waiting, I think, maybe for as long as I need, so I say, “It's not like it's totally your fault, or mine. Sometime I'll tell you more, okay?” Instead of yelling, instead of freaking out and hushing me into acceptable quiet, my mother scoots her chair toward me and hugs me hard. We both cry for a while. Then she explains. “After she died, we just…we stopped talking about it. We did just what you're not supposed to do. And I should know. I'm the expert, right? I give advice about this sort of thing every week. But it's not the same when it happens to you. Other people's issues—their patterns—always seem easy to break, to conquer.”

Patterns, people. I flash to Hank chording, his staccato speech, the social flinching. I thought I could cure him. Change him. Morph him enough that he wouldn't say the wrong thing or do it. Or not do it. And I thought I could snap myself out of my own kiss-induced stupor with a simple pact. No kissing. Like that solved anything. My mother looks up as a doctor in seawater-blue scrubs passes by. No news for us yet. “And when Dad was home, he'd feel…I don't know. Palpitations. Stress. But he couldn't see that it wasn't…”

“Like when you don't say what you need to, or you don't delve into the reasons behind things…you just fix the symptom, not the issue,” I say.
Please let him be okay. Please.

My mother gives me a wry smile. She looks at another physician, but the surgeon goes to another family. My mother's eyes well up. “Sometimes it's hard to tell what's a symptom of grief and what's…”

“Real?” How do you know what you feel versus what you want to feel? How can you be sure that what you're looking at—a star, a planet, a face—is what you truly see? I think about the planetarium with Hank. How I knew. How I could say anything to him but kept clinging to the slip of paper in my wallet as my defense.

Before I can say anything else, a woman, with a mask on her face and what looks to be a shower cap on her head, emerges from the double doors and spots my mother. The whole world seems to lose oxygen; my chest is weighted, heavy with anticipation. My mother grabs my hand.

“My dad?” I ask, and leave my mouth hanging open. I picture my dad's hands, how they taught me to look into a telescope. How he sliced his thumb on a deck nail and got stitches. How he shoves his work into his briefcase and then it doesn't close properly. How he smiled when he saw me parallel park for the first time. How he frowned when he saw how I did it the second time—half on the curb. How he always messes up the words to “Solsbury Hill,” that Peter Gabriel song neither of us understands. How he looked in his hospital bed at the beginning of the summer. How much has changed since then.

“He's going to be fine. The Maze surgery seems to have gone well.” The doctor turns to me and starts to explain. “Any irregularity in your heart's natural rhythm is called an arrhythmia. Presumably you know your dad had an arrhythmia—it was treated with medicine.” My mother nods, looking at me.

“It didn't work, apparently,” my mother says, and still keeps my hand in hers. “They did this…Maze surgery suddenly, Liana. But they would have had to do it anyway. It was scheduled for next week.”

I feel punched. “That's why Dad changed his flights?”

The doctor coughs. “Flying carries with it an increased risk of stroke—blood clots—”

“So you knew he'd need heart surgery and didn't say anything?”

“We tried to.” My mother drops my hand and smoothes her hair, keeping calm. “But you left so quickly tonight.”

The next morning is still really part of the night before since I never went to bed. I arrive back in the cardiac care unit and join my mother in my dad's room. I place her change of clothes and bathroom bag on the chair by the window.

“Thanks,” she says. Outside, the late summer morning light ripples over the parking lot and, farther on, the water.

I stare at my dad, at the familiar sight of him in a hospital gown, but this time with the jarring additions of tubes and monitors, his skin slightly pasty.

“Dad.” Gingerly I touch his hand.

“It's okay,” my mom urges.

I sit with him, pulling my T-shirt over my tattoo. He knows it's there, probably, but why flaunt it now? Dad's himself—that is, able to talk and look at me—just tired. “How you holding up?” he asks.

“Me? How about you?”

“So many pronouns,” he offers.

I shake my head. “I have a cell phone, you know.” I display it. “Next time—maybe call me when you guys are experiencing life-changing things.”

“
Things
…
Things
is nonspecific. Say ‘events.'”

“God, Dad. Way to ruin a moment,” I joke, and touch the scar on his thumb from when that deck nail sliced him.

“There won't be a next time,” Dad assures me.

We sit there for a while, talking, not talking, my mother and I take turns resting or going to the cafeteria. I return to the vending machine and think of Hank and his M&M's, how small events—him showing up in the bathroom, say—can change everything. And how big ones—my dad's emergent heart surgery—can stabilize your world. How nothing, but everything, has changed. How I don't look it, but I feel it in my skin. Like I could check my tattoo to find that the planets have tilted or vanished. And how really, all the bright objects we see from Earth aren't there anymore—stars aren't what we make them to be—they're already burned, faded, remnants of what was. The half-life. How I need to tell Hank all of this, but how I suspect he won't let me even try.