Vengeance (4 page)

Isn’t distance what I had wanted? Tucson was a clean slate. A virgin expanse of sun across the urban sprawl. I arrived there as an adult so no childhood haunts or high school sweethearts lay in ambush around the bends. A nostalgia-free world where buildings were nothing more than architecture and materials and every vista was an adventure. I hadn’t polluted those horizons by dredging up my youth. To the people who knew me out there, I was who I wanted to become, not who I had been. We were so busy talking about school and professors and the life we were living, no one asked about the life I had left behind. Around the holidays, a few people would ask if I was flying home. I’d always say I was using the time to catch up on studies. No one pried.

Here, though, my childhood lurked in shallow graves like land mines. As I drove, memories burst forth at the sight of long-forgotten monuments. Houses where I hung out with friends. Did their parents still live there? The intersection where I had my first car accident. The elementary school yard where I would talk with my high school girlfriend late on summer nights, heads poked through the guide ropes and legs dangling over the edge of the play fort’s rope bridge. Looking like jailhouse chimps. Deep waters began to stir in me, but I refused to be immersed.

Who was Ethan Tanner? Was the man I had made myself into merely a construct? A lie? Was I still, and would I always be, scion of Liam, brother of Aiden? Heir to sullen airs?

The flippant melodrama of my inner monologue hinted at the answer. Grad school was certainly doing a number on the way I thought.

The town was oddly both more and less familiar under the silver dome of sky that passed for daylight. Details in the daytime contradicted memory. Houses were different colors, hedges were missing from yards, and once-admired stretches of homes showed their disrepair. But I could make out locations in the distance that I wouldn’t have seen at night, like an undeveloped tract of trees where we had once dragged in scraps of battered plywood to cobble together a fort, invisible to passing traffic.

I parked around the corner and hiked into the acre of forest. The ground was layered with rotting, wet leaves and pine needles, but looked as if no snow had made it through the interlaced branches. The woods were surprisingly secluded, even with most of the foliage gone. Sound and light were dimmer inside, and it felt even a few degrees less cold. I marveled that no one had built on the lot yet. As I ran my hand across the bark of once-familiar trees, I tried to recall what our last words to each other had been. Did it matter? We hadn’t prepared weighty speeches in anticipation of never speaking to each other again. And a few phrases shouldn’t have the power to replace a lifetime of memories.

I stubbed my toe on the edge of a plank of wood beneath the leaves. I cleared it off with my foot and reached down to inspect it. It was a piece of wafer board a few square feet in size, broken roughly along one edge. It looked to have been half-immersed in the earth for some time. Could it have been a relic from half a lifetime ago? A ruin of the fort my brother and I had made? Probably not.

The fact that the trees still stood and some new kids had laid claim to the treasure of that place offered enough solace to keep me from feeling gravely hollow, at least for the moment.

Chapter 4

It was a shorter-than-expected drive back to the motel. The whole town seemed to have contracted in size in the years I was away. I parked in front of my room, but didn’t feel like going in. The motel room was a holding cell with outdated furnishings. But I had nowhere else to go. I wasn’t sure which of my old friends might still be around or how to get in touch with them. This was before the days of social media and cell phones, and paging through the phone book seemed contrived.

Anyway, I was eager to hear what Paige had to say. So why didn’t I want to go inside?

I sat through a few songs on the car radio, turned down so low I couldn’t recognize what I was listening to. I can’t say I was collecting myself. Maybe I was adjusting, like someone easing into a hot bath, getting used to the temperature. For me, though, it was allowing the undeniable reality of my brother’s death to permeate me.

Inside, I switched on the TV, but turned the volume down low, as if it were a conversation barely making it through the wall from the adjacent room. I changed into the t-shirt and jeans I’d had on the night before, leaving the bathroom light on and the door ajar. I called the front desk, but there were no messages. So I had to wait.

The wake had exhausted me more than my spat with my dad. I lay on my back on the bed, hands clasped over my abdomen. Like Aiden, I realized. It was a peaceful pose, one a person could relax into for eternity, I supposed. But my mind was restless. What had Paige been talking about in the parking lot? I didn’t really know her. I couldn’t even remember if I had talked to her on the phone directly sometime in the past few years or if maybe I had heard her voice in the background. Aiden had trusted her. Maybe that would have to be good enough for me. Still, for someone who was virtually a stranger to say something like that – that Aiden hadn’t died in an accident, but had been murdered – at the wake seemed a little unhinged to me. It might not have been anything more than a flood of grief causing her to try to make sense out of what seemed like a senseless death. But how would it provide her any comfort to imagine a scenario in which Aiden was killed? That may have been less random than a motorcycle accident, but to me it was much more unsettling. Yet I couldn’t let it go. Was there something to it?

My hollow stomach growled. I took the hint and rolled off the bed, slipped on some shoes, and headed across the street to the convenience store. The interstate hummed beyond the fuel islands and fast food joints. The sealed asphalt beneath my feet was foreign, laid as a quarantined welcome mat for aliens. No sense of the town permeated through it. Ironically, the area wasn’t far from the streets where we used to ride our bikes to the 7-11 to play video games, browse the comics, and concoct suicide Slurpees. The interstate was a boundary. Not that we were scared to venture past it, but because we suspected there was nothing beyond it that held any interest for us. Breathing in the tar and gas fumes that resided there, I grinned at how accurate our intuition had been.

The store was perfectly temperate, though the colors of the packages seemed too vibrant to my eyes. I wandered up and down each aisle, even perusing the first aid supplies and engine oil additives I had no intention of buying. I didn’t question my own actions. It was my mind’s way of staying occupied. But by the time I did finally grab a snack-sized bag of mixed nuts, an apple fruit pie, and a bottle of Sprite, a police cruiser was pulling up. The cashier probably got anxious that I was dawdling and suspected I was there to hold the place up. At least, that made sense to me on a human nature level. But I didn’t think I looked the part, and it’s not like I had been waiting for other customers to clear out. It was just her and me and the lullaby of the beverage coolers. So maybe the cop was a coincidence. A friend had told me once that the store he used to work at had a sign they put in the window if they wanted a passing cop to stop. But it was probably more likely than not that the police would make rounds at places vulnerable to robbery as part of their patrol.

The officer sauntered in as I was paying. I scanned his face out of the corner of my eye as I received my change. No one I knew. He held the door for me as I left, and I supposed he and the cashier compared notes, staring at my back as I strolled across their parking lot, the road, and the motel’s lot.

When I got to my car, I could hear the phone ringing in my room. I juggled my cargo in one hand so I could unlock the door, which I kicked closed behind me as I dropped my haul on the bed and grabbed the phone.

“Yes?” I said.

“Ethan?”

“Yes?” I repeated.

“It’s Paige.”

Of course it was. But I bit my tongue. We seemed to be dancing with formalities. But we were strangers, after all.

“What I was saying earlier. I know it must have sounded strange. But I can explain now. Now that we’re not surrounded by all those people.”

“Yeah. OK.”

“Not over the phone. I’m less than ten minutes away. Can I come over?”

It seemed altogether natural and simultaneously peculiar that she would ask to come over. But I wanted to hear what she had to say, if only to confirm that her story was a way of grasping to make sense of things. Seeing her face and body language while she spoke would help me determine that, I thought.

“Yeah.”

“See you in a few.”

I turned on the lamp on the round table in front of the window and split the curtains open about six inches to see when she pulled up. To kill the time, I turned the TV volume up to a perceptible level and slouched in one of the chairs with its high wraparound arms.

I must have dozed off because her knock startled me. I saw her car next to mine through the curtains as I stood. I didn’t bother with the peep hole.

“Hi,” she said. I had lost count of the greetings we shared that evening.

“Hey.”

She too had changed into more comfortable clothes. Under the mid-length padded parka she wore unbuttoned she sported leggings and a loose heather gray t-shirt, capped off by heels on her bare feet. She had a large purse slung over her shoulder. Her hair looked as if she had rolled out of bed and run her fingers through it. Her face looked numb.

I stepped back and she came inside. She set her purse on the table by the window and closed the curtains with a groan as if finishing a job someone had left incomplete. She dropped her jacket on the back of a chair and plunged both hands into her purse and said without looking up, “Thanks for seeing me. I don’t know if this seems odd. Does it seem odd to you?”

“No, it’s fine.” I averted my eyes from her nipples perking against the thin cotton.

“Well, still. Thanks for letting me come over.”

“Sure. So what you were starting to tell me—”

“Do you have any ice?”

She had pulled a bottle of Captain Morgan out of her purse and was unscrewing the cap.

“Ice? No.”

I hadn’t checked for ice, but that seemed like the best answer.

“They must have an ice machine,” she said. “I think I saw it over by the office. Could you go get some ice?”

Now she had a plastic bottle of Coke out, too. She stepped over to the mini fridge and picked up the ice bucket, extended it to me as she grabbed the upside down stack of exactly two plastic-wrapped plastic cups. I received the bucket, held it against my stomach for a moment as she returned to the table. She was determined to make drinks. Ice, I figured, would at least dilute the alcohol.

When I returned, she snatched the bucket and dropped a handful of cubes in each cup. She poured the Coke after the rum. Once this was done, I thought she seemed less anxious. She stirred her own drink with her forefinger. She tested the results against her lips then committed to a full sip.

“Did Aiden ever tell you how we met?” she asked. She took a sustained drink as she waited for my answer. The ice cubes collided against one another like a traffic pile-up as she held the cup high. She refreshed her drink immediately and sat on the edge of the bed.

“No,” I said. I honestly couldn’t even scan my memories for such a story at that moment. “I don’t think he ever did.”

“I love that story,” she said. “Can I tell it to you? It’s a great story.”

She had clearly started drinking before she arrived. Part of me wanted to insist on her telling me what she had promised to tell me after the wake. But I realized that listening to this story was something of a favor to her. It was a meaningful gesture for her, to be able to tell me.

“Of course,” I said. She patted the bed next to her, inviting me to sit. I pivoted the chair with her jacket on it and sat facing her.

“Well, we met at a party. At my place. I didn’t invite him. He was there with some other girl. I didn’t know her, either. You know how people tell people and all of a sudden you don’t know half the people at your own party. So, I don’t know why, but I went all out that night. I’d never been so drunk in my life. And the whole night, I kept my eye on Aiden. And I could tell he was keeping an eye on me.” She laughed at something she remembered, shook her head several times, sporting a wide grin. “Oh my god, I was so fucking wasted! It got really late and his date caught on and finally got a ride with someone else. What a fucking night! But then my neighbor came over. She was having her own party, and she was throwing a fit about the cars and the noise and I don’t know what. I was in no shape to hash it out with her, but your brother calmed her down enough to get her out of my house. But she came back with her man and got him raising his voice at me. And Aiden had had enough. He nailed that mouthy fucker right in the jaw and dropped him on his ass. Ha! Oh, that sorry mother sure looked surprised. You know what happened then?”

It took a second to realize she was waiting for a reply. “What?” I said.

“Aiden reached out and pulled the guy up. He said he was sorry he had to do it, but the guy can’t come into
his
woman’s house and act like that. I don’t know if he called me his woman to let the guy know he had a stake in the matter or if maybe he already thought that’s what he wanted me to be. But I liked the sound of it. Oh, I know I was plastered, but I can still remember how it felt to hear that man call me his woman.”

She had worked in sips between lines in her story, but now she emptied the cup again. I didn’t know how to feel about her story. But I could sense how much he meant to her and how much she had lost. So I allowed her a share of sympathy and decided not to push her to tell me anymore. She was probably more distressed than drunk, and the latter was probably just to help her work through the former.

“You haven’t touched your drink,” she said.

To be polite, I took a long drink. She had made them strong.

“We used to go outside and play in the rain whenever we could,” she said as she poured herself another. “We lived in this place low on Fourth Avenue, near the tracks, almost downtown, but we had a little lawn in front and we played in the rain. It was the summer of... last summer? No, the one before. Ninety-three. Our first summer together. We'd be out there yelling, ‘It's raining! It's pouring!’ We used to argue about how that song went. He tried to convince me the old man went to bed
then
bumped his head. I said he bumped his head, and that's why he went to bed. He won every time, but I never really believed it. How could he bump his head when he was already in bed? We finally quit singing that and yelled ‘Singin' in the Rain,’ instead. Neither one of us knew the words to that one, so we didn't have anything to argue about there.”

She had her hand on the cup, but she didn’t seem to have the stomach to take another drink. I was glad for that because I thought she was on the verge of being incapacitated, and I had no idea who to call to come get her if she went over the edge.

“He carried me over the puddles,” she said. “We were both soaked to the bone, but he insisted on carrying me over the puddles.”

The weight in her chest, I knew, was the same massive vacuum that was inside me.

“We weren’t together at the end,” she said. “We were going to get back together. We needed some time apart. But we stayed in touch. We talked almost every day. But I know it was temporary. I know we were going to be together.”

I wanted to tell her that I envied her. That I envied the hundreds of days she spent with him, while I had taken for granted that my brother and I would reunite time and again down the line. Aiden and I knew we would be there when we needed each other, and we tended to our own lives in the meantime. I had grad school and all the craziness that comes along with it. And he had had a life that I knew so little about, I was realizing more and more.

“God, I wondered if he was mad at me,” she said. “I still do. I thought he wasn't calling because he was mad. Three days went by. It was two days after he died when I heard. And I cried and I cried. I didn’t know it was going to happen. And I would have called him first if I had known.”

She was sobbing, but she had it under control, breathing deeply and sharply, catching herself. Her hand slipped away from the drink and reached to wipe emerging tears from the inner corners of her eyes.

“I should go,” she said.

I wasn’t sure she was right to drive, but she was already standing, so I stood, too. She closed her eyes for a second and started to go limp. I caught her under her arms and pulled her upright against me. I held her for a few seconds, but even though she was mumbling and had clasped her hands behind my neck, she didn’t seem conscious. So I stepped her backwards to her chair. As I bent to sit her down, she tightened her arms around me and pulled herself up to my neck, where she started nuzzling and kissing me below the jaw.