The Prettiest Star

by Carter Sickels

  “A whale needs to be in the ocean,” I said. “There is no ocean in Ohio.”

  “Well, maybe no ocean,” Mamaw said. “But they’s Lake Erie.”

  We’re not out here long before Edna Davis, my grandmother’s next-door neighbor, comes over to gossip. My grandmother always has a story—so-and-so’s husband is messing around, so-and-so’s pregnant, so-and-so’s lost his job—and the women in town flock to her for the latest information.

  “Lotto’s up to three million today,” Edna says. “You better get you a ticket.” Edna is wide and tall, and looks like she’d make a good wrestler on WWF. She has curly gray hair she fluffs with a pick, and wears velour jogging suits most of the time. She used to be one of my grandmother’s most devoted Avon customers, and is still partial to shimmering electric blue eye shadow.

  “I played the numbers this afternoon,” Mamaw says. “Woo-wee, wouldn’t that be something.”

  Edna’s a better audience than I am, and Mamaw tells her the story about the woman in Clark County selling drugs.

  I interrupt. “What kind of drugs?” In school we watch films about teenagers smoking angel dust, which makes them scratch their eyes out and leap from windows. Apparently, drugs are everywhere. I have never even been offered a joint.

  Mamaw narrows her eyes. “Well, Jess, for land’s sake, I don’t know what all kinds of drugs. Probably marijuana.”

  “Cocaine,” Edna says. “I heard tell it’s spreading into small towns.”

  Car doors slam, screen doors rattle. People are getting home from work. They fuss in their yards or sit on their front steps with a cigarette and a beer. Tomorrow, my brother will be here. I look over at my grandmother, the secret like a grain of sugar on the tip of my tongue. She taps her cigarette against the green glass ashtray, sprinkling feathers of ash on the 7UP decal in the center, and shakes her head, still thinking about the drugs.

  “I’ll tell you what, sometimes I don’t know what the world is coming to.”

  Killer whales use echolocation to communicate. They call out, and the time an echo takes to come back to them tells them how far away an object is. The echoes help them to navigate and hunt and find each other. Echolocation is like a sixth sense.

  When I was little, I used to think that Brian and I could communicate telepathically, like the brother and sister in the movie Escape to Witch Mountain. I believed I could send him my thoughts, like whale signals, and he would hear them. I was just a dumb kid. At night, after I said my prayers, I would close my eyes and listen to the pulsing of the dark, but I never heard any voice, never received any message.

  I’m in my room with the door cracked, Duran Duran on the boombox. Volume turned low, so I can still hear my mother moving around in the kitchen, putting away dishes, making herself a cup of hot tea. My father is out in the garage. We’re hiding from each other, waiting. The house smells like the pot roast we had for supper. Hot, soft potatoes melting between my teeth, stringy beef like veins. I could only eat a few bites.

  I stare at myself in the mirror. I don’t look anything like Brian. I’m plain-faced with scattered freckles across my nose. Boring brown hair and boring brown eyes. I pull my hair back in a ponytail, then take it out again, and the ragged ends fall around my shoulders. My body looks soft and flat and weird. I’ve changed three times already. I’m wearing my only pair of Jordache jeans, a bright pink T-shirt, and my Reeboks, the coolest clothes I own. I don’t look cool.

  A muffler rumbles underneath the music. Gus’s truck. I thought we’d all go to meet Brian at the bus stop, but my mother said Brian didn’t want a big to-do. From downstairs, Sadie barks. I count to three, and then I go.

  I’m the first one at the door. I stand still, watch the knob turn, like I’m one of those dumb girls in a horror movie, stuck in my tracks. Sadie is barking, wagging her tail. Gus steps in first. Rain trickles down the bill of his Chester Eagles hat and slides down his jacket. He wipes his boots on the welcome mat. He is carrying a big lime-green duffle bag.

  “Hey, Jess,” he says.

  The door swings wider, and a man walks in, his face shadowed by a blue hooded sweatshirt. He’s wearing a jean jacket, and black jeans, and Nikes with a red swoosh. He pulls down the hood. For a second, I don’t think it’s him. He’s skinnier than I remember, and looks old, a grownup. His hair isn’t as blond as it used to be. He wears it short on the sides and on top, longer in the back. His teeth are the color of tobacco juice, and his raggedy lips look dry and chapped. Stubble on his chin. He reminds me of the pictures I’ve seen of drug addicts. Maybe he’s a junkie.

  “Jess,” he says, and his voice is the same, it’s déjà vu, hearing him talk. “You’ve gotten so old. What are you, like thirty now?”

  “Fourteen,” I say.

  He sets down a small silver suitcase and stands close enough to hug me, but doesn’t. Keeps his bony hands at his sides, and I don’t make a move toward him either. I don’t know him, and feel shy. Sadie whines at his feet, pushes her muzzle into his legs, and he crouches down and digs his knobby fingers into her fur.

  “You got old too, Sadie,” Brian says.

  When he stands, I see a little gold hoop in his right ear, delicate, the shape of a fingernail. I can’t remember which one is the bad one to have pierced. Right or left, gay or straight.

  The air shifts, thins out. It isn’t just the three of us anymore. My father moves slowly up the stairs, and my mother comes out of the kitchen. They stand next to me, about three feet from Brian. Big Gus tries to scrunch himself into the corner of the doorway, tucking his fat chin, like he doesn’t want anyone to see him.

  “You must be hungry,” my mother says.

  “Run into any flooding?” asks my father.

  Six years he’s been gone and this is how they greet him, like he just went out to the store for cigarettes. We crowd in close, no one touching. My father looks at the grease rag in his hand like he has no idea how it got there, and balls it up and stuffs it in his hip pocket. “Glad you made it okay,” he says.

  He takes a step forward, standing a head taller than Brian, and clamps his hand on Brian’s shoulder. Just as quickly as he touches him, my father reaches his hand back. But it’s enough. Him touching Brian like that seems to break something in my mother, like she has just realized who this is, and she lets loose a quiet sigh, and goes to him with open arms. Brian, taller by a few inches, keeps his head lifted, looking behind her at the wall. My mother stands with her back straight, and her arms around him, holding him but not, uncomfortable, the way boys are when they slow-dance, all stiff. No boy has ever asked me to dance, but in gym class last year old Miss Prescott put us in pairs and made us learn the waltz. One two three, one two three.

  “Where’s Mamaw?” Brian asks, stepping back from our mother.

  “We decided to wait and tell her tomorrow,” she says. “So she’ll be surprised.”

  Brian’s disappointed. “I was expecting to see her.”

  Gus says he has to hit the road and slaps my brother on the back. I don’t want Gus to go. His big, soft presence takes away some of the weirdness in the room.

  The gold beam of headlights drizzles through the windows as Gus backs out of the driveway. Then it’s quiet again. All of us still and standing in the same place until Brian walks around us and goes into the living room. He looks up and down and around.

  “Nothing’s changed,” he says.

  “I’ve got a pot roast warming in the crock pot,” my mother says.

  Brian sits at the table and our mother dishes an enormous helping of pot roast into a bowl and sets it in front of him. All of us in the kitchen together for the first time in six years. My parents are trying to make conversation and act like this is normal. The light over the stove gives off a yellow glow. We are in a dream. The three of us standing here watching him eat. The rain falling. The air heavy and fragile, like at a funeral. And, I guess that’s what it is, in a way. Because I think, for just a split second, that my brother has come back
home to die.

  Brian

  May 11, 1986

  Hello.

  Here I am in Chester, Ohio. My hometown.

  I’m shooting this from my bedroom. Down in the basement. Got my own bathroom down here too. This used to be my sanctuary, where I’d go to listen to records, dream about New York. David Bowie’s voice carrying me out of Chester into the starry sky. It’s emptier now, but looks about the same. Wood paneling, shag blue carpet. A real ’70s museum.

  Here are all my baseball trophies—I used to be such a jock. And, here’s my idol, with his blushed cheeks, feathered hair. Cigarette in hand, silver bracelet sparkling like a disco light. Space oddity, alien, freak. I’m surprised my mother didn’t get rid of all my posters and records, a reminder of my weirdness, my queerness.

  Here’s my dog. Sadie, hey, Sadie, come here. I didn’t know if she’d remember me, but she came right up and licked my hand, while my parents and Jess just stared at me, the bogeyman.

  Obviously, I didn’t jump into the Hudson. Didn’t off myself. That day, when I was thinking about it, when I went to the piers for the last time, I knew I didn’t really have it in me. Anyway, now I’m in this weird honeymoon spot—I feel stronger, healthier than I have in a long time. Like there’s a little bit of hope.

  Hope is a dangerous thing.

  Instead of killing myself, I wrote my parents a letter. I didn’t know what I was going to tell them. I’ve known guys who were sick and went back to small towns all over the country—upstate New York, Kansas, Florida, Kentucky—and never said a word about what was wrong. They went back to their hometowns and died from a mysterious illness.

  I sat there for a long time, pen in hand, trying to figure out how to compose the letter. I thought about telling them I had cancer or something. Then I thought about Shawn, what he would do. I wrote the word to see it for myself.

  Dear Mom and Dad,

  There is something I need to tell you:

  I’m sick.

  I have HIV.

  I have AIDS.

  I wanted to give them the chance to tell me no, you can’t come home again.

  After I mailed the letter, I didn’t know if I’d hear back. But my mother called. I held the phone to my ear like a fucking life line. Come home, she said. My dad didn’t get on.

  Truth is, I missed my family. And, I didn’t know what else to do. I had to get out of New York. Everything reminded me of Shawn. And death. I saw my reflection in the ghosts of men I passed on the streets.

  And here? In Chester?

  My parents told me no one knows and they want to keep it that way. Jess doesn’t know, my grandmother doesn’t. The word AIDS will never be said. The word gay will never be said. We’ll live happily ever after in denial. Denial has helped me along so far…

  Except, look at me.

  My symptoms started about a year ago, maybe a year and a half, but I was pretty sure I had it even before I noticed anything. That’s how it goes. For years the virus works on the inside, invading white blood cells that are supposed to defend the body against infections. Then, the monster really begins to show you what it can do. Night sweats, skin rashes, diarrhea. I came down with colds I couldn’t shake. A few months ago, I went into the hospital, disgusting white thrush coating my tongue, bacteria in my lungs. I thought I wouldn’t come back out. That’s how it goes. A cough, a fever. Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia. You check into the ICU and come out in a body bag.

  After I spent three weeks at Bellevue, I started to feel strangely better. It’s not going away, I know that. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night with cold wet sheets tangled around my ankles like snakes. Sometimes herpes blisters flare up in my mouth. Oh, you pretty things.

  Sharon

  I call in sick and wait for him to wake up. Jess is at school, Travis at work. Earlier this morning, Travis and I went over to Lettie’s to tell her Brian was home. She couldn’t believe it. “My Lord,” she kept saying. She had tears in her eyes, and Lettie isn’t a crying kind of woman. Travis didn’t want to tell her ahead of time, in case Brian didn’t show up, he said, but I think he wanted to see what Brian looked like first. He’s shockingly skinny. And yet. He doesn’t look like the men I’ve seen on TV. What I was so afraid of, what Travis was afraid of. He’s not completely wasted away in that way that makes them resemble concentration camp prisoners, doesn’t have the cancerous splotches on his face or hands. People won’t take one look at him and know.

  Travis told Lettie a lie about Brian getting over a sickness. “Don’t drink after him,” he warned.

  I’ve told him it’s not contagious like that—I’ve read this, I’m sure, in the newspaper and in the magazines at the dentist office. Even Lettie’s supermarket tabloids say as much. But Travis says there are no guarantees. Maybe he’s right. When Brian walked in, at first I felt unsettled touching him—my own son—and hated myself for it.

  Travis doesn’t want anyone to know about Brian, not even Jess. If Lettie finds out, she would be devastated. If others find out, they’ll run him out of town. It’s happened other places. That little boy in Indiana who got it from a blood transfusion. I remember seeing him on the news, thin and sickly and pale. The interviews with angry parents who didn’t want him in the same school as their children. I felt sorry for the boy—it wasn’t his fault—but I also understood their side: I’d do anything to protect my kids.

  I warned Lettie about Brian’s thinness. “I’ll fatten him up,” she said. She wanted to come over right away, but I promised to call her as soon as he woke up.

  It’s all I can do not to go downstairs and wake him. My body jitters with disbelief: my son is home. All week I cleared the junk out of his room, trying to make it look like his again, but last night Brian just dropped his bag on the floor, unimpressed, and flopped on the bed with all his clothes on, even his dirty tennis shoes. I stood there waiting for something—a word or gesture, a truce of some kind. “See you in the morning,” he mumbled. “I’m beat.”

  Around eleven he trudges upstairs, just like when he was a teenager, sleeping late and annoying Travis. I remember him as tall, but that was never true—he was one of the shorter players on the baseball team, and never caught up to Travis’s six feet. His thinness makes him look even smaller, an undernourished waif. Sweatpants and a T-shirt hang loosely off his limbs, like he’s wearing someone else’s clothes.

  He holds a movie camera on his shoulder.

  “What’s that for?”

  “My camcorder,” he says.

  A red light blinks. When I try to move out of the way, he follows me. “Brian, please.”

  “Okay,” he says. He presses a button and the red light disappears.

  “I don’t want to be in any video, thank you very much,” I say. This past Christmas, Matthew and Sherri got a camcorder and recorded us opening presents at Lettie’s, and then we had to sit there and watch ourselves do it all over again on TV. I don’t see the sense in it.

  Brian sits at the table and stretches out his legs and crosses his bare feet one over the other. No, he’s not as sick-skinny as I was expecting, but it’s still bad. His cheekbones are more pronounced, his forehead looms. He looks like he’s been up all night, the skin under his eyes thin and smoky blue. Blond stubble shadows his upper lip and chin. Discolored teeth. Those teeth! I’ll take him in to see Dave Green. As a teenager, Brian was striking—people commented all the time on his looks. I thought he would grow into a beautiful man.

  “Did you sleep okay? Was the room warm enough? Do you need more covers?”

  “Everything was fine, Mom.”

  But he’s looking around like he doesn’t know where he is. Not much has changed. The same harvest-gold refrigerator and stove, same wallpaper with its tiny bouquets of daisies, and a framed needlepoint that says “Home is Where the Heart is”. I’m embarrassed by how old and dull everything looks.

  “I’ve been wanting to get new wallpaper,” I say.

  “You got a microwave. That’s n
ew.”

  The sun coming through the side window turns his face a deep pink, like he’s standing in front of a fire. I can’t take my eyes off him. No, he’s not strikingly beautiful anymore, but he’s still handsome—in a worrisome way, like he’s walked through dangerous land to get here, spent days without food, water, sunlight.

  “Do you want coffee? Tea?”

  “I’m usually a coffee drinker, but tea sounds good.”

  I fill the kettle and turn on the burner. “You used to drink it with me when you were little. Remember?”

  “Yeah, Lipton. With lots of sugar.”

  “Now I use Sweet’N Low.”

  “That stuff will give you cancer,” he says, and reaches up and runs both hands through the back of his hair like he’s going to pull it into a ponytail. The little gold hoop in his ear catches the light. Last night I saw Travis staring, and I was worried he would start something. But then he looked up at the clock on the wall, maybe wishing he could turn the hands back.

  Brian picks up the Chester Times and reads the headlines aloud in an exaggerated newscaster voice. “Church bake sale. High school girl to enter beauty pageant. Church fish fry.” He raises his eyebrows. “Exciting stuff.”

  “Well, it’s not New York.”

  I can’t read his expression. Amusement? Resentment? He started talking about leaving Chester when he was a little kid. Wanted to be an actor, a singer, a famous writer, a famous something. Isn’t that what all kids say? Even when things were at their worst between him and Travis, when Travis wanted him apply to colleges and talk to baseball scouts, and instead Brian took a job at the now closed IGA to save up money, I didn’t believe he’d go. I never stopped thinking about him—every day I prayed for him to come home—but whenever I tried to picture New York, my mind drew a blank. Sometimes I made things up. I pretended he was away in the army and would come back home, just like Travis. Or, I imagined he was away at college on some pretty campus with ivy growing on brick buildings, like you see on television. I never once thought of him as anything but alive. I didn’t grieve for him like he was dead. He was away, and one day he would come home.