Love in Many Languages

by Jamie Bennett

  “And everyone except Fox is living there rent-free.”

  “Well, Fox doesn’t pay rent anymore, either.” That was what he and Reid had gotten into a bit of an argument about. “He pays by helping out around the house, things like that.”

  Cooper didn’t say anything for a moment. I could tell by his aura that he was very disapproving. Also by the way he was frowning, pursing his lips, and shaking his head. But all he said was, “It’s none of my business.” Which was true. Then he said, “We should just stick to Japanese.” And that made me feel very sad.

  I looked around as we got onto I-96. “Where are we going?”

  “Back to my house,” he answered, sounding a little surprised. “Didn’t I say that? I thought we could order a pizza or something. It will be easier to talk at my house rather than at the library. This is a working dinner, right?”

  “Yes. Sure.” We rode in silence down the expressway.

  “I need to be home, also,” he said suddenly. “My mom needs me there.”

  “You live with her?”

  “And my brother.” I watched his throat move as he swallowed once, then twice. “My father passed away about six months ago in an accident. It took some time for me to sort things out in California, then I came home. My brother’s only eighteen. He needed some…guidance.” Swallow. “This is more than you need to know.”

  “I want to know. Thank you for telling me. Is your mom still able to go to work?”

  “Not anymore.” Swallow. “She’s having a hard time. She can’t walk anymore and we have people coming during the day to help out. We’re doing renovations on the house for her wheelchair. You’ll see.”

  “My grandma was sick for a long time and I took care of her,” I told him.

  “Really?” He glanced over at me, sounding so surprised.

  “I did for a few years. I know how hard it is on everyone. My babcia, my grandma, wanted to live at home, and die at home too. I thought it was the least I could do for her, since she had really been my mom. My real mom passed away from a drug overdose when I was eight but my grandma had always been there. I had always lived with her, in my house.”

  “That’s…I’m sorry.”

  “No, I’m not trying to make you sorry! I was just trying to say, I understand, some. And also, it’s ok to tell me things about yourself, too. That’s what I wanted you to know.” I smiled at him. “It’s better for your heart to be open. That’s just a fact.”

  “Is it.” He didn’t sound like he believed me.

  “It’s a scientific fact,” I assured him, and he made a little huffing noise.

  “You and I may have different ideas about the definition of science.” But as he said it, he looked over and gave me one of his rare smiles, which changed his face from serious and a little granite-y to young and just…delightful. I smiled back at him and my heart beat like a rabbit’s.

  Cooper’s house was in North Rosedale Park on a quiet street. There was a partially constructed ramp up to their front door, plywood leaned against the side of the house, and a port-a-potty in the driveway. But I loved his house, because of the graceful proportions, the window boxes of bright flowers—it just had a lovely light. “It’s so restful,” I told Cooper. “I love the flowers.”

  “My mom was really into her garden. I’m trying to keep it up. Come on in.” He slid aside some construction debris to clear a path for me and opened the front door. Oh, air conditioning again. “Tanner? Mom?” he called.

  “She’s asleep.”

  Oh wow, it was a young Cooper! A little slimmer, not as tall and without the grey in his hair, but with the same dark grey eyes and stern features. Except on Cooper, the features didn’t look quite so angry. This guy was super pissed, glaring at his older double.

  “You were supposed to be home an hour ago,” young Cooper said.

  “I need to stop and get Ione on the way.” Old Cooper gestured to me. “Ione, this is my brother, Tanner.”

  “It’s nice to meet you.” I put out my hand and smiled.

  Young Cooper—Tanner—turned to me for the first time. We stood in silence.

  “Tanner, say something!” Cooper, my Cooper, said impatiently. “What’s the matter with you?”

  Tanner was just staring at me. “It’s nice to meet you,” I repeated, but I dropped my hand. “Um, should we go…” It was very uncomfortable, the way he was staring.

  Cooper reached over and smacked the back of his brother’s head, and Tanner snapped out of it a little. “Ione? Is that her name, you said? Ione,” Tanner repeated. His face had lost the anger and he was looking at me strangely. “Who are you?” he asked, his voice kind of soft. Dreamy.

  “She’s Ione, a woman I take a class with. Why are you acting like an idiot?” Cooper reached out to cuff him again but this time his brother ducked.

  “Yes, that’s it. I’m Ione.” I took a step back.

  “Ione,” Tanner said again, and tilted his head and grinned at me.

  “Jesus H. Christ. Tanner, I’m ordering dinner, so if you want something, let me know. We’ll be in the library. Ione, let’s go.” Cooper put his hand on my shoulder, heavy and firm, and started to direct me away from his strange sibling.

  That made Tanner break out of his daze. “I’m going out.” He walked quickly toward the front door.

  “Where are you going? When will you be back?”

  The door slammed behind Tanner and his brother sighed heavily.

  “You think he’s getting into trouble,” I said sympathetically. “I don’t think so, though.”

  “I shouldn’t ask, but why don’t you think so?”

  “He just doesn’t have that feel to me. But I’d have to spend more time with him to be sure.” I patted Cooper’s hand on my shoulder.

  Cooper seemed to realize that it was there, and pulled it quickly away from me. “Let’s go get to work.”

  He meant that. We reviewed every bit of vocabulary we had learned, watched videos, did flashcards on his computer. He had every single thing memorized. Kind of.

  “‘Could you please repeat that?’” he read from the English flashcard from the screen. “I know this one.” He ran his hand over his hair. “Moist chicken shimmery. Is that it?”

  “Mou ichido onegai shimasu?” I said slowly.

  “Moist…moss…”

  I put my hand on his mouth. “Mou ichido onegai shimasu,” I repeated, and ran my index finger over his lip. “Try it again.” I tried to help him form the words, but I really I was mostly staring at his mouth, his lips as they pursed and struggled with the sounds. His mouth was very expressive, and his lips were very firm, but also—

  He removed my hand. “I need to check on my mom.” He stood up from the table and I leaned back in my chair.

  He really, really didn’t like me. I looked back down at the notes I had scribbled out in class, mostly little drawings of things around the room with some words mixed in. It was terrible, this feeling of unrequitedness! Also, this feeling of hunger. I was starving, so I wandered into the kitchen, and Cooper walked in a moment later. “Is she ok?” I asked him.

  “Yes. I was going to bring her down but she doesn’t feel up to it. Can I help you find something?”

  I closed the cupboard. “I was just thinking about making dinner. Fox and I were remembering how we used to cook. Would you mind? I’m not gourmet but I do all right.”

  “Uh, sure. I guess.”

  I started pulling out ingredients. “Will your brother be back to eat too?”

  Cooper sighed. “I don’t know. I don’t know where he went. He won’t listen to any rule or instruction I give him.” He stopped, but it was obvious to me that he had more to get off his chest, so I stood and looked at him, waiting. “He’s so angry at me, and all I’m trying to do is set up some basic standards for how he should behave,” he said finally. He ran his hand over his head and sighed. “My dad and mom were a lot older when they had him and they were working almost constantly. Once I went away to
school and was out of the house, I always got the impression that there wasn’t a lot of discipline or structure in Tanner’s life, not like what I had, anyway.”

  “And now you’re trying to impose some structure and be the first disciplinarian he’s ever had? That’s hard. For both of you.” I looked at all their supplies and decided to make extra dinner for Tanner, just in case. I remembered 18-year-old boys eating a lot.

  “He needs to listen to me,” Cooper said stonily. “He doesn’t have a clue about what he’s doing, where he’s going wrong. He’s not even going to college in the fall. My parents rode me…” He shook his head, frowning.

  “Did you ever get into trouble, when you were in high school?”

  “Me? No.” He seemed startled. “Did you?”

  “Definitely. And I hung out with people who got into even more trouble than I did. They had a lot of different reasons for it. Like, some of them wanted attention, you know?”

  “You think he wants my attention?”

  “I don’t know him very well. Or you. I’m just saying, if your parents were older and busy, and then your mom was sick and your dad died, and now you come back here and it seems like you’re working all the time, then maybe. Maybe he doesn’t want to give in right away to the new guy, either. You both light as stubborn to me.”

  “Stubborn lights. Huh,” Cooper commented.

  “I’d need to be around him more to read him better. Just maybe.”

  “Maybe all that’s true. Or maybe my parents did a poor job of raising him, and I have to suffer the consequences, and he will too. He’s fighting me constantly about college, and I…I don’t want him to make bad decisions at eighteen that will screw up the rest of his life.”

  “Oh, I don’t see that he’ll screw up his life, not with you as his role model now.” I was chopping vegetables. “Who does the grocery shopping? You guys have everything.”

  “I do.”

  I looked over and he was rubbing his temples, eyes closed. Grocery shopping, gardening, parenting his brother, taking care of his mother, saving a company, learning Japanese. Hm. I stopped chopping and went behind his chair. “Just relax for a minute, ok? We’ll have a nice dinner and then we can go back to torturing you with Japanese.”

  “What are you doing?”

  “I’m rubbing your back.” Wasn’t it obvious? I dug in with my fingers and his muscles were as hard as iron. “Take a deep breath and blow out slowly, counting to ten. In English.”

  I was kind of surprised when he did it. I felt him slowly relaxing under my hands, which were actually getting tired, he was so damn tense.

  “Better?”

  “Thank you,” he said, sounding surprised again.

  “My pleasure. I’m going back to the stir fry.” I kept cooking, mixing the vegetables and the chicken I had cut up and heating the rice from the hundreds of paper takeout containers I had found in the fridge. Despite having all the groceries, it seemed like they were mostly ordering in. Mmm. It smelled good. “Can you set the table?”

  We sat together and Cooper ate a ton. It was always very gratifying to see someone eat your cooking. “I’m best at Polish food. That was what my grandma, my babcia, used to cook. Next time I’ll make you something really good.” He glanced up at me and I added quickly, “If we study together again.” I told him more about what she liked to make and my own quick meal started to pale in comparison. “Next time,” I assured him.

  Finally Cooper leaned back in his chair. He had done his duty to my dinner but there was enough for his mom and his brother and for the next night, too. “That was delicious. Thank you very much, Ione,” he said, very formally.

  “You’re welcome very much.” I smiled at him and he looked at me, then smiled back. I felt an urge to lean across the table and kiss him, like Reid had done to Karis over their desk, but I stopped myself. At least I had gotten to rub his back a little.

  Cooper picked up the dishes and put them in the sink. “You know, we’ve probably done enough for one night. Why don’t I run you home?”

  There was a noise upstairs, a bump, and both of us looked up.

  I stood too. “You don’t have to drive me. Go help your mom.”

  “I can—”

  “Stay here in case your brother gets home, too. I’ll see you in class.”

  There was another noise upstairs and I saw his face turn anxious. “Maybe that would be better. Wait inside for your ride to come,” Cooper told me. “Thanks again for helping me and for dinner.”

  “Sure. Bye.” When he had disappeared up the stairs, I walked outside onto his porch, back into the humid night. I was coming down the steps when I saw someone slinking around the yard, so I stopped, ready to go back in.

  “Ione?”

  It was Tanner, the rebellious little brother. “Hi,” I greeted him. “I made some dinner. It’s on the stove for you.”

  “Really?” He stepped into the light from the porch.

  “Sure. Your brother ate like a pig but I made a lot so there are leftovers. He’s helping your mom out.”

  “He let you go?”

  Creepy, much? I took a step back from him.

  “I mean,” I heard the embarrassment in his voice, “he’s not driving you home?”

  “No, I’m going to get the bus.” I had brought my purse but my wallet and phone didn’t seem to be in it. I had enough for bus fare floating around in the bottom of the bag. “Nice to meet you, Tanner.”

  “I can run you home on my bike.”

  “Um, thanks, I’m not much of a bike rider—”

  He laughed, and when he did, I caught a glimpse of a different boy. Young man. “My motorcycle,” he clarified. “Come on. I don’t want to go in yet.”

  I hadn’t been on the back of a bike in a while, and it was as fun as I remembered. Tanner took the corners a little too sharply so I had to really hang on to him. I started to laugh about a minute into our ride, I was enjoying it so much, and I smiled the whole way home. I pulled off the helmet when he roared up into my driveway and shook my hair free.

  “Thanks!” I told him. “That was great! What an awesome bike.”

  “What?” He was staring at my hair.

  “Thanks for the ride. I love your motorcycle.”

  “It was my dad’s,” Tanner explained. “He left it to me. We used to work on it together.” I opened my mouth to answer, and saw a movement up on my porch. “Who’s that?” he asked me.

  I saw a glimmer of pink hair. “I think it’s a girl I know, Corrie. Hi,” I called, relieved to see her again. She stepped partway into the spotlights beaming from Sania’s house and I squinted at her. Her face looked off, somehow. I started to walk toward the porch. “Thanks again, Tanner.”

  “Yeah, sure. Hey, are you going out with my brother?”

  I stopped. “No. I was helping him with Japanese, but he doesn’t like me. So no.”

  “Great! I mean, yeah, cool. Maybe, uh, I’ll see you around.”

  Probably not. “Maybe. Goodnight.” I ran up the rest of the way to the porch and saw why Corrie’s face looked different. Her cheek was swollen and bruised. And it looked like she had been crying.

  “Is it still ok if I stay here?” she asked.

  I put my arm around her and we went inside. “Of course it is. Absolutely. Are you hungry? Let’s make you something to eat, ok?”

  She nodded a little. As I closed the door, I heard the motorcycle roar away into the summer night.

  I led her into the kitchen. “Sit down and…” I looked around. I had picked up a few chairs to leave in there but they had already walked away. “You can sit up on the counter.” I got some ice out of the freezer and miracle of miracles, found an old towel to wrap it in. “Put that on your face.” Corrie held it gingerly to her cheek.

  For the second time that night, I started to make dinner, this time with the ingredients that Fox had bought but hadn’t used. But I would pay him back. “What have you been up to lately?” I asked, starting the questions
off slowly.

  “Not much.”

  “Me neither. I was studying tonight,” I mentioned.

  “Sounds lame.” She relaxed a little.

  “I was excited about you staying in the green bedroom, but then you left,” I said.

  “I’ve been around. I have a boyfriend and I was staying with him, but then he got kicked out, too.”

  “Yeah? You could bring him over here, if you wanted.” I moved the chicken breast to its other side in the pan, the one pan we had left. This was going to be a one-pot meal for sure. “I mean, you’re welcome to bring him here, unless he’s the one who hit you.”

  “No,” Corrie said quickly. “It wasn’t him. I mean, no one hit me.”

  Hm. “Ok.” I started to make a little salad with Fox’s supplies in the chipped mixing bowl he had used for his cereal earlier. She looked like she hadn’t seen a vegetable in a while. “Sometimes relationships are hard. I had a boyfriend in high school that I loved so much. Like, the first guy I ever loved. He had a really bad temper but I was always doing things to set him off. That was what I thought, anyway.”

  “This is a stupid story,” she told me. “Is the food almost done?” I heard the ice she held to her face crack in the heat.

  “Anyway, he used to hit me sometimes. But under my clothes, so people wouldn’t know. One day after school, a teacher saw us arguing. She saw my boyfriend throw me up against his car, but I swore to her that he hadn’t touched me, that I had fallen. She made me come to her classroom and she told me how she used to be married to a guy who pushed her around, hit her. She was separated from him. She told me some terrible stories.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ignored her. I thought she didn’t understand me, or my boyfriend. Then that teacher’s husband? He hurt her, really badly. He put her in the hospital and she didn’t come back to school for the rest of the year. And I was like, I better do something before I’m married to him, and I end up just like her.”