Hazard

by Margaret Combs

  Consumed with packing for college, I hadn’t thought of my brother for several hours, perhaps even days. As I had lifted the trunk lid and packed down the layers of bulk, I didn’t notice him in the shadows. Not until his voice ventured softly into the room, saying my name the way he always did, without the r and g.

  “Mossie, I’m not going to college,” he said.

  I looked up. He stood in my bedroom doorway, sorrowful, dazed with comprehension. Unable to manage the l’s, he pronounced it “cawedge.”

  His voice had uttered an unspoken truth. That he would not follow me out into the world, but rather, stay in a life where one day he had a sister, and the next, she was gone.

  “Okay, Dad! Have my coffee, now!”

  This volley pierced my ear. I lifted my hand, cupping it over the whorl of my earlobe, and closed my eyes. Tiny tears clawed their way around in my eye sockets. I still hadn’t grown numb to this scene, hadn’t grown calluses along with my parents. How had I been born so ill-equipped? I fought a desire to hurl my voice into the mayhem, to cry out to my parents, “What is your secret? How do you breathe through ruined moments, over and over? Tell me.”

  I knew then why I’d run from my family: to escape the undertow of my brother’s tantrums, but even more so, to flee my failure to make him my whole life. I couldn’t have known I wasn’t alone. It would be years before I learned how many siblings of disabled children flee into marriages or faraway careers.

  In the next instant, my father lunged over the table, reaching for Rod with both hands before he clamped his fingers together, mid-flight, yanking both palms back to his chest and dropping once again to his seat. Jamming his clapped hands between his knees, he bent over, head bowed, breathing hard. He so rarely showed emotion that, when he did, it felt dire. I shot a look over to my mother but her gaze beaded toward her lap.

  Dad lifted his eyes, releasing his words in a careful row.

  “You must lower your voice, Rod.”

  “Okay, yes!” Rod thundered. “I will, Dad!”

  In the distance, I could see the restaurant manager emerge from behind the cash register and look our way. In another minute he was going to march over and ask us to leave. Some diners were getting up from their tables and leaving without dessert.

  Then, without warning, my brother found the off switch somewhere deep inside himself. His next words, softly spoken, eased from his lips, contrite and subdued.

  “I be nice, yes, have my coffee back,” he said. His tone was calm and, astonishingly, laced with a touch of kindness.

  We sat in silence, not moving, uncertain whether this squall had blown through. I sensed for a surprised moment that my parents, despite of their steadfast wills and years of practice, were addled and shaken.

  “Well, all right then,” my mother said, softly, raising her bowed head.

  Clearing his throat, my father lifted Rod’s half-filled cup and handed it back across the table. Quietly, with a long-fingered and delicate gesture, my brother took it back again.

  The next few minutes passed in near silence. Rod took tiny bird sips from the edge of his cup, eyes flitting around and back to the table. Each of us was careful not to look his way, avoiding, at all cost, the dreaded eye contact, which could send him off again.

  My father paid the bill, pressing the money onto the table and, as always, counting the change twice. Then, on his cue, we stood to go.

  My eyes found the couple in the next booth. Their faces were wary and they wouldn’t meet my gaze. Their eyes, like so many others in the room, followed my father, mother, and brother, as they trundled, single file, to the door.

  For the smallest of moments, I paused, fingertips touching the table, with its mess of coffee stains, strewn packets, and empty cups. This was the very moment when, as a child, I would slip the other way, making for the restroom and its few moments of hidden respite. Where I’d wait my turn and then stall at the sink, carefully rinsing my hands, re-banding my hair and pretending, at least to myself, that I was separate from my family. And from where, a few minutes later, I’d emerge, heading for the front door by myself, hoping the crowded tables had forgotten what had happened and to whom I belonged.

  Now, I brushed flecks of sugar from my fingertips. And then, inexplicably, I slid out of the booth, rounded the coffee stand and, in a few steps, caught up to my brother’s funny loping walk. Thick air from the faraway exit billowed toward me and, with it, the smell of hot rain. I felt the ember of an old instinct. I did not put my arms out to hide him, but nevertheless stayed close behind and, with the angle of my torso, shielded him from the roomful of gawking eyes.

  Chapter 28

  Losing It

  After the debacle of Dave’s Diner, we spent the rest of the car trip resorting to fast food drive-throughs. McDonald’s, Wendy’s, Wimpy’s—any place where we could get a meal and stay inside the sanctuary of the car. These were the days before crisp salads and grilled chicken were added to fast-food menus, before fat and sugar were associated with ill health, so our choices amounted to Big Macs, Fish Filets, and various volumes of French fries, topped off with synthetic milk shakes.

  Part of me was relieved not to get out of the car, but each time I unwrapped another oily Fish Filet in the back seat, trapped in my seatbelt, thighs sticky with the heat, I swallowed little shards of resentment. I was an adult now, and I wanted to be able to get out of the car if I so chose, to select from a variety of food groups, to have a tension-free lunch in a comfortable, roomy booth with my mother, order a glass of iced tea, split a piece of coconut cream pie without my brother spoiling it, making us stuff food down our throats and high-tail-it for the door.

  At the next hotel stop, the final one on the trip, I tried proposing this idea, catching my mother in a rare moment by herself. She was tidying up the hotel room as Rod and my father took a drive to go fill up the car with gas.

  “Mom, let’s seize the day and walk to the café. Maybe split a piece of pie together?” I suggested lightly, as if this were not a big deal and we would not be doing something behind the back of my father, or admitting that we’d like a moment away from my brother.

  “Oh?” she answered. Her voice rose as if she were questioning the air. She finished folding Rod’s shorts and added them to the prim tower of T-shirts on the bed.

  My mother rarely stopped tasking, picking up, wiping the counter, putting away dishes. Years later she would admit this was her way of relieving anxiety and the boredom of housewifery. Aside from bending over the crossword puzzle on Sunday afternoons, she never sat down.

  “I don’t know,” she said vaguely, “I suppose …” Her eyes, hazel-gray like mine, drifted toward the window, then down to her watch while she frowned, and then back up to the window.

  In the next moment, tires crunched outside, and I knew the moment had passed.

  “Never mind,” I said, exasperated. “I’m going to run to the store down the street. I need a few things.”

  This was not true. What I needed was the same thing I had yearned for most of my life: a moment alone with her. Not for any profound reason, just to be mother and daughter over a piece of lemon meringue pie. This simple wish was wildly unattainable. When I was a child, I had merited her attention when I was competing, but I didn’t have gymnastics now.

  I couldn’t tell whether she registered my frustration. She bent over the laundry basket and picked up another shirt.

  It didn’t occur to me that my mother’s incessant housekeeping was a coping tool, a way to allay boredom and stave off depression. She was a woman with a gifted mind who had never had the chance to use it, a musician whose only outlet was an occasional solo at church, a former beauty queen who now faced an aging, ordinary woman in the mirror. She did not want to sit down and take time to be present, or reflect, or think about the future; it was too hard.

  “Well, as long as you’re going, can you pick up some crayons?” she asked, checking the shirt for ring-around-the-collar. “Rod’s upset about the bl
ack, it broke the other day. I’ll give you some money.”

  “Mom, really, I can spring for crayons.” My voice was flat and petulant—teen-like. Small.

  I gestured for the keys as Dad came into the room, and then, turning quickly, whacked shoulders with Rod as he came through the doorway. The two of us ricocheted in opposite directions, whamming into the door frame.

  “Sorry, Rod. Are you okay?” I said, gaining my balance and rubbing the lump already bulging over my ear. I touched his arm and he flinched.

  “Oh, yaas, Mossie!” he shouted in my ear.

  Cocking both wrists, palms in the air, I moved backward through the doorway and onto the porch, keys dangling from my fingers.

  “Just go on,” my mother said, hastily closing the door.

  In the next moment, I was in the car and driving out, clipping the hotel hedge as I went by. The moment I reached the straightaway I gripped the wheel and vigorously yanked myself back and forth, back and forth, teeth clenched. Swiping at my eyes, the view more and more blurred, I slid through two stop lights and my collarbone burned from the seat belt as the car slithered under my haunches, the loose belly of the embankment giving under my swerving, scudding tires.

  Somehow, I made it to the A&P parking lot without running off the road, swinging into a parking space between a Valiant and a pick-up truck and snapping off the engine. What on earth is wrong with me? My throat throbbed and snot ran into my mouth. Rummaging into the glove box I found Kleenex and blew hard, the smell of heated rubber wafting through the open window as I pushed my spine back against the seat and sat there, breathing, appalled.

  I had forgotten this part of myself—having been away from my family long enough to believe that I had recovered from such viral, thwarted frustration. It had taken only a few days of traveling with them in the confines of a car to bring it roiling back. If Barbara Ann were here she would laugh me out of this—show me the ridiculousness of the situation, how silly it was to want a few uninterrupted moments with our mother and a piece of pie. But she was not here with me, and this was a rooted anger—the same one I had felt all those years ago, when I drew the picture of my family and ripped it to shreds. The only way I had found to manage this feeling was to distance myself from my family. Thank the Lord I only had another day on the road and soon would fly away, back to my own life. This thought and a few more minutes of breathing calmed me enough to get out of the car. Despite the heat, I stood there for several minutes, composing myself and blowing my nose. Then I slipped my sunglasses on to camouflage my eyes and crossed the parking lot, heading for Excedrin and crayons.

  An hour later, when I brought the box of crayons in from the car, I handed it to Rod, wordlessly, keeping my gaze averted. My eyes were dry and swollen in their sockets, and I could think of nothing I wanted more than a hot shower and the closed door of a bathroom.

  Something, though, made me glance his way, and I noticed on his mouth a certain kind of tilted smile. I detected a bit of remorse in the cocked angle of his head. His face dipped, nose down, and he muttered something.

  In our old way, I understood what he was saying. He was asking me to color with him. As always, I felt a softening in my heart, but with it, a new kind of despair: I didn’t have the right to be angry. I couldn’t have a good sibling row with my brother; he was no match for me, and any form of fury I hurled at him was shameful. He was not to blame.

  I did not yet realize that Rod was not the one fueling my frustration. Flipping open the latch of my parents’ suitcase, I dug out his Batman coloring book, handed it to him, walked into the bathroom, and shut the door.

  That night, lying awake, I listened from the other side of the hotel room through the darkness. Sometime in the last ten years Rod had started snoring; not surprisingly, I reasoned as I stared at the ceiling, since he took after my grandfather. But also not in the expected way, no rambling inhale, whistling exhale, but odd random bunches of arrhythmic snorts and snuffles. I could hardly stand the sound, the randomness and lack of rhythm startling me anew each time he paused and started up again. There was something disconcerting, disturbing, crazy-driven about the sound, something hopelessly entrenched. I got up, rustled quietly in my suitcase and slipped on some jeans, then stepped outside the motel door and sat in one of the flamingo-pink metal chairs to wait out the long night.

  The next day, on the final few miles of the trip, I awoke from an exhausted, drooling nap in the back seat. The car tires slowed and bumped over a curb. Lifting my head, I saw we had pulled into a Denny’s parking lot.

  “What’s wrong? Why are we stopping?” I slurred, dropping my matted hair back to the bunched-up pillow.

  “Well, I don’t know about you, but I’m hungry,” my father announced robustly, unhitching his seatbelt and unlatching the door. “Anybody else hungry?”

  “Yaas,” Rod said.

  What on earth is my father thinking? Is he mad? I didn’t say this out loud. I closed my eyes and felt a distinct slump beneath me, a loss of altitude. I’m the one who’s crazy, I thought, or I will be, soon.

  Slam, slam-slam, the car doors banged around me as I sat up. The three of them, my parents and Rod, walked away from the car, heading toward the glaring mouth of the place. My father’s tall frame ambling in that gangly long-muscled way; my brother’s soft, shapeless, mildly paunchy figure gimping a few steps behind; and my mother’s petite, once-trim, now-rounded figure clipping along in clean white slacks and sneakers.

  For a moment I pondered whether to call after them and feign a headache-need-to-nap excuse, but, already, I knew I wouldn’t go through with it. I was too desperate for something—anything—to eat other than fried food, and for any reason to get out of the car, even if it meant walking into a family restaurant and sitting down in a booth with my brother.

  Groggily, I got out and trotted across the parking lot, where my father was waiting with the door held open. He herded us in, detouring himself and Rod off to the bathroom to wash up, and then came back, settling into the strategic booth, across from my mother. Here we were again.

  “Well now,” he announced, clapping his hands together and rubbing briskly as if he were about to embark on a healthy and pleasurable hike up a mountain. “I’m going to have Rod order tonight.”

  God in heaven, I thought. My lids flattened and I looked over at my mother. Studiously, she kept her eyes down on the menu. Just when I thought we’d been through it all. After days of Rod-incidents all along the route, acting out in the lobby, in the public bathrooms, on the sidewalk, shouting and stubbornly refusing to pipe down, my father decides to cattle-prod the bull inside my brother one more time.

  If I had been younger, this was the moment my mother would have looked up from her menu, frowned across the table, and said, “Wipe that bad attitude off your face, young lady.”

  But I wasn’t younger, and suddenly I realized where my seething frustration came from. Not from my brother, who every day struggled with the world of others, following their rules, working harder than any of us just to say hello, keep eye contact, respond, and ask for more coffee. As maddening as his behavior could be at times, I knew deep down I was seeing him box with life, his valiant attempt to do as he was asked, to fight back when he could, to come out swinging at a fate that he did not chose, and that he knew none of the rest of us had to endure.

  My frustration came from the fact that I was buckled by it—the relentlessness of his struggle and the impossibility of peace. I wanted a harmonious family and knew this was secondary to my brother’s struggle—that when it came down to my need for peace or my brother’s struggle, my parents would choose his struggle. My father would not only bring Rod into a restaurant and risk another debacle, but he would do it with me here, and furthermore, he would add a twist, a new challenge: he would have my brother order the meal.

  The moment came, the waitress stopping at our booth, her pencil poised, and I jumped in to order first, the full sum of my rebellion. Next, my father ordered for himself and
my mother, as always, and then he said, “Rod, it’s your turn. Say what you’d like to eat for dinner.”

  “Yaas,” Rod said, looking sideways and mumbling.

  “Speak a little louder so she can hear you,” said my mother, touching his arm.

  “Okay!” he said, and then, as if he were practiced at this, he ordered a hamburger, Coca Cola, French fries, and apple pie, seamlessly, without having to repeat a word.

  I exhaled and slumped, like a slow-leaking balloon. I should have been elated but I’d been at this too long. My brother’s unpredictability defeated me.

  “That was a very nice job, Rod sweetie,” said my mother, pleased, releasing her napkin ring and shaking the cloth onto her lap. “How about that.”

  Chapter 29

  Lift Off

  Florida was a deadly place to be in May. Heat and humidity cloaked me like a wet towel as I trekked toward my father’s Plymouth Belvedere with Don and our adolescent boys, each of us hauling an inordinate number of suitcases. Moisture sprouted up and down my vertebrae as if my spine were a soaker hose. I didn’t have to guess how my husband was faring. He loathed heat and perspiration.

  “Whoooee, is it hot!” sang out my younger son, Zachary, cheerily.

  Just shy of puberty, Zachary was a perpetual delight. Light and wiry and always in motion, he tended to shimmy up trees and leap off stairs and rooftops, resulting most recently in several stitches to his forehead. He found joy in the ridiculous and adventure in any scenario, including this one, a weeklong visit to my family. Dylan, on the other hand, was appropriately self-absorbed at fifteen, dressed in black jeans, cool Vans, and a Scream T-shirt. In the last year he had burned off his layer of baby fat and was now a slenderized version of Don. As the lead singer in his rock band, he worried that he was away from his high school friends and missing rehearsals for Battle of the Bands, and, if given the choice (which we did not give him), he’d plug into his Walkman.