by Dan Chaon
The problems of my college years had passed away by that time. I was working at a small private college in upstate New York, in alumni relations. My wife and I seldom went back to Nebraska; we couldn’t afford the money or the time. But I talked to my parents regularly on the phone, once or twice a month.
We ended up going back that Christmas after Ezra was born. My mother’s letters had made it almost impossible to avoid. “It breaks my heart that I can’t hear my grandson’s voice, now that he is making his little sounds,” she had written. “But am getting by O.K. and will begin lip-reading classes in Denver after Xmas. It will be easier for me then.” She would get on the phone when I called my father. “I can’t hear you talking, but I love you,” she’d say.
“We have to work to make her feel involved in things,” my father told us as we drove from the airport, where he’d picked us up. “The worst thing is that they start feeling isolated,” he told us. “We got little pads so we can write her notes.” He looked over at me, strangely academic looking in the new glasses he had for driving. In the last few years he had begun to change, his voice turning slow and gentle, as if he were watching something out in the distance beyond the window, or something sad and mysterious on TV as we talked. His former short temper had vanished, leaving only a soft reproachfulness in its place. But even that was muted. He knew that he couldn’t really make me feel guilty. “You know how she is,” he said to my wife and me, though of course we did not, either one of us, really know her. “You know how she is. The hardest part is, you know, we don’t want her to get depressed.”
She looked terrible. Every time I saw her since I graduated from college, this stunned me. I came in, carrying my sleeping son, and she was sitting at the kitchen table, her spine curved a little bit more than the last time, thinner, so skinny that her muscles seemed to stand out against the bone. Back in New York, I worked with alumni ladies older than she who played tennis, who dressed in trendy clothes, who walked with a casual and still sexy ease. These women wouldn’t look like my mother for another twenty years, if ever. I felt my smile pull awkwardly on my face.
“Hello!” I called, but of course she didn’t look up. My father flicked on the porch light. “She hates it when you surprise her,” he said softly, as if there were still some possibility of her overhearing. My wife looked over at me. Her eyes said that this was going to be another holiday that was like work for her.
My mother lifted her head. Her shrewdness was still intact, at least, and she was ready for us the moment the porch light hit her consciousness. That terrible, monkeyish dullness seemed to lift from her expression as she looked up.
“Well, howdy,” she called, in the same jolly, slightly ironic way she always did when she hadn’t seen me in a long time. She came over to hug us, then peered down at Ezra, who stirred a little as she pushed back his parka hood to get a better look. “Oh, what an angel,” she whispered. “It’s about killed me, not being able to see this boy.” Then she stared down at Ezra again. How he’d grown, she told us. She thought he looked like me, she said, and I was relieved. Actually, I’d begun to think that Ezra somewhat resembled the pictures I’d seen of Del as a baby. But my mother didn’t say that, at least.
I had planned to have a serious talk with them on this trip. Or maybe planned is the wrong word—considered might be closer, though even that doesn’t express the vague, unpleasantly anxious urge that I could feel at the back of my neck. I didn’t really know what I wanted to know. And the truth was, these quiet, fragile, distantly tender people bore little resemblance to the mother and father in my mind. It had been ten years since I’d lived at home. Ten years!—which filled the long, snowy evenings with a numbing politeness. My father sat in his easy chair after dinner, watching the news. My wife read. My mother and I did the dishes together, silently, nodding as the plate she had rinsed passed from her hand to mine, to be dried and put away. When a train passed, the little window above the sink vibrated, humming like a piece of cellophane. But she did not notice this.
We did have a talk of sorts that trip, my father and I. It was on the third day after our arrival, a few nights before Christmas Eve. My wife and my mother were both asleep. My father and I sat out on the closed in porch, drinking beer, watching the snow drift across the yard, watching the wind send fingers of snow slithering along low to the ground. I had drunk more than he had. I saw him glance sharply at me for a second when I came back from the refrigerator a fourth time and popped open the can. But the look faded quickly. Outside, beyond the window, I could see the blurry shape of the elevator through the falling snow, its outlines indistinct, wavering like a mirage.
“Do you remember that time,” I said, “when I almost fell off the elevator?”
It came out like that, abrupt, stupid. As I sat there in my father’s silence, I realized how impossible it was, how useless to try to patch years of ellipses into something resembling dialogue. I looked down, and he cleared his throat.
“Sure,” he said at last, noncommittal. “Of course I remember.”
“I think about that sometimes,” I said. Drunk—I felt the alcohol edge into my voice as I spoke. “It seems,” I said, “significant.” That was the word that came to me. “It seems significant sometimes,” I said.
My father considered this for a while. He stiffened formally, as if he were being interviewed. “Well,” he said. “I don’t know. There were so many things like that. It was all a mess by then, anyway. Nothing could be done. It was too late for anything to be done.” He looked down to his own beer, which must have gone warm by that time, and took a small sip. “It should have been taken care of earlier—when you were kids. That’s where I think things must have gone wrong. I was too hard on you both. But Del—I was harder on him. He was the oldest. Too much pressure. Expected too much.”
He drifted off at that, embarrassed. We sat there, and I could not even imagine what he meant—what specifics he was referring to. What pressure? What expectations? But I didn’t push any further.
“But you turned out all right,” my father said. “You’ve done pretty well, haven’t you?”
There were no signs in our childhood, no incidents pointing the way to his eventual end. None that I could see, at least, and I thought about it quite a bit after his death. “It should have been taken care of earlier,” my father said, but what was it? Del seemed to have been happy, at least up until high school.
Maybe things happened when they were alone together. From time to time, I remember Del coming back from helping my father in the shop with his eyes red from crying. Once, I remember our father coming into our room on a Saturday morning and cuffing the top of Del’s sleeping head with the back of his hand: he had stepped in dog dirt on the lawn. The dog was Del’s responsibility. Del must have been about eight or nine at the time, and I remember him kneeling on our bedroom floor in his pajamas, crying bitterly as he cleaned off my father’s boot. When I told that story later on, I was pleased by the ugly, almost fascist overtones it had. I remember recounting it to some college friends—handsome, suburban kids—lording this little bit of squalor from my childhood over them. Child abuse and family violence were enjoying a media vogue at that time, and I found I could mine this memory to good effect. In the version I told, I was the one cleaning the boots.
But the truth was, my father was never abusive in an especially spectacular way. He was more like a simple bully, easily eluded when he was in a short-tempered mood. He used to get so furious when we would avoid him. I recall how he used to grab us by the hair on the back of our necks, tilting our heads so we looked into his face. “You don’t listen,” he would hiss. “I want you to look at me when I talk to you.” That was about the worst of it, until Del started getting into trouble. And by that time, my father’s blows weren’t enough. Del would laugh; he would strike back. It was then that my father finally decided to turn him over to the authorities. He had no other choice, he said.
He must have believed it. He wasn’t, despi
te his temper, a bad man, a bad parent. He’d seemed so kindly, sometimes, so fatherly—especially with Del. I remember watching them from my window, some autumn mornings, watching them wade through the high weeds in the stubble field out behind our house, walking toward the hill with their shotguns pointing at the ground, their steps slow, synchronized. Once, I’d gone upstairs and heard them laughing in Del’s and my bedroom. I just stood there outside the doorway, watching as my father and Del put a model ship together, sharing the job, their talk easy, happy.
This was what I thought of, that night we were talking. I thought of my own son, the innocent baby I loved so much, and it chilled me to think that things could change so much—that Del’s closeness to my father could turn in on itself, transformed into the kind of closeness that thrived on their fights, on the different ways Del could push my father into a rage. That finally my father would feel he had no choices left. We looked at each other, my father and I. “What are you thinking?” I said softly, but he just shook his head.
Del and I had never been close. We had never been like friends, or even like brothers. Yet after that day on the elevator, I came to realize that there had been something between us. There was something that could be taken away.
He stopped talking to me altogether for a while. In the weeks and months that followed my lie, I doubt if we even looked at each other more than two or three times, though we shared the same room.
For a while, I slept on the couch. I was afraid to go up to our bedroom. I can remember those first few nights, waiting in the living room for my father to go to bed, the television hissing with laughter. The furniture, the table, the floors seemed to shudder as I touched them, as if they were just waiting for the right moment to burst apart.
I’d go outside, sometimes, though that was really no better. It was the period of late summer when thunderstorms seemed to pass over every night. The wind came up. The shivering tops of trees bent in the flashes of heat lightning.
There was no way out of the situation I’d created. I could see that. Days and weeks stretched out in front of me, more than a month before school started. By that time, I thought, maybe it would all blow over. Maybe it would melt into the whole series of bad things that had happened, another layer of paint that would eventually be covered over by a new one, forgotten.
If he really had pushed me, that was what would have happened. It would have been like the time he tried to choke me, or the time he tried to drive the car off the hill. Once those incidents were over, there was always the possibility that this was the last time. There was always the hope that everything would be better, now.
In retrospect, it wouldn’t have been so hard to recant. There would have been a big scene, of course. I would have been punished, humiliated. I would have had to endure my brother’s triumph, my parent’s disgust. But I realize now that it wouldn’t have been so bad.
I might have finally told the truth, too, if Del had reacted the way I expected. I imagined that there would be a string of confrontations in the days that followed, that he’d continue to protest with my father. I figured he wouldn’t give up.
But he did. After that night, he didn’t try to deny it anymore. For a while, I even thought that maybe he had begun to believe that he pushed me. He acted like a guilty person, eating his supper in silence, walking noislessly through the living room, his shoulders hunched like a traveler on a snowy road.
My parents seemed to take this as penitence. They still spoke sternly, but their tone began to be edged by gentleness, a kind of forgiveness. “Did you take out the trash?” they would ask. “Another potato?”—and they would wait for him to quickly nod. He was truly sorry, they thought. Everything was finally going to be okay. He was shaping up.
At these times, I noticed something in his eyes—a kind of sharpness, a subtle shift of the iris. He would lower his head, and the corners of his mouth would move slightly. To me, his face seemed to flicker with hidden, mysterious thoughts.
When I finally began to sleep in our room again, he pretended I wasn’t there. I would come in, almost as quiet as he himself had become, to find him sitting at our desk or on his bed, peeling off a sock with such slow concentration that it might have been his skin. It was as if there were an unspoken agreement between us—I no longer existed. He wouldn’t look at me, but I could watch him for as long as I wanted. I would pull the covers over myself and just lie there, observing, as he went about doing whatever he was doing as if oblivious. He listened to a tape on his headphones, flipped through a magazine, did sit-ups, sat staring out the window, turned out the light. And all that time his face remained neutral, impassive. Once, he even chuckled to himself at a book he was reading, a paperback anthology of The Far Side cartoons.
When I was alone in the room, I found myself looking through his things, with an interest I’d never had before. I ran my fingers over his models, the monster-wheeled trucks and B-10 bombers. I flipped through his collection of tapes. I found some literature he’d brought home from the detention center, brochures with titles like “Teens and Alcohol: What You Should Know!” and “Rap Session, Talking about Feelings.” Underneath this stuff, I found the essay he’d been working on.
He had to write an essay so that they would let him back into high school. There was a letter from the guidance counselor, explaining the school’s policy, and then there were several sheets of notebook paper with his handwriting on them. He’d scratched out lots of words, sometimes whole paragraphs. In the margins, he’d written little notes to himself: “(sp.)” or “?” or “No.” He wrote in scratchy block letters.
His essay told of the Outward Bound program. “I had embarked on a sixty day rehabilitation program in the form of a wilderness survival course name of Outward Bound,” he had written.
THESIS: The wilderness has allowed for me to reach deep inside my inner self and grasp ahold of my morals and values that would set the standard and tell the story of the rest of my life.
I would go into our room when my brother was out and take the essay out of the drawer where he’d hidden it. He was working on it, off and on, all that month; I’d flip it open to discover new additions or deletions—whole paragraphs appearing as if overnight. I never saw him doing it.
The majority of the essay was a narrative, describing their trip. They had hiked almost two hundred miles, he said. “Up by sun and down by moon,” he wrote. There were obstacles they had to cross. Once, they had to climb down a hundred-foot cliff. “The repelling was very exciting but also scarey,” he’d written.
This was meant to teach us trust and confidence in ourselves as well as our teammates, they said. Well as I reached the peak of my climb I saw to my despair that the smallest fellow in the group was guiding my safety rope. Now he was no more than one hundred and ten pounds and I was tipping the scales at about two twenty five needless to say I was reluctant.
But they made it. I remember reading this passage several times; it seemed very vivid in my mind. In my imagination, I was in the place of the little guy holding the safety rope. I saw my brother hopping lightly, bit by bit, down the sheer face of the cliff to the ground below, as if he could fly, as if there were no gravity anymore.
“My experience with the Outward Bound program opened my eyes to such values as friendship, trust, responsibility and sharing,” Del wrote in his conclusion. “Without the understanding of these I would not exist as I do now but would probably instead be another statistic. With these values I will purely succeed. Without I would surely fail.”
Next to this he’d written “Sounds like bullshit (?)”
I don’t know that I recognized that distinct ache that I felt on reading this, or understood why his sudden distance, the silent, moody aura he trailed after him in those weeks should have affected me in such a way. Years later, I would recall that feeling—standing over my son’s crib, a dark shape leaning over him as he stirred with dreams—waiting at the window for the headlights of my wife’s car to turn into our driveway.
That sad, trembly feeling was a species of love—or at least a symptom of it.
I thought of this a long time after the fact. I loved my brother, I thought. Briefly.
None of this lasted. By the time he died, a year later, he’d worked his way back to his normal self, or a slightly modified, moodier version. Just like before, money had begun to disappear from my mother’s purse; my parents searched his room for drugs. He and my father had argued that morning about the friends he was hanging around with, about his wanting to take the car every night. Del claimed that he was dating a girl, said he only wanted to see a movie in town. He’d used that one before, often lying ridiculously when he was asked the next day about the plot of the film. I remember him telling my mother that the war film Apocalypse Now was set in the future, which I knew was not true from an article I’d read in the paper. I remember making some comment in reference to this as he was getting ready to go out, and he looked at me in that careful, hooded way, reminscent of the time when he was pretending I didn’t exist. “Eat shit and die, Stewart,” he murmured, without heat. Unfortunately, I believe that this was the last thing he ever said to me.
Afterwards, his friends said that he had seemed like he was in a good mood. They had all been in his car, my father’s car, driving up and down the main street in Scottsbluff. They poured a little rum into their cans of Coke, cruising from one end of town to the other, calling out the window at a carful of passing teenage girls, revving the engine at the stoplights. He wasn’t that drunk, they said.
I used to imagine that there was a specific moment when he realized that he was going to die. I don’t believe he knew it when he left our house, or even at the beginning of his car ride with his friends. If that were true, I have to assume that there would have been a sign, some gesture or expression, something one of us would have noticed. If it was planned, then why on that particular, insignificant day?