by Paula Guran
“Stay single,” I told him, raising my glass. “These are your good years.”
He came back to me, his fingers circling his own mug.
What he didn’t say, what he didn’t ask, was How would I know this gospel I was preaching?
Big brothers are required to say certain things, though. To give advice, whether it’s from experience or from a book of celebrity interviews that now has a comprehensive index.
“You going to miss him?” Daniel said then, watching my eyes for the lie.
“He’s Dad,” I said, taking another long drink.
“But still.”
Behind me a dart struck home, and the redhead tittered.
“I miss him for Mom,” I said.
“Yeah,” Daniel said, nodding like this was true. Like this was something he hadn’t thought of.
“I saw you that night,” I said then, trying to spring it on him. “Did you ever know?”
I’d been saving it for more than half my life.
Daniel looked to me, his head turned sideways, like for clarification.
“Night of the Possum,” I said, in our family way.
“Oh, yeah,” Daniel said. “The possum. Man. I’d nearly forgotten her.”
Until just that exact moment, I’d never once thought of that possum as having a sex. But of course it had been a mom. It had had babies. Of course.
Her.
The way he said it was so personal, though. So intimate.
“What did you see?” he said, setting his mug down after touching the beer to his lips again. He wasn’t drinking it, I didn’t think. He was just doing what I did. He was fitting in. He was looking like one of us.
He wasn’t, though.
Not even close.
According to Daniel, he’d been out to Janine’s grave in private in the weeks since her funeral—a behavior learned from Mom and Dad, he claimed, from following them on the sly, making their little pilgrimage of grief before dinner two or three times a week, if it was just a casserole cooking. He’d been there, sure, but never with a shovel. Never to dig that little cardboard coffin up. What did I think he was, a ghoul? Can a kindergartner even be a ghoul?
“That’s what I’m saying,” I told him, a beer deeper into this night of nights. “You were just, like, curious, I think. As to what we’d actually buried.”
“Janine,” he said.
I stared at him about this, waiting for him to see it.
I’m an indexer, Daniel an electrical engineer, but still, we’d both figured out long ago that what happens with Mom’s kind of miscarriage is that the body either reabsorbs the fetus or the body chunks it up, delivers it bit by bit, to be assembled never.
Not pleasant to think about, but the human body’s crawly and gross when you look too close.
Each of us figuring that out about Janine, it was probably why we’d gone into comparatively sterile work settings: desks, drafting tables.
Nothing with blood.
“It would have messed me up, though, right?” Daniel said, touching that warm beer to his lips again. “Given me a unique perspective on—on life.”
I took a real drink, waited for him to say the rest.
I didn’t want to disturb this moment.
He was watching the redhead behind me again, talking to the two girls she was with. It was like he was taking a series of still shots with his mind. With his heart.
The reason he was dismissing my question about girls was because girls were all there was for him. I could tell by the way he watched her. But it would cruel for him to flaunt it in front of his big brother. In front of his practically celibate big brother.
“If I’d dug her up like you say, I mean,” Daniel said, coming back to me for a moment. Holding my eyes with his, probably so he could gauge how I was taking this: as hypothetical, or as confession.
“You did dig her up,” I said. “That’s why you had that shovel. For the possum.”
“It was right there on the porch,” Daniel said, his voice falling into that little-brother whine I hated. “I was on my way back from the bathroom and I heard you, came to see. The door was open behind you, man. The shovel was right there where Dad left it. It’s where he always left it, for snakes. Remember?”
I studied the grain of the table top, trying to track this version.
Mom had had an encounter with a king snake. That little sharpshooter shovel did have a handle at top, perfect for holding the shovel blade steady over a snake’s head.
But I’d seen.
“So, if you’d dug her up,” I finally said. Because there had to be some ground he would cede.
Daniel pushed air out his nose in a sort of one-blow laugh, a version of the way Dad used to dismiss our pleas for money or keys or permission, and said, “Then . . . she would have been dug up?”
“We should go out there,” I told him.
He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “There wouldn’t be anything,” he said. “Not after all these years. Maybe an eyeball. Those are hard plastic, right?”
“You’re talking about Janine,” I said.
“We’re talking about a doll,” Daniel said. Obviously. “And, say we go out there, and that doll’s still there,” Daniel said, leaning over his beer. “Would that somehow prove that I dug up the . . . the surrogate of Janine, and then put her back exactly as she’d been?”
He was right.
“Or it would prove that nobody’d ever dug her up at all,” he said, lifting his beer and setting it down, for emphasis.
“I thought—” I said then, looking behind to the group of college girls as well, “I guess I just thought that . . . you were a kid, man. I thought that, that you might really think that stupid doll was Janine. Whether you dug her up or not.”
“It. Whether I dug it up or not.”
“I thought you’d think that that was what Mom had had inside her all along. That, I don’t know, she would have grown up into a mannequin or something. That everybody was always walking around with these dolls lodged in them, waiting to get out.”
“The women at least,” Daniel added, in his playing-along voice.
“It’s your theory,” I said. “Or, I mean, it would have been.”
Daniel wasn’t watching the college girls anymore. Just me.
“I was five,” he said, finally. “Not stupid. But thanks, big brother.”
I nodded like I deserved that, and kept nodding, drank another beer, talked about nothing, and left him there with the college girls, didn’t talk to him for two years, I think it was. And that was just for Mom’s funeral.
Her granite headstone came in two months later.
Carved into it was that she’d been mother to three beautiful children.
I ran my fingers over the jagged valleys of those letters, and watched cars pass on Route 2.
“Guess you can die of being alone,” Daniel had said to me earlier that day, about Mom.
Or, not about Mom, but because of Mom.
He was talking about me, though.
I was becoming the male version of a spinster.
It can happen when you grow up without enough light.
Ask anybody.
For the next year and a half or two years, Daniel was a ghost. He lived in the city, I even knew where, but the life he led—it wasn’t even a mystery to me, really. I assumed it would be a follow-through of who he’d been before. And I was happy for him. One of us deserved that.
I was out at the farm, sleeping in the same bedroom I’d slept in as a boy.
Someday I’d move into Mom and Dad’s room, I told myself. Someday.
The lacy drapes in Janine’s room were so fragile now that touching them made them crumble. Nearly three decades of sunsets can do that.
At night, crossing to my desk for another round of pages, I would find myself watching the window over the kitchen sink. For fireflies. For Janine. She never came, though. She’d never even been born. Finally, as I’d known all along was going to
happen, I walked out into the trees with a new shovel, to settle this argument.
Our big tree was the same as it had always been. In tree-years, the intervening decades hadn’t even been a blink.
The grave mound was long gone, of course. Now there were beer bottles and old magazines scattered around, meaning teenagers had discovered our idyllic spot. The models in the magazines were wearing clothes from years ago, staring up at me from the past.
I pushed the blade of the shovel into the ground, leaned over it, gave it my meager weight and dug deeper than my dad had, just to be sure.
Nothing.
That night I dug two holes.
The next night, three.
On the fourth night, angry, I raised the shovel before me formally, like a cross I was about to plant once and for all, and sliced down through a long slender root. I closed my eyes, sure this had been the tap root. That this tree had lived two hundred years just to have me kill it by accident. Kill it to settle a debate that was only happening in my head.
If it had been the taproot, and if my dim recollection that this was a good way to kill a tree was accurate, it would be a week or more before the leaves wilted at the edges, anyway.
I didn’t know if I could force myself to watch. Meaning this tree was either going to be alive or dead to me for the next few decades. When I’d think about it, the picture of it in my mind would shudder between possibilities, and that clutch in my gut would either be guilt or relief. Either absolution or condemnation.
And Daniel was right: the waxy cardboard box, it had long since been reclaimed. I kept hoping for at least a rusted staple to prove the burial, the coffin, the funeral we’d all been complicit in staging, but even staples would have turned back to earth, this long after.
It was about this time that something started going wrong with my stomach. With my digestion. The doctor my plan allowed told me it was nerves, it was stress, that I would push through, get better. Not to worry. Then he clapped my shoulder, guided me back out into the daylight of the city.
I stood in the parking lot by my car for longer than the attendant understood. He watched me the whole way past his little guard booth, perhaps trying to gauge for himself the news I’d just received. It would be a game you would come up with just to stay sane, sitting in that guard booth day after day.
I was dying, I didn’t tell him.
It was that house. Living there, it was killing me the same way it had Dad, the same way it had Mom. Because I had no real connections to the world, no fibers or tendrils reaching out from me, connecting me to people, the world was letting me go. Letting me slip through. Maybe it was even mercy.
And the house was the mechanism. My stomach had been fine before, my digestion nothing I’d ever had to think about.
Radon, lead paint, asbestos, contaminated water, treated lumber sighing its treatment back out: it could be anything poisoning me.
I had to warn Daniel. Sell the house after my funeral, I would tell him. After I’m gone, get rid of it. Don’t keep it because of Janine. She was never even real, man. And she’s not there anymore, either. I looked. I looked and I looked. She’s gone. And it’s for the best.
Driving to the address I had lodged in my head like a tumor, the townhouse listed under Daniel’s name for years in our shared legal documents and invoices, I indexed in my head the talk I was going to give him. It made it more real, having an index. Being able to turn to this page for that part, another page for a different part.
It calmed me, kept me between the lines the whole way over.
I parked behind his garage, blocking him in if he was there—the visitor slots were all taken—knocked on his door. No answer. I didn’t knock again, just sat on his patio and studied the sides of my hands, my stomach groaning in its new way. After twenty or thirty minutes, the super or maintenance man came by, greeted me by Daniel’s name.
“Brother,” I corrected, stopping him, waving off the apology already coming together on his face.
“Oh, yeah,” the super or maintenance man said, close enough now to see. “Mr. Robbins not home yet?”
“Guess not,” I said. “I can wait. He didn’t know I was coming by. Kind of a surprise reunion.”
“Here,” the maintenance man said, and stepped past, and, just on the authority of family resemblance, opened the door with the master key, pushed it open before me as if to prove this was really happening.
It was an indication of how little of a threat I looked to be. An indication of how frail I must appear, that sitting on patio furniture in the sunlight could be considered cruel, could be something he would want to save me from.
“You can die of being alone,” I said to myself, once I had Daniel’s door pulled shut behind me.
Daniel’s place was much as I guess I’d imagined it: black-and-white prints bought as a set—some national park, and the sky above it—a sectional leather couch, a large television set rimed with dust. An immaculate kitchen. Ice-cold refrigerated air.
I called Daniel’s name just to be sure.
Nothing.
I settled into the couch, couldn’t figure out his remote control.
I felt like an intruder. Like one of those people who break into vacation homes and move through them like ghosts, running their palms over the statuettes, over the worn arms of the dining room chairs.
I almost left, to do this right, to call him, arrange a proper visit.
For all I knew, when he came home, there would a girl under his arm, fresh from happy hour, him having to guide her shoulders so she could find the couch. So she could find the couch occupied by her date’s pale reflection.
I stood, breathing harder than made sense for somebody alone in a room, and told myself just the bathroom, and that I was to leave it exactly as it was, no splashes, no drops, no towels hung obviously crooked, no smudges on the mirror. And then I would leave.
Except, on the back of the toilet was a mason jar, one of those kinds with the lids that have wire cages on them, to trap all the air. Behind the thick glass was what I assumed to be potpourri, or some sort of collection of dried moss strands. I picked it up gingerly, turned it to the side.
It was hair. Long winds of dry hair.
I rolled the jar in my hand, studying it. The hair was in sedimentary layers. Like a curio from a gift shop.
I shook the jar timidly. All the hair stayed the same. And it really was hair. I set it down, zipped up, and was going to leave it there, had told myself it was the only sensible thing to do. It wasn’t sensible to interrogate stranger’s decorations. And that’s what my brother was, by now, a stranger.
Still. I came back to the jar, tried to twist the top off to smell—this had to be something decorative, something all other single men knew about as a matter of course—but the lever had rusted shut, from the steam of a thousand showers.
“Good,” I said out loud. This wasn’t my business anyway. This wasn’t my life.
When I saw the metallic red hair a few layers up from the bottom, though, my fingers opened of their own accord.
The jar shattered on the side of the toilet, the hair unwinding on the tile floor, taking up the space of a human head, and still writhing, looking for its eventual shape.
I could still hear that red head’s dart sucking into the dartboard. Could still see her standing at the line painted onto the floor of that bar. But I couldn’t see the rest of her life.
She hadn’t been the first, and she hadn’t been the last.
The way I made it make sense was that Daniel had become a hair stylist instead of an electrical engineer. That, when he’d hit thirty, he’d changed professions, gone with his heart instead of a paycheck. He got more interested in the people in the crosswalk than in the traffic cueing up at the lights.
Daniel who was just as indifferent with his wardrobe and appearance as I’d always been. He’d be no better a hair stylist than I would.
Still, this couldn’t be what it seemed.
I felt my way
out of the bathroom, made myself walk not into his bedroom—smelling where he slept would be too intimate—and not back down the stairs like I’d promised myself, but to the only other door on this floor I hadn’t been through. The only door that was closed.
I told myself I was just going to reach in, turn the light on in there long enough to catalog it as storage or living space—I might need to stay here one night someday, brother—but then, the door open just enough for my forearm, my hand patting the wall for a light switch, something scurried behind me.
I turned, didn’t catch it.
The sense the sound left in my head, though, it was an armadillo, somehow.
No: a possum.
I clutched the door frame, my heart slapping the inside walls of my chest, a sweet, grainy smell assaulted the inside of my head, and looked into what was neither living space nor storage, exactly.
This was an operating room.
On the table, tied down at all four corners, was the latest woman.
All Daniel’s attention had been focused on her stomach.
He’d been looking for something, I could tell.
Above the table, on the ceiling, was a large mirror. Meaning the girl had been alive when this started.
I shivered, hugged my arms to my side, and felt my chin about to tremble.
On one of the flaps of skin that had been folded back from her middle, there was still a black line.
Daniel was drawing that baby shape on the body before he cut in. And he was cutting in to free the doll, the doll he knew had to be there, the doll Mom and Dad had practically promised was going to be there.
Janine was still whispering to him.
I shook my head no, no, please, and when I turned to leave, there they were on the wall. All the dolls he’d—not found, that was impossible, that was wrong.
The dolls he’d bought and salvaged and sneaked home. The dolls that completed the ritual he’d learned at five years old.
They were all wired to a pegboard, their smooth plastic bodies covering nearly every hole, and the pegboard was the whole wall, by now. This was the work of years. This was a lifetime.