The God of War

by Marisa Silver

  I looked at the dresser, where the box full of Malcolm’s things sat. “Did I ever tell you about Mal’s treasures?” I said.

  “You mean, along with all the other stories of your past you’ve regaled me with?” she said, her sarcasm light and forgiving.

  I opened the lid. Inside lay a collection of rocks and sticks, an ace of diamonds, a golf tee, some coins, the plastic rings from a six-pack of soda, a bird feather. I couldn’t speak for a few minutes. I felt ruined by what I saw. And then I described every object inside the box to Margaret. I was careful to explain how heavy a rock felt in my hand, to describe the specifics of its contours. I rubbed the feather against my face the way I knew Malcolm must have. Margaret listened and asked questions, too: What kind of bird did I think the feather came from? Was the rock igneous or sedimentary? I knew she cared about the answers, and I was grateful to her for honoring the importance of these random items. I could never understand what Malcolm saw in the orphaned bits and pieces he collected or why they were meaningful to him. I knew they didn’t exactly explain or describe him. But I could believe he had made choices—this rock, not that one; this feather and not another—and that each object moved him in some way, and that he was capable of a kind of attachment, a very particular sort of love.

  MALCOLM’S ASHES WEIGH SO LITTLE, like those plants my mother once loved, which were bleached and baked to a near unearthly lightness. Logic would dictate that we accrue weight along with years, but this turns out to be false. I understand science. I believe in it too, mostly, although there are things science can’t easily explain. For instance: Why do some people go through life in groups, while others, like Malcolm, or Richard, or Kevin make their journeys alone? Or why does land root in your soul so that you feel you are not yourself when you are away from it? Do the qualities I see in this land around me, the equal parts of grace and despair, desolation and tenacity reflect something back to me that tells me who I am? Science has no answers for these questions. And although I have come to understand that my brother was born into the brain that steered him on his strange, foreshortened passage through life, and that a fall on a summer day so long ago did not determine who he became, there is also a part of me that knows that we drop each other and we pick each other up. We do it over and over again.

  A car drives up and parks at the edge of the beach. Angelo and his wife and child get out. Angelo is tall like his father and the only one of us who inherited our mother’s red hair and fair skin. His boy runs down the beach, and Angelo’s young wife, heavy with their second child, calls after him to be careful. Angelo raises a hand in greeting, and then my mother emerges from the car. She wears a simple shift and sandals. A rope of heavy stones hangs from her neck. Wooden bracelets circle her wrists. I wonder if she ever missed that gold cross, and if she did, what she imagined happened to it. She sees me, smiles and waves.

  I did call her from my motel room after I talked to Margaret. She answered the phone and said my name, as if she had been waiting for me. I drove to see her that night.

  She stayed in San Diego to be near Malcolm and to raise Angelo, who was, to her dismay, a city boy, enamored of noises and crowds. She took work at spas, and when that industry flourished so that there was barely a block in any reasonable neighborhood that didn’t boast some kind of establishment devoted to a new concept called “wellness,” she began her own. I still laugh to think of her running a business, no matter how small and homegrown hers is, and it is. She rents a tumble-down cottage in a neighborhood that was once marginal but now boasts gourmet food shops and doggy daycare. She painted and salvaged until the place took on a handmade, human quality that appeals to the kinds of people interested in her services. She pays her taxes and attends community board meetings. She lives above her business, and when I arrived that night she gave me a short tour of her spa rooms. They were typical and not much different from the rooms she worked in when I was young, except that I recognized her unique decorations—the walls and tabletops were festooned with her desert treasures.

  We climbed the stairs to her second floor apartment and sat across from each other at her kitchen table. Her hair has turned grey, but she has never cut it short, and it falls about her shoulders like a magician’s cape. Her face is finely wrinkled in a way that deepens her beauty. I was grateful for the mugs of tea that sent up a veil of steam between us. I did not know how to begin. I never told her the truth about what happened the day of Kevin’s death, and this information, held for so many years, has widened the distance between us. When I was younger, the secret felt like the necessary repository of my anger toward her, and I withheld the truth with all the self-righteous spite of any young man who defines himself in opposition to what he does not wish to become. That night, I was determined to tell her the simple truth: that Malcolm had shot Kevin and that I had carried that secret for thirty years, but that I no longer would or could. I had allowed it to shape me, to become the myth I based my life on, but that it was just that: a fairy story I told myself in order to survive my particular war. I was done with all that now.

  But as the steam cleared and I looked into her face, I said nothing. What would the truth do to us now? How would it change us? Would it open us up to regret and recrimination? Would it serve to separate us from each other forever? Staring at my mother, so lovely in her years, I did not want that.

  “I miss him already,” she said. “My sweet, dear Malcolm.”

  And so I said nothing. Her love for Malcolm was uncritical even to the end, and I believed that he deserved such devotion. I believe we all do, but it is the rare ones among us who are lucky enough to receive it. My brother was lucky. Sitting in that room, my hands around the warm mug, watching her eyes sparkle with barely restrained tears, I knew that I was lucky, too.

  “GRANDMA! LOOK!”

  Angelo’s son jumps up and down, and Laurel meets him at the shore, bending to inspect something the sea has brought in. When she stands, he reaches his arms up, and she lifts him onto her hip. They are easy with each other. He leans his head on her shoulder and takes a piece of her hair into his hands, rubbing the ends against his cheek. I can tell this is their habit, and that it comforts them both.

  Angelo meets me by the shoreline. He looks at the murky water, and I know from his expression that if he feels anything for this place that was never his home it is only the kind of disconnected interest we summon when our parents describe the haunts and follies of their childhoods. This place is not his history. What happened here is the story of strangers. Still, I wish I could make him see how it was when Malcolm was a boy and stood by this sea, how he crouched to study something no one else would take the time to notice, how he jumped up and down in excitement at a passing flock of birds. I wish I could make Angelo hear the pitch-perfect caw that Malcolm made, a sound so uncannily right that for one moment he became indistinguishable from the birds he loved so much.

  Laurel walks over to us and transfers her grandson to his father’s arms. She reaches up and touches my cheek. Her finger traces the line of my jaw. I remember her hands running over the spines of plants, feeling them as a way of knowing them. Her eyes travel down to the box in my hand. Her expression seizes as she registers what is inside.

  “I’m sorry,” I tell her, remembering the times she said these same words to me, as if my mistakes were her fault, and as if she understood the inevitable complications of my future but wanted, against all logic, to relieve me of their weight. I think I mean these words in the same way. I wonder if my heart is big enough to carry her burdens as she did mine.

  There are things we might say to each other about innocence and guilt, about grievous mistakes and their consequences, about the punishing ramifications of willful ignorance. But we are trapped by history. Knowledge cannot change who we were and what we did to each other.

  Was Malcolm guilty of murder? I’ve thought about this question nearly every day of my life. Did he act out of rage or love? Did he know he was taking one life to save anot
her? I ask myself, too, if I need answers to these questions. Are there any words that will tell me what I want to know?