“Are you the Brother?”
It was the first thing he had said in weeks, and though Engales couldn’t know this, he felt the weight of it, the newness of it: a voice that had been cooped up and preserved, until now. He looked to James for affirmation, or for something, but James just shrugged, his eyes also moist, his mouth pressed into a straight line. Engales realized that James had probably not understood what Julian had said—it was in Spanish—and that he was the only one who could. Because he was the brother. He was meant to be responsible now.
Suddenly everything became as clear as a freezing night sky. He was the brother. He was the brother who left the egg yolks to fry in the sun. He was the brother who left his sister at the tops of fire escapes, who wouldn’t swim out to her if she were caught in the waves at Mar del Plata, who left her to the spineless men and the kidnappers, while he fled toward high ground. He can’t save you, Engales had said to his sister about Pascal. But hadn’t he meant it about himself? He was the brother who couldn’t save his sister, and who would surely not be able to save her son.
He was the brother who left, just when he was supposed to stay.
His missing hand clenched and stung as he wheeled around to do what he had already done so many times before: beg New York City for an escape. Beg New York City for a chance in hell.
PORTRAIT OF THE MAN IN THE MIRROR
HAND: In the shop windows, you’re a blur when you run away. The streaky reflection of the swinging arm: only one. The other, without the pendulum of the hand, stays tighter at the side, its arc narrowed permanently. The shop windows reflect the cadence of your heart. There’s a beat missing, a lurching, a missing weight on one side, and you deserve this. You are an uneven man. A man who’s leaned so far to one side and then fallen, away from everything that ever loved you.
MOUTH: One, two, three cups of whiskey, four, five, Mexican beers, six, seven in the morning, and you can’t go home, oh no, you can’t go home yet, because this is as close as you’ll get to home in this city: the bar on Second Avenue with the neon clock in the corner that’s never told the right time, not ever in its life, not even when you were younger, and you’d just arrived, and time mattered not at all anyway; you were just a boy. Now, there’s your face, in the mirror behind the bar. It’s heavy, dark, ancient. It’s counting: an eyebrow twitch. One, two, three—he must be five or six years old by now, if your own clock is right, five years since you got that letter from your sister with her big news, five years since you’d refused to write back, five years lost and nothing gained, only a body full of alcohol and the sun’s coming up already and there’s your stupid face, all full of shame and that dumb mole, something you want to pry off with a bottle opener, to distract yourself from the pain with more of it.
ARM: Telemondo’s for cigarettes, and there’s Jean-Michel in the back of the store, buying the most expensive bottle of whatever he’s buying; he’s just had his first huge sale. Best to look away from the mirror of Jean-Michel, a mirror that had once reflected your own potential and now reflects your failure, your missing parts. Hold your arm behind you, so Jean-Michel doesn’t see. When he does see, try to leave. When he holds you back, let him. Let him pull your sleeve up. Let him give you the only gift he’s got: his goofy smile, so warm, then a scribble on what’s left of your arm. SAMO is dead, he writes, blowing a stray dreadlock from his face. Let him. Let him tell you with his goofy smile that the world has not ended. That you haven’t lost everything. That nothing is everything. That without things there are still more things. There are still the eyes of another human looking at you, seeing you. There is still writing on an arm. There are still things to take care of, things to be done, things to save. “Go get it,” he says. And you have to, and you will.
EYES: Because they were just like yours, weren’t they? The eyes of that little boy.
EPILOGUE
ONE HUNDRED PICTURES EVERY NIGHT
Julian can’t find his pen and therefore cannot fall asleep. It’s imaginary, he knows, but he also knows that knowing things doesn’t always help. For example, his mother knows everything. So why the heck isn’t she here?
This is the ceiling: red and blue lights, twisting, like a kaleidoscope he had tried out at the market back home. This is a kaleidoscope: you pick up the skinny pole and look into it and there will be a circle full of colored shapes that shift and spin when you move the pole around. His pen is hiding somewhere in his brain and his heart is clomping like a horse on the loose. His eyes are open as if toothpicks are holding them up.
This is the cat that Julian can hear crying outside: lost. Cats don’t sound lost unless they’re lost. He wishes there was a certain cry for boys to make when they were lost, but there isn’t.
This is who’s next to him on the bed: the Brother. It’s the Brother from his mother’s story, and Julian knows for sure because he did a quiz.
“If you’re really the Brother,” he had made sure to ask when the Brother came to pick him up that morning at James’s house, “what color is our door at home?” “Red,” the Brother had answered. Good. “If you’re the Brother, what’s my mom’s favorite food?” “Butter.” Good.
“You’ll be spending Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays with me,” the Brother had explained then, while the snow fell sadly behind him and on him, as if he didn’t matter. “Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays here.”
“But those are all the days,” Julian had said, standing in the doorway, watching one particular snowflake that had made a crash-landing into the Brother’s black hair. They’d learned the days in school that year: each day went with a color, until the week made a rainbow.
“Yes they are,” the Brother had said.
“What days does my mom have me?” Julian had said, though he feared he already knew the answer.
“No days,” the Brother had said. “For now, no days.”
Things his mother had not told him about the Brother: that he had a piece of pointy skin at the end of his arm that looked like a sea lion, that he had hairs on his chest, that he had a black spot on his face that might jump out at you, that he smelled like smoke, that he didn’t look very magical at all; he had too many hairs on his face.
Things his mother had not told him in general: that she would have him for no days.
Now he doesn’t want Tuesdays and Thursdays and Sundays. He doesn’t want Mondays and Wednesdays and Fridays and Saturdays, either. If his mother has no days, that’s what he wants: no days. He doesn’t want this whale’s back, heaving and black in front of him on the bed. The Brother in the bed with him is scary. He wants the Brother from the story.
This is the story: There were a brother and sister who loved each other as much as was humanly possible. The sister loved her little brother so much that every night, when he was asleep, she baked him a hundred cakes. The little brother thought the cakes just appeared there every morning, as if by magic, and though he loved them at first, he began to take them for granted. He stopped jumping for joy when he saw them. He stopped tasting every single one. He stopped grinning when he woke up to the smell of frosting.
At this part in the story, Julian would be panting with anticipation. He would always say the same thing. “But it was his sister!” he’d say. “It wasn’t magic, it was his sister!”
“Shhhhh,” his mother would say. “Let me finish the story. It was only when the little brother saw a fleck of batter on his sister’s face one morning that he knew it had been her. His own sister, staying up through the night to make him the most beautiful cakes. He couldn’t believe it. Meanwhile, his sister had become terribly sad, thinking her cakes were worthless.”
“And so he wanted to give her something back!” Julian would nearly shout.
“Quiet now,” his mother would say. “You’ll wake your dad. Yes, he wanted to do something for his sister in return, to show her how much he loved her back. So he did what he did best. He began to draw.”
“A hundred pictures every night!” Ju
lian would say in a loud whisper, his eyes wide.
“A hundred pictures every night,” she would say. “Pictures of all the people they knew. The butcher, the guy who owned Café Crocodile, the man who played the guitar in the park—everybody from around town, all their friends.”
“And did the sister like the drawings?”
“Yes, she did, very much. She loved them. She hung them up all over the house.”
“So why did the brother leave?”
“How do you know that the brother left? I haven’t gotten to that part of the story yet.”
“Because you told me the same story last night,” Julian would say, grinning and burying his head in the sheets.
“Well tonight is a different night,” his mother said. “What if I told you that the brother was still making pictures for his sister? Or that he never left at all?”
“Well, then, that would be a different story,” Julian said.
“It would be,” his mother said, with a wink.
“How would it end?”
“It wouldn’t have to end,” she said. “It would still be going. The brother would grow up to be a man, with a big voice. He was a magic man, you see, who could see into people’s heads and hearts. And he would find a wife who was also magical, and they’d have a magic child, move into the house next door to his sister, who also had a child. Their two children would learn how to make cakes and make pictures, and they would stay up all night, making things for each other and then calling each other with tin cans from their bedroom windows.”
“Tin cans?”
“Tin cans. With a string between them, to carry the vibrations, which turn into sound.”
“But that’s not the real story.”
“How do you know?”
“Because the sister is you!”
His mom would ruffle his hair and smile. “And how do you know so much, little man? How on earth do you know so much?”
“I just do know,” he would say, nestling his head in the place between her chest and her arm. And always: “If I draw one hundred pictures, can I be like the brother?”
“Sure,” his mother would say. “But you’ll have to do it in your head, because it’s time for sleep. You can use your imaginary pen. Take it to bed with you. Draw up anything you want to dream about, anything you need.”
Now: He wants to dream about her. He needs her. He needs her teakettle voice and her soft hair. He needs her cake smell and her lotion smell. He needs to go to the window and yell for her. But if he moves he might break the spell of the Brother’s sleep. Plus, it’s snowing out, and if he opened a window, some might get in.
A truck kabooms down the street outside, tossing Julian’s heart into the air. He has to find his pen. Should he wake the Brother up? Could he? Or would the Brother yell? Would the Brother have a mean face on?
Julian’s eyes land on something scary in the corner of the ceiling: something with wings, as big as a baby bird. It waits like an evil stain with two white eyes.
Wake him up, whispers the creature. Julian plugs his ears. He doesn’t want the creature to talk to him.
I said wake him up, pea brain! says the creature. Julian scrunches up his nose, sits up, looks straight at the creature, whispers: Okay! But be quiet or you’ll wake him up yourself!
With his littlest finger, Julian touches the Brother’s shoulder. The Brother doesn’t move. With his second littlest finger, he touches the Brother’s bicep. Nothing. With his third littlest finger, he touches the very tip of the Brother’s arm: the sea lion’s nose. Suddenly the Brother jolts up in bed, swings his head from side to side, and lets out a gruff yelp.
Julian scrambles off the bed and onto the floor. He peeks his head just up over the mattress.
“What the hell?” the Brother says, his eyes bobbing with sleep. There is his mother, right there in the lightest parts of the Brother’s eyes; what a relief.
“I mean, I’m sorry,” says the Brother. Eyes up a little bit, just enough to see the Brother wiping at his forehead with his one hand. His face is lit up from only one side, where the kaleidoscope is coming in, and Julian can see the little hairs coming out of his chin, like a bad cactus.
“What’s happening?” the Brother says. “Why are you waking me up?”
Julian stays put and stays silent. He wants to tell the Brother about the creature in the corner, but doesn’t think he’s allowed.
“Come back up here,” the Brother says, patting the mattress and yawning. “Come on. I won’t bite.”
Slowly, Julian crawls back up to the bed. The Brother tugs on the cord of the lamp and a big circle of light swallows the Brother’s side of the bed. Julian sticks his foot out into the light and wiggles his toes. Then he looks up at the creature, who he now sees looks like a brown butterfly.
“That’s Max the Moth,” the Brother says. “He’s harmless.”
Julian flashes his gaze away from Max and back to the Brother. He looks at the scary sea lion of the arm, its twisted nose.
“And this,” says the Brother, “is my messed-up arm.” He lifts the arm into the light and the sea lion’s face looks less scary. A cakey line of black blood runs over it. “Do you want to touch it?”
Julian moves closer on the bed, touches the tip of the animal with his little fingertips. He looks at the Brother for confirmation. “It’s okay,” the Brother says. “It doesn’t hurt.”
With the boy’s little fingers on his arm, Engales suddenly sees it differently. Like the hand is not a part of him but simply an object, something that exists in the world that he can observe and assess. He thinks of the Chinese woman’s sagging cheek, of Señor Romano’s massive stomach. He thinks of the little wart that poked out of Lucy’s armpit, of the constellation of scars she had under her chin, from when she fell into a tree branch as a kid. For the first time since the accident, his own appendage, with its hideous scar, does not frighten him. Suddenly it’s like all the other things he’s ever found interesting. It’s a scratch.
“Pretty ugly, huh?” the Brother says.
“Yeah,” says Julian. “Looks like a sea lion face.”
Engales laughs a little. “Now tell me,” says the brother. “You can’t sleep?”
Julian shakes his head.
“I know how you feel,” the Brother says. “I couldn’t sleep when I was a kid, either. Too much fun stuff to think about.”
“And scary stuff,” Julian says.
“And scary stuff,” the Brother says.
With this, the Brother reaches for a bottle on the floor. Julian watches the arm without a hand as it raises into the air while he turns, like an airplane’s wing. The Brother drinks from the bottle and the room smells bad.
“I couldn’t find my pen,” Julian says, in his smallest voice.
“Your pen?”
“Yes.”
“Why do you want a pen in the middle of the night?”
“It’s imaginary.”
“Why do you want an imaginary pen in the middle of the night?”
“To draw a hundred pictures.”
“You’re a weird kid, you know that? Did your mother ever tell you you were a weird kid?”
Julian looks down at his hands.
“And why would you do that? Draw a hundred pictures?”
“It’s what you do when you want someone to know you love them more than the rest of the things in the world combined.”
Engales chuckles. The boy’s eyes are so large and intense, and his little voice so serious, that the whole thing seems almost comical. But then there is Franca again, living in the little wrinkle between the boy’s eyes: so serious, just like his sister.
“I see,” Engales says. He scans the room. Tacked on the wall by the bed are two copies of the Jacob Rey flier, the one he’d gotten from the bearded man on the morning of the accident. Lucy must have tacked them up. But why? And why are there two? Engales pulls one down and flips it over, hands it to Julian. “There’s some paper,” he says. “Let’s see if
I have a pen.”
While Engales searches for a pen, Julian flips the paper back over, looks at the picture of the little boy. “Who’s this guy?” he says.
“It’s a boy who’s missing,” Engales says distractedly, as he rummages unsuccessfully. No pen.
“If you can believe it, I don’t have a pen, Julian. You know I’m not that good of a grown-up yet. But I have something else probably.”
“But why is he missing?” Julian says.
Engales pushes himself up off the bed and gets to searching beneath it. The light doesn’t reach underneath, so there is an expanse of black, probably a few mice, all his painting supplies. He feels the whiskey course through him as he paws the floor with his one hand.
“Because no one can find him. Here. Here are my old paints.”
He plops the case that Señor Romano had given him so long ago onto the bed and a smooth wave of nostalgia breaks within him. He sets the case on the bed, opens its little gold lock.
“But is anybody going to find him, though?” asks Julian. His eyebrows scrunch in a pointy state of worry.
“Yes, someone is going to find him. In the meantime, you can draw on his back. Now look, you can use this brush here.”
Engales pulls out a skinny red paintbrush and a tube of yellow paint. He sees Señor Romano’s big face, his paisley tie, his wide, kind mouth. He is a boy again, sitting on the floor of his dead parents’ room, painting the wrinkle in his sister’s forehead over and over. Hey, pea brain, she’d say. Do you need to do all the bad parts of my face?
They’re not the bad parts, he wants to say now. He wants to say other things, too. He wants to say everything.
He wants to tell Franca what happened to him at the gallery on the night of James’s show: how his body had betrayed him, how he had not meant to leave Julian, but how once he had left he could not undo it, the leaving was part of him, something engrained in his body. He wants to tell her what happened at Telemondo’s, how Jean-Michel had made him rethink everything, made him see there were still things to be saved. He wants to tell Franca everything, everything she’s missed.
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