Meteorites

by Julie Paul

  So what’s that feeling he has, when he’s alone in his wood shop? A pulling sensation. A chill when he normally runs hot. Someone watching him.

  Is it her, wanting them to make up, like in that cheesy movie, Ghost?

  Likely, he’s just going a little crazy.

  Joel knows that Mike believes he was always Christina’s top choice, but it isn’t true. There was that day when the three of them were studying for math at their place, right after she and Mike started dating. Studying started by watching Three’s Company and other garbage on the two channels they got. Then Mike got called into work at the Chinese restaurant last minute, so that left Joel and Christina. He remembered their old agreement: if they were able to fool them, they could kiss each other’s girlfriends. There was no fooling Christina, obviously—the three of them had been friends for years—but Joel ignored that part of it.

  Video Hits came on, Madonna baring it all, and there they sat like old folks, covered up with Jean’s latest afghan.

  “You want some Quik?” he asked her, during a boring Depeche Mode video.

  She smiled at him. “Want what quick?” Always the wordsmith.

  He blushed. “Um. You know, chocolate milk.”

  “Sure,” she said. “Want some help?”

  “No, I got it.” He also had an instant erection.

  As Joel stirred the powder into the big glasses of milk, he made a deal with himself: if she took the glass with Bugs Bunny on it, he’d kiss her; if she took the plain one, he wouldn’t.

  Back in the living room, she was on the phone. “Be home around eight,” she was saying. “I’ll do the stalls then, Dad. Bye!”

  “Machine?” he asked.

  She nodded. “Luckily, or else I’d have to go home and help. Your parents are at work, right? And it’s okay if I stay like we planned? Mike said he could give me a ride home later.”

  “Dad doesn’t get home till sixish. Mom’s at a Tupperware conference in Toronto. And I can drive you.”

  “Hello, Bugsy.” She reached with her elegant hand to take the glass. “Thank you.”

  “No problem.” He was red again.

  Joel sat down in the same place as before, but there seemed to be less space; he had to put his arm behind her so he wouldn’t bump her glass of chocolate milk. He had to kiss her. A deal is a deal.

  They necked until they heard Bill’s car pull into the driveway, then scrambled to separate ends of the couch and pretended to be interested in the news.

  Joel doesn’t know whether he could have kept Christina from dying. But he returns to this moment on bad days, when he wishes he’d made more of a move, somehow, and kept her from getting more serious with Mike, who’d been poaching his girlfriends since middle school.

  Horndog. Douchebag.

  He’s still not ready to make up with the jerk.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  “What’s shaking, Joely-boy?” The woman behind the counter has flour on her forehead and an apron covered in smears of what Michael hopes is only chocolate. She gives him a once-over. “Who died?”

  “Hello,” he says. “And, actually, I’m Joel’s brother. Michael.”

  The woman’s jaw drops; he hasn’t seen that response in a decade.

  “No shit,” she says. “I mean, hello. Welcome. I’m Vi. Where are you coming from, son?”

  “Vancouver,” he says.

  She whistles. “That explains your get-up. I’ve never seen your brother out of jeans.”

  “You know him well, then,” Michael says. “I’m, well, I’m surprising him for a visit, and I want to bring some food, and so . . . ”

  “They get my cinnamon buns, mostly. Sometimes a chicken pot pie. Margo’s got her hands full with that little one.”

  “Lovely. I’ll take both.” Jean would be proud of him: never showing up empty-handed is one of her rules. Another is to never show up unannounced. He’s one for two.

  “Say hello to your brother,” Vi says. “And that little chocolate family of his.”

  Something he hasn’t heard much in a decade, either: Brother.

  He can’t quite believe how Joel’s settled down already, and with a wife such as this. His mother showed him their wedding photos a couple of years ago, just after she’d received them: they’d eloped in Algonquin Park although, to Michael, she looks like she’d be much more at home in a sparkling ballroom.

  “Quite the curls, eh?” his mother had said. “Her father’s Jamaican.”

  “She’s stunning,” he said. “Where’d he find her?”

  “She found him. Came to the lake to buy some chairs, out from Toronto.”

  “He’s still making those damned things?” Joel had started making wooden furniture when they were teens, Muskoka chairs for the cottagers around the lake and bookshelves for the locals, and from what Jean had told him, he’d moved on to more general carpentry.

  “Not sure,” she said. “But they got him a wife, so that’s something.”

  His paintings, so far, have yielded many women of varying ethnicities (none made of chocolate, Vi), although he’s learned not to lead with that question. But a wife? Or love? No sign of anything like that at all.

  Mike and Joel Schaefer, matching sons of Bill and Jean, insurance salesman and Tupperware lady, respectively, were once citizens in a cosmos of two, one in red, the other in blue. Five floorboards separated their beds until they could jump across the gap, bed to bed, cheering each time they made it.

  Joel and Mike, Mike and Joel. From one egg to one room in the uterus, to eighteen years in that bedroom in a small house at the bottom end of Ontario, in Jackson’s Point, beside Lake Simcoe, a gigantic, almost-Great Lake, Ice Fishing Capital of Canada, to this—a ten-year gap—how was that possible?

  Back then, life was simple and good, scrapes and bruises, blanket forts and fishing for poop in the toilet; card houses and wolf calls and waterskiing and complaining about chores. The good working-class life, with dinner in front of the TV on Friday night. Mike and Joel, Joel and Mike—special because they were the same. Everyone they met told them so, after saying they were lucky to have a “built-in best friend.” Sappy, but also true.

  When girls entered the picture, they found them cute, adorable, matchy-matchy, although Joel had a slightly wider mouth, and Mike’s brow furrowed more. Joel, shyer, walked with his head just a bit more stooped. Mike—it was just a fact, not a brag—had a little more luck with the girls. They sometimes switched T-shirts at the school dance to see if anyone would notice. They fooled people when Mike reminded Joel to stand up straighter.

  They got to know Christina in Grade 10, and over the next two years, in her Smiths T-shirts and long skirts, coming into town on the school bus from her farm, writing poetry in the back seat, reciting it from the top of picnic tables, she was their friend, nothing more.

  Christina, who seemed to burn through each day like she was being chased, a flurry of gestures and scarves and limbs, eyes shooting blue flames at whatever she focused on, and for a brief moment in time, it was him—still Mike then, not yet Michael Schaefer, artist.

  But Christina is dead now and has been for ten years. So why does she haunt him? He’s done the research into sensing spirits, something more acceptable to mention on the West Coast, and from what he can tell, those shadows he sees from his peripheral vision are possibly her. Ditto the sudden sinking feeling in his belly when everything otherwise is fine, or the sense that he’s got insects buzzing beneath his skin.

  Apparently, she’s trying to convey a message. He’d like her to stop it: he knows he messed up. But she’s the one who killed herself, months after the fire, even after he told her he’d keep on loving her, no matter what her face looked like. She’d seen his shocked expression, though, when she pulled back the scarf she’d been hiding beneath, the one and
only time he saw her after the fire.

  He’d like her to go, now, to rest in peace, so he can do the same. But if wishes were horses, as Jean used to say when he and Joel had circled half the Sears Wish Book for their Christmas lists, beggars would ride.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  Saturday mornings, Margo usually gets to stay in bed while Joel does Evie-care and breakfast, and she only comes out when she smells cinnamon or sausage. But today she’s getting up with Joel, even though Evie was awake half the night teething.

  “You’re not exhausted?” he asks.

  “My back is sore,” she says. It’s a lie. “It feels better when I’m moving.”

  “It wasn’t from me, I hope,” he says, pulling her to his chest. “Or maybe more of that would help?”

  She kisses him lightly on the lips. “Maybe later,” she says. “I’m thinking more about a hot shower.”

  The heat does nothing good for her hair or skin or the bags under her eyes—my bags have purses, her mother likes to say—but it’s the only place she can gather her thoughts, alone, and give her a few minutes in which she won’t be tempted to tell Joel that Michael is on his way.

  Gah! She’s so nervous. What will he think of her? She shouldn’t care, but she’s never met a brother-in-law before. She wants to impress him, and not embarrass Joel; she wants to know everything about him and what happened to drive them apart—all Joel has said is that Michael messed up, not only stealing a girl from him but worse, and it ended in suicide. What does that even mean, and will Michael tell her? She’s not sure she’s going to be able to keep her cool. Never mind her cool, what about Joel’s? He might just lose it when his brother walks through the door.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  On that Saturday afternoon, when Mike was at Christina’s barn, Joel was supposed to be studying. He took a joint out of Mike’s drawer, smelled it, felt its paper skin and the strands of plants inside. It was just plants. An herbal remedy. That was most likely why Christina wanted to try it; he knew she’d never touch a cigarette, not with all the crap they put in them. But herbs—she was into that sort of thing. She wore a crocheted bag around her neck, all the colours of the rainbow, filled with stones that were supposed to make her more creative. Once, she placed a stone in his hand.

  “Lapis lazuli,” she said.

  “Is that some kind of spell?”

  “No, silly. That’s the name of the stone.”

  The rock, bright blue, felt warm in his hands. Her warmth. It was the colour of her eyes condensed into solid form.

  He could have smoked it then, that slender joint: he had it between his lips. He could have put himself out of his misery and gotten a serious buzz going, so that when Michael came home after work, after being at Christina’s, after having sex with her, after getting high, he would have been the one feeling good.

  But what Joel did was return to his Chemistry 12 textbook, until the most terrible phone call of his life blasted through his concentration.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  Of course, Michael misses Joel—they shared a womb. They were best buds from the get-go.

  But after Christina died, everything changed. It was like he was seeing things on a screen, in pixels, as if all of life were filtered, divided into little segments, none of them including his twin.

  He took off for the West Coast, the farthest reach. The world he moved to was stacked boxes, apartments, little cubes of life, and when he wasn’t waiting tables to pay for it, he painted tiny boxes on huge canvases, dividing the space into smaller and smaller squares because it made him feel better. It was what he knew. They were manageable little objects, like rocks in a river: if he reached one, he was safe. He had to leave it, eventually, but he could move on to another.

  Day by day, canvas by canvas, he was able to keep going like that.

  Maybe he’d tapped into some kind of communal need because people started noticing his work; or maybe they just liked the pretty colours. Then, thanks to his mentor, Ron, he got a show in a big gallery, but he still felt like he was just surviving, doing what he had to do to keep himself moving forward.

  Before he started winning prizes and fellowships and bought this condo, far above the streets, he buried Mike and became Michael Schaefer and, like so many people in Vancouver, dug his roots into the sky.

  At the beginning of Grade 12, he and Christina started dating. In early October, she took him to Toronto to visit her aunt and they ended up at the AGO. He’d never been to an art gallery—he didn’t know that galleries were for anything other than selling stuff. But there they were, wandering past incredible work, just to look and feel.

  She introduced Michael to the Group of Seven first. He thought Lawren Harris’s white mountains, peeking from behind dark hills, looked like the abominable snowman from Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. When he told Christina this, she kissed him and called him a weirdo. Then they went their separate ways so she could write an assignment without distraction, and he ended up in the Henry Moore room.

  He walked around each of those giant women, reclining, sitting awkwardly, and seemed to recognize them. Maybe that was normal, recognizing someone in Moore’s work—the universal in the specific, all of that—but to Michael, they embodied his mother, Jean. Taller than most women, but bigger-boned and angular too, and like Moore’s reclining figures, leaning on one hand, she couldn’t fully relax.

  He loved them. Started imagining what it would be like to be famous like this, known for capturing someone’s essence in stone, or on canvas. It was the first hint of the strangest notion he’d ever had: he wanted to become an artist.

  On Thanksgiving Sunday, they smoked up in the hayloft at Christina’s farm. It was only the second time they’d done it, and after a few tokes each, they started making out. What was left of the joint, Michael set on a beam beside him. They were giddy, relaxed, totally turned on. Afterward, they both fell asleep, just for a little nap, and when his watch beeped its alarm, Christina didn’t stir.

  Before leaving, he had a couple more tokes to finish up, but when it started to burn his fingers, he dropped the tiny roach. He searched for it—nowhere to be found. After waiting another couple minutes to make sure everything was okay, he left Christina sleeping, more relaxed than he’d ever seen her, her face peaceful, aglow. He had to get to work on time, so he gave no more thought to the fallen butt. There was no smoke, no fire, nothing to worry about except being late for work.

  |||||||||||||||||||||

  From the bedroom, Joel hears a vehicle pull into the driveway, then, as he always does, checks from the window to see who’s at the wheel. What the fuck?

  Mike. His brother is getting out of a silver SUV with two white bakery boxes and a liquor store bag. In a grey blazer. On a Saturday. In June.

  Before he can stop her, Margo answers the door in her post-shower attire—just a t-shirt turban wrapping her wet hair above her silky peach kimono. She shrieks a welcome that will surely wake Evie from her late-morning nap.

  “Oh, my God! Michael! Come in! Come in!”

  Michael? His name is Mike.

  “Joel!” she yells up the stairs. “We’ve got a visitor!”

  What the hell is going on? She doesn’t sound surprised.

  “Joel, where are you?”

  He’s here, but all he wants to do is hide, or climb onto the roof and descend the trellis, make his way to his shop, or better yet, drive away.

  “Joel!”

  He can’t escape it. Joel descends the old creaking stairs, and sees Mike, standing in his hallway, as pale as in the photograph. Is he going to faint?

  “Hey,” Joel says.

  Margo’s lit up like she’s won the lottery. She knew. How could she not prepare him for this?

  “Long time, no see.” Mike sticks out his hand for a shake he doesn’
t want to return. His hand is cold, smooth—are his nails actually polished?

  “You went to Vi’s, I see.”

  “Just a little something. She thought I was you, going to a funeral.”

  “Ha!” Perfect. Now everyone in town would know about this.

  Evie starts wailing from upstairs, a sudden siren. Mike looks startled.

  “I’ll go,” Joel and Margo say at the same time.

  “No, I’ll go,” she says. “I’ve got to get dressed anyway.”

  She’s right about that.

  “I’ll give you the tour,” Joel says, defaulting to what he always does when visitors arrive. And why shouldn’t he show off his hundred-and-twenty-year-old house and all the renovations he’s done in a year? It’s not in any glossy magazine, and won’t win a huge award, but he’s proud of it. And Michael better be an appreciative audience.

  He is. He notices the craft, the details, the work Joel’s completed. Doesn’t overreact at the nasty counters and cupboards in the untouched kitchen—the next room on the reno list, once they can afford something better than laminate.

  “Check it out,” Joel says, pointing at the lozenge-shaped gilded frame on the hallway ceiling. “Apparently there was an artist going door-to-door, back in the day. There are a few specimens still intact.”

  The painting is a strange representation of a beaver that looks more like a cross between a jackrabbit and a cougar, around which the artist painted faux-marble tiles in grey and black. It’s sort of ugly, but it was part of what charmed him into buying this old house.

  Mike nods. “Impressive.”

  He’s still being polite. When will that groomed composure start to crack?

  Half an hour later, Mike’s standing on Joel’s back deck, laughing with his finally clothed wife, playing peek-a-boo with his daughter, and it’s Joel’s composure under threat. His muscles feel like they’re turning to bone, his hands forming tight fists he’s not sure he’ll be able to control if Mike touches Margo’s arm once more. And yet he’s making goddamned iced tea for them all to drink in the sun and pretend that everything is normal.