by Phoebe North
Mostly, she talked about the upcoming court case. She’d finally conceded to using Dad’s lawyer, who was giving them a fair price, at least, for such a high-profile crime. Don Muselmaan, she’d tell us, had said that it was important Jamie look sympathetic in the public eye. The defenses in other, similar cases—and there were only a few—had focused on how troubled the boys had been. How they had sought out adult influence, almost as if to say they’d been asking for it. My brother grunted at that, but the grimace that passed over his features was small and so quick as to almost be imperceptible. Mom didn’t notice. She just talked about how handsome Jamie would look in a new suit, and how maybe he should cut his sideburns off, too.
“Don has a new strategy,” she told us, spearing her fork into our kale salad. We’d had over two years of frozen dinners, and that’s when she remembered dinner at all. Now Mom had signed us up for a CSA and bought a new blender so that she could make the two of them green smoothies for breakfast. It was as if she were waking up, coming back to life now that Jamie had returned. “We’re hiring a media team. I don’t know why we didn’t sooner—I’ve been fielding calls left and right.”
It was true. She’d finally disconnected our house line because of how much it would ring through dinner.
“Don suggested a media special,” she continued. “One of those nightly news programs. He’s not sure which yet. But he had a title. The Lost Boy Returns.”
“Like Peter Pan?” I asked, and I glanced at Jamie. I thought of how my brother had once looked in my imagination, clutching a knife in his hand, his shoulders weighed down by furs. Like Peter Pan, yes. But better.
Jamie glanced at me. Another quick glance, one Mom would never catch. “Sounds good,” he said. “If it gets that fucker locked up, I’ll do whatever it takes.”
“Hey!” Mom said, wincing at his language, but my brother didn’t even bother shrugging. He was sixteen years old, more of a grown-up than we’d ever thought he would be. Mom cursed all the time. Why shouldn’t Jamie?
“What?” he said calmly, serving himself more salad. “You want him locked up, too, right?”
Mom scoffed. “Of course I do, Jamie,” she said. The nickname didn’t seem to bother him anymore. Not much did, except for what had happened.
“Great,” my brother said. “The Lost Boy Returns, it is.”
The special was to be filmed in the city, in an NBC studio in Manhattan. At one point, I was invited to participate. Muselmaan said it would be useful to show the impact on the entire family, but I didn’t like the idea of the camera staring at me, scrutinizing me. And what could I have possibly talked about? How I believed Jamie wasn’t dead, because he’d found a way into the fantasy world we’d invented when we were little kids? How I’d picked up my brother’s girlfriend in his absence, like she was some sort of hand-me-down? I still hadn’t told Jamie about any of that. So I begged off, claiming that I had to study for my upcoming midterms. It wasn’t entirely fabricated, but it wasn’t precisely honest, either. Still, nobody pushed. I think Mom and Jamie both knew that I was the last person who would help his likability in the public eye, even if Muselmaan couldn’t have known that. Jamie had cleaned himself up, but I was still who I was. Messy, angry, awkward, always saying the wrong thing. Just wrong.
Once it was decided, my mother declared that they would make a special trip out of it, just the two of them. Her and Jamie. They would take the train to the city, book a hotel room. Maybe they would show some family photos on the special, and they had me sign a release for it, just in case. I scribbled my name on the contract, glad to be left out. I was eager for a few days alone in our house to pretend that the whole enterprise didn’t exist.
For three days, I got silence, blissful silence, for the first time since Jamie came home. I felt guilty, how much of a relief it was. I finished a painting I’d been working on in my room, flowers drooping in a bowl of water. I studied. I listened to NPR. I texted Miranda photos of my lunch. I enjoyed my solitude, my loneliness, ignoring that strange tug I felt in the back of my mind. Somewhere, under hot lights, my brother was secretly miserable. I knew without knowing, just like I’d once known that he was alive. But I told myself it was imaginary. I’d been wrong about how he felt before, after all.
The special aired a few weeks later. Mom made big plans to order take-out food from the Indian place in Elting—butter chicken and garlic naan, Jamie’s favorite. She even bought us a bottle of sparkling cider.
I took one look at the sweating bottle on the counter and asked if I could go to Miranda’s house instead.
“The whole thing feels like none of my business,” I told Mom.
“What are you talking about?” she said. “It’s your brother’s life.”
But before I could respond, Jamie stepped into the kitchen. He picked up the bottle and looked at it, as if it contained something stronger than Martinelli’s, something worth studying.
“It’s okay with me,” he said. “Annie doesn’t have to watch it.”
We both turned to stare at him, but Jamie only stared back.
“What?” he said.
That night, I sat on Miranda’s floor, painting Warcraft figurines with her. We never played the game, but she liked the way that they looked on her bookshelf. It was funny, how much comfort I was taking in spending time with her again. Though we’d nearly stopped talking during the few passionate weeks of Vidya, we had picked up right where we left off—hanging out, doing nothing of much importance together.
Now she held one of the diminutive knights in front of her face. “You don’t want to watch it, even a little bit?” she asked.
I shook my head in a fevered sort of way, and then was quiet for a minute, watching her brushwork. Her hand was ridiculously steady. I was painting as much as I ever did at home—landscapes and still lifes now, nothing with people in it, nothing that told a story. Since Jamie had returned, I’d started to convince myself that my art was empty, meaningless. But no matter how carefully I tried to record real life, my strokes were sloppy, broad and expressive. Miranda was capable of a different kind of art. She made her own chain maille, tiny links she bent together by hand one by one.
“We don’t talk about it,” I said softly. “We never talk about it. I feel like if he wanted me to know . . . he would tell me, wouldn’t he?”
Miranda looked at me, and I could see her eyes refocus from the figurine onto my own face. It made her look a little off-kilter for a moment, like we were sitting in entirely different rooms, in entirely different worlds.
“Maybe,” she said. “Maybe it’s too hard to talk about.”
“It’s private,” I said, more firmly this time. “He’s doing this because the lawyer says he has to. But I think, given the option, he wouldn’t even talk about it to anyone. I mean, why would he?”
“Because . . . ,” she began. But then she shook her head, like she was shaking away a thought. “Yeah, you’re right.”
The corner of my mouth twitched up. It wasn’t exactly a smile, but it ended the conversation, anyway.
“Do you want a snack?” she asked. And if Miranda had been anyone else, she might have given me a meaningful look, or pressed me to talk about how it all felt. But I was already getting enough of that from my therapist and from Mom and from Dad and the world at large. Miranda was my best friend for a reason.
“Sure,” I said.
She nodded and hopped up off her bedroom floor. “Sure. Chips or pretzels?”
“Pretzels,” I said.
33
Jamie went to Dad’s apartment once and only once, about a month after he returned. When he saw the pullout sofa and the dim, cramped bookshelves and the moving boxes still in the corner, never fully unpacked, he rushed off to the bathroom and slammed the door behind him. Elijah, Dad, and I could hear the vomiting sounds from the other side of the wood, but it would be a few minutes before Dad went over and knocked his knuckles against the painted surface.
“You okay, kiddo?”
After a few more minutes of retching, and then the whoosh of a flush, Jamie cracked the door open. His face was waxy and bathed in sweat.
“I can’t stay here,” he said. “I’m sorry. I can’t. I can’t.”
Dad pressed his lips together, but what was he going to say? He only nodded.
The next week, for the first time in years, I didn’t go to my father’s apartment on a Saturday night. Instead, he and Elijah came to us. Mom was nervous. She skipped her Friday class and spent the whole night scrubbing our house from top to bottom, cleaning hair from behind the toilet, vacuuming the drapes.
“Come on, kids, you could help me out a little,” she shouted down the hall, though it was clear by kids she meant Annie. My brother’s domain was his room and only his room. His therapist had told Mom not to push him. He hadn’t had rules or chores in captivity. It would take time for him to learn to live like a normal person again.
It wasn’t something that needed a response. I turned up the music on my laptop, hoping to drown out everything that was happening around me.
At dinner, Dad’s smile was strained at the edges. He’d brought our mother flowers from ShopRite, carnations that stayed crisp and new in the winter air. Once, this kind of sharp, clear weather made me think about the Winter Watchers. Now I stared out the closed French doors in our dining room and dreamed of being anywhere else.
Still, Mom asked me to light the Shabbat candles and Dad said grace over the loaf of bread she’d made, the first time she’d turned on the breadmaker since before Jamie disappeared. It was all so very domestic.
They chattered and clanked forks against their plates and Dad kept pouring more wine and toasting to my brother’s return. Just a few weeks before Jamie had come back, he’d finally introduced me and Elijah to his girlfriend from church. Now there was no mention of Debbie. I should have felt happy, but it all felt fake. The only comfort, I told myself as I cleared the plates alone and the rest of them watched TV in the living room (Elijah wedged between my parents, Jamie sitting off from them on the floor, his expression unreadable to me) was that Dad wasn’t staying. He’d go back to his own space before the night was over, and I could pretend this all was an unpleasant dream.
Later, when I sat in my room sketching, Jamie’s shadow darkened my door for a moment. He seemed to watch me for a while, silent, thinking. I felt his presence there as much as I saw it. Once, I wouldn’t have said anything to him. I wouldn’t have needed to.
But now I turned. “What is it?”
My brother flinched, like my movement was too quick for him. “Do you think they’ll get back together?” he asked.
I shrugged. “Who knows,” I said. I flashed my hand through the air. “You know how the two of them are.”
My brother chewed on his lip, peeling the skin away. He was always doing stuff like that. Picking his skin, which was clearer now. Biting his cuticles. He’d done it before, too, but it was worse than ever. Mom said it was because of the trauma.
“But they fight all the time.”
I frowned. What Jamie was saying was true, sure. But it was also ancient history. They’d been broken up for two years, and while they sometimes bickered about custody agreements or lawyers, things were nothing like they used to be between them. Of course, Jamie didn’t know that. That happened sometimes with him. He’d say something, and I’d suddenly remember that he was missing whole huge chunks of time.
“That doesn’t mean they’re not crazy about each other,” I said, and for some reason, explaining it to Jamie made it all a little easier to digest. Maybe they would get back together. And even though I didn’t want it, there wasn’t much I could do about it, either. “Just because you hate someone’s guts doesn’t mean you don’t love them, too.”
Jamie was silent for a long moment. But then he made a strange noise. A snort of laughter, even though I didn’t mean it to be funny. “Sure,” he said, touching his hand to the door. “Whatever. Good night, Annie.”
“Good night,” I told him, trying not to frown, too, as I went back to my drawing.
34
Sometimes I wondered what it was like to be Jamie. Not the dark parts. I did my best to never let my mind touch that. But the rest of it. I wondered what it was like to sit around all day at home in his sweatpants, doing worksheets for school during what should have been his junior year. His tutors had him read Steinbeck novels, slim and important, and write five-paragraph essays summarizing them. No analysis. No thought. Once my brother had written poetry. Composed songs. Read philosophy. Now he watched TV and slept. My mother was good to him. Dad, when he was around, was kind. But he didn’t have a life, not really. Even Eli seemed to avoid him. I think it was too much for him, too, what had happened to Jamie.
As the months rolled on, I still didn’t know how to talk to him about it, about anything. Every time I tried, my heart would start to pound and I’d feel my fear take over. And I felt something else besides fear, something that was even harder to talk about. Anger. I’d look at him and feel resentment begin to squeeze my stomach. It terrified me, how angry I felt at him. I’d frantically tried to deny that anger, which I’d been carrying with me all this time, for years and years and years. I had no right to be angry. I knew that.
But I was anyway.
One night, when I was up late painting, I heard Jamie’s bedroom door quietly creak open—and then heard his weight on the stairs. I could hear the back door opening. He was going somewhere.
I should have let him go. He was sixteen now. For years, he’d been coming and going as he pleased, and his therapist had said we shouldn’t push him if he felt the need to wander. It had been a coping mechanism, she’d said, in a time of immense difficulty, and would likely be a comfort for him now. But for some reason, against my better judgment, against all practical advice, I put down my brush, stuffed my feet into my sneakers, and followed him out into the yard.
“Jamie,” I called, in a hushed voice.
He was nearly at the creek. Even in the darkness, I could see him rolling his eyes at me. “You’re supposed to be asleep,” he said.
I shrugged. “So are you.”
For a moment, my brother looked out toward the dark woods. Then he sighed. It was early spring; his breath fogged the air. He’d been home for six months, but we were strangers still.
“Fine,” he said. “Come on. But you need to promise me you won’t tell Mom.”
“Of course I won’t,” I told him. “When do I tell her anything?”
He was quiet. I wondered, for a moment, if he’d even ever realized how different my relationship with our mother was from his relationship with our mother. We’d grown up in the same family, but we might as well have lived on different planets.
In silence, we launched ourselves over the creek together. Of course, we didn’t turn around or slip into Gumlea. If I’d been wondering if it was officially dead for both of us, I had my answer.
But our bodies knew the way, without stumbling, with no map. Before we knew it, we had reached the pirate’s sloop—the picnic table that some other boys, long-grown, had graffitied. There was a small fire blazing in the circle of rocks before it. And sitting there on the table itself was Neal Harriman, wearing a denim jacket, with a collection of shining bottles near his hip. He must have been home from his fancy private school for spring break. He’d hardly changed. Short, with pale hair and a pinched face like a fox. He’d tried to grow a mustache to cover it, but in the dancing light of the fire, I recognized him immediately.
“Annie,” he said in surprise, and then he glanced at my brother, who only shrugged.
“She insisted on coming with me,” he said.
Jamie went over to the table and grabbed a bottle. The liquor inside was bright pink, the color of a melted strawberry Popsicle. He opened it and started to down it, though it was already half drunk.
Neal glanced at me, his lip curling. I tried to understand what my brother had seen in him over all these years. I trie
d to understand what my brother saw in him now. I came up empty.
“Yeah, but remember last time?” he said.
I felt anger spark inside me. But before I could say anything, my brother did.
“She was a kid then,” he said faintly, but he was looking at me like he wasn’t quite sure. At last, as if it prove it to himself, he offered me the bottle. I looked at it sweating in his hand. I was fifteen, and I’d smoked pot once, but I’d never been drunk before. Still, I felt the sudden, urgent need to prove that I belonged there, too. If not to Jamie, then at least to myself.
I went and grabbed the bottle, not breaking eye contact as I drank. It tasted like a juice box. Strawberry Hill, the name on the label said, which sounded like the name some kids might come up with. Like the name of someplace in Gumlea.
The wine sloshed around in my belly, warm and too sweet. As the alcohol worked its way through me, I watched Neal crouch before the fire, poking it.
“I can’t believe you still hang out with Neal,” I blurted. “He never even told the cops about—”
My brother cut me off before I could say Kevin Rapp-Palmer’s name.
“That’s between the two of us,” he said, his voice low and a little husky, like he was holding something in. A secret. Well, not much of one. It was the same thing I’d heard him say to Mom and the lawyer, that Neal Harriman wasn’t at fault, that he didn’t want him dragged into the whole mess. Mom hadn’t understood his loyalty. I hadn’t, either. Now Neal didn’t even turn to look at me. He was too occupied by the fire. I took another swig, felt my anger swell, then die. Neal’s fire sucked. The wood was wet and steaming. The flames were weak. Once, as a tiny child, I’d dreamed about the things that happened in the woods at night. I’d imagined teenaged parties like brightly painted bacchanals. Now it seemed impossibly ordinary. A poorly built fire, and a teenaged boy poking at it with a stick.