by Phoebe North
I was still staring at myself in that bathroom mirror, but in the strange light, and in light of my tiredness, it seemed like my flesh was almost starting to melt off. I could see the bones beneath my skin, the sinuses empty now—no baby teeth.
“That’s not totally true,” I told him. Thinking, Still haven’t found a way to tell my girlfriend about you yet. “Anyway, it never seemed like there was much choice for me. I’m an open book, more or less. And you’re . . . I don’t know. You’re a chameleon.”
“Shape-shifter,” he said, and let out a ragged laugh. “I can’t—I just could never figure out how you weren’t terrified to let the other kids and Mom and Dad and Gram and Poppy and everyone know how weird you are.”
I winced. My brother wasn’t wrong about that, in a way. But it wasn’t something simple—wasn’t something I was really proud of. Because it had made my life harder in a thousand different ways. With kids like Nina. With Vidya. Even with Jamie.
“Of course I was terrified,” I said. “I’m always terrified.”
A long pause. A laugh. “Really?”
I glanced toward the closed bathroom door, thinking of the beautiful girl waiting there, and everything I had not told her. Everything I would not tell her, until I was forced. It was too big, too scary. A dragon who could eat you whole and spit you out again.
“Really,” I said. “Why do you think I always told so many fucked-up stories as a kid?”
“Because you were talented,” he said, at the same time I said, “Because I was scared.”
A laugh, mutual, but joyless. And then a strange, awkward silence stretching out after.
“What was your fight about, anyway?” I asked him at last.
Jamie got quiet for a long moment. When he answered, his voice was even lower than before. “Our future,” he said. “She wants to get married. I told her I can’t yet. I know I can’t. Not until I clear things up with Dad.”
“Dad?” I asked, feeling the deep crease between my eyebrows.
“I’ve been trying to call him,” he said. “But I can’t bring myself to do it. I sit there staring at the phone for hours but I just can’t do it. She thinks I’m hiding something from her. Another woman, I think. But I told her that’s not it. It’s Dad. If I can’t even tell him who I really am, how can I fucking marry her?”
He was rambling, practically incomprehensible. “What are you talking about?” I finally asked. But when he answered, something had shifted in his voice. His tone was flat. Dead.
“Nothing,” he said. “It’s nothing.” He was shutting down again. Shutting me out. “Okay. I gotta go. Shelley just came home.”
“Okay,” I told him. There was a long silence, one where other siblings might tell each other that they loved one another. “Good night.”
“You too,” my brother said, and I hoped we both knew what the other meant.
45
Having Court beside me changed that February, and the cold weeks of March that marched on after. It could have been bleak and endless, white snow dunes piling up beside the dorm and then turning gray, the steam heat clicking in my empty bedroom like old bones. Instead, she was my fire, my internal heat. We hid in the library together, trading books. We flirted at the grocery store, making old women roll their eyes. Alone in my dorm together, she told me I could draw her so long as I made something worthwhile out of it. Then she twisted her long, limber body into positions that were absurd. When the timer on her phone went off, she came over to me, tucking her chin against my shoulder, and peered at what I’d done.
She challenged me. She told me my art was still missing something. “Your voice,” she said, and I felt a fistful of tears rise in my throat then because I knew it was true. But I didn’t know how to fix it. The words had always been Jamie’s, or at least that’s what I’d assumed when I was little. I didn’t know how to untangle my story from his. I didn’t know how to make my words mine.
For years, I’d been running away from him. And I told myself that he’d been running, too—from school, from our parents, from our previous lives. Isn’t that what he’d told me that day on the motorcycle? That he just needed to keep moving. Maybe it was true, but I’d begun to suspect it was only a half-truth.
In March, just a fortnight before spring break, a boy by the name of Dylan Martin was found after being forced to live in a storage shed for three months. Dad called to tell me that Jamie was going to be on 20/20 to talk about what happened, his trauma and everything after.
“You should watch,” he told me, though the tone of his voice suggested that he knew I wouldn’t. But this time, I surprised myself, calling Court in the middle of the night the night before the special aired.
“I don’t want to have phone sex,” she whined, and I laughed through tears, because I’d been crying, thinking about my brother and everything he had been through and how I hadn’t been there for him. I could hear her sit up in bed.
“Oh G-d,” she said. “What’s wrong?”
“I don’t have a TV,” I told her, and I knew that this would be a turning point and yet still found myself saying it anyway. After this, she would know the whole story, every ugly bit. “My brother’s going to be on TV tomorrow and I don’t even own one and I can’t watch him.”
“On TV?” There was a stretch of silent surprise. I didn’t know how to explain to her that my produce manager brother was going to be on TV, that he’d been on TV before, so I just fell silent. After a beat, Court sighed. “Annie, Annie,” she said. “My TV is your TV. Come over, baby.”
So I did. The next morning I bundled myself up against the cold, wearing a scratchy hat and a scarf that I think had been Eli’s before I stole it away for school, and Court picked me up outside the dorms. She took me back to her place, and she made us grilled cheese and canned tomato soup. It was the best thing I’d ever eaten, gooey and buttery and acidic and rich, and we bundled up together in her bed, the space heater pointed right at us, and watched my brother, small and strange on her flat screen.
“He looks nothing like you,” she said, and it was true. At some point our features had diverged and now his face was more like Dad’s, soft features and oddly pretty lips, whereas I was more like Mom these days with her high cheekbones and strong nose. It felt like a lifetime ago now that we used to feel like twins.
It didn’t help that his hair had been slicked down with gel and they’d put a polo shirt on him. That had to be Dad’s doing. The James M. [Redacted] Foundation was much more successful in their fundraising efforts when my brother was presented as a good Christian boy, untouched by the darkness of his experiences.
Still, the darkness was there. Inherent. My brother was talking about how he’d lived in that little apartment with that little man, explaining that he’d presented himself as a son or a brother or a nephew to anyone who would have asked.
“But you weren’t,” said the interviewer, the lines of her face blurred by the camera’s lens. “You were lovers.”
My brother didn’t hide his grimace. “We were never lovers,” he said sternly. “There was absolutely nothing romantic about what happened between us. He was my rapist,” my brother said. “He tortured me. He said he would hurt my family.”
The interviewer paused, nodding. You could see that she knew she’d made a miscalculation. You couldn’t just call someone’s convicted rapist their lover—but the woman who was interviewing him wasn’t quite ready to admit she was wrong.
“James, some questions have been raised about why you didn’t go for help sooner—”
The corners of my brother’s mouth were downturned. These were the questions he was always asked, the questions that everyone wanted answers to. Why hadn’t he just left? Surely he could have done something, helped himself, walked away? He was a victim of course, and they always acknowledged that, but there was always hesitation in the way they talked about it. Shouldn’t he have been a victim in the right way? Weren’t heroes supposed to be faster, better, and braver, too?
“I was afraid,” my brother said swiftly. “I was absolutely terrified. Until you’ve lived through that, you can’t understand what it’s like.” But then I heard him say something strange: “In a situation like that, you have to carve out your own freedoms.”
The interviewer didn’t ask what Jamie meant by that. But I couldn’t help but circle around the idea. Your own freedoms. Like the bike was to him now. Like Gumlea once had been for both of us. What had been his freedom in captivity?
The woman interviewing him didn’t seem to wonder. Instead, she leaned forward and fixed her hand, which looked older than her face, on my brother’s hand.
“James, do you have any thoughts you’d like to share with Dylan about how to move on from an experience like this?”
“Sure,” he said. “You need family and you need faith. A community. I’m building my own family now. I just proposed to my girlfriend. She said yes.”
My brother flushed at sharing this news, which was news to me. Or was it? I thought about our late-night phone call. Jamie’s voice, shaking, when he told me they’d been discussing their future together. I guess Jamie had worked out whatever it was he’d wanted to talk to our father about. Or else decided it didn’t really matter. That seemed closer, truer. Our family wasn’t very good at catharsis.
“You just have to look ahead,” my brother continued. “Keep moving forward. Never back.”
“Thank you, James,” said the interviewer.
Court turned the television off. “Holy shit,” she said, and the silence settled in thick between us. For a moment, I was terrified that it would swallow us up, the kind of silence that had enveloped me ever since Jamie had returned. But it didn’t. After only a moment, the silence dissipated.
“Are you okay?” she asked me. “What am I saying? Of course you’re not. That’s so fucked up. I’m so sorry.” When I didn’t answer, she tucked me under her arms and drew me close. She ran her fingers through my hair.
“You’ve been carrying this for a long time, haven’t you?” she asked. I nodded, pressing my damp face to her collarbones. Even in that moment, tucked inside her arms, I worried it was too much for her. Too heavy. Too big. Too weird.
But she just held me.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I’m so sorry it happened to you.”
Not to Jamie. To me. It had happened to me, too, I realized. And Court saw it, and saw how it hurt, even now.
“We were so close as kids,” I whispered. “Mom used to say that you couldn’t tell either of us a secret without the other knowing.”
“You told each other everything?” she asked.
I laughed a little, through my tears. “We didn’t have to. We would just know. Sometimes it felt like magic, but after Jamie disappeared, it started to feel like a curse.”
“You must have missed him so much,” she said, and her words were like a tender punch to my rib cage. Because, honestly? I hadn’t.
“No, I—I didn’t think he was gone. I thought—I thought he was talking to me, still, somehow, asking me to help him. But I couldn’t. And then he came back, and he hadn’t been at all where I thought he was, so I just . . . shut him out. I knew it wasn’t fair of me, and I knew I was hurting him—”
“I bet it hurt you, too,” she said. “To pretend like that part of your life hadn’t even happened.”
I nodded. I hadn’t thought of it that way, even though of course she was right. “It did, but in the moment it hurt less than facing the truth.”
We were quiet for a few minutes. The only sound was her heartbeat, her breath. And mine.
“Where did you think he was?” Court asked me finally. “You said he wasn’t where you thought he was. Where’d you think he went?”
I winced, but I couldn’t say it. Not just yet. I shook my head, burrowing deeper under the covers. Court still held me. Court didn’t mind.
“That’s okay, baby,” she said, bringing her mouth close to my ear. “You’ll get there soon. I know it.”
I didn’t feel so sure. But I decided, in that moment, to trust her anyway.
The next morning, I woke up early to make Court and her roommates breakfast. I filled the percolator with coffee grounds that looked like black crystals in the dim winter morning. I made toast from nutty, rough, cardboardy bread from the health food store. I fried bacon. Soon enough, Court came out of her room, looking disheveled and faint. She stood in the door for a while, watching me.
“You like taking care of people, don’t you?” she asked.
I shrugged. “You’re one to talk,” I said, grinning. She grinned back but didn’t deny it. “I took care of my little brother a lot after the abduction.”
Abduction. Usually I wouldn’t let myself even think the word. It was always disappearance. It was always before he was gone. But somehow watching my brother on that bad, overproduced television show had helped me be able to think those words, to wrap my mind around what had happened to Jamie, to me, to all of us.
“I keep thinking,” she said as I peeled the bacon off the griddle and laid it out on a paper plate, “about what your brother said about moving on.”
I felt the corner of my mouth quirk up. “It’s a nice sound bite, but you shouldn’t believe it. He was probably coached on what to say.”
She cocked her head to the side, considering. “It didn’t sound like a lie. He said he has faith. I didn’t know you were religious.”
I sat down with the plate of bacon and offered one to Court. She sat down, too, backward on her kitchen chair like she always did. She took one by the edges, delicately licking off the grease.
“That’s the funny thing,” I said. “Jamie isn’t. At least not that I know of. We were raised Jewish, but I’m not sure he ever believed.”
“Jewish, really?” Court glanced down at the bacon.
I laughed. “Okay, Jew-ish, maybe. But . . .” I stared at Court’s thrift store plate, shiny with grease over the vintage floral pattern. There were dying leaves under it, wilting flowers, fruit gone to rot. It was the only plate like that. None of the other ones matched.
“But what?” she said.
“It meant something to me once. It got away from me, I guess. In high school. It felt weird going to shul alone, without—”
“Jamie?”
“Without anyone. My dad’s super Christian now. My little brother, too. Who knows what Jamie really is. He might not know, either. Mom is—I don’t know. She’s flighty. It reminded her too much of him, so she didn’t want to go anymore. So I stopped, too.”
“You should go again. I’d go with you.”
I glanced up at her, arching an eyebrow. “You’re not . . . ?”
Court laughed and crunched down on the bacon. “No, I’m a Unitarian. It’s all kind of the same, though, isn’t it? At least that’s what they taught us in my church. Anyway, if you wanted someone to go with you, I would. No big deal.”
I smiled at her. Ate my bacon. Slurped my coffee, still black. It felt good to hear that. I don’t know why, but it did.
“Sure, maybe,” I said.
“Think about it” was Court’s answer.
I did. That’s how I ended up at the humanist synagogue, watching Court, a kippah on her head. It was strange to be at a new synagogue with new customs—no potluck after, but a candle lighting and Kaffeeklatsch with the rabbi, where he played a guitar and sang songs about the perseverance of our people. I felt too shy to introduce myself, but not Court. She went right over and shook his hand, then introduced me as her girlfriend. I felt grateful to her in a thousand different ways and wondered if the gratitude would ever end. After so long spending my life with my doors closed, they were swinging open, letting in small shafts of hope. After the service, we went to the diner and poured too much sugar in our coffees and laughed about it, giddy and overcaffeinated from our fingers to our toes.
I asked Court if she wanted me to go to church with her, something I thought I’d never do. I certainly hadn’t been willing
to go to church for my father. But Court was different. Still, she only smiled, and it seemed for a moment like there was a secret beneath her lips. “I really only ever go when I’m home, for Dad,” she said. “I kind of have my own church these days.”
That’s how I ended up at Court’s children’s literature tutorial. She’d been talking to me about it for the entire time we’d been dating, suggesting I should come, but I’d danced around it—never really sure why. And now the weight of my excuses had evaporated. She’d done my thing. It was time I did hers.
There were five students and a professor in a drafty room in the library, arguing about subtext and paratext and metatext. I sat in the corner, sipping from a thermos of instant hot chocolate with a splash of rum in it, eyes wide and listening.
I’d never heard anyone talk about books this way before. They pulled them apart until there was nothing left but bones. They talked about how the books talked to each other. It reminded me of Gumlea, how the land had been littered with the stories that had been read to us at bedtime and that we’d seen on TV. At one point, the professor asked me what I thought, and all I could say, in a hushed, almost-reverent voice, was that I didn’t know. Because I didn’t. It was as if they were speaking a language I once had understood but had since forgotten.
After, as Court pulled on her duffle coat and yanked the hood up over her eyes, she kissed my cheek and said to me, “What’d you think?”
“It was amazing” was all I could say.
I felt like I was standing at the bottom of a great mountain, almost ready to begin my climb.
46
I dreamed I was back on the Island of Feral Children. The treetop village teetered, every bough creaking beneath. The homes were empty now, the children grown and gone on to lives of their own. Years and years ago they’d left sacrifices for me in their doorways, but the meat had been torn away by wild animals. Now all that was left were pelts, shivering on the wind, spotted with long-dried blood. They looked like flags. I walked through the breezeway, my face a scowl, breathing only through my mouth.