The Wide Night Sky

by Matt Dean

  Chapter 25

  Ben came home as quickly as he could. When he arrived at the Charleston airport near midnight on Wednesday, his father, sister, and brother were waiting for him outside the security checkpoint. He dropped his seabag to the floor and stumbled into his dad’s embrace. His dad cried, which made Ben cry. Corinne and John Carter hugged them both and each other, and then everyone’s sleeves got very damp.

  When they began moving again, it was at first as a clump, with their arms intertwined and their feet colliding. For the first time in days, Leland laughed. “It’s like the last episode of Mary Tyler Moore,” he said. All the way to the parking garage, he sang “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” or at least the four or five lines of it he knew.

  At the house on Montagu, everyone settled around the kitchen island. Corinne and John Carter practically emptied the refrigerator onto the countertop—a platter of cold cuts, a loaf of Sunbeam bread, ham biscuits, muffin-sized coffee cakes, store-bought sweet tea, all the things that neighbors and friends had brought. Ben ate everything within reach. John Carter placed a tumbler of iced tea at his elbow and kept refilling it.

  Between bites, Ben told them about his long journey. Two days of short, bumpy hops on military aircraft. Twenty hours of coach and business-class flights across Europe and the Atlantic. A child at Fiumicino gabbling at him in Italian and receiving his answers with squeals and giggles, as if English were just the silliest-sounding language. Free Heineken in the Crown Lounge at Schiphol, courtesy of a former marine who’d spotted his seabag and wanted to thank him for his service. The surreality of the tulip concession, with its canal house of bottle-green glass appearing to scrape the airport ceiling.

  During the lapses and silences, Leland thought perhaps he should try to explain what had happened. He should tell his children about their mother’s last dash for the bathroom. He should describe, or attempt to describe, the madness of her eyes searching the room and the terror giving way to nothing, to the dead-weight droop of her body. Then again, they’d probably already guessed at all of that, and if by some mercy they hadn’t, why would they ever want to?

  A little after one o’clock, Corinne left for home, and the men went to their respective beds. John Carter had taken the bigger bedroom years ago, leaving Ben the smaller one at the front of the house. Ben had known that, of course—known he was coming back to the little bedroom, just as he’d come back to it every year on leave—but he’d forgotten what a monkish cell it was. Except for a framed poster of Klimt’s Forest of Birch Trees, the stone-colored walls were bare. Except for a glass lamp, the desktop was empty. A grid of pale light and thick shadow lay across the ebony floor, the shapes suggesting somehow that the window was barred instead of mullioned. Ben lay in the twin-size bed, on a mattress so limp that it made him miss his rack from boot camp, and tried to ignore the shush of wind outside, the occasional thump and whine of a passing car’s tires, the clatter of limbs and leaves in the nearby trees.

  He rolled over onto his side and stared at the empty bookcase. Someone had stowed his gear. His model rockets, his graphic novels, his posters, his sketchbooks, his pencils and markers—wherever they were, they weren’t here. He had no doubt that it was his mother’s doing. She wouldn’t have thrown anything away, but she would’ve told John Carter to carry everything up to the attic. Probably. On the other hand, she’d once surrendered his dog, Bozo, to the pound.

  If he could get his hands on the shit now, he could read himself to sleep. Have another look at Terrorstan, maybe, and search J’s slouchy figure and drifty dialogue for signs of his creator.

  Ben stood up and pulled the sheets and blankets off the bed. Shoving everything into the bottom of the closet, he made a nest for himself. He dumped his seabag onto the floor and scattered his crumpled-up laundry on top of the bedclothes for extra cushioning. Once he got in and pulled the door shut, the space was black and nearly silent. He finally began to doze—at least until he had to piss.

  Across the hall, John Carter lay awake, too. Propping himself up in bed, he grabbed his phone and texted Doris: You know what’s a funny word? Varix. Who ever heard of a varix?

  It was three o’clock in the morning. He didn’t expect an answer. But she replied almost immediately. Are you getting autocorrected like whoa? What are you even saying rn?

  He stabbed the buttons on his phone. Something we never even heard of before.

  Varix, plural varices. Who ever heard of that.

  But that’s what mama had. That’s what did it.

  So sudden. Can’t get my head around it, yknow?

  Back .21. Cannot. Get. My. Head. Around it. He corrected himself: *B A C

  Someone was moving around in the hall. John Carter put his phone down on his bedside table. Creeping to the door, he looked out. It was Ben, stumbling to the bathroom, grunting and scratching himself like a bear. When John Carter got back to his bed, Doris had answered his message.

  Did you know she was drinking so much? Did you notice?

  Strange, he thought, that this conversation could seem so simple and clear via text message. In real life, the words—varix, varices, blood alcohol content—had the power to invoke physical pain. And those were just the words he knew how to spell. Most of the complicated words, the medical words that came from Latin and Greek, had disappeared from his memory, leaving only the gist of the story: A vein had burst in his mother’s gut, and she’d bled to death.

  A series of thunks and creaks came from across the hall, and then a squeal and a bang. The bathroom walls collapsing, or possibly the roof caving in—that’s what it sounded like. John Carter rushed into the hall. Ben was there, too, coming from the little bedroom, his eyes wide, his mouth hanging open.

  The brothers peered into the bathroom. Their father was trying to pry one of the travertine tiles off the wall with a claw hammer. Already he’d succeeded in chipping off part of one tile and crazing the one next to it. The wall above bore a deep divot. A long swath of paint and paper had peeled away, revealing the powdery white plaster beneath.

  “Dad,” Ben said.

  Leland looked into the space between his sons. His eyes were strangely absent of emotion, unless purposefulness counted as an emotion. It was possible to believe—if only for a sliver of a second—that he might wield the hammer against Ben or John Carter. But after a moment, he turned away and went back to work. This time he swung the hammer and struck the center of a tile. The travertine split into shards, but except for a shower of dust and some fragments barely the size of cornflakes, the pieces remained affixed to the wall. One of the chips sliced Leland’s cheek. A trickle of blood oozed into his beard.

  “I’m freaking out a little bit,” John Carter said through his teeth.

  “No shit,” Ben said, also through his teeth.

  “Should we call someone?”

  “Like who? Batman?” Ben said. “He’s making a lot of dust. Maybe we should call Alfred.”

  John Carter’s phone buzzed in his hand. He’d carried it with him from his room. Doris had texted him again, but he couldn’t concentrate on what she’d written. Instead he tapped out a new message to Corinne: come now 911!!!

  While he waited for the message to go though, John Carter glanced away from the phone and saw that his brother’s skivvies were gaping open at the fly. He threw up his hand to block the view, though in fact he’d seen nothing more than an egg-shaped patch of shadow. “Put on some effin’ pants,” he said. “Jeez.”

  Squinting and cocking his head, Ben said, “Tater, did you really just say ‘effing’ instead of ‘fucking’?”

  “I really just did,” John Carter said. “I think.”

  With a shrug and a shake of the head, Ben went away, and when he came back, he had on a pair of gym shorts and a T-shirt. He spread his arms and spun around. “Better?” he said.

  Corinne had texted back. What? I was just there like 2 mins ago. Wtf?

  Two hours ago, John Carter thought, not two minutes. Maybe she’d b
een asleep.

  Well, of course she’d been asleep. She had a husband, a warm bed, a cozy apartment where there were no ghosts whispering varix, varix, varix at all hours of the night.

  He typed a reply: Just come. You’ll see.

  After a moment, she texted to say she was on her way. Sitting side by side on the floor of the hallway, the brothers waited for their sister. Leland continued his attack on the stone and plaster, the banging, pounding, cracking. Now and then there was a lull. During a quiet spell, Ben said, “Wish I’d taken a shower. Looks like I’m SOL for the duration of hostilities.”

  Craning his neck, John Carter peered around the doorjamb. So much dust had fallen to the floor that dunes had formed. Leland had knocked away three or four square feet of tile, along with much of the drywall underneath. He’d bloodied his feet stepping on the splinters of broken limestone. The hammer’s wooden handle had raised blisters on his palms and forefingers.

  “How long can it take her to get here?” John Carter said, looking at Ben.

  “Dude,” Ben said, “it’s been less than ten min—”

  A deep rumble inside the bathroom interrupted him. The noise swelled and burst in a near-deafening explosion, a reverberant metallic din, the sound of a life-altering catastrophe. A strangely musical plinking followed, the racket of innumerable small bits of something scattering across the floor. A shower of tiny glass pebbles rolled out into the hallway, pattering dully on the carpet.

  John Carter turned to Ben, but Ben had fled. He lay at the far end of the hall, flat on the floor, his mouth open, his hands and arms shielding the back of his head. When he rolled over and got up again, after a minute or so, he blushed to the roots of his hair. He made a pair of fists and shook them loose.

  “Are you okay?” John Carter said.

  Still red-faced, Ben shrugged and waved away the question and nodded toward the bathroom.

  The brothers leaned into the doorway. Their dad had broken one of the shower doors, and the safety glass had shattered into uncountable bits. Most of the pieces had tumbled into the shower itself, but a layer of them blanketed every surface. A few small grains gleamed like gems in the folds of Leland’s pant legs. Shell-shocked but unharmed, he dropped the hammer. The air seethed with white dust. He coughed and spat a clot of gypsum into the sink.

  Downstairs, the front door opened and shut. Corinne trod up the stairs. She looked tired and cranky—hair everywhere, eyes bloodshot, mouth turned down at the corners. She’d adopted an expression she’d worn a hundred thousand times in her life, whenever one of her brothers had claimed ignorance or inculpability or ceded some difficult responsibility to her. Make a line drawing, Ben thought, and you could put it next to the dictionary definition of fuck off. Snap a photo and float it on a bruise-colored background, John Carter thought, and she could become an Internet meme. Done-With-Your-Bullshit Girl.

  The moment her eyes flicked upward to their faces, her features rearranged themselves. Peevishness gave way to resolve. Her back straightened. She strode directly into the bathroom. Glass crackled under the soles of her sneakers.

  Within a very few seconds, she and Leland emerged from the bathroom. To the boys it looked like a kind of miracle, but Leland had shocked himself into docility. He was easily led. Corinne took him by the hand and he followed, that was all. She coaxed him down the stairs, along the hall, and into the kitchen.

  Ben and John Carter crept to the bottom of the stairs and listened. It occurred to Ben that they were behaving like ten-year-olds, but he couldn’t bring himself to the point of shame. In fact, he was just about sick of not being a ten-year-old. He longed for a good old-fashioned prepubescent tantrum, the kind that required a buildup, a whole day or weekend of sulking and snarling—itching for a switching, his grandmother might have called it—until finally it erupted in a blood-pumping, throat-ripping shouting match. It’s not fair! You like Tater best, always have! He’s got the piano, and what do I get? I don’t get nothin’! I hate you, I hate you, I hate you! Of course, what he really wanted was the mending, not the breach; he wanted one more chance to crawl into his parents’ bed and allow his tears to be dried and his apologies to be accepted.

  At the kitchen sink, Corinne soaked a clean washcloth in warm water. With a corner of the cloth she dabbed away the blood that had crusted the hairs of Leland’s beard. He winced, but she kept at it.

  “When I was a little girl,” she said, “you would have described this as ‘acting out.’”

  Fresh blood welled in his cut. She got him a napkin and guided his hand, setting him the task of holding pressure on his wound.

  “What the hell happened?” she said. “At the airport you were laughing and singing. At midnight you were drinking sweet tea and joking about the House of Tulips. Now this.”

  “We laugh that we might not cry,” he said with mock grandeur, and then, after a moment, “I don’t sleep much, but when I do, I have dreams. I had a bad dream.”

  “But why take it out on the poor bathroom?”

  Corinne turned to the sink and rinsed out the cloth. Leland examined the napkin, the bright red crescent of blood.

  Why take it out on the bathroom? Good question. A lot of time and money had gone into redoing it. Purplish gray travertine, etched glass, nickel knobs and fittings, farmhouse sinks, a cherry vanity. It was beautiful, tasteful, completely up to date. It belonged in Architectural Digest—and he hated it. He’d consented to every decision, and yet he hated the outcome.

  “When I woke up from my dream,” he said, “I just wanted to put everything back. I wanted it all to be like it was when I was a kid. When you were a kid, even.”

  “Maybe you should call a contractor like everyone else,” Corinne said.

  When she turned from the sink, she found her father glaring at the island as if he meant to do it harm. She sat him down on one of the stools and knelt to clean the cuts on his feet.

  “Do you believe in God?” he asked her. “I mean, now that you’re Catholic?”

  The old question, she thought. Did she believe? Andrei had grown up thinking of God as a literal being with intelligence and purpose, someone who could be talked to, interceded with, praised and thanked and beseeched. She’d never believed in that kind of a God. She didn’t think she ever could. But did she, or could she, believe in something more transcendent, more intangible? She’d experienced something akin to religious ecstasy at her baptism, but what was ecstasy, after all? A bit of dopamine fizzing around in the brain, just that and nothing more.

  “I don’t know,” she said, looking up at her father. “I really don’t know.”

  “When I was a kid, I think we believed in something. Not a hellfire-and-damnation kind of God. Nothing so Baptist as all that. A very nice God, sort of like Captain Kangaroo—or at least that’s how I think I pictured him. Fat lot of good He did us.”

  She went to the sink again and rinsed the cloth. “Apparently, I witnessed a miracle once. A little girl raised a bird from the dead.”

  “Why do Catholics get all the miracles?” He paused a moment. “Wait. Did I see that on Huffington Post?”

  “Oh…probably.” She wrung out the washcloth and laid it over the edge of the sink to dry. Wiping her hands on a towel, she said, “Why did you stop believing in God?”

  When she turned back, she saw that he’d gone pale as talc. She went to him, hugged him, held him.

  “I should tell you—” But he couldn’t go on from there. He sighed.

  “If you tell me you’re proud of me,” she said into his ear, “so help me, I’ll kick you in the shins.”

  “Fair enough.”

  After a while, she led him to the study. Her brothers’ footsteps thudded on the stairs as they scurried into hiding. She tucked her father into his makeshift bed on the sofa, where he’d been sleeping for days. She called her goodbyes up the stairs, and the boys answered back more or less in unison, “‘Night, Coco.” Exhausted and chilled through, she went home.

 
Ben settled into his nest in the closet. After a while, when he heard someone moving around, he opened the closet door.

  John Carter had come in, dragging his blankets and a pillow. Flopping onto the bed, he said, “Thought it’d be like old times. Like when we had the bunk beds. You remember?”

  “Yeah, of course.”

  “And sometimes when there was a storm, I’d get scared and ask to sleep on your bunk?”

  He was talking about a time long past, when he’d been four or five and Ben had been seven or eight. Ben said, “I recall.”

  “Would it be weird to do that now?” John Carter paused. “It would, wouldn’t it?”

  After a moment, Ben said, “Naw. But if I get a hard-on, just keep still and pretend your name is Ashley.”

  John Carter said nothing.

  “That was a joke, Tater,” Ben said. “Obviously.”

  John Carter dragged his blanket and pillow to the closet. Kneeling, he felt his way along the floor until he came to the edges of Ben’s bedclothes. They lay back to back. Ben waited and listened, and when John Carter’s breathing fell into the unmistakable rhythm of sleep, Ben rolled over and clung to his brother. In the space between waking and dozing, it was just possible to believe that they were small again, safe in their footed pajamas, sheltered from anything sadder or scarier than a mislaid toy or the rumble of thunder.

  The Friday Before Christmas