by Adam Haslett
“You wanted to be with your friends,” I said. “You were in the middle of school. We got it, Celia and me, we understood.”
“I couldn’t stand being there. I had to leave. But that’s the thing, that’s the thing—I still dread it. It’s already happened, but I still dread that it’s about to happen—soon, right now…I haven’t been a good brother,” he said. “I’m sorry.” He reached across the table and took hold of my upper arm, squeezing it tight, as he used to when I was little.
“Yes you have,” I said.
I had never seen Michael cry. Not even when we were children. The muscles of his face unlocked. His whole jaw seemed to loosen, his mouth came open, his lips shook. In his glistening eyes there was a brightness. He looked new again. New and terribly sad. And I cried with him.
“I didn’t know what to say when I came back that summer,” he said. “You were all so upset. But I didn’t feel anything. Nothing. I was blank. I kept trying, I knew I was supposed to feel something, and to help you, but I couldn’t. And it was so hot. You remember? It was stifling. For weeks. And I just stayed in my room playing records because I didn’t know what else to do.”
“You were wearing wool,” I said, and laughed. “You had on those gray wool pants and a blazer when you came in. You looked so different. Like a grown-up.”
“I despise that house in summer.”
“Celia and I—we were there together when Dad was sick. We saw everything, and I guess we—her, mostly—we made up some way of talking about it. But you were gone. I thought you’d been talking with Dad on the phone, that somehow you knew him better. I didn’t know what to say, either. It wasn’t your fault.”
To have ever been impatient with Michael’s suffering seemed suddenly callous. All the effort I had expended pretending our lives weren’t much different, so that he wouldn’t have to feel lonelier than he already did—it hadn’t been for him, but for me. Because I had wanted so fiercely not to pity my brother. Not to pity him as I did now.
It occurred to me that I could kiss him. I could take him in my arms. He hadn’t been touched like that in so long. I could help him. Not with the love he wanted, but with the love that was here. What harm could there be in that?
I handed him a paper napkin and he blew his nose. He took another sip of his drink. I just smiled. It didn’t matter now that he’d begun to cry. He was finally opening, and letting go.
“Do you remember being up here in the summer?” I said. “Playing on the rocks, out on the island?”
“I think I read Death in Venice,” he said. “Which Mom approved of for some reason. The poet of all those who labor on the brink of exhaustion.”
“Those phrases of yours—the ones you read aloud—that’s why I started writing. I probably never told you that. It was because of you reading me those lines.”
He sat up in his chair, confused by what I’d said, straining to understand it.
“You were so excited by the sentences, they were so satisfying to you. It was like listening to someone preach, the way you read them. I didn’t know what most of them meant, I just heard your rhythm. And I wanted to be part of it.”
“Really?”
“I tried to sound like that, whatever it was. To write something you might want to read aloud like that. It’s not what I do anymore, obviously. But yeah, at the beginning.”
“The miracle of an analogy,” he said, using the napkin now to pat the sweat from his forehead. “That’s what Proust calls it. On those rare occasions when the miracle of an analogy had made me escape from the present. That’s the only real life, the only thing that makes you know you’re alive—the backward ache. That’s what music is. The trouble—for me—is that at some stage I realized those miracles, those aches, they have a history. They’re not private. The music’s always about what someone’s lost. That’s what you hear, when it’s good: the worlds people lost, the ones they want back. And once you hear it that way, you can’t avoid it—that it’s somehow about justice.”
He emptied his glass a second time and placed it on the table.
“It’s like water,” he said. “I don’t feel a thing.”
“I never wanted to say this to you, it seemed too harsh,” I said. “But whenever you started talking about all that reparations stuff, I kept thinking, The only reparations getting paid are from Mom to you. Like you were demanding she give you another childhood. For her to take care of you that much. Because you were angry about the way things went for you. And it just didn’t seem fair. To her. And it still doesn’t.”
The freshness of his sadness had begun to recede, his expression becoming more distant. I couldn’t tell if he was considering my words, or if he simply hadn’t taken them in.
“You want me to have a life like yours,” he said. “Like yours or Celia’s. Someone to be domestic with, a profession, so that I’ll be taken care of. Mom wants it too—for me. But that’s what I mean about sentimentality, how cruel it can be. Because how can I ever not want those things when you all want them for me? And yet it’s never going to happen. I don’t mean that in a self-pitying way, even if I do pity myself sometimes. I just mean that isn’t my life. People don’t want to be loved the way I love them. They get suffocated. It isn’t their fault. But it isn’t mine, either.”
“You can let go of that now, though,” I said. “The childish, obsessive stuff. That’s part of what you’ve been holding on to.”
“You’re not listening,” he said, and lifted the bottle again, filling his glass almost to the brim.
“Why don’t you take it easy,” I said, and reached over to slide the glass away from him, off to my right. “I’m here, I’m listening. Finish what you were saying.”
He stood slowly from the table, walked into the kitchen, and returned with another glass, which he filled and began to drink from. “I told you,” he said, in a voice I didn’t recognize, low and determined. “I have to sleep now.”
The countless times he’d said this before, I’d heard it as a complaint. To be sympathized with, yes, but not so much as to alter my plan. But this sounded different. There was no more pleading. Instead, he was doing what he never did—asserting himself. I could have stopped him. I could have taken the bottle away, and the second one he had carried in and placed on the floor beside his chair, and poured them both down the sink as I had the others. But I didn’t. I watched him drink that third glass of Scotch to the bottom, and another after it.
Did I know then what would happen—know without knowing?
At some point I stood up from that table and walked into the living room, where I scrolled through the music on Michael’s laptop, and found one of the albums I remembered him playing for me over and over. “Come here,” I called to him as Donna Summer’s “On the Radio” began to fill the air of the cabin.
Michael didn’t move at first and I called out to him again. Finally he raised himself and came in to perch unsteadily on the arm of the couch.
“Why are you playing this?” he asked.
What he had said to me a moment ago was true. I hadn’t been listening to him, not for years. I’d wanted him to be better for so long that I had stopped hearing him tell me he was sick. For the first time I saw him now as a man, not a member of a family. A separate person, who had been trying as hard as he could for most of his life simply to get by.
I took both his hands, interlacing our fingers, and I swayed to the beat, which had kicked in now beneath Summer’s pining voice. “Come on,” I said, encouraging Michael with the motion of my arms to sway with me, and after a moment he did, to my surprise, reluctantly rocking his head from side to side, woozy and out of time but responsive nonetheless, his knees bouncing just a little to the beat.
How long had we both been ashamed? How long had he suffered alone?
I stepped in closer and, taking his wrist in my hand, guided his arm around onto my waist, and put my own on his, holding him to me. Gently, I pressed his head down onto my shoulder. And then the two of
us leaned against each other, and danced.
I remember seeing the taillights of the lobsterman’s pickup come on in the dark, and listening to the chug of its aging muffler as he backed onto the road and pulled away toward the harbor. That’s how I know it was still nighttime when, instead of remaining awake with him, I left Michael downstairs on his own.
I saw that other bottle of booze on the floor beside his chair. And I must have seen the bottles of Tylenol, too. He had placed them on the dining table, next to the salt and pepper. I saw, and yet I didn’t see.
I didn’t mean to wake you. You should go back to bed.
That’s what he had said to me when I came down. I knew he wasn’t going to stop drinking. Not until he slept, no matter what it took, or how long. But still I left him there on his own and went back up to my room and turned out the light.
I slept until midmorning, later than I ever usually did, a thick, dreamless sleep. I woke calmly to the sound of dripping and saw icicles outside my window melting in the sun. Lying there in the bed awhile, I listened for the sound of Michael in the house but heard nothing other than the trickling noises of the thaw out in the yard.
I got dressed and was halfway down the stairs when I saw him. He lay on the couch, eyes closed, head tilted back, his legs stretched toward me. Below the edge of the blanket covering his legs, his splayed feet were visible. A dried streak of vomit ran from the corner of his pale mouth, down his cheek and onto his shoulder. The empty bottles stood on the coffee table beside him.
I knew right away that he was dead. And that I had failed him.
Yet still I hurried to the couch and knelt beside him, as if I could shake his body back to life. His hands were cold to my touch, his chin jutting upward at an unnatural angle, as if he were gasping for breath. Lifting his head off the pillow, I gathered it into my arms, and clasped it against my chest, rocking back and forth, weeping into his hair. Wake up, I kept whispering, please, please wake up.
I have no memory of how long I held him. Or of how long afterward I remained in the chair opposite, beholding his body, the brow furrowed, the eyes resting like stones in their sockets. Long enough to observe a square of sun creep down the wall, across a map of the bay, and onto his glowing form, before it slid onto the rug and vanished.
I had never understood before the invisibility of a human. How what we take to be a person is in fact a spirit we can never see. Not until I sat in that room, with the dead vehicle that had carried my brother through his life, and for which I had always mistaken him.
I knew that as soon as I stood up, I would have to act. I would have to go into the world and seek help. But as long as I remained in the chair, in the silence, none of that could begin.
Celia
I didn’t believe it. You never do, at first. The force of the need for it not to be true blots the truth out. Afterwards, there is a daze.
I remember, once Alec had reached me and I had left work, lying on the floor in our living room, with the green fronds of the palm tree out on the sidewalk swaying against the white of the clouds through the top pane of the window and the telephone wires sagging gently across the view, and not thinking of Michael, not yet.
Strangely, what played itself over and over in my mind wasn’t Alec and Michael in the cabin and what could have happened between them, but a night almost two decades ago, back in Walcott. I had been out drinking with Jason and his friends in the field at the end of the brook path, sitting in the dark out in the meadow. Jason and I were still dating, despite my mother’s worry that we did drugs together, and despite my having lied to my father, on the last day of his life, about breaking up with him. I had told my father that because I thought it would make things easier for him, to be able to tell my mother that he had succeeded, knowing I could hide the truth from them easily enough.
Jason had been awkward around me for weeks. He didn’t know what to say about my father’s death. That night he kept slipping his hand out of mine. He joked restlessly with his friends and the girls they had brought with them, even as they paired off and began making out on the grass. When the banter died down, I nudged him onto his feet and we walked up the slope toward the woods, where we lay down and began kissing. I wanted to feel his weight on top of me, but he stayed up on his elbows, letting only our lips touch. The hours with him that summer were the only hours in which I didn’t feel drowned. I couldn’t tell him that, though. He wouldn’t have wanted to hear it.
I willed him to put his hand on my stomach, to nuzzle his face against my chest, taking us farther away. Instead, when he heard the voices of the others starting up again, he rose and sauntered back down the hill. I didn’t follow right away. I lay there taking in the stars in the clear night sky, listening to the voices trail off, telling myself that what my father had done wasn’t easy for Jason either. I needed to be patient.
When I got up and returned to where we had first gathered, they were gone—all of them. I crossed the meadow back and forth calling out to Jason in a stage whisper, as if I might wake someone. But they had departed, he and his friends, off to drink at someone’s house.
It was as I walked home alone through the warm darkness of that summer night, in the nearly perfect quiet of our neighborhood, that I vowed never to let that happen again. Never to put myself in a position to be left by a man. It was one of those youthful promises you make to yourself and keep long after you stop recognizing what you are doing, or how it is distorting your life.
That’s what kept coming back to me in the numbness of the afternoon after Alec’s call: how deeply I had made that promise, and how long I had kept it, never being with a man who might leave me. Always maintaining that control.
A promise to oneself never to be left. What sleight of mind.
The radio station at BC, where Michael had DJ’d, aired a tribute show, playing the music he had championed. Alec, my mother, Caleigh, and I listened to it together in the living room in Walcott. Caleigh had come to stay with us at the house for a couple of days before the memorial. There were a hundred things to do, and Alec and I did more or less all of them, working together like the well-honed team we sometimes were. My mother, who never got sick, came down with a heavy cold. Her friends Suzanne and Dorothy brought meals to the house for us, and arranged the food for after the service.
It seemed to me the wrong time to announce my own news that Paul and I had decided to get married, which I’d been waiting to tell my mother in person at Christmas, but Paul disagreed and said she would want to know, which once I reflected on it seemed right—to give her that. The morning before we flew back to California, I found her upstairs in her bedroom, writing thank-you notes to the people who had sent their condolences. She cried again when I told her—for me, and for Michael—but I was glad that I had done it.
I gave myself a few days back at home before going in to see my clients again. It was hard at first. And it stayed hard for months. To sit there quietly, hands folded in my lap, listening to them elaborate on their troubles. An old impatience returned, the kind I had experienced when I started as a therapist: the urge to search for the moments in their past that contained the key to liberating them in the present. That’s what I used to do, press for more and more family history, excusing it to myself as interest and attention, when really it was a distraction from the suffering in front of me, a desire to find the passage of experience that would explain their pain away. What good plot didn’t offer that? A meaning sufficient to account for the events. But as time went on, I realized that my clients’ lives weren’t works of art. They told themselves stories all the time, but the stories trailed off, got forgotten, and then repeated—distractions themselves, oftentimes, from the feelings they were somewhere taught would damn them or wreck them.
It had taken me a long time to see how strong this desire for an answer was. I had to train myself to notice how it arose, and how to put it aside. Because if all I did was scour what a person said to me each week for clues, I wouldn’t do her m
uch good. I had to give up my own need to cure if I was going to stand any chance of shepherding her toward acceptance of who she already was.
I never did that for Michael. I never gave up my belief in a secret, a truth lodged in the past, which if he could only experience and accept would release him. I thought of it as that moment of his in the woods with my father and Kelsey and me. An awkward teenager living in a town he loathed, on a walk he didn’t want to take, trudging through his unhappiness as adolescents do. And then through no will of his own, as we came to that clearing and paused, sensing all around him a malignancy he couldn’t name, a violence he had to escape. A vision of evil.
When Alec told me what Michael had said to him on their last night, about feeling guilty for going back to England without somehow warning us, I thought to myself: Yes, that was it, the moment he needed to confess and let go of. As if it were that simple.
He’d sounded so desperate on the phone from Maine. And yet I hadn’t said what I should have to Alec—that it had gone too far, too quickly, and that he had to stop it. I’d kept believing in the one catharsis. As Alec did, and my mother, in her own manner, and even Michael, who never stopped trying to want what we wanted for him. How could he? We’re not individuals. We’re haunted by the living as well as the dead. I believed that before. But now I know it’s true. It’s what he kept trying to tell us.
Alec
Seth’s sister, Valerie, picked us up at the airport. I greeted her from the backseat as the two of us piled in with our luggage.
“So you exist,” she said. “Welcome.” She had the same fine black hair as her brother, only longer and with a slight wave to it, and the same dark green eyes. “Don’t worry about Luke there,” she said, “he’s out cold.” The head of the toddler strapped into the safety seat beside me rested back and away from his little body, a clear streak of drool leaking from the corner of his mouth.