Use Your Imagination

by Kris Bertin

  From downstairs, where he built and broke and fixed things, Michael called up to her:

  “What the hell was that?” he shouted.

  Maggie, without an answer to give, said nothing. She went upstairs to get ready for the day but found, when she was standing in front of the mirror, fully dressed, that she was still contained by her brother’s story, that it had closed in on her like a vault. Before collecting the laundry bags lining the hampers in each of their bedrooms, before turning on her other brother’s radio show and cleaning the house, she logged onto Facebook and went to Allan’s profile.

  She clicked on the little thumbnail of his face and watched it expand. Updated just six months ago, it was completely different from how she remembered him. He was tanned, and his hair was short, parted, almost normal looking, though buzzed down to nothing on the sides. He was wearing a polo shirt, and it was tight on him. He had always been skinny, almost sickly looking, but now, looking at something other than his little face in a box, she saw that he was plump with toned, carefully maintained muscle. Her idea of him was outdated. He had pecs, and the muscles she didn’t know the name for, running from his shoulders into his neck. His forearms, folded neatly across his sternum, looked like enormous drumsticks from some impossibly big bird.

  On his wrist was a watch that hung heavily, with a jet-black face and shining, platinum-coloured links. It looked very expensive.

  “Jesus Christ,” she said to nobody.

  ***

  The next Sunday she took the call on the other set of stairs, the ones directly under where she usually sat, the ones leading to the basement, and she even closed the ramshackle little door behind her. The older daughter, Kelly, upon seeing this new development in the order of things, made a face that Maggie glimpsed through the crack before the door closed. The face she made was one of indignation.

  “Hey, Allan,” Maggie said, sitting in the dark.

  “Hey,” he said. It sounded like there was a smile on his face. He was listening to music.

  A second later, footsteps went by and the light came on over her head, smacked to life by her daughter, doing her best to tell her mother that she knew she was up to something (and how dare she keep it from her). For a moment Maggie worried about another phone in the house, but realized there was no other line to listen on. Just a decade ago, there probably would have been one. Instead, each member of the household had their own device. The light was the best her daughter could do to interfere.

  “Thank you, honey,” Maggie said sternly, and loudly, and then had to explain to Allan what was going on.

  “Sorry,” she said. “There’s little fucking spies everywhere.”

  Then, almost in a panic, Allan asked if she had told anyone. She told him no.

  She was hurt when Allan sounded relieved, but then imagined what it must have been like for him to have kept this from everyone. She had spent the entire week thinking about it, about what his life, on a daily basis, must look like. She found herself inevitably thinking about the woman with the suits, about her sadness and Allan’s sadness for her. Strangely, this was the most surprising thing from the call: that Allan could possess sorrow or compassion in these amounts. The stone-faced boy she was familiar with seemed incapable of it. She had thought only briefly about what reaction his new job would elicit from their mother, who thought Allan was the sweetest, funniest boy in the world, and who once said he could have been a “not ready for prime-timer.”

  Maggie clarified that she hadn’t talked about it, not even to Michael, which was true. Of course, he had asked again what the very long call was all about. The only thing she could think to say was that Allan was lonely, and that he was maybe trying to be a better brother. Only after saying it out loud did it occur to her that both of these things were very likely true.

  She doesn’t remember what was talked about on this second call, only that it felt like he was testing the waters with her. She learned something more about his business: some guys worked for an agency but he didn’t, and his business was centred around his website and ads that showed him from the chin down, with and without a shirt, smiling and not smiling, and then a silhouette of him on a mountain, which he thought might lead to some good hikes or outdoor adventures with clients, but never did. He was happy to talk to her, but also just seemed happy to talk altogether, as though he’d been in desperate need of this.

  At the end of the call, she sat on the painted wood of the stairs, staring straight ahead at the little storage cubby where she kept things there was no place for: the kitchen appliances with a once-a-year use like the ice cream maker, the home pasta machine, the Crock-Pot, and her husband’s miscellaneous small motors and batteries, which were valuable enough to keep, but not interesting enough to sit near his workstation. She looked at her own stretched face in a big festive silver ball hanging out from the Christmas decorations.

  Does he need help?

  She saw that these calls were maybe therapeutic for him, and that Allan might actually need to speak to a real therapist. Later, with the giant piles of laundry in front of the stacked washer and dryer, she wondered if this new habit of calling her was perhaps the result of his lifestyle.

  Not this latest, bizarre male escort stuff, either. She was thinking of the nomadic drift he’d been in before the massage thing: travelling, surfing, working just long enough to sock away enough money to buy a ticket to the next place. Living in southeast Asia, visiting shrines and posing like Buddha under waterfalls, trying to forcibly wring meaning out of exotic locales all while capitalizing on the value of his foreign money. Getting drunk with expats, getting high, getting tattooed, never taking time to build or accomplish anything. She only saw what he posted to the internet from his obnoxiously big SLR camera, but she could read between the lines. She had never been to Laos, or Cambodia, or Thailand, but she doubted enlightenment could come, shoulder to shoulder with hedonism, with AK-47s getting fired at old cars, with a troupe of crazy, screaming Australians and handfuls of bulk fireworks and hallucinogens and whatever else he was doing.

  She thought, too, as she always did, about their father and his influence over them all. His lifetime of infidelity to their mother and his subsequent wives, and the years her brother had been alone with him after she and Frank were out of the house. It seemed impossible that this couldn’t have had an effect on him, couldn’t have promoted the kind of psychotic, anarchic attitude toward sex and adulthood that the old man was still unable to escape, even today.

  But then, she reasoned, Allan had settled down, at least by his own standards. He really had earned that certificate to practice massage therapy, really did save up enough to buy a car, and the house they grew up in from their parents, though he abandoned it when their father decided to move back in. Perhaps this was similar to her thoughts on what he looked like. Maybe her entire idea of him was out of date, and unfair.

  Then, she realized, there was no perhaps about it. He was nothing like she had thought.

  But there was something sad about him. This thought was inescapable. His days were spent lifting weights, tanning, running, and visiting with these women. What else was he doing? Did he do anything else? These were the questions she avoided asking this second time. He lived hours away from their hometown, where she still lived. She saw his friends sometimes, but they never asked about him.

  Does the new Allan have friends?

  She tried not to think about him when she was at the house, as though the words themselves could radiate out of her head and her daughters might pick up on them. She knew this was an irrational thought, but there was some strategy to it, she felt. Even though she could move these reflections aside when she was at the house, where so much was demanded of her, when she was at the jewellery store, dusting glass counters and looking at a ceiling fan, they added up.

  Maggie tried to guess if her worry was fair or not, eventually deciding that it was a compass
ionate response, a natural one. Its genesis, she saw, was in her children, in their sleeping faces, and her aching love for them. In the basic, tired contentment of lying next to her husband, of being in the dark with someone you are bonded with. This was maybe the only real happiness she could understand, of being accepted by and accepting another person, and pledging herself to him. This is what Allan was missing out on. This is what he might be keeping himself from, some basic biological truth: You need other people.

  It occurred to her that she disagreed with every single thing he was doing.

  One Sunday, when she was scratching with a fingernail the parts of the waffle maker which became clogged and could not be cleaned with a dishcloth alone, she began looking at the phone, hoping the call wouldn’t come. This, she knew, was noticed by her girls, because they pointed it out. Emma couldn’t make judgements about why anything happened, any guesses about what things might mean. All she ever did was note that things were, in fact, happening.

  “Your face gets ugly when it’s now,” Emma said, filling the sink.

  No matter how frustrating it was, Maggie always reminded herself that the younger one was lucky to be this way, at least for now. That so long as this was how things were for her, Maggie should keep it going. It would allow her daughter to be happy in a way no one else in the household could be.

  “Thanks, Emma,” Maggie said.

  “Just don’t talk for so long,” the other one said. “You ever think of that?”

  Her husband had noticed, of course, and his silence on the matter was an indication that he knew whatever was happening inside the phone was none of his business, or else she would have said something. In his respect for her privacy, she felt trapped. Between being unable to tell Allan what she thought of him or share how he was worrying her made her feel closed off, like two long, separate walls had been erected around her and she was trapped in a hallway, alone.

  For some reason, she also kept thinking about what was maybe the only truly awful thing she had seen in her life: a man who had been run over by a truck. It was winter, when she was pregnant with Kelly, when she was still in school, still without a driver’s license and forced to walk everywhere when Michael was at work. She saw his feet first, standing upright, and then the rest of him, torn apart at the middle. He was an old man with a grey beard, covered in blood but without any in his body, pale and dead in his darkened winter clothes, and there was only one other person there, a woman, watching from across the street. She called out that it had been a truck, that the driver had fled. His insides weren’t red and pink like she had imagined, but a kind of dark brown, like tree bark. Maggie had done nothing except for look at him, and call to the witness.

  “Is someone coming?” she had asked.

  “Yes,” the woman replied.

  This was when she allowed herself to leave.

  The memory was an upsetting one, but almost sort of ordinary. The sort of thing people saw from time to time, she reasoned. There was something about it that made her think of Allan. She wondered if it had something to do with disgust, if maybe her mind was sorting her feelings about Allan next to this one. Or maybe it meant nothing. Maybe she was just distracting herself with it.

  One Sunday, maybe a month or two after the first call, Michael came up behind her and wrapped his arms around her waist when she was in her holding pattern of dread before the phone rang. She immediately tensed and said Don’t in a tone that was totally uncalled for. Everyone was there, everyone saw. Everyone heard it.

  She apologized after the call, after a few hours of silence, and said to him that she had been stressed out lately, but that she was going to fix it. The answer, which she didn’t verbalize to him, was that she was going to stop nodding and agreeing with Allan, and start questioning him, gently, maybe eventually leading him to the revelations she wanted him to have on his own.

  Michael nodded and, instead of hugging or kissing or consoling her in some small way, clapped her on the shoulder.

  “Awesome,” he said. “Look forward to it.”

  ***

  Maggie thought, when she was just hearing about his new, strange life, that this would be the end of Allan’s revelations to her. It wasn’t.

  When they came, the other confessions were worse than the first one.

  Having already told her the big one, he was suddenly admitting to her things that he had told no one, ever. He really was confessing, she saw, and her plan of action for moving him away from whatever unsavoury life choices he’d made now seemed impotent, and pointless. These newer ones weren’t things that could be stopped, but things which had already happened and which could not be undone. Facts, about him and how he had got here. They were introduced without asking permission, like his first ones, but came about naturally, when she referenced some piece of information about him that she thought was true, but wasn’t.

  Normal conversation was still happening, still going on around them, and there was still talk about Mom and Dad, and Frank’s show. He mentioned work sometimes, and despite how many women he talked about, recently there had been one he had been mentioning more than any others. Janey, or Jean. Something like that. He was with her more than the others, and she was booking whole blocks of his time, every Friday through Sunday. That she was flying to see him every single weekend. When she asked what he did with her, the answer had been candid. It had been that mostly he talked to her about her problems, and fucked. When Maggie had said she didn’t think he did that, he said he did with this one. He even surprised Maggie by saying that they really liked each other. Questions about how this worked when money was in the equation, or what exactly that meant for someone like him rose up in her, then sank down. She decided that this might be the best news she could hear from him, the presence of some kind of stability. This was as close as she got to feeling good about him.

  Then, when she touched on something that he felt needed to be clarified, another confession would come. Over the months, she learned that:

  Allan had, upon returning from abroad, been homeless and out of work. He’d lived on the street for around two months without telling any of them, when they still thought he was in Mongolia or Kazakhstan. It wasn’t a big deal, he said, it was something he just had to do. This was so unspeakable that, when she learned it, she had taken in a breath and then let no more out. It was one of their short calls, where neither of them had anything more to say about it.

  Before that, there was the sickening one, that Allan had slept with one of their neighbours, a woman in her forties and fifties, when he was young. Very young, fourteen or fifteen.

  And there was the fact Allan hadn’t dropped out of college, he had been expelled.

  This one, about college, came first. Though it was surprising to hear, at first it seemed lesser than his admission about being a prostitute. She tried being generous.

  “That’s not so bad,” she said. “No one needs to know that, Allan.”

  He said it was a secret that he felt would destroy his relationship to their parents, both of whom were academics, and who had yet to accept his failure to achieve even a bachelor’s degree, and so he made her promise to keep this a secret too. Admitting, quietly, that he had been carrying this lie for so many years seemed to pain him worse than the rest of it.

  “I hate lying to them about it,” he said, “but I couldn’t tell them what really happened.”

  “Well,” Maggie said, “what really happened, Allan?”

  This was one of the times when he took a deep breath and gave a long preamble to the story, saying that it might not sound okay at all, but he had reasons for doing what he was doing. On that particular call, Maggie thought he sounded like a politician giving a news conference. Like he was admitting to some large moral failing that had jeopardized his campaign and let his supporters down. He even said that it was all unfortunate. He even added that it was something that had happened, rather th
an something he had done. This call ended before an explanation, when Allan suddenly ran out of steam, and Maggie had another week of wondering just what it could possibly be.

  “Oh,” Maggie said, “I guess this is a two-parter.”

  “Sorry,” Allan said. “I have to go to the gym.”

  The following week, she wrote a post on Marriage Boot Camp about secrets, first drafting it from the point of view that secrets can destroy a family, and that opening up was a crucial part of being partnered with someone. She bought a stock photo of a man and woman having a sober talk at the dinner table for it, but then, before posting it, rewrote the entire thing. This time, she wrote that secrets are fine, that people are allowed to have them, and that not everything needs to be said.

  Her final line was You don’t need to tell everyone everything, and when she published it, she realized she was writing about Allan. She had already shared it to social media. Already, there were little thumbs that liked what she had to say. One of them was Allan’s.

  “Fuck,” she said, looking at the page. The stock photo didn’t even make sense anymore.

  The following Sunday, she didn’t change out of her church outfit and shower before breakfast like she usually did. The family ritual of shedding their nice clothes and getting into sweatpants or pajamas for breakfast was suddenly broken. Everyone noticed this, too.

  “Why are you still dressed?” Michael asked her.

  “I’m going to the grocery store after this,” she said.

  “I see,” he replied. She didn’t need to go to the grocery store.

  When the phone rang this time, she felt, in her blouse and blazer and slacks, like she was going to a funeral, or a divorce proceeding. She cleaned the third stair to the basement with her hand before sitting down. Only after she sat did she understand that she was mad at him. That she resented him for this.

  “I’m here for the stunning conclusion,” she said, after their hellos, cutting through whatever pleasantries might normally have been exchanged. “I’m ready.”