by Lauren Rico
Brett 5
When I raise the door on our garage, I’m met with the familiar smells of oil and gasoline. The smells of my father. The chilly fall afternoon spills inside, washing sunlight across a big shelf in the back. I spot what I’m looking for right away, a box with my name on it. I promised Maggie I’d dig up some of my old pictures and my yearbook while we’re here.
I’m about to reach for the box when a glimpse of cobalt blue in the corner catches my eye. I leave the box for a moment, drawn to the long-forgotten treasure of my youth: my first mountain bike. It came to me the summer of my twelfth birthday, the summer that my mother’s mother spent here with us.
Grandma Ruth was, like my mother and Aunt Elise, a tall, strong woman. One Saturday morning, she shooed us from in front of the television, insisting we go out and play in the fresh air. I didn’t mind, especially with that new bike to show off around the neighborhood. Jeremy, on the other hand, was irritated at giving up his cartoons, and absolutely furious that I had something he didn’t.
We rode around for over an hour before making our way back to the front of our own house. My brother dropped his bike onto the grass and came into this very garage while I practiced tight turns in the driveway. I wondered why he came back out with the big broom. I didn’t have to wonder for long. As I rode past him, Jeremy stuck the thick wooden handle right into the spokes of my new bike. I literally flew over the handlebars, hitting the blacktop driveway hard enough to break my arm. Grandma Ruth, who had been sitting on the front porch reading her bible, saw the whole thing.
“Trudy!” she called into the house. “Trudy, come out here, Brett’s been hurt!”
My mother was out of the house in a flash, bypassing Jeremy to tend to me as I lay there, scraped up and crying. Grandma Ruth had another destination in mind. She made a beeline for my brother, approaching him with such momentum that he stepped back, for fear she would plow right into him.
“Jeremy Dean Corrigan! What do you think you’re doing?” she demanded.
He put on his sweetest, most innocent face and gave her a sheepish smile. “Nothing, Grandma Ruth. Brett fell off his bike.”
“Nonsense!” she said sharply enough for my mother to turn and watch. “I saw what you did, young man. Why did you hurt your brother like that?”
“I didn’t, Grandma Ruth,” he insisted.
“Oh, really? Who am I supposed to believe, Boy, you or my lying eyes? Hmmm?”
“Mama, please,” my mother called over to her. “I need your help getting Brett into the car so I can get him to the Emergency Room. I’ll talk with Jeremy later.”
It might have ended right there if my brother hadn’t folded his arms across his chest, put a snide smile on his face, and looked up at the old woman with one defiant eyebrow raised. He was claiming victory.
She laughed at him then. It started out as a stifled chuckle, but quickly escalated into a mocking cackle. My grandmother laughed and laughed, while we all looked on in astonished silence. I was so stunned that I stopped crying. Jeremy narrowed his eyes into little slits and puckered his mouth in disdain, looking as if he’d like to eviscerate her at that very moment.
Grandma Ruth, twice his size, looked down on him, eyebrows raised. “Is that all you’ve got, little boy?” she asked him mildly.
I could practically see steam coming out of Jeremy’s ears. No one had ever dared to challenge him. He was so enraged, that he actually growled at her. And then an interesting thing happened.
Ruth Purdy, widow, mother of five, grandmother of six, set her jaw, squatted down on the lawn so they were face to face, and she growled back at him. He stopped, looking at her as if she was crazy. Mom and I were rooted to the driveway, incredulous to what we were seeing unfold in front of us.
“You listen to me, and you listen good,” she hissed, now poking him in the chest with her index finger. “I see you in there. I know what you are. ‘For Satan himself masquerades as an angel of light’, doesn’t he, Jeremy?”
I watched in astonishment as my brother’s face turned a deep shade of scarlet, and his eyes grew as big as saucers.
“That’s right. You’re not invisible. God knows your black and wicked heart. God sees you, and keeps an account of every evil thing you do on the face of this earth. But you don’t care about that, do you?”
The eight year old shook his head no.
She smiled.
“No matter, Jeremy. No matter at all. ‘For they sow the wind, and they will reap the whirlwind.’”
“Mother! That’s quite enough!” my mother said, getting to her feet, the spell finally broken.
“No, Trudy. It’s nowhere near enough,” my grandmother said, getting to her feet again as well. She used her hands to smack at the grass cuttings, which had stuck to her skirt, then turned her back on Jeremy and walked toward where I was still sprawled. “But then, you already know that, my sweet child, don’t you?”
My mother didn’t answer.
Without thinking about it, I reach over and rub my left forearm with my right hand. It still puts out a dull ache when the weather is especially damp and chilly. A regular reminder of what my brother is capable of.
I’m not blind to my own behavior. I look back and I realize that I got over the broken arm … just as I went on to get over the stolen girlfriends, the missing money and the constant, systematic destruction of nearly every good thing that came into my life.
Will I get over this, too? Right now, in this moment, I can tell myself with absolute certainty that I will never forgive Jeremy for taking my father from me. What I cannot tell myself with any certainty, is whether I’ll ever be able to put aside the fact that he’s my brother. My blood. Only time is going to give me that answer, I suppose.
With a sigh, I take the box of high school memorabilia down from its shelf and head back outside, dropping the garage door as I do. I’ll leave Owl Bridge in the morning to rejoin the Walton Quartet on tour. After being here with Maggie and my mother for a week, the thought of it fills me with both relief and dread.
“Hey! What ya got there?”
I look up to find Maggie sitting on the front porch swing. The late afternoon sun casts a halo around her dark curls, reminding me of the day we met …the day she held my head in her hands while we waited for an ambulance to take me to the hospital.
“Angel head,” I utter softly, and feel a smile come to my lips. It’s mirrored on her face.
“Angel head. I haven’t heard that in a long time, Mr. Corrigan.”
“That was the day you saved my life,” I tell her as I move down the walkway and up the porch steps. I put the box down and sit next to her on the swing, putting an arm around her
“Well, I wouldn’t go that far …” she murmurs softly, shaking her head.
“I would. And I’m not talking about my injuries, Maggie. I – I don’t know what I’d be doing or thinking or how I’d be acting right now if I hadn’t met you.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but I press a finger to her lips.
“No, Mags, I don’t think you understand. You changed me. You snapped me out of the funk I was in …” I take a deep breath and close my eyes against the tears I can feel coming. “Because of you, my father died knowing that I was a decent guy. That I wouldn’t spend my entire life enabling Jeremy to do …whatever the hell he does. It was a gift that I was able to give him because of you.”
Maggie reaches up and puts a soft hand to my face, her brilliant blue eyes holding me hostage to her gaze.
“Listen to me, Brett. You have always been a decent guy. More than that, you’re a good man. A caring and compassionate man.”
I tear my eyes away from hers. I can’t look at her when I say this.
“Sometimes …” I begin in a whisper, “Sometimes I wish I was more like him.”
“Like who? Jeremy?” she confirms, her tone turning brittle with alarm.
“Not the crazy shit,” I explain, “but …Christ! Maybe if I could be a little more �
�heartless bastard’ and a little less ‘mama’s boy’ I could get over whatever the fuck this is with me. This fucking inability to just cut him out of my life. For good …”
Maggie takes a deep breath and takes my face in both of her hands, her grip more forceful this time.
“Okay, so, first of all, I could never love a heartless bastard, so scratch that. And second, have you met your mother? In this instance, being a ‘mama’s boy’ is not synonymous with ‘pussy,’ if that’s what you were implying.”
I can’t suppress the smile that’s making the corners of my mouth twitch. I put my hands around her waist and pull her close to me. She lets go of my face and puts her head to my chest, as if we’re slow dancing, right here on the front porch of my childhood home.
“I just … I hate myself for not hating him more.”
There. I’ve managed to sum-up the biggest quandary of my life in less than ten words. And I can’t hold back the tears anymore. They spill down my face in earnest as she shushes me and rubs comforting circles on my back.
Brett 6
The stage lights are too bright. The concert hall is too warm. I can’t seem to get comfortable in my chair, or in my skin, for that matter. Despite what I had hoped, there’s nothing that feels right, or good, or comforting about my return to the Walton Quartet tour.
I’d thought, stupidly, that throwing myself into my music would make me feel a little better. I was very, very wrong. At this moment, it’s all I can do to keep myself from bolting off the stage and running back to the only place on this earth where I’m guaranteed some comfort …Maggie’s arms. But that isn’t an option at this moment.
I strong-armed my way through the light and bright Mozart Quartet. I pushed through the hypnotic Philip Glass Quartet. Right now, as we reset our music, retune our instruments and take an inventory of eye contact between one another, I am finally in the homestretch of this godawful night. It won’t be long now before I can flee the oppressive applause and concerned glances of my colleagues for the sanctuary of my soulless hotel room and its minibar. But, standing squarely between me and that blissful numbness, is Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings.
If only we’d chosen something different to end the program … but then, how could we have known six weeks ago that I would suffer such a devastating loss? As soon as I got into town for rehearsal this afternoon, Joe sensed this could be a problem. He immediately offered to drop the piece, knowing that it would be difficult for me. But I’d insisted it would be fine – that I would be fine. If that wasn’t the most idiotic fucking display of pride, I don’t know what is.
Now, as Joe begins to play the first violin part, he enters on a note so soft and subtle that it seems to materialize out of the ether. I can’t help myself, I commit the cardinal sin of chamber music performance: I close my eyes. Playing in a setting this intimate, with no conductor to direct the ensemble, requires the keenest attention to body language and facial expressions. But if I can’t see my colleagues, then I can’t see the worry or the sympathy that they’ve been telegraphing to me silently all night. If I can’t see Joe, or Neville, or Philip, I can lose myself in Brett.
I play underneath, listening as Joe spins the lamenting melody that will possess the next ten minutes of my life. The rest of us – second violin, viola and cello, slip in beneath him. We provide a slow-moving blanket of music to catch the sound of the first violin’s tears. Not that this is some self-indulgent funeral dirge. This music is raw, unbound emotion … grief at its harshest and cruelest.
It’s pining for something forever lost, wishing you could retrieve all that time you wasted, because you now realize that there will never be another hour. Or minute. Or second. There will never be another heartbeat.
As our individual parts melt into one another, we become mourners standing around a gravesite, bound only by our collective agony. Aside from that single thread that tethers us to one another, we are each lost in our own internal suffering; bereft and desolate.
When it’s my turn to echo the melody begun by the first violin, I find relief in allowing my viola to shoulder the wordless tune for me. Under my bow, I feel it growing and spreading and building. And then I pull back, allowing the cello to take on the burden of this lament.
Then, little by little, the tension starts to coil and our individual parts weave together into a single intense sound. Our unified agony turns in on itself until we are lost in a frenzy of ragged desperation. This is the sound of a fist, raised and shaking its ire towards the heavens, crying out at the injustice of it.
And then there is silence. It is the silence of the dead. It hangs for one very long moment before transforming itself into the softer, lower chords of acceptance for that which we cannot change. When the original melody returns again, it’s no longer haunting … it’s haunted. The jagged edges of sorrow and despair have been rubbed smooth by grudging acceptance. And then Joe is there again, the first violin in its final moments, with the same rhythm but different notes– a lower, tempered play on the opening measures.
As the Adagio comes to its conclusion, the sound stretches thinner and thinner until there’s nothing left to hold it together anymore. Just air. And then shadow. And then darkness.
The flame is snuffed. The casket is lowered. And now there is nothing left to prove that this moment ever even existed. That is, except for my broken heart.
****
“Join us for drinks?” Joe asks as we head back to the dressing rooms to get packed up. “We’re meeting some of the Detroit Phil guys.”
Absofuckinglutely not.
“No, thanks, Joe. I appreciate the invite, but I’m pretty wiped.”
He nods his understanding. “Do you …do you want me to tell you if your brother’s name comes up?”
“No,” I shake my head and then stop. “Yes, actually. No … Oh, fuck, I don’t know, Joe. You decide. If it seems like something I should know then please, do. But if it’s just the same bullshit he’s always up to …then I’d just as soon not. Okay?”
I can see in his expression that he realizes just how wrung-out I am. “Did you tell him you were going to be in town?”
“Oh, trust me, I don’t have to. I have no doubt that he knows. And if he wants to find me, he will.”
We arrive at Joe’s dressing room door and he puts a reassuring hand on my shoulder. “You’re not your brother, Brett. You don’t answer to him anymore. You never did – you just didn’t know that before. But you do now.”
“Well, maybe somebody should tell him that,” I mutter as I turn my back and keep walking.
I find my way out through the backstage door and into the chilly Detroit night. It’s cold enough that I can see my breath, but I’m still feeling warm and flush from sitting under those stage lights. Suddenly my jacket feels as if it’s choking me and I stop to peel it off, breathing a sigh of relief when I’m finally free of my leather albatross.
I’m just about to start walking again when I spot him not twenty feet in front of me. It turns out that Jeremy on a bench in Detroit looks very different than Jeremy at my mother’s kitchen table. I was certain he’d show up somewhere, I just wasn’t certain when or where.
“Bro!” he grins happily as he gets to his feet.
He holds out his arms to embrace me, but I just stand there, staring at him blankly. Finally, he drops them to his side.
“What? Aren’t you happy to see me? I can’t believe you didn’t mention that your tour was bringing you here to Detroit! I had to read it in the paper.”
“When should I have told you? Before you demanded your inheritance, or after you threatened Mom?” I reply icily, shifting away from him.
But a cold reception is no deterrent for Jeremy.
“Come on,” he coaxes. “At least let me buy you a beer. A one-drink truce, Brett. That’s all I’m asking for. If I piss you off, you can just get up and leave. No harm, no foul.”
Oh, I passed pissed several days ago. Now, I’m parked squarely in the r
ealm of rage. I consider my state of mind at this very moment, concerned that if I sit down with him for even a single sip, I might just kill him with my bare hands. In the end, I decide I’m more curious to hear what he has to say than anything else. He can see that I’m waffling.
“Please?”
I don’t think I’ve ever heard my brother say that word. He probably spent hours practicing in the mirror so it would look and sound natural coming out of his mouth.
“Fine,” I huff in exasperation and follow him in silence to a pub around the corner.
“Bud, please,” I say to the waitress once we’re seated.
“Make that two,” Jeremy adds.
“So, what do you want?” I demand, getting right down to business.
“How was the funeral?”
“Really, Jeremy?”
“I didn’t want to upset Mom, so I decided it was just best to stay away. God only knows what she would have done if I’d been at the church and the cemetery.”
“Sounds more like you were worried about yourself. About what she might say to you in front of our friends and family.”
“Family? What family? It was just you and Melanie, wasn’t it?” he wonders innocently as the waitress sets our bottles down in front of us.
“Jeremy,” I growl, holding up my wrist and tapping my watch pointedly, “I don’t have the time or the energy for your bullshit. If you keep it up, we might not make it through a one-sip truce.”
“No, no,” he says as he shakes his head. “Sorry. Maggie. I meant to say Maggie.”
I sigh.
“Aunt Elise made an appearance,” I tell him at last.
“Aunt Elise? Jesus, I can’t remember the last time we saw her. Where the hell has she been all these years?”
“Only forty-five minutes away, as it turns out.”
He takes a sip of his beer.
“And she told me she’s a lesbian,” I continue.
“Well, duh!” he mocks me.
“Wait. What? You knew that?”
“Of course! Don’t you remember she brought her girlfriend to Grandma Ruth’s funeral?”