Limetown

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Limetown Page 23

by Cote Smith


  CHAPTER TEN

  Emile

  The drive across town gave Emile time to replay what he’d seen in Moyer’s mind. The scenes that unraveled before him didn’t make sense: Jacob, his brother, here, in Lawrence, all along. In one scene his brother skipped up the steps of his front porch, opened the door to a warm and happy home. All this while Emile moved from one motel to another, wandering campus after campus, calling out his brother’s name, so that the last six years of his life became one long, undocumented montage of misery.

  He pounded on Jacob’s door. Night had arrived. The house was dark. Emile continued to knock, if only to make noise, to announce his existence. He backed off the porch and looked up at the house. Small, one floor, with an attic with a window. A starter home for a bubble family. Emile shouted Jacob’s name. He picked up a rock to break a window. The neighbors came out. A neatly bearded man asked if Emile needed any help. He held a baby in his arms.

  “I was looking for my brother,” Emile said.

  A woman stepped forward—the man’s wife, the baby’s mother—and smiled. “They’re at the hospital.”

  “The hospital?” Emile said.

  “Yes,” the woman said. “You must be Emile. Jacob’s told us all about you.” Behind the woman the baby started to cry. She returned to her family, dabbed the baby’s nose with her sleeve. “We better get back in.” They climbed their porch, and the woman said good night. “He’s going to be so happy to see you.”

  * * *

  Emile sat in his car in the hospital parking lot. The conversation with Jacob’s neighbor had stunned him, causing the waves of anger and resentment to recede from his mind. But now they came flooding back, this time with worry. Why was Jacob at the hospital?

  Inside he gave his brother’s name at the registration desk. He took an elevator to the third floor as directed, then swung left down a long hallway. He passed a pair of smiling nurses, and at the end of the hallway he pressed a button and was buzzed through a set of double doors. A doctor, killing time at the nurse’s station, nodded. “Congratulations,” he said.

  Emile knocked on the door, and his brother opened it. After all this time, it was as simple as that.

  “I don’t believe it,” Jacob said, and before Emile could think to ball up a fist, Jacob pulled him in close. He had grown stronger, his brother. Bigger too, Emile noticed, when Jacob finally let go. It wasn’t all muscle. He was thicker in the face, the waist. It was a body that was living well. “I was hoping—” Jacob began, but didn’t know how to finish the sentence. “Come in, come in. She’s resting.”

  Emile followed him into the dark hospital room. A nurse stood over the bed.

  “She’s been here two weeks,” Jacob said, “and they still can’t figure out what’s wrong. Or if it’s affecting the baby. They don’t think so, but if, if . . .” His voice broke off. Emile waited. “Everything was fine. Then one morning she woke up with these red dots all over her legs. I thought it was just a rash. Thank god she didn’t listen.” He shook his head. “They’re called petechiae. Means her blood isn’t clotting. And if her blood isn’t clotting when the baby comes. Well.”

  The nurse pulled the privacy curtain around the hospital bed. “Everything looks fine,” she said. Everything, it was understood, except the mysterious disease that brought the patient there in the first place. Emile didn’t know what to say. His mind went to the neighbors he’d met a little while ago. The bubble family in their bubble house.

  “Where were you?” he finally said.

  “What?”

  “Where the hell were you? I’ve been, for years I’ve been—”

  “Keep your voice down,” Jacob said, his focus drifting back to the curtain, at the woman resting behind it.

  Emile grabbed his brother by the shoulders to make Jacob look at him.

  “Take your hands off me,” Jacob said.

  “We had a plan,” Emile said. “You were here the whole time? With your wife?”

  “She’s not my wife.”

  “And now you’re having a kid? Man, look at me.”

  Jacob threw his arms up, knocking Emile’s hands off his shoulders. “What? You think I planned this?”

  “How the hell should I know?”

  “I’m twenty-four, Emile. I’ve got no money, a shitty job.”

  “You have a house. A home.”

  “That’s Alison’s. And how did you—”

  Alison stirred behind the curtain. Jacob’s attention shifted away from Emile once more, to her. Emile could feel the worry wrapped around his brother’s chest, clutching tight. It was a helpless, suffocating feeling, one that could crack his ribs.

  “I tried,” Jacob said. “I swear I did. You were already gone. They wouldn’t tell me where.”

  “So you quit looking,” Emile said.

  Jacob sighed. “That’s not—not everything is about you.”

  Of course it is, Emile wanted to say. None of this would have happened without me. You left Lawrence because of me. You gave up your dream because of me. But then you thought better of it. You convinced yourself that you’d done enough, that you didn’t owe me anything, not even what you promised.

  “You said you would come back,” Emile said.

  Alison groaned. “I can’t do this right now,” Jacob said. “Let’s talk tomorrow.”

  “You’re serious. After all this time.”

  Alison groaned again. “Listen to her.”

  Emile looked at the curtain. He didn’t hear anything, this time. But he saw how anxious his brother was, how distracted, so he gave in. “Fine,” he said. He wanted Jacob’s undivided attention when Emile listed all the ways he had failed him.

  “You can crash at my place if you want,” Jacob said.

  “I have a room.”

  “Oh,” Jacob said. “Well, all right.” Jacob thought of the Eldridge, of the last room they shared together. He could not imagine what Emile had been through since. “Hey Emile,” Jacob said. “It’s good to see you.” Then he disappeared behind the curtain.

  * * *

  They kept a key under a pot, like the Sinnards, except this pot featured nothing but dirt and dead leaves collected from nearby oak trees. Exhausted, Emile collapsed onto the couch. When he woke, it was morning. Jacob still hadn’t come home, giving Emile the freedom to wander the house and snoop. There wasn’t much to it. Hardwood floors, sparse walls, a few cacti. There were no pictures on the walls or above the small fireplace mantel. Emile wondered how long his brother had lived here, with Alison. Last night, even in the darkness, the house looked so cozy, with its quaint white porch and large, front-facing window. But now that he saw it up close, it seemed cold, almost perfunctory.

  Jacob returned from the hospital a few hours later, pale and tired. He went straight to the kitchen and made himself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich that he wolfed down in three bites. Emile waited for him on the porch. Jacob handed him a beer that Emile refused. Jacob opened one, put the other at his feet.

  “Alison’s awake,” Jacob said, “if you’d like to meet her.”

  “How’d you meet?” Emile asked.

  “Fate. That’s the way I tell it, anyway.” He drank half his beer in one tilt, before looking at Emile with his bloodshot eyes. “Would you like to see it?”

  “No,” Emile said. “I want you to tell me. Tell me what was so great that you gave up looking for me.”

  “It wasn’t like that.”

  “Tell me.”

  Jacob finished his beer, opened the other. “You probably thought college was a dream,” he said. “That I lived on some beautiful campus, made friends with my roommate, met Alison at a dorm party. But it wasn’t like that. It wasn’t anything, actually, because I never made it. I mean, I went where they sent me, but I didn’t last. Not even a month.”

  “Why not?”

  “I just had this feeling. Everything reminded me of them, you know? Of Vince and Max, and their boss.” Oskar Totem, Emile thought. I know his name
now. “If I stayed in school, I would always be in debt to them. That’s all I could think about. I felt like I traded you in for a future I didn’t even want anymore.”

  He paused to finish the rest of his beer. He had come home, he said, or the closest thing to it, not because he wanted to, not because he liked it here, but because here, in Lawrence, was where it made the most sense to wait. Here was where Emile would someday return when things went wrong.

  “It’s hard—I can’t explain what I felt. I wish you would just look,” he said. “You might not want to know that I felt guilty. I know I never should have left you at that place. I told myself I was doing the right thing, the safer thing, and I probably was, but that doesn’t mean it’s what I should’ve done.”

  The neighbors popped out of the house, their screen door screeching, slamming shut. The wife pushed the baby in a stroller. They waved from their front yard.

  Jacob waved back. He lowered his voice. “They followed me, you know. To college.”

  Emile nodded. He felt a twinge of sympathy for Jacob then, but he didn’t tell his brother that they had followed him too. He didn’t tell him about the motel rooms, the photos he took every morning before he left, or how his things were often not in the same place he left them when he came back.

  The neighbors stopped in front of Jacob’s house. “Beautiful, isn’t it?” the wife said. She looked up and admired the clear blue sky. “Such a perfect light.”

  “Yes,” the husband said. “A wonderful day for a reunion.”

  They paused long enough to make Emile wonder, before setting off down the street. Jacob and Emile sat in silence while the neighbors circled the block. When they returned, they asked Jacob how Alison was feeling, and to holler if he needed anything. Emile watched them go inside their house. He waited for a hand to pull back a window curtain.

  “I want you to meet her,” Jacob said.

  Emile finally turned to his brother. He snuck a look inside Jacob’s thoughts, to see what Jacob felt when he spoke of Alison. He didn’t see a particular image, not a moment or a scene. It was just a feeling. A buzzing. Of excitement, of hope, but also that worry again, that it was too good to be true. It was a feeling Emile hadn’t felt since his night with Claire.

  “What do you think?” Jacob asked.

  Emile stood up and walked off the porch. He didn’t want to see his brother happy.

  * * *

  Emile went back to his motel and called the number Moyer had given him. They would meet that night, at Lost 80, and Emile would hear him out. Until then, he had the day to kill, a whole heap of time to think about what his brother had said, the excuses and explanations he’d given. Maybe he would go to the Sinnards, ask them if they knew their other non-son was in town, that he had been for years.

  He got in his car and drove. The wind picked up, turning the gravel road into a cloud of dirt and rock. He was a mile or two past his turn before he realized he’d missed it. But he got an idea and drove farther north, away from the city, until he saw a sign advertising apples for sale at Beckett farm. His car crawled down the dirt road and parked at a safe distance from the house. The house looked worse off than when Emile last saw it, blurry in Austin’s thoughts. The paint was chipped, and a chunk of gutter dangled off the roof. Emile got out of the car. A dog busted out the screen door and met him with a loud bark. Emile stopped.

  “Don’t listen to him,” Austin said, emerging from the house. “He doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” It took him a moment to recognize Emile.

  “What’s his name?” Emile asked. He could feel Austin’s shock, like plunging into freezing cold water.

  “His name is Stick.”

  Emile let the dog sniff his hand, crouched down and pet its head. “Stick. Do you like sticks, sir?”

  “He doesn’t like sticks,” Austin said. “It’s what he does. Came up to me one day while I was out with the cattle. Tried to shoo him off, but he wouldn’t listen. Been stuck with him ever since.” Emile stood up, and the dog retreated to Austin’s side. “What are you doing here?”

  “I don’t know,” Emile said. “I heard you were still around.”

  Austin spit brown into the dirt, and Emile recognized the color, the wad inside Austin’s lip.

  Austin looked east straight into the sun. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  “I could help,” Emile said, without thinking. “Or at least keep you company.”

  Austin sized Emile up. They had been about the same height in high school, but Emile was taller now. “Not up to me,” Austin said. He lowered his truck’s gate and, without prompting, Stick jumped up and onto the bed. “Ask him.”

  Neither of them spoke as they rode a mile or two around what come summer would be a field of corn. Now it was just acres of dirt, still empty from the harvest. They stopped when they reached a barbed wire fence, and Emile and Stick followed Austin as he secured loose posts. The fence stretched as far as Emile could see, which, in Kansas, was practically forever.

  “You didn’t know what you were getting yourself into,” Austin said, an hour in.

  “Guess not.”

  “Well, feel free to say your piece and move on. I don’t want to waste anyone’s time.”

  “My piece?”

  Austin stopped mid-hammer. His thoughts snapped to the night Emile found him in the woods, a night, over the years, Emile had gotten pretty good at not thinking about.

  “I was trying to help.”

  “You think you helped?” Austin threw the hammer down, where it stuck in the mud. “I was in the hospital for three weeks. No one came to see me.” Emile saw him lying in a hospital bed, his entire body, it seemed, bruised or broken. “Everyone knew. The school, the whole damn town. My parents wouldn’t even look at me. And where were you?” He picked up the hammer and pounded a nail into oblivion. “Nah, man, you didn’t help shit. You just left.”

  “I’m sorry,” Emile said. And he truly was. Though as Emile followed him to the next post, he wasn’t just thinking of Austin. He was thinking of Jacob, how, like Emile, he had also just tried to help. In that way, Austin’s anger reminded him of his own.

  Emile followed him the rest of the day out of guilt, offering his company as penance, though Austin didn’t speak to him again. When they were done, he drove Emile back to the house, and went inside without a word, Stick trailing closely behind.

  Emile did not go to Lost 80 as he had promised Moyer. He spent that night at the airport motel, watching planes leave and land. The departures were much louder than the arrivals, he noticed. His mind stayed on Austin and his brother. Austin had never forgiven him. Could he forgive his brother? The question kept Emile up long after darkness fell. When his phone rang, after midnight, he answered just so he could hear a voice that wasn’t his own.

  “Mr. Haddock,” Moyer said. “Apologies for the late call.” He cleared his throat. “But I need an answer. Dr. Totem has become quite insistent.”

  “I don’t even know what you’re talking about,” Emile said, still lost in his own thoughts.

  “The project. He wants to know if you plan on playing a part in this groundbreaking venture of his.”

  “A part?”

  “Not a part. I don’t know why I said that. You are the venture. Did I mention you would work in Australia? My homeland!” He began to sing. “We’ve golden soil and wealth for toil; our home is girt by sea.” He paused. “I never knew what a ‘girt’ was. You still there?”

  “I’m still here.”

  “Did my singing persuade you?”

  “It did not.”

  “Was it the girt? I can sing a different verse.”

  “It’s not the girt,” Emile said. “It’s your boss.”

  “I don’t like the sound of that.”

  Moyer chuckled on the other side of the line, misunderstanding the moment. He must’ve not known about what had happened at the Eldridge, or the vow Emile had made when he returned to the hotel. He must’ve not known that t
he only reason Emile would even consider hearing Moyer out was so that he could learn more about Oskar Totem. So that one day, if Emile still desired, he could meet him and enact any one of the vengeful thoughts buzzing around his brain.

  “And what of your brother?” Moyer asked. “The daddy-to-be.”

  “How do you know about that?”

  “Dr. Totem takes pride in always knowing these kinds of details. I think he’s a little envious of you. You know so much, so easily.”

  “Then he doesn’t know me at all.”

  “Maybe,” Moyer said. “Who knows better than you who knows yourself the best? I mean—you understand.” Moyer held the phone away from his ear and sneezed. “Anyway, he did want me to convey one more thing. Keep in mind, these are his words, not mine.”

  “What is it?”

  “Well, he suggests—no—he believes that there is no future for you here. Your brother, yes. You, no. He couldn’t believe you’d want to stay after you talked with your brother and, you know, met the mother of his child. That must have been quite the introduction.”

  Emile went quiet. He didn’t like the idea of Moyer, Totem, whoever, knowing more than he did. “Actually, I didn’t get the chance.”

  “Oh,” Moyer said.

  “Who is she?”

  “What? Oh. No. I couldn’t possibly spoil that for you. But shall I ring you tomorrow? Or how about this: I’ll wait at Lost 80. I like it there. It’s sort of romantic, in a seedy, American way.”

 

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