He didn’t get home until seven. The house was empty. The television was still on, the table dusted with scattered white powder. He found Aden crying in the bathroom, a welt across his back and another across his legs. Eli examined the wounds. He turned to the toilet and threw up. It was his fault: He’d left his brother alone. He thought of the Jesus in the painting, the rivers of blood. He imagined his brother beaten and bruised, wrists sliced through with razor blades. No one touched his brother.
The next week when they learned Roker was coming to stay, Eli instructed Aden to invite himself over to a friend’s and personally escorted him to the neighboring house after school. When he returned home he gathered beer bottles from the kitchen sink. He put three in a Ziploc bag, carried the bag to a rock in the backyard, and used a hammer to smash the glass to pieces. He waited until Roker and his mother were asleep before sprinkling the shards of glass on the mattress beside the grown man’s naked hulk of a body, and on the floor where his feet were likely to land in the morning.
Roker received thirty-two stitches. Eli received a year in Sunday school.
“Your Jesus works miracles?” his mother asked Aunt Jenny, hauling him up to her sister’s doorstep that Sunday morning. “Ask His holiness to civilize this one.”
Eli’s mother didn’t believe in church, but she did believe in capital punishment.
Aunt Jenny was thrilled: She’d been begging to take the children to church for years and was happy to provide the service no matter her sister’s motivations for allowing it. Every week for a summer Eli was to attend Sunday school. He was also to stay after to wash Uncle Rod and Aunt Jenny’s cars and to mow their lawn. This was on top of his usual chores cleaning up at home, a duty that now fell entirely to him as further punishment. He continued to finish the night’s old beers left in the kitchen and, to spite his mother, smoked her cigarettes while he cleaned. He arrived at Aunt Jenny’s for church every Sunday smelling of Corona and menthol.
“You smell like the devil,” she would say, not without good humor.
He was wound too tight for the soft-spoken old ladies who taught children’s church, so he sat beside his aunt in the adult sanctuary, chewing Wrigley’s or sucking hard candy while he amused himself drawing unkind cartoons of the minister farting at the pulpit. Rather irreverently, Aunt Jenny kept her favorite Pew Art on the fridge.
She rarely made him do the chores his mother had demanded he complete. She explained her lawn mower was too unwieldy for a boy to handle. She decided the car wasn’t so dirty it needed immediate washing. Most afternoons she made Eli sit with her at the kitchen table, eating sugar cookies and playing board games. Eli loved the way her kitchen smelled of sweet things freshly baking. He loved how all her furniture matched. He liked to sit on the love seat in the living room and run his sensitive, quivering hands up and down the edge of the seat cushions, the crushed velvet slick beneath his palm if he pushed in one direction, the fibers resisting when he pulled his hand the other.
When summer was only half over, and carting Eli to Jenny’s house became more a punishment for his mother than it was for him, she announced he’d served his time and informed Jenny he wouldn’t be coming back. He took a month off church. Things were better. Roker was gone. The new boyfriend was an idiot, but gentle. Eli had his usual Sunday pastimes to keep him busy, fishing and harassing his brother. Some nights he still locked himself in the bathroom, took secret satisfaction in drawing blood from his own arms with unwound paper clips and kitchen paring knifes. He worried about Jenny:Who would she play Monopoly with? Who would eat her cookies? He got his church clothes back out in resignation: He just couldn’t be worrying about her all the time. He didn’t want her to feel lonely, he explained to her on their way to service. She nodded and said she agreed that she wouldn’t know what to do without him.
Aunt Jenny was no missionary, but she did her bit. She taught Eli to bless his food before eating and to recite the Lord’s Prayer before bed. She answered his theological inquiries as best she could: why God was invisible, why He was so angry in the Old Testament, why the churchgoers drank grape juice and called it blood.
The way he described his childhood, Aunt Jenny was an anchor of sanity in his otherwise chaotic world. Even in high school, when he only went to services to stare at the uniformly gorgeous back row of the junior high all girls choir, he still spent whole afternoons at Jenny’s, sleeping on her couch, mowing her lawn, eating the food she cooked only for him.
Eli had Jenny all to himself. Aden would have nothing to do with her. Aden had friends and clubs. He had been labeled Gifted and reaped all the rewards that came with the title. The teachers loved him. Their mother sobered up enough to attend his parent-teacher conferences, basking in the praise. He was soon being courted by costly private schools that offered to pay his way.
Aden’s intellect eclipsed Eli’s more practical talents: Eli could put anything back together in better shape than it had been in when he took it apart. He was terrible at math but had an innate skill for carpentry. He knew cars. These talents merely impressed upon teachers the need to keep Eli under close surveillance. Whenever he was sent to the principal’s office for gluing the teacher’s pens to her desk or drawing dirty pictures on desktops, the principal wanted to know the same thing: why couldn’t he be more like his brother? Eli didn’t mind. He loved that people loved his brother. And when it did bother him, there were bottles from the pantry to silence the unwelcome thoughts and endless blades with which to cut and mask the hurt.
He couldn’t say when the drinking began in earnest. He’d been sipping from his mother’s beer bottles for as long as he could remember. He could get liquor when he wanted it. But somewhere between his third and fourth year of high school the pictures in his memory begin to blur. Faces fade at the edges. The order of events is vague, the line of chronology tangled.
At eighteen he applied to a state school to study engineering. To everyone’s surprise, he was accepted; unfortunately, it took him less than two semesters to justify his most avid critics’ doubts. After a string of D’s and F’s, he dropped out. He followed his girlfriend to Michigan, where he worked at GM until his perpetual delinquency cost him his position. In four years he went through as many jobs. When his girlfriend left him for someone else she cited his drinking as the problem. He argued otherwise. She’d slept with his neighbor. That seemed like a pretty good reason to him.
He’d loved her, and her departure woke in him some innate sense of self-preservation. He knew he didn’t have an addiction, but was willing to admit he drank maybe a little more than was necessary. He could ration his drinking, cut back some. He traded whiskey for beer. Every evening after work he stopped at the Exxon station for a six-pack and for cigarettes. The first night the beer lasted until nine. The next night until eight when he decided he couldn’t be expected to go from constant drinking to a few bottles of cheap beer without weaning himself carefully. He walked to the bar down the street for a drink—just one—and had five. For two months he rationed his drinking in this way, promising he would only have the six-pack, finding himself at the bar by ten.
The night of the accident he’d found one of his brother’s letters buried under a month’s worth of unopened mail. Aden only wrote because his new wife, Rebekah, made him. Eli had missed their wedding, passed out at home on the couch while his flight took off down the runway. Rebekah had sent pictures. Every year he received a birthday card containing gift cards for local restaurants (Aden wouldn’t let Rebekah send money) or typed, printed letters recounting the news of their lives: his promotion, their first child. Eli didn’t own a phone. With her elegant penmanship, each letter as carefully scripted as her message, Rebekah did the brothers’ talking for them.
But the letter that night was in Aden’s crisp, square handwriting, the message without Rekebah’s practiced kindness: Their mother had been found dead in her apartment. Her manager discovered her after she’d missed three days of work. An accidental overdose, they c
laimed. The funeral would be held on the seventeenth.
He read the letter on the thirty-first.
Eli drove to the nearest liquor store and bought a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. He drove to the field ten miles from his apartment where he sometimes liked to lie on the ground and stare at the stars, feeling their brightness buzz all the way to the back of his skull. He felt God best when in the field, exposed to the elements. He could feel the holiness of things humming in the trees, roiling the ground. He felt these things more clearly when he’d been drinking.
Lying on his back, staring up at the night, he tried to feel some pain at the loss of his mother. He tried to feel grief, if only to feel something at all. But the memories that battered him were merciless in their specificity, and they only inspired a pure, unadulterated hatred: his mother on her bed, half naked and passed out, the welts on his brother’s legs, nights crouching by the toilet, overcome to gagging with its stale odor as he set another razor blade to his skin. He stood up, threw out his arms, and screamed. He screamed until his spit was froth and his throat raw. Until he was empty.
Usually he walked home—he knew enough to walk when he’d been drinking—but that night he wanted to sleep in the field, under the stars. A ceiling over his head would be too suffocating. He needed to feel ample air around his arms and legs, to know he could run if his anger overwhelmed him. He woke to a storm. It was midmorning, dark and cold. He ran to his car, anxious to escape the rain.
Four miles down the road he ran his car off the road and wrapped it around a sycamore.
He remembered very little of the actual accident, except for the panicked realization that he was trapped. He did, however, remember waking up in the ER, feeling the shock of being completely sober for the first time in four years.
He was twenty-three, a college dropout and an addict. He went the only place he knew to go.
When Jenny opened her door and found Eli standing there, duffel bag in hand, face battered by the accident, she began to weep. She had been as affected by the years: Since he’d run away she’d lost her husband to a heart attack and the better use of her right hip to an icy curb outside her church. She had never fully recovered from either.
“You smell like the devil,” she said, and welcomed him back into the house.
Jenny informed him he could stay if he worked. With only a high school diploma and a stubborn refusal to cut his hair, his job opportunities were limited. He could easily have worked full time as a bartender, but Jenny wouldn’t allow him within arm’s reach of alcohol. He worked part time at a custom car design factory where he showed marked skill with a welder, supplementing the physical labor with another ten hours at a family-owned grocery where he stocked shelves and mopped floors.
His aunt kept a regimented life. She woke every day at seven, kept lists, and had not missed a church service for fifty years. But she gave Eli his freedom, providing he stayed away from bars and attended Wednesday night prayer meeting. The structure of her life was a refuge for Eli, whose tyrannical cravings and unpredictable temper had left him without any sense of stability. She lived for his stories, humored his mood swings, and fueled his emaciated body. She never asked for an explanation of his past behavior and she made it clear she did not condemn him for it.
His conversion to the faith was as slow and methodical as the fight for his sobriety. On his days off he sometimes drove to the art museum to sit and mediate on the Crucifixion paintings that he had first seen as a child. He studied the rivulets of blood running the course of the dying Christ’s body, fascinated by the idea of a suffering Savior, seduced by the liquid flow of paint. He copied pictures of the painting for hours. Church was far less interesting, but he went, he listened, and then he took what he’d heard and turned it in his mind while he sat studying the face of Christ. Over a Saturday breakfast of eggs and toast he tried to articulate to his aunt how his love of art and his love for Christ would be forever overlapped in his mind, irrevocably intertwined. She worried he was perhaps idolizing the paintings even as he explained the difference between the worship of an idol and the appreciation of an icon. He was not as good at talking about art as he was at making it. She only nodded, and prayed, believing God was good enough to honor this young faith however peculiar its inception.
They lived in shared quiet routine for two years until Eli began to talk of school. She didn’t laugh when he said he wanted to study sculpture. That was all the encouragement he needed.
He was accepted to the art academy on academic probation, a cautionary action that proved entirely unnecessary. He excelled. In his painting class he met the first person who could replicate on paper the tattoo he described from memory. She drew the pattern on his arm and sat with him at the parlor while the tattoo artist carved the image into his skin with blood and ink.
He unveiled the tattoo to Aunt Jenny at Christmas. When she recovered from the sudden onset of heart palpitations, her only complaint against the tattoo, which her church and personal faith expressly forbid, was that it was “so big.” Had he needed one so big?
When he explained that the tattoo was meant to remind him of the angels who had pulled him from the wreck, who had kept him from getting burned, she went as far as to be flattered that he’d thought of her—she was glad that at least he hadn’t done something as foolish as print her name in a heart on his shoulder or something as sentimental.
By the time Eli finished his story, the bar had closed. Outside the snow had stopped. The snow-covered trees stood elegant as ladies dressed in white stoles. Eli wanted to walk.
“But what about your van?”
He shoved his hands in his pockets. His only protection against the cold was a blue pilot jacket that was an inch too short at the wrists. “I’ll get it in the morning.”
“They’ll tow it if they find out you left it here all night.”
“I’ll get it early. It’s too nice out to drive.”
It was two in the morning and not quite twenty degrees. Nothing a reasonable person would consider “nice.” I joined him on the sidewalk anyway. A sheet of ice intersected our path, and when I reached it he took my arm to guide me over the most treacherous part.
“Why did you stay on campus for Christmas?” I asked. “Why didn’t you visit your aunt?”
“She passed away two years ago. A stroke.”
“I’m sorry.”
He lifted his shoulders, a very gentle shrug of resignation. “She didn’t suffer. And she was lonely as a widow. I visited as often as I could, but there was nothing I could do to fix that loneliness.
“I haven’t seen Aden in years. He’s never quite forgiven me… .”
He left the thought unfinished. Eli was always surrounded by a crowd. I had never thought of him as someone moving through life alone.
“You know I’ve lived a lot of my life at the hospitality of other people,” he said. “And I never accept someone’s hospitality without appreciating it. It’s good of you to let me stay in your place until I get things sorted out.”
“Of course—it’s nothing.”
“Don’t say that. I know it isn’t nothing. Well, maybe it’s not for Zoë—she couldn’t care less—but I know it matters to you. You’re kind of a cat person.”
“A what?”
“You’re one of those people who likes things the way she likes them.You’re structured.”
My expression must have amused him. He asked, “Am I right?”
“It’s not a very flattering description.”
He was nonplussed. “I don’t mean it as an insult.”
Turning the corner to my street, we had no choice but to walk directly over a large frozen puddle. He toed forward, inch by inch, his hands perpendicular to his body for balance.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“It’s slippery.”
“It’s just ice.”
“I don’t want to fall,” he protested. “I’ve seen people really fall. You can nip the tip of your tailbone right
off.”
I laughed. I was happy and full and glad to be out in the night air, talking to this man who never failed to surprise me.
At home, I fell into bed half dressed and wide awake.
There was a bang on the wall as the futon fell against the wall.
“Sorry,” he called.
“It’s all right.”
I waited for him to say something else—Good night or See you in the morning, but there was only silence.
The next morning Zoë thanked me for taking Eli out to dinner. I didn’t know what version of the story Eli had given her, but I went along with it.
“We had a good time,” I said, reaching for the coffee, hoping it would magically compensate for a meager four hours of sleep.
“Well, just for the record, I appreciate you loosening up.”
I said you’re welcome, sure that if Zoë knew just how much I’d loosened up—how much I’d said and how much he’d confessed— she’d be more concerned than grateful. There was Eli’s girlfriend to think of. Jillian had been her old roommate, after all.
I did not intend on loosening up around Eli again.
9
I went to Valerie’s baby shower reluctantly, knowing I was the only one from our graduate class who’d been invited. I didn’t know the woman hosting or the women attending, and three hours of sharing cheap cake with strangers was not my idea of a fun Saturday afternoon. The house was new and smelled of paint and wood, of still settling construction. During lunch I held my fruit punch with both hands, nervously eyeing the white carpet while the ladies swapped stories of losing their virginity with the pride of veterans recounting battle wounds. The youngest in the group was getting married in a month and wanted to know whether she and her fiancé should stop having sex now or just give it up for the last week. She wanted the wedding night to be amazing.
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