“Yeah, I recognized him right away when I saw him, even though his face was a total mess—same kid I met at the house that time when Mom and Uncle Vik were gone, right? The mandolin player. I didn’t know he could sing like that though. I had shivers, seriously.
“So when the song’s over, Jonathan just stands there looking bleary, swaying a bit. At this point I’m not sure he’s unsteady because he’s drunk or because he’s been beaten up so bad. Both, as it turns out. Next thing Jonathan does, is he swings the mandolin by the neck and chucks it, overhand, into the crowd. It bounces off the pool-table light, its brass shade, and smashes all over the floor. Pieces of mandolin everywhere.
“Then Derek, that asshole, steps forward and shoves Jonathan right off the front of the stage. Not more than four, four and a half feet down, but still. Like I said, he can be a real dick. I push my way up there as fast as I can, but Jonathan is just sitting there on the floor with his knees up and his head in his arms. He’s not hurt, at least not more than he was when he walked in. Crying pretty hard, though.”
Jonathan. Mark kept calling you Jonathan. He kept saying your name. It sounded respectful, not mocking, and he had said you weren’t hurt. I started to breathe a bit better.
Bron was hovering around me by this point, going, “What? What’s happened?” Because I guess I was pretty pale.
I told her everything was fine and took the cordless phone down to the den. The place looked amazing. Bron’s sister, Zorah, had showed up and called a cleaning service, and they’d taken all the empties away, mopped up all the spills. They even shampooed the furniture. While Mark was talking I lifted the couch cushions to check, though, and the hole from that burning cigarette was still there. They’d just turned the cushions upside down.
Mark told me he took you to his office—half carried you, he said—and asked you what you were doing at the Border.
You were there to see him, actually, you told him. Mark says, “Jonathan immediately starts pacing around the room, apologizing over and over. He’s looking really upset and agitated. I ask him what’s wrong—because drunk or not drunk, he really seems way more upset than the circumstances call for—and he says, ‘I confess, we have a bit of a situation on our hands, Mark.’
“‘Is it about Adam?’ I ask him, and he goes, ‘It’s about your brother, yes. Your little brother. I did something really bad to Adam, and now he’s in trouble with the law.’
“So I ask him what he did. I’m thinking, I don’t know, maybe drugs or something—maybe you both got busted for something, and he threw you under the bus or something. But Jonathan says, ‘I seduced him. He didn’t want me at all; he was in love with my sister, Shayna, and I confused him and tricked him into thinking maybe he was gay. And now he’s going to have a criminal record and he’ll never get into college.’
“I have to tell you,” Mark says, “I couldn’t really make much sense of the story; none of it was adding up for me at all, and meanwhile Jonathan has started crying harder. He’s pacing and crying and picking random things up off my desk and putting them down again, and I can barely understand anything he’s saying because he’s crying so hard.
“He keeps saying college is your only way out. ‘College is Kurl’s only way out, and now I’ve taken that away from him.’
“‘Out of what?’ I keep asking. ‘His only way out of what?’ And Jonathan finally says, ‘Out of Uncle Viktor. Away from Uncle Viktor.’”
Then Mark stopped talking. He said he had another call, asked me to hold on a second. He got back on the line and said he had to go to work. The day manager was sick, and they were supposed to clean the keg lines today. He was about to wake you up, Jo, and call you a taxi. “I’ll call you again in an hour from the bar, okay?” he said.
“Wait,” I said.
“I promise, I’ll call you back within one hour,” he said. “And Adam?”
“What?”
“It’s going to be okay. All of it. It’s going to work out okay.”
Sincerely,
AK
Sunday, May 15
Dear Little Jo,
Mark called again an hour later exactly like he’d promised. I didn’t want him to know I’d waited the whole hour on the sofa in Bron’s den, just sitting there holding the phone in my lap. When it rang I practically dropped it. I was that wound up.
“I’d come pick you up,” he said, “but it’s crazy over here; I can’t leave the bar.”
I told him it was all right.
He said he had just called Mom and found out I’d been booted out of the house.
“Did she tell you why?” I said. My heart started beating like crazy.
“More or less,” Mark said. “Listen, though. About Jonathan. Can we talk about him first?”
“Sure,” I said.
Mark said, “When I woke him up this morning, I asked him what the hell was really going on. You know, what had him so upset last night. He told me about that party the other night—just the night before last, right?—when you beat on that kid. What does he call them? The butcherboys. He told me he’d walked in on you and his sister having sex. Shayna—her name’s Shayna, right? And he told me a bunch of stuff he’d discovered about his mother, about how she died.”
I didn’t say anything.
“I’m not trying to grill you here,” Mark said, “but that is some heavy shit. That last part, about his mom. Did you know about all that?”
“No,” I said. “Well, some of it. Not all.”
Did I know? I didn’t know, Jo. For one thing I didn’t know you’d seen Shayna and me at the party. I wasn’t planning on lying about it—I mean I’d written to you about it already; the letter is sitting in my backpack in a stack with a bunch of other undelivered letters—but in that moment I realized that, of course, you haven’t read that letter yet. And so maybe you’ve been thinking that on top of everything else, I’m going to lie about it to you. As if you need more betrayal.
“Anyhow,” Mark said. “About you getting kicked out of the house? Mom said she believes you’re a homosexual. Her word. She said Uncle Vik found a love letter, or something.”
I said, “He did.”
“A letter to a boy named Jonathan.”
“Yes,” I said. I swear at that point I wasn’t even nervous about telling Mark, about confirming it for him. Because all I could think was, What is it you discovered about your mom, Jo? What is it about her death?
How it must have felt for you to hear something like that, whatever it was. How what I did with Shayna, and then what we said afterward to the cops about Shayna being my girlfriend, must have made it so much worse for you. How being with Shayna may have seemed easier to me for a messed-up minute or two at that party, but it must have made everything so, so much more horrible and sickening and complicated and lonely for you.
I didn’t say any of this to Mark. It was just like the first call: all that stunned silence on my end of the phone. Maybe worse this time. I was so stunned by the fact that it was my brother Mark on the phone saying any of this in the first place. I mean I had to say something, but all I could finally manage to say to him was, “Are you mad?”
“At you?”
“Yeah.”
“No, Adam,” he said, “I’m not mad at you. I feel horrible about all this. Uncle Viktor beating on you, all this time? Jonathan told me about it this morning, that Uncle Vik beats you, so I asked Ma about it. She didn’t exactly deny it. I mean, Christ, Adam! Why didn’t you ever say anything?”
I said to Mark, “Me being gay, I mean. Are you mad about me being gay?”
“Well, I’m not an idiot.” He sounded kind of impatient now. “You’ve had, what? One girlfriend? For, like, five minutes?”
“That doesn’t mean—”
“I’m saying I knew, all right? Since you were in junior high at least. You were what, thirteen? You had that magazine in your room.”
“What magazine?” I said. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. My brother had
me confused with someone else.
“Some gay magazine. You know, boy bands or something. Tiger Beat or something.”
“Tiger Beat isn’t a gay magazine.” Despite everything I laughed.
“It is if a dude’s looking at it in bed.”
“That’s—that’s insane.” I was laughing.
Mark started chuckling a bit too. “Oh, come on. All the queers on tour read that magazine. It was all they could get over there.”
“There are queers in the army?” I said. I couldn’t believe I was having this conversation with my brother. I just couldn’t believe it.
Everything, everything out in the open. And suddenly I was really worried he would hang up, and it never would have happened in the first place. I got really panicky all of a sudden that I was imagining the entire phone call.
Mark said, “Where the hell have you been, Adam? This is the twenty-first century. The whole world is crawling with queers.”
I was crying. I mean the laughing had shifted directly into crying. I couldn’t speak at all. I held my hand over the phone.
“I have to go,” he said. “The beer truck just pulled up.”
“Okay,” I said. I had to try really hard not to let him hear I was crying. I don’t know why I cared, after everything else.
“You’ll be staying with me for a bit,” he said. “Drop by the Border for the apartment key later today, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“It’s all going to work out okay,” he said. “I promise.”
Sincerely,
AK
Sunday, May 15
Dear Kurl,
Bron just dropped by. I’m feeling slightly sheepish, in retrospect, about the fact that we wouldn’t let her into the house. My excuse is that I was in no shape to answer the door. I’d taken a cab back from your brother Mark’s apartment this morning and crawled directly into my tent.
Lyle barged into my room and lifted the tent flaps to examine me, demanding to know where I’d been all night, complaining about how frantic with worry he’d been, accusing me of stealing his booze and deliberately engaging in irresponsible and dangerous behavior by mixing my medication with alcohol after the doctor had explicitly warned me about drug interactions. He confiscated the prescription bottle and told me that from now on, he would be serving as my pharmacist, and that I was officially grounded.
I didn’t say a word, just stared him down until my eyelids were so heavy I couldn’t not close them. I believe I may have fallen asleep while Lyle was still mid-lecture.
He was right about all of it, of course. I’d polished off most of a pint bottle of Lyle’s bourbon on my trek to the Texas Border. It hadn’t been a particularly well-formulated plan—neither the drinking nor the onstage performance at Mark’s bar. I’d had only one cogent thought, the same thought that had been spooling through my head continuously since Bron’s party: less pain, less pain.
Anyhow. I heard the doorbell ring, and then Shayna came into my room, leaned over my desk to the open window, and yelled a bunch of obscenities down at Bron.
“Come on, you guys,” Bron called back. “Just come for a drive with us.”
Us. She’d said us. I scrambled out of my tent as fast as my sore ribs would let me and looked out the window, but the Escalade wasn’t there.
Bron had moved from the front step to the center of the lawn so that she could see into my window. “Jonathan, Kurl is so ashamed that he made me park at the end of the street, so you wouldn’t have to look at him,” she told me. “But he wants to see you.”
I wasn’t buying this for a second. Who wants to see someone but stays in the car?
“You’ve done enough damage,” Shayna yelled, over my shoulder. “You need to leave us alone.”
“Fine. I’m leaving your mail here in the box,” Bron told me. “Do you have anything to send back with me?”
“No,” I said.
“Hold on. Aren’t all of these letters for Kurl?” Shayna said. They were scattered over the surface of my desk.
“No,” I said, but she could see they were all addressed to you.
She scooped up the envelopes and held them behind her back. “I feel bad enough already,” she said. “Don’t make me feel worse by breaking up over me.”
“It’s not over you,” I said. I wanted her hands off my letters and her out of my room.
Shayna leaned over the desk again. With one sharp movement she flung my stack of letters out the window.
“Hey!” I said. A shiver of relief came over me, though, as I watched Bron gathering them up where they’d scattered in the grass. I hadn’t known what to do with all those unsent letters, and I’d been watching them pile up with an increasing sense of dread. Bron stood on tiptoes to retrieve an envelope from the hedge.
“Sorry about this,” I called down. “Thanks.”
“Yeah, thanks for fucking up my whole life,” Shayna called, beside me.
Bron walked away, down the street, and as soon as she disappeared I went downstairs and pulled your pile of letters out of the mailbox. The return address on the envelopes says Mark Kurlansky, but it’s definitely your handwriting.
To be honest, Kurl, I haven’t decided whether I’m actually going to read all these letters or not. The last one I read was your breaking-up-with-me letter, in which you referred to yourself as toxic waste and told me I would be better off without you. It made quite an impression on me, that letter. I’m not sure I’m ready to subject myself to more of the same.
Yours,
Jo
Monday, May 16
Dear Little Jo,
You’re not at school today. Not surprising I guess. I had no idea about your ribs being broken when you fell off your bike in the ravine that afternoon before the party. About you being already injured before the butcherboys got to you a second time. A third time, if you count getting crushed into your locker. All in one day.
I mean I still feel bad about Dowell, about hurting him so badly. This morning someone told Bron that I broke Dowell’s nose and his wrist. And that he needed stitches in his tongue where he bit it. Those would be the official medical-treatment items, but based on my firsthand knowledge of punch-to-bruise ratios I bet Dowell is barely recognizable under all the swelling.
He’s not at school today either. If he was—when he is, in a few days or a week, maybe, tops, I think I’m going to have to say something to him. I wanted to go see him right away, at the hospital or at his house, but Bron said I should proceed with caution. Her words. She said his parents may still be on the fence about pressing charges, even if their son is a notorious bully, and if I went around there and started professing my guilt and regret, it could give them the opening they’re waiting for.
I don’t know. I still feel awful about it, but maybe I feel a tiny bit less awful knowing the butcherboys were after you not just at the party, but that whole day.
I wish I could see you, Jo. Just for a minute, just to see you looking different than last time I saw you. Did you know that you were smiling? You were floating there in the hot tub, showing me how your trousers were getting ruined by the water. I mean I didn’t understand what you were saying at the time. Your words were all garbled together. Your eye was swelling shut where the belt had smacked it.
I was just coming around, coming back to myself. And I thought at first maybe I’d done that to you, that swollen eye. I mean for a few minutes there I honestly wasn’t sure. It’s not perfect. I’m aware it wasn’t perfect, me gapping out like that in the middle of a massive temper blowup. It still freaks me out pretty badly, remembering it.
And you were floating in the water, trying to lift your knees to show me your trousers. Grinning at me like some kind of nightmare.
Jo. I wish I could see you. I wish at least I’d had the guts to get out of the car with Bron so I could have seen your face in your window.
Sincerely,
AK
Wednesday, May 18
Dear Little Jo,
I told Mark about the party, about beating on Dowell like that. When I said I barely knew what I was doing, that I barely saw who I was hitting, I thought Mark would be really shocked. I thought he’d think I was mentally unbalanced or something. I mean I’ve been worried about that quite a lot actually.
But Mark told me it happened all the time in Afghanistan. In a firefight someone would fire his weapon and later not remember doing it. They’d have to file reports after any conflict, and they often couldn’t agree at all what had happened, or in what order.
He said once this guy in his unit named Ostend got his thigh grazed by a bullet. He went down but then popped back up and kept running like nothing had happened. And when they got to safety, Ostend was bleeding all over the floor and didn’t even notice. He was swaying from the blood loss, Mark said. Mark and another guy had to pin him down and bind up his leg for him, and it was like the leg wasn’t even attached to the rest of his body: Ostend kept looking down saying, “What the hell are you guys doing to my leg?” As though his brain couldn’t hold on to the knowledge that he’d been hit. He just kept blocking it out and blocking it out, like it didn’t exist.
Mark said all this has something to do with trauma. The flow of information gets interrupted somehow in your brain.
“Did it ever happen to you?” I asked him.
“Not over there,” he said, “but when I arrived home at the airport, I didn’t recognize Mom.”
I laughed, until I realized he was serious. “What do you mean you didn’t recognize her?”
“Sylvan and Mom came to meet me at the airport,” Mark said. “A flight attendant was wheeling me across the tarmac, and Mom came running at me, running in for a hug. I sort of hugged her back out of politeness. I was thinking, ‘Wow, some weird lady is getting all emotional about a veteran coming home.’ Then she stepped back, and I looked her straight in the face, and I still didn’t recognize her. She could have been anybody.
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