The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  When he was home, he couldn’t talk about Haiti the way he could in his letters. His vitality seemed to pale. When I’d take him to the airport for his trip back, he’d be nearly quivering with excitement and relief, holding it in for my benefit I supposed, not understanding that I knew quite well he wasn’t escaping, but returning.

  He was resolute in not acknowledging the tension between Anita and me. But an entirely tense country? A hand-to-mouth existence, disease, poverty, death? O Charlie, he wrote, safely back in squalor. I am living I am living I am living.

  THEN 9/11 HAPPENED. Then the war in Afghanistan. It took him nearly a year, but he got there. He started working for a relief organization in Kabul and took trips outside the city, to visit schools, to give vaccines. He didn’t want to be in the capital but no other westerner was crazy enough to live outside it if they weren’t military, and he relented. I thought he missed Haiti but when I asked him, during a rare phone call, he said, “No, I was done there.” But then he launched into a tirade about Kabul’s too-convenient plumbing, electricity, restaurants. “People think it’s so bad here. This is civilization.”

  I was getting sick of his weird purity. “Well, for God’s sake, are you actually making any difference?”

  “No,” he said, and his voice was full of despair. “It’s angry here. Everyone’s angry.”

  “It’s a fucking war, Nicky.”

  “That’s not it,” he said. “I’m not close enough to it. Not close enough. I can’t get to it.”

  “Close enough to what?”

  But he couldn’t, wouldn’t, answer.

  HE GOT SOME INTESTINAL PARASITE that made him drop thirty pounds that he didn’t have to lose. I was surprised he even told Anita. He’d gotten so confused, so out of touch with the way normal people, we, reacted, that he thought her being a nurse would make telling her okay.

  Instead, she called me. “I need information. I don’t even know what he’s taking. He says he’s better, but he won’t tell me what he weighs.”

  “He probably doesn’t know.”

  “If he’s going to a doctor he would know.”

  “He’s not going to ask. If the doctor told him he wouldn’t remember.”

  “All he has to do is—”

  “Jesus, Mother,” and I felt her cringe, because she was still a country girl and you still didn’t take the Lord’s name in vain, but I didn’t care. “I can’t make him do anything. I don’t know why you’re asking me. What are you asking me to do here? What power do you imagine I have?”

  I ignored my own worry—no, fear—and the kinship she and I had because of it. Instead I thought how I could push her like this, now. I could be cruel and she would say nothing. I didn’t do it much and I didn’t like myself afterward, but it was almost a discipline, to make myself so blunt, unmerciful: it was my role now, it was my due.

  AND THEN, ALL AT ONCE, it was over. He was traveling outside the city, in a small convoy, when the van ahead of them drove over an IED. His car went off the road and he lost consciousness, but just for a few minutes; that was all, that was it. But afterward he couldn’t sleep. Woke up every night screaming, and finally they, whoever they were, convinced him he had to leave.

  I went to Atlanta. He looked desiccated. He slept a lot, and in between Anita took him to doctors. He was drinking special milk-shakes. She’d never been much of a cook, and she loathed waste, but now she was making food all the time, mounds of unseasoned chicken and white rice, throwing most of it away untouched. I felt superfluous—or worse; Anita said, “He doesn’t want to collapse around you.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. “Do you think he would collapse? I mean—maybe he needs to.”

  “Of course he doesn’t,” she said.

  We were in the living room. I don’t know how we’d ended up in there. Maybe because it was the farthest from Nick’s bedroom. Maybe also because that part of the house smelled the least of smoke. I could tell my mother had started smoking inside again. But the living room didn’t even have an ashtray.

  When Anita and I had moved into that house, Hugh’s house, the baronial living room had been nearly empty, and twenty-five years later it was still underfurnished, a beige, corporate-looking sofa and two chairs lonely on the enormous Oriental rug. She had told me years before that she’d only stayed in the house so when Bobo and Big Hugh drove by they could know that she was still there, part of Hugh was still there, although she had no feeling for the house one way or the other. I found myself inspecting the carved limestone mantelpiece, the moldings and coffered ceilings with a new eye. I wished Win were there to compare notes with.

  “They all had training,” my mother said firmly. “He’s going to be fine. He knew the risks, they knew all about it—IEDs, snipers, mines. They all knew what could happen. And he was already weak, because of the GI situation.”

  “Mother.”

  She didn’t answer. She wanted to start talking in medical lingo. She knew I knew it. She went over and sat down on the window seat, limping a little. “You need to see someone about that leg,” I said, but she ignored me.

  She was still young, only sixty-one, and in certain lights looked younger, her features still fine, her auburn hair thick, her figure still voluptuous, impractical—her body had never fit her. But the direct sun coming through the bay window revealed that smoking had done its work, etching rough lines and graying her skin, which had once been milk white. She was sometimes short of breath, and one leg tended to swell; her legs had always been elegant, but now she wore pants almost all the time. She’d shifted to a desk job at the hospital and would not admit it was because she couldn’t be on her feet. Her aging enraged me. But we stayed out of each other’s business. That was the pact. So only Nicky was left.

  “He’s not good,” she said finally.

  “No. He’s not.”

  “There were children. In the van. That hit the mine. That blew up.”

  “There were?”

  “I don’t know why we let him go,” she said. Behind her, through the leaded bay window, I saw the yard sloping up, behind the cracked and weedy tennis court, and daffodils dotting the ivy. It was mid-March. “I don’t know how we did it. Nicky of all people. How could we—Charlie. Charlie.” She was looking to the side, through the little diamond panes, not at me. “He picked them up. Bodies. Limbs. Pieces. He saw all of that. Nicky saw all of that.”

  He’d made a bet and lost. He’d been looking for a present so intense it would envelop him, and now he had a moment he could never leave.

  A FEW DAYS LATER she said, “I want him there with you.”

  “With me?” There was a pause. “At Abbott?”

  “Yes. Please.”

  Her voice was matter-of-fact. Anita did not do guilt or guile. It was a request, not a command.

  “He can teach,” she said. “He’ll be good at it. He’ll be happy there with you. You know he will.” She didn’t beg, or clasp her hands, but that was the closest I think my mother ever got to getting on her knees in front of me. I heard it, in her voice, some dire knowing.

  For a moment, just for Nick, my mother and I were co-conspirators, as of old. We were planets, and he was the sun.

  I thought for a moment of Divya, when I had held open my arms for her ghost ship of grief to engulf me instead, and how I had done it, and was stronger now.

  I was thirty-eight. It was remarkable to contemplate. And my house had been empty and waiting for a long time.

  Ten

  The row of blond heads in the front pew, and at the end, one dark. She turns and looks at me pleading, and I stand and push past the knees and out of the pew and out the door and into the blinding white world. And vomit to the bile. And get in my car. And disappear.

  In my mind sometimes I’m still there, moving, road gray and frozen ahead of me, I have never come back.

  MAY AND I HAD SPOKEN only once more.

  She’d gone back to Paris after that and written letters, and called and called,
and one day finally I’d picked up and she’d said, “Is there someone else?” and since that was as good a reason as any I’d said yes, because I wouldn’t sicken her the way I had been sickened; it wasn’t truth that sickened, but knowledge—truth was there regardless, but did the tree’s fruit exist if you did not eat of it?

  She’d said, “You loved my father more than me. That’s the real truth. You wanted to get close to him. And that is fucked up, Charlie.” I’d said she was right. I hadn’t sounded like anyone I knew, least of all myself, certainly not any self I had ever been with May. Maybe that was why she’d been crying, because I’d transformed, I had tricked her, legless belly in the dust.

  She’d said she hated me and I’d said, good. Although the safest thing was not hate but the end of hate, passion replaced by cold neutrality. I wanted this mostly for her sake but for mine too, because I wanted so much to make a sacrifice in the name of atonement. To have her look at me, hear my voice, and feel nothing. And I would feel the punishment of that pain.

  And I’d believed I’d heard it, then: the space, the moment where she’d decided, or realized; when she killed something, or gave it up, or watched it disintegrate. It was a before and after, with finality, and I’d almost said Now you’re grown up but I didn’t. But I had been glad that the thing was done.

  And then she’d said that she was the one who was never coming back. Abbottsford was mine if I wanted it, she didn’t care. I’d heard that ice in her voice, the absolutely genuine disinterest even beneath the tears. I hadn’t thought I would get my wish so soon. And so that had been the last time we spoke.

  I heard news of her, sometimes, inadvertently: she’d gone back to Paris, she was teaching in Dallas. Still, when I saw her, day after day—whenever I saw a tall girl, a dark-haired girl, a girl dipping her face shyly away, or hugging her books to her chest and hunching as she walked, regretting her height—my first thought was always No. Even before the excitement and then the disappointment and then the relief when the girl turned and was not May. Because she was supposed to be living a shining life, elsewhere. Because, elsewhere, she was glorious: I hadn’t hurt her at all.

  AUGUST. THE LONG ABEYANCE. Zenith of ordinary time.

  Heat, and perfect stillness.

  Nicky was ensconced in Abbottsford. He’d gained a few pounds. He’d thought Abbott was a good idea—a great idea. “I get it,” he said. “Time to grow up. But I love it here anyway.” He’d refused to live with me, though. “I’ll crash with you all the time,” he said. “But I need my own place. Besides, I don’t think you want a roommate. You wouldn’t like that much, Charlie,” and after one open-mouthed moment I’d shouted with laughter and relief. “It’s going to be all right,” he said, laughing too.

  Still he could drop by the house anytime, with his light and need; but today, he’d gone to Boston, to see friends. So I was off duty. Off, on—both new to me.

  When Divya called I almost didn’t answer, but then I did. (Either way, of course, would have changed nothing.) “Did you see the e-mail?” she said.

  “What e-mail?”

  There was a pause. Then, “Oh, Charlie. My dear.” Her voice was a long sigh. “Your ramparts have been well and truly breached.”

  Eleven

  There was a Labor Day tea. Because there would be a Labor Day tea for ever and ever amen. And Divya wore an orange salwar kameez, and her hair was complicated (as Ram would have said), and Anil was home from law school, tending bar, which was a long folding table in the corner of the garden. I asked for bourbon. “It’s kind of swill, Charlie,” he said, holding up the bottle.

  “Do you think I really mind?”

  He didn’t answer, just gave me a look and poured, generously. He didn’t know. Divya hadn’t said anything. What would she have said?

  Then Adam Salter—the very one, the young assistant dean, who was now the middle-aged headmaster—began his usual remarks. So wonderful this special place true excellence the whole person the Abbott family. He’d start his introductions in a minute, and I pivoted discreetly, scanning the crowd. Salter caught my eye: Where is he? And all I could do was shrug. Because my brother was not the issue, no, not at all. Then Salter’s darting eyes stopped somewhere beyond me and he broke into a huge smile. “There he is! Excellent timing, Nick!”

  “Thank you, sir.”

  I turned and there he was, looking sheepish, probably having just realized how fine he’d cut it. His khakis were a little rumpled. He had on an old seersucker blazer that I guessed, by its sacklike tailoring and slightly wide lapels, to have been scavenged from the remnants of Hugh’s closet. He’d remembered a tie. But he’d forgotten to change his tennis shoes, and I knew that if you looked, not all that closely, you’d be able to see his left big toe through the holes. He was as gaunt as a saint, and his red cheeks were clear and ardent as a boy’s—as if he’d just come off some twilit playing field in the snapping air of autumn. As the weight of everyone’s gazes sank onto him, one hand crept up and snaked through his flopping hair.

  Then he smiled and all around me I felt the silent sigh, and I knew he was forgiven henceforth and forevermore.

  “The newest member of our math department!” Adam said. “Via Haiti and Afghanistan! Boy, has he got some stories to tell. He’s just gonna knock the kids’ socks off. Oh, and by the way, it’s all in the family, Nick here is the brother of our own Charlie Garrett—”

  “Half brother,” I said. I moved closer, reached up to clap Nick on the shoulder, allowing the inevitable inspection. “Obviously.”

  For a moment, gazing at Nick as though he were the last wild dodo, Adam looked supremely satisfied, as only Adam could, and only Adam could be forgiven for.

  But that wasn’t all. As I’d known he would, he’d saved the best for last. “Folks, folks!” he cried. “And finally! One of our beloved Abbott families. It just hasn’t been the same without a Bankhead!” He ticked through all of them, even Florence, not mentioning the pot or the academic probation or the divorce, lauding instead the southern refinement and warmth, the lacrosse and wrestling and crew, the esprit, oh so dearly missed. Preston an institution. “A cultured and cultivated citizen. A patrician in the true sense of the word …”

  And meanwhile there she was. There she stood.

  Through the whole hagiography I waited for that slouch, the look that meant she wanted to disappear, but it never came. Salter wound down and then looked at her expectantly, waiting for an answering paean to school spirit, but May just raised her hand in a gracious little wave.

  She was back, she was twenty-nine, and it was breaking my heart.

  And then she was walking over to us, she was kissing Divya on the cheek and then me, and I didn’t even feel it, and I must have introduced Nick because then she was saying to him, “I think I saw you already. So that’s who you are.”

  She was wearing a suit. Pale yellow linen. Three-quarter sleeves, pearls, Jesus all she needed was the pillbox hat. “You look so cool, May,” I said. “You always look so cool.”

  Behind me, Divya sighed.

  I saw recognition in May’s eyes, but she only smiled. “Thank you, Charlie.”

  That suit: it was buttery. I had to bite my tongue not to say it. You look like butter. Not just the yellow linen but it made her buttery, she herself, oh, I was a blithering idiot, she looked so rich. Her skin was creamy brown from summer, summer, the bare heels flicking down in Abbott Pond, the head sleek as a seal’s, and I could not think these things, I had to find a way to not think them.

  Her smile was china white; she was perfectly in control; her hair was shorter, cut to her shoulders, straight and shining, oh, the woods are lovely, dark and deep. As soon as was polite, sooner, really, if the truth be told, I extracted myself, set my empty glass on the nearest table, wove my way through all the seersucker and white, all the last rites of summer, and out under that arbor, beneath the last roses, beneath their falling petals.

  THE TABLES WERE IN A U. The maple outside the wi
ndow was still green. It was my seventeenth first day, but in a complete reversal from that young teacher standing terrified, years ago, this classroom was now my safety. This was the safest I would be all day. With May somewhere in the building, as she would be, from now on.

  And so I began. “Well, look—at—all—of—you. Huh. Who is responsible for this?”

  I walked slowly around the tables, feeling the wattage of my seniors’ attention on my face. I had no doubt I looked engaged, mock stern, in control, because I could see myself, in fact I was nowhere near my body but floating elsewhere, pulling all my old moves out of the files, my old speeches; no need to reinvent the wheel. “Mr. Pentecost. Miss van Slake. Mr. Bolling?” They started to grin. “Mm-hm. Mm-hm … Miss Hirschfeld. And Mr. Middleton.”

  I hardly ever called people by their last names anymore. Today it was just for effect, and they knew me well enough—I was known, here at Abbott, well enough—for them to realize. The habit had died away gradually, as I began to use it more and more ironically, until it lost its significance, its protection. Until the protection was no longer needed. No more the great division. No more the professor on high.

  Syllabus. Handed it out. Expectations For The Course. They listened with open, serious faces: there were colleges to be gotten into, high, slick walls to be scaled against all odds. We all knew this. We all knew too that actually I was on their side. Poor seniors. Poor fetuses, still floating warm and safe. Teetering on the edge.

  I turned and wrote on the board (oh the comfort), turned back. A senior seminar (this one was the Observer and the Hero) was really a bunch of my favorite books with a theme attached because, by God, that’s the point of a senior seminar. Well-known fact. I even told them that, and they liked it, liked that I was honest with them, giving them the skinny, letting them in on the code.