The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  Then we were passing the peace and Anita turned to me and said something in a language I did not understand, both garbled and otherworldly, and I looked at her politely and in a split second that was days long I thought, This is something new to learn, she is showing me something new. May took Nick’s hand but was looking at me: Do something. The corner of Anita’s mouth was drooping, and for a moment her face was full of fear and wonder and then I saw her thinking and deciding, and she turned back to me speaking tongues from another land and her eyes were flat as a general’s.

  By the time we got to the hospital, it was over. A pudgy young doctor with a surprising, painful handshake said that they could do surgery but unfortunately the procedure itself could cause a larger stroke, and Nicky said why the hell would they do it then? What was this piece-of-shit hospital and what do your doctors in Atlanta say and what the fuck is this doing nothing!

  “Nicky, Nikko,” I said.

  “Don’t fucking Nikko me.”

  “Nicky,” Anita said, in her own voice, which had come back. “That’s enough. Come here. Come sit here with me. Right here,” and she patted the bed next to her.

  The doctor had said she’d flicked a clot. What a ridiculous word. What a transparent effort to cut the body down to size, to a comical, manageable adversary, and to absolve the doctor of this lack of control, of knowledge, over this crazy, unpredictable, corporeal self. Flick a clot here, flick there. There’d almost certainly be more.

  May came and got Nick and he clung to her, embarrassingly, nuzzling her in the hall like she was in heat. “Nicky,” she murmured. “Baby.” She wouldn’t meet my gaze, but I felt us speaking through the empty air.

  After they had gone, I found Anita signing papers in her room, with a doctor as witness. “I should have done this so long ago,” she said, and she handed them to me.

  I looked at them. “Okay,” I said. I sat down. I shuffled through them again. The doctor looked from one of us to the other, and then said he’d leave us alone. When he was gone I said, “Mother, do you want to die?”

  “No, Charlie, I do not. I want to be clear as day about that. No I do not. But what I want does not matter one whit.”

  “What about what I want? What about Nicky? You don’t know what they’d be able to do. If something else happened. Aren’t there all kinds of things—”

  “Charlie, I know exactly what they’d be able to do.”

  We stopped. I waited for the silence to smooth. We had been in one time, Anita and I and Nicky. And now we needed to move to another. I sat and absorbed this truth.

  Finally I said, “Do you want me to talk to Nicky?”

  “No,” my mother said. “I’ll do it.”

  “Be careful.”

  She didn’t answer. I put my head in my hands and she didn’t say anything. But I felt her there. A presence. Not an absence.

  MAY’S COAT HUNG ON THE HOOK. Anita’s crutches leaned against the kitchen wall. The stair chair hulked on the banister. Books tilted on my bookcase at leafed-through angles; Nicky’s boots stood by the back door; his bed in one of the spare rooms sat perpetually unmade, somehow larger that way. New implements appeared in the kitchen, supplanting my lone dull knife, my cracked cutting board. Food I hadn’t bought sat in the fridge. The washing machine was going, the dishwasher was going. My house was full to bursting. The ashes in the fireplace were always warm.

  I WONDERED ABOUT THE SPRING. and summer. I’d plant a garden. I’d look out the window and there would be May, in a big floppy hat, tending the rows. Anita in a chair, directing. Nick sweaty and beaming. A long golden afternoon.

  ANITA RODE IN THE CHAIR. She rode it when Nick came over. Wheelchair to stair chair to wheelchair to patio: she said she wanted air, she didn’t mind the cold, it was refreshing. The pressure of his hope was painful for her. She hated sitting and looking; he didn’t hate it, but mostly his body just didn’t understand it, at least not for long. They sat on my snow-shoveled patio, bundled up, and vibrated with their effort not to move.

  At night she might read, or more often play games of complicated solitaire, the cards snapping down. I learned to ignore the sound and learned also to be contented with reading passively, since that was all I could do in a room with another person. My attention changed. I took to reading detective novels, and Anita, who recognized a title now and then, seemed to approve. By silent agreement, we played cards together only when Nick came over: usually hearts, sometimes gin, and then Nicky taught us a complicated game he’d learned in Haiti called Onze, which involved eleven rounds of bidding. I set up a table in the living room where her chair would fit, and we huddled around the flame of the cards.

  But what was surprising was that my old anger had become a blankness. I realized what an effort it had always been.

  She said one afternoon, looking out the window at the gray-and-white February day, “I don’t know how you stand this snow.”

  “Of course you do,” I said, not sharply.

  She looked out the window a long time. Outside, nothing moved. The quiet was implacable, untouchable. She said, “I guess you’re right.”

  “I ALWAYS DID LIKE TO WORK,” Anita said.

  She’d started with babysitting. She preferred odd jobs, though, even physical, dirty things, like pumping gas or mucking out barns. But babysitting was the easiest job to find, for a girl. She preferred the younger kids, who were still wide-eyed and never judged, and loved simple things without knowing they were simple. She didn’t like the ones who were overly mature. “Too big for their britches,” she said. “Girls usually. I didn’t really like other girls. Oh, that hand on the hip and that know-it-all voice. Cutting their eyes at you. They were just imitating their mamas. Those mamas pretended to like me, because of my grandparents. They pretended to be sweet, oh, if you were a girl you had to be sweet—Lord have mercy. They pretended all day long. I always said if I ever had children I wanted them to be boys.”

  “So you got lucky,” Nicky said proudly.

  “Yes, I did.”

  She got older and got better jobs and saved all her money. “And then I made my first big mistake. I was seventeen and I bought a car. Charlie probably remembers that car. A blue Ford Fairlane. Two-door.”

  “Yes, I do,” I said.

  “I loved that car. It wasn’t much, but you always love your first car. But, you see, I showed my hand, and when Granddaddy saw I could pay for a car he said I could pay for everything else. I turned eighteen and he made me pay room and board. He made me pay for nursing school.”

  “What did you do?” May said.

  “I got a night job and a weekend job, and I paid for it.”

  “Well good for you.”

  “Once I heard Granddaddy bragging on me. Saying how I was paying for everything myself. He said I was smart too, and I don’t know what folks thought of that. Course he would never say any of that to my face.

  “But, you know, that car—I had to make it worth it for myself, I reckon. So what I did was, I drove. I figured if I was going to pay for everything, they didn’t need to know where I was night and day. It wasn’t any of their business. And so whenever I had time I just drove around. As far as I could get, in my spare time. I liked to go to towns where I’d be a stranger. I liked to eat alone in a restaurant where no one knew who I was. I’d have the special. Or a piece of pie. Or just coffee, for a nickel. I loved that. People looked at me like they felt sorry for me, being alone, but I loved it. Or they looked suspicious—but I didn’t care. Because I didn’t know them and they didn’t know me. And I hadn’t done anything wrong.

  “Then one day I went over to St. Annes, this little town on the coast.”

  I sat up. She saw it. I shifted on the sofa and rattled papers. She kept her eyes fixed on May, and they began to shine with an artificial brightness that came from the effort not to look in my direction.

  “It was a swanky place, where the tourists went. Historic and all. Our town was twenty miles inland and hotter than Hades,
you understand. But St. Annes was on the water. There was a breeze off the harbor and some fancy stores. And some of the stores had air-conditioning.

  “So I was walking around and going in and out of the air-conditioning when I saw some girls I knew. I’d grown up with these girls, you understand. And in the middle was a girl I’d known since I was born, and she was pregnant—that belly just high and proud. This was a girl who’d married the most popular boy in the class. Right after graduation. Awful boy. Mean as a snake.” She lowered her voice as though we were back standing on that street corner with her. “I saw her with a black eye. More than once.” May sucked in her breath. “Everyone knew, but everyone still thought she was lucky. They did. People could do that, think two things at once that made no sense together.

  “And on either side of her were two girls who had just disappeared during high school, and then come back—who, you know, who’d gone to visit an aunt and uncle in another state for a while, there.” She gave May a look: Do you know what I’m saying? and May nodded. It had become a story only for May. Both May and Nicky would believe that was because it was, essentially, a woman’s story. They wouldn’t question my mother’s intensity.

  “So I saw them coming toward me and I knew they’d ask what I was doing in St. Annes, all shocked, like I was committing a crime. They had all these shopping bags, but I was just walking around and they knew I didn’t have the money to shop there. And before the sun went down everyone in my town would know that I’d been in St. Annes, and I wasn’t doing a thing in the world wrong, but I just wanted to be left alone. And that belly was coming toward me—oh, I don’t know! And so I turned the first corner, and there was a church there, a pretty little church with the pointed windows, and a big arched red door, and the door was open and I heard singing. And so I just went in. And that was the first time I’d been in an Episcopal church and oh my, it was the strangest thing I had ever experienced.”

  “Does anyone want anything?” I said, standing up. “I’m getting a nightcap. Anyone?”

  “We’re good,” Nick said, not looking up.

  The liquor cabinet was a shelf in the pantry that held my lone bottle of bourbon. I poured myself a double, or maybe it was a triple, and sat down at the kitchen table, but I could still hear everything.

  “Late afternoon and there was a service going on,” she was saying. “Up and down and up and down on your knees. And the prayer book. Flipping around in that—oh, mercy. Everyone knew where to look, of course, and I just hoped no one would notice me. Granddaddy would have said it was idolatry—all those things getting in between you and Jesus. That was the way I was raised.

  “And then this young priest says it’s the confession, and he said the page number so I knew where to look. I think he saw me.” I held the glass with both hands. A secret heart to save me. “I think he knew I was confused. So I could follow along finally and I heard it. ‘From time to time.’ ”

  Nicky asked what she meant, and Anita pretended to be distressed that he didn’t remember the liturgy he’d grown up with, but really she wasn’t surprised and didn’t care; I guess she knew that all those years in church he’d knelt and stood and sung he’d just been a good boy, a sweet boy, and he was now untethered and the old words had flown from his head, if indeed they had at any point taken up residence.

  I left the kitchen, drink in hand, and went to the doorway. “ ‘We acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have committed,’ ” I said.

  And she finally looked at me. “Yes,” she said. “Do you see?”

  “ ‘Provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us,’ ” I said.

  She turned away. “But I had thought the sinning never stopped. It was important. Important to me—he said it, that priest, so calm. So polite—‘from time to time’! Oh, every now and then! Oh, we’ve just made a few mistakes!”

  Nicky laughed. “That’s way better.”

  But Anita was talking to May. “Do you see?”

  “My father was always complaining about the new prayer book,” May said. “He used the 1928. He didn’t care. He wouldn’t change.”

  “It doesn’t matter,” Anita said, shaking her head, as if May hadn’t spoken. “But it mattered to me. ‘From time to time’! To think that you were only wicked sometimes! You weren’t made of sin! I didn’t tell my grandfather. No sir. I don’t think I told anyone. I never talked about it, I think. Until now. But it was a new life. It was a whole new kind of life.”

  “It’s getting late,” I said.

  Now we’d have the regular comedy of Nick deciding whether he would stay at my house or go with May. Sometimes I liked to watch him squirm, sometimes I stayed to smooth things over so no one would be embarrassed. Tonight I just turned and went back to the kitchen. A good place for the help. Got a refill. Nick was going with May. I called good night, didn’t get up, and soon I heard Anita’s crutches, the arrhythmic tapping turning to squeaks as the rubber tips met the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

  “I’m not going to tell her,” she said. “I said I wouldn’t and I meant it.”

  “Don’t get angry at me.”

  “Don’t think I’ll break my word.”

  “Maybe she knows Preston was in St. Annes. Maybe he mentioned it once. I have no idea. Why are you skating so close to the edge?” I took a perverse delight in the metaphor. Noted my perversity. “Why? Don’t you understand, Anita, that I am going to be the only villain here? Not her father. Only me.”

  “You’re protecting him.”

  “Oh, God.” I put my head in my hands. “I’m protecting her.”

  “And yourself.”

  “No, Mother. That’s absurd. I’m done. I’m cooked.” I looked in her face, full in her beautiful face, the face of my dying mother. God damn it all to hell. “You don’t get it. There is nothing to protect. But May—I loved her, and she loved me, and then as far as she knows I ruined it by being an asshole, but what I am not going to do is make it sickening for her, is make it an abomination. That is my choice, not yours. Mine.”

  Now it was her face that was like stone. I remembered that face: it was the face that dealt with drunken Hugh. It meant she loved me but she had given up. But I didn’t care. I didn’t care.

  She turned and tapped her way toward the stairs. I heard the grind of the stair chair. After a moment I went to the bottom of the stairs and asked if she wanted help. There were still practicalities. Her body was going to assure us of that. No peace.

  But she didn’t answer. And so I sat down again alone. No peace.

  A COUPLE DAYS LATER I walked into the kitchen and found May making a cup of tea. Anita was taking a nap, and Nick was still at school. It was fiveish, already dark, the time when the world needs to think about a drink and some supper, the time when a man might like a little quiet. But no. “May-May,” I said, “why are you here?”

  Her back was to me; she didn’t turn around. She poured water into her mug, replaced the kettle with a new precision that said, I know I’m a guest. “Don’t you feel strange calling me that?”

  “No. Because you’re here in my house. Nearly every day.” She stirred the tea slowly. That little clink of the spoon. It reminded me of Anita, except that she didn’t drink tea, took her coffee black—so how was that? “Anita wants you here. You need to be here for Nicky. I realize that.” I cleared my throat. “I am grateful.”

  “But dubious.” She finally turned, gave me a quick smile, and then went and sat down. It was an invitation, but I didn’t move. She wrapped her hands lightly around the mug, blew on the surface to cool it. Still I stood in the doorway. As always. Even in my own house. “She just tells stories,” she said.

  “Oh, and I bet they’re good ones.”

  “You’re so angry at her.”

  “Not as angry as I used to be.”

  “I don’t know what happened between you two, Charlie, but—”

  “May. No.”

&n
bsp; She was quiet a long time. “I think I will never understand you.”

  “No, probably not.”

  She drank her tea. Looked at her watch. “I don’t know where Nicky is,” she said. “He told me four.”

  “I don’t know what she’s going to say to you,” I said.

  “You’ve heard it all before,” she said. “Haven’t you?”

  “You never know what mothers are going to say.”

  She was picking up her mug again but her hand slipped, and the hot tea sloshed over. Just a few drops but she gave a little cry, and then she said, “No, you never do.”

  HERE IS ONE THING May told me, later.

  How the first time she had visited and Anita had held May’s hand and said, Come back sometime, Anita’s voice had been strong, wry, unadorned, but May had felt it was a shell, that the animal inside that had once been strong was beginning to shrink. Something wavered in Anita’s eyes—a fleeting transparency, an absence. And her hand was encased in loose skin and seemed made of pieces of itself, no longer bonded into a strong whole. It chilled May when she felt it, and she knew what it meant.

  Nick and I had been standing there and May had felt our eyes and knew we watched her hungry for information, but what? What did we think she knew?

  The oddest thing though was that as May had held Anita’s hand and the chatter floated in and among us, everything rudderless, all of us anxious for different reasons, May heard a bird outside, making an insistent call. It cut through the white January cold and was a bird, alive in winter, was life, was notice that time was moving, joyously; that, hidden, things were preparing to grow; and May had known that early out-of-place harbinger bird was counterpart to the smoky absence that passed behind Anita’s gaze. Hints and guesses.

  So she went back. Over and over. Sometimes she told Nick or me that she was coming by and sometimes she didn’t, although she didn’t hide it either. She saw that Nick was confused at first by her visits, that she did not chat about them to him, as she might have about buying her groceries or picking up her dry cleaning. She kept herself from saying Why do you think your mother is an errand and then realized that of course he didn’t think that, that he was trying hard to believe that his mother living in my house was a routine that would last. He wanted May to visit that reality and bring back sanitized reports.