The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  One day she told Anita she would bring her lunch. Nick and I were both at school; she might have told us she was going; if she did, then Nicky surely would have beamed with a determined pride, and I would have said a clipped thank-you. Most likely. Anyway, she went, and as she opened the front door (she told me this particularly, the materiality of that day, how the midweek, midday world made her notice the thingness of things) she felt the heft of it in its swing, felt the smooth clicking of the doorknob and thought of me. Imagined me with my head bent, oiling and mending, taking care of my house as though it were my child. Then she replaced my bent head, in her mind, with Nick’s, Nick excited and earnest and a bit self-consciously clumsy, my calm competence (how much credit she gave me!) replaced by the pellucid concentration of a little boy, and Nicky’s hands filled not with the mechanism of locks and machinery but with something living and beautiful, a bird’s nest maybe with tiny speckled eggs.

  She closed the heavy door as softly as she could behind her and heard the click. And then listened to the silence; let the house’s familiarity and foreignness surround her, fill her, and come to equilibrium. Not hers, this house, it had never been. But somehow Anita’s presence mitigated that.

  Anita wasn’t in the living room or kitchen. May went upstairs, humming a little to announce herself, then called, softly; she didn’t know why. But when she knocked and then pushed Anita’s door open, she saw that my mother was asleep. The TV was on but muted; the remote control was by her relaxed hand and her chest rose gently up and down. The warm arrested present of the sickroom. And in the peace the thought descended on May seemingly from the outside, a truth of her world, now come to light: Oh Anita, I love your sons.

  May stood there in the column of her love. She thought the force of her mind might wake her. But Anita slept on even though May felt her self, her person, was shouting. She stood there and felt that Nicky was on her skin, but that I (oh yes she said this) was running through her veins. She could have stood there looking, picking each feature out of Anita’s face and matching it with her sons’, but she also knew she would see too many mysteries, too many people who were not hers, whom she would never know, that it would break her heart that they were both so alone.

  Oh I love your sons.

  She willed the love to dissipate, or at least become ordinary. What was she doing? She was standing on the solid wooden floor of my house. My house filled with things, objects that were not hers, that had nothing to do with her but that nevertheless had a straightforward permanence she understood and could take refuge in, unlike this confusing transporting emotion—thank God Anita had not been awake to see it on her face, see it surrounding her like so many flapping wings.

  “ARE YOU VISITING?” says the young priest, on the steps of the stone church, in the town of St. Annes. If he’s even a priest. His sash is diagonal across his chest like a boy scout’s. She’s confused, says yes, she is. “How long are you in town?”

  She explains then that she’s both visiting and not. That she lives in a town nearby. He says she should come back sometime. He’s a visitor himself. A deacon—he points to the sash, as if she will understand—in seminary, here on summer assignment.

  She thinks the collar means he can’t get married. She doesn’t even know. So it doesn’t matter that he’s handsome. That there’s something bare and hungry and essentially alone in his face, something she recognizes.

  She will go back to the main street, and the girls from her hometown will be long gone. But even if they’re not, she could face them. Nod hello and keep going. That’s what they expect of Anita Spooner.

  She says she will be there on Sunday.

  Twenty-one

  I’m in our kitchen, aged eleven or so, at the table with its plasticky fake-wood grain, with the salt and pepper shakers and the precise stack of paper napkins. The windows are dark but if I could see out I’d see only trees, in our little valley outside the guesthouse.

  My mother’s at the counter, her back to me, and I watch the shifting of the double-knit uniform as she moves, her slender ankles rising in rebuking contrast to the thick white soles of her work shoes. Her elbow pumps up and down as she opens cans. Occasionally we have TV dinners but those are expensive, and tonight we will have green beans and spaghetti heated up in pots on the stove, and an iceberg-lettuce salad, which she will dutifully provide on its own plate and will make me finish, as always, because it is fresh.

  I know that she’s an indifferent cook only from occasional dinners at friends’ houses, and I’m aggressively disciplined about not imagining, when I’m in our own kitchen, warm cakes on glass stands or roasts emerging from ovens, or fried chicken, or pans of brownies already cut into squares.

  She sets down two heaped plates and the little, inevitable salads, and we say a blessing and I feel a satisfaction—hers, mine, it doesn’t matter, it’s the same—at how well the two of us are doing things.

  Yes, I’ve finished my homework, and I got a hundred on the spelling test and an eighty-four on the math test, and maybe that wasn’t my best but next time will be better.

  Before long—tonight, or some night soon—she’ll ask if I still need a babysitter, or am I too old, what do you think, Charlie, and the long procession of Jennifers and Amys and Janets will end. Soon, also, she’ll tell me that Mr. Satterthwaite from church has invited her to dinner, and I can stay home by myself if I lock the door and don’t answer it if anyone comes and go to bed by nine, and of course the McClatcheys will keep an eye out like always.

  But at this point there still is a girl from the neighborhood there in the afternoons, and as we’re eating she remarks that this Linda or Lauren has said that I spend all my time inside reading, and Charlie you need to go outside and get some fresh air, find some boys to play with, it’s not healthy.

  And I say yes ma’am because that is what I always say and I am used to Charlie get your nose out of the book, but who would listen to such absurd advice? When a book is a time machine, taking me back and sideways to other minds and times and cities and planets but mostly forward, forward, to dinnertime, to when my mother would walk in the door and the unsympathetic girl would leave and I could re-emerge into my life, and it would be only the two of us again, my mother and me, and although I felt like I barely had her at least she was mine alone—who would give such magic away?

  EVERYONE WAS SICK. Every wastebasket was filled with used tissues. I noted this to Divya and she told me not to be disgusting, and then she said, “My God, you’re right.” Colds turned into flu and bronchitis. The infirmary was full. The buildings were germ incubators. I waited my turn, but stayed obnoxiously healthy.

  Nick, however, missed a couple of days, then came back, then was out again. He looked gray. I asked if he was sleeping and he said he was fine. He didn’t come to my house for several days running, and then he went to Boston for the weekend, without May, to visit friends; then he was sick once more. Finally I said to May, “Look, I know you’re lovebirds and all, but I think Anita needs Nick to come over and say hello.”

  She gave me an odd look. “I thought he was sleeping at your house,” she said.

  “No. Did he say he was?”

  She looked miserable, and nodded.

  HIS APARTMENT WAS DISGUSTING. Fetid, dirty dishes, unflushed toilet, papers everywhere. “Do me a favor and call before you come,” he said, and picked up a few smeary glasses and carried them to his overflowing sink. He looked bad, but he sounded normal—no congestion. I insisted on touching his forehead. Clammy, not warm. “I’m getting better.”

  “Why’d you tell May you were at my house?”

  “I didn’t say that,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said that. I’m here because I didn’t want to make Mom sick. Or anyone else.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing. Is May worried?” His eyes softened, color came into his face. “I’ll talk to her.”

  He’d be in the next day. He was contrite. Yes, he knew, he was in trouble wi
th the secretaries, he hadn’t been calling in and they’d had trouble getting subs, but he always thought he’d feel up to it until the last minute. “Nancy Beamer came after me today,” I said. Nancy was the ferociously efficient head school secretary. “And I told her it’s not my responsibility. Which it’s not.”

  “Go away, Charlie, you’re breathing my germs,” he said.

  He didn’t want anything. No groceries, he was fine. In the past I would have insisted, but one patient was enough for me.

  I SAW MY MOTHER’S FACE when Nicky came back: saw her delight. Together we heard the heavy front door opening, the rattle of the door knocker, Nicky stomping his boots on the mat inside. “He’s here,” she said to me, just as Nicky’s joyful voice came floating up the stairs: “Mama?”

  I’D GOTTEN RELIGIOUS about attending hockey games. I made all the home games and even a few away ones. It was for Zack, and then I finally had to admit it was for me: it was a relief to have a new imperative, a new ritual; amid the dry cold of the rink, the artificial smell of the ice, I didn’t have to think.

  I grew used to its particular spectacle, the slamming against the thick Plexiglas, the girls sitting behind shrieking with fear and delight, like they were on a roller coaster. The players masked and padded, cartoonish, as they smashed expressionlessly into one another and the boards; I wondered if this was an aspect Zack appreciated—the disguise, the protection, how emotion became invisible because it was purely private. You couldn’t even see them sweat, unless they took off their helmets. Their bodies had no expression except for that urgency, that speed.

  Maybe, for Zack, it really was the speed, only that. The closest thing to flying: imagine yourself across the rink and then, suddenly, you’re there, with the push of a foot. That’s what he’d told Nick, anyway.

  The band oompahed. They’d play the school song, some Springsteen, and some Beatles, with glockenspiel, including “Norwegian Wood,” with the tuba taking the sitar part; our band director prided himself on his original arrangements. Then, maybe, something that might be AC/DC. With glockenspiel.

  Once I was sitting in the front row and as Zack skated by after a whistle he waved at me. A very small wave, like a four-year-old, or a teenager.

  Then, at the break, the shouts of “Book-er! Book-er!” as Booker Middleton drove out on the Zamboni. It was odd and endearing that he’d appointed himself Zamboni man, remarkable that someone, once upon a time, had thought of chanting his first name, even more so that he let them, and it had become tradition. Around and around and I’d watch with the usual mildly obsessive suspense, hoping he didn’t miss any slivers. He never did. He was predictably precise. The gleam of the new ice, the careful overlapping, beginning to be hypnotic until he reached the center and then he lifted his blue squadron cap into the air; and then the wild cheers and whistles, the stomping feet.

  Zack was on fire, relentless on goal, even behind the mask I could tell his focus was absolute. The other hapless goalies down again and again on rubber knees, and again and again he got past them. I brought a hat to every game, to throw on the ice, just in case.

  I MISSED ONLY ONE GAME, on a Friday night when I sent May and Nick instead. I stayed home with Anita and pretended I wasn’t babysitting. We watched Casablanca on TV, and she fell asleep while Bogey and Bacall were in Paris, and I spent the rest of the movie mostly watching her face, afraid it would twist or sag. It never did, but she didn’t look peaceful either. Her brow furrowed and behind her closed lips her mouth dropped open in a look of grim, disquieting astonishment. Finally I turned off the TV and woke her up and helped her to bed.

  As it turned out we lost, 2–1, but a rout had been expected, so it felt almost like a victory. Zack didn’t score—that had been Darius—but he was credited with the assist. He’d also gone down once in the second period, but Nick hadn’t even noticed; no one much did. It was a collision like dozens of other collisions.

  Zack didn’t admit to the double vision until the next day, when he tried to get out of bed and vomited just from sitting up. That’s what I heard. On Monday, he was once again missing from my classroom, from everyone’s. There were scans and consultations, and second and third opinions, and finally unanimous agreement: he could never set foot on another rink or field. He could not be in the military, any branch; he certainly would never fly a plane. He was lucky to be alive, and another hit could kill him.

  “I THINK I SHOULD TELL YOU,” Anita said. “I had another one today. It’s like a curtain coming down over my eyes. It passes down and then up. And I couldn’t say my name. So I sat down in a chair and I stayed there. And ten minutes later I was fine. Charlie, I just thought you would want to know.” She paused. “There’s nothing I can do, though.”

  “Then I don’t know why you’re telling me,” I said. It was just us. Just my mother and me. She told only me because I could handle it. Charlie can handle these things. I thought of her sitting, alone, waiting for whatever was going to come next. “But tell me anyway,” I said. “Always tell me.”

  It was afternoon—I’d just gotten home. The days were getting longer already, the sun higher; it was blinding on the snowy mountains. The kitchen was flooded with light.

  Overnight it had snowed, a light powder, and now it was blowing, glittering in the sun. A southerner would be amazed. Floating snow like silver dust. Here in this foreign land. “Look at that,” I said, and stepped away from the window, so she could see.

  SHE SAID THAT I should go visit Zack, flat on his back in a dark room, and I said I would. She said that she’d like to go herself, and I said I’d take her. We should give it a week or so, though, she said, because that boy has to sleep, he has to heal. It would be too soon for visitors. I saw that she was looking for a patient besides herself.

  “I wonder if that girl will go to see him,” she said. “I don’t know if that would be bad or good.”

  “You think about them that much?” I said.

  “I had a boy like that in the ICU,” she said. “In a coma. His girlfriend visited all the time. Cried and cried. I got impatient with her, I remember that. I think I kept it to myself all right though.”

  I made a sympathetic noise.

  “They kept hanging on and hanging on, they wouldn’t unplug him.”

  “Mom,” I said. “We won’t do that to you. And Zack is not in a coma.”

  “I know that,” my mother said, inscrutable, unrepentant.

  No, he was not in a coma, but neither did he want to stay flat on his back for a week, and one night he got up when everyone else was asleep and walked to the gym; he could think better in the cold, maybe; maybe the cold kept him together—that was how I felt, sometimes, winter as a bracing, binding agent, winter as discipline, and maybe Zack Middleton was the same. The cold in his nostrils and he thinks, I’m all right, they’re all full of shit, I’m fine.

  And so he goes around and around and around: flying. If there hadn’t been a recent warm spell, if Abbott Pond had been thickly frozen, maybe Zack would’ve gone there—because, it seemed, he needed to skate. To fly. But that elemental motion was forbidden to him now, so he had to sneak out to do it. It was a little after midnight, they found out later, from the security camera footage at the rink, where Zack went instead—but if he had been at the pond he might have looked up at the geometry of Orion stretched against the sky, that gargantuan wheeling warrior, the ice of his sword at the ready, and felt a protection and wonder.

  The brightest of Orion’s stars is dying; I wonder if Zack knew that.

  But instead he used his father’s keys to the rink and the alarm and he laced up his skates and flew bareheaded and alone. The only sound the scraping of the blades against the ice. Around and around.

  He knew that rink so well—he carried that geometry in his body; at least that’s what I imagine. If he’d closed his eyes, he might’ve been fine. If he hadn’t relied on his vision, doubling the boards like fun-house mirrors; if he had instead closed his eyes and felt the limits of the
rink—then maybe he could have kept going, around and around, flying.

  There is no Icarus constellation, I later discovered. A gross oversight. But there’s a crater named for him on the moon. I looked it up. Apparently astronomers are known for their dark humor.

  Someone found him in the morning. Not Booker—thank God not Booker. Instead a part-time janitor, filling in, whose name I don’t know, who saw the dark heap on the ice, the crumple of Zack, who had miscalculated, who had hit his head for the last time in the night, who had fallen to earth for good.

  I KNEW THAT, at the cemetery, there might be a pile of dirt and a shovel, and a polite line of somber people waiting their turn. I warned Nick, who had never been to a Jewish funeral. A shovelful of dirt and it would be final and real, I said, but also palpable, deeply right, a mitzvah.

  But what I did not expect was how cold it would be that day, how Zack’s grave would be on a hill, and how there would be so many people it would be hard to see; that the pile of dirt would be enormous; that there would be no explanation or announcement of this custom, this rite, just the sounds beginning. The cut of the shovels, the ringing of the rocky soil on metal. The clods thudding on the casket. I couldn’t see who was digging. There was no polite line.

  But then the crowd shifted without seeming to move, amoeba-like, and through gaps in the wall of motionless people I could see two men: Angela’s father, and Booker. Booker was wearing a yarmulke but he was so tall I could see it only when he bent to dig. Together, they lifted the dirt and poured it in. Lifting, pouring, from the towering pile. Divya reached up and held on to my arm. My other arm around Nick. May close by his other side.