The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  She nodded politely.

  He said, “But you know, I can’t be with a girl who acts that way.” Her hand froze at the door. She nodded again, amazed at herself and at this new sin but also at a new, detached compassion: Poor boy, he thinks this has anything to do with him.

  “I’ll get me a wife when I come back.” He seemed to be waiting for a challenge, but when she said nothing he went on, “But that is not what a man wants. A woman who done what you did, tonight.”

  “I don’t blame you,” she said, and got out of the car.

  SHE TOLD HER GRANDPARENTS she was going to Brunswick, twenty miles south, to see about a job. Her clothes were getting tight. She had no more time. Early the next morning she got in the car she had paid for herself and drove, not south but north, six hours, to Atlanta.

  She had had no idea what a city was like. She drove around and around, and the city kept going. When she finally stopped she was in front of a post office, with an impressive granite facade.

  It was lunchtime and the line was long. As she stood in line, she understood that she was not known. She let her back sway, her belly protrude. Was it visible? She’d had to buy a bigger skirt. She was not known.

  A man waiting behind her glanced in her direction, and she pretended not to notice. She put her bare left hand in her pocket. That was something to take care of.

  At the counter, she asked for stamps. When the man handed her the sheet, she carefully tore one off, licked it, and stuck it in the top right corner of her envelope. Then, with her right hand, she handed it to the man, who had gray hair and laugh lines. “It’s to my grandparents,” she said. He smiled with approval and told her to take care now.

  As she walked out of the post office, she smiled straight into all the faces she did not know.

  Twenty-three

  Saturday was quiet. My mother slept more than usual. I tried not to hover.

  At one point she said, “ ‘He never met a stranger.’ Do you remember?”

  “I remember,” I said. That was what Hugh used to say about Nicky. Who would toddle up to anyone and beguile them. Whenever Hugh said that my mother and I would look at each other and silently agree: We’ve met lots of them. We are strangers.

  “He’s a person who is going to be alone in the world,” she said.

  “No. He has us.”

  She smiled, and said she was just tired.

  I UNDERSTOOD I COULD ASK her no more about Preston, not now. She was spent. Everything she’d rolled up and put away years and years before, laundered and put in a brown paper sack, stuffed in the deepest of drawers—she’d gotten it all out and given it to me. And now she was lighter, but unsteady. She had to get used to me knowing.

  “IS THERE ANYTHING you want me to tell Nicky?” I said. “He said he’s coming. Soon. With May.”

  “No.” A few minutes later she said, “He needs to hear things in a particular way.”

  Oh favored son.

  She was dozing on the couch. Her head sank back. Then she straightened and said, “I burned that letter up.”

  “What, Mother?”

  But she was asleep.

  WE DIDN’T GO to church Sunday. Nicky finally came over, with May, in the late morning.

  It was gray and raining, just above freezing, dreary. When he came in he shook off his wet, hatless head like a dog and wouldn’t answer questions. He looked thin and strangely radiant. “I just want to see Mom,” he said.

  “I need to know how long you’ve been drinking.”

  “That was bad, what you saw, Charlie,” he said. “But I don’t drink. It just—I was desperate. Don’t you get it? I’m sorry. I’m sorry you had to see that. I don’t do that.”

  May went into the living room and sat down, her back to us.

  “Where’s Mom?” Nicky said. “Why isn’t she downstairs?”

  “She’s resting.”

  “It’s the middle of the morning.”

  “It’s a good day for a nap,” I said. “She knows, by the way. She’s worried about you. So you can go explain it to her.”

  He gave me a look that was equal parts woundedness and incomprehension, and went upstairs.

  I went into the living room. “It won’t help to get mad at him,” May said, tonelessly.

  “I don’t see why not,” I said. “No one ever does. It’s not going to make things worse.”

  She didn’t answer, and went to make tea. I settled back into the work I’d been doing. The world couldn’t just stop. We all had jobs and we had to do them. Anita understood that, I thought.

  I concentrated on the fire, on the quiet. I read a solid B essay by Dex on nature imagery in “East Coker.” I allowed myself to be annoyed that he was mailing it in, then further allowed myself to be resigned, since he was a senior. Convinced myself to not take it personally. Considered what his best work might be: Could Dex Pentecost write an A paper on Eliot? Maybe not. Although I realized I wasn’t concentrating very well, and maybe this wasn’t a B paper after all; actually I had no idea what I had just read—

  “He has nightmares. Almost every night.”

  My pen stopped, hovering.

  “Or I wake up and he is out of bed, just sitting at the window, staring. And I can’t comfort him, Charlie. Nothing works.”

  I heard how many times she had comforted him. How she loved him.

  “Are you afraid for him all the time?” she said. I didn’t answer. “You should have told me,” she said, and then shook her head, speaking to herself. “It doesn’t matter. It wouldn’t have mattered.”

  Jesus God this clamping matrix of time and feeling.

  “I wanted him to see someone,” she said. “He won’t do it.”

  “He would just charm them. Fool them.”

  “You didn’t tell me he was good at that.”

  I said, “I didn’t know.”

  She was very far away, there in that chair, next to the sofa, next to me. A person I could not touch.

  I went on to the next paper. I put Dex’s at the bottom of the stack, without a grade, since I didn’t trust myself. More and more I had to do this, duplicate my work, start over. I’d forget what I’d done. I’d lose my place.

  “Charlie.”

  “Mm.” She didn’t say anything else and finally I looked up. Her eyes were wide, her head cocked. “What?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, but then she stood and headed upstairs, and I followed her.

  Anita’s door was open just a crack. May stood, listening, and then opened it softly. She went just over the threshold, just far enough so I could see too.

  Nicky was curled on the bed, his feet hanging off the end. His head was nestled in the space where Anita’s leg should have been. He was asleep, his hands held the blankets in fists, but his slack face looked spent and weirdly plain, for the first time I could remember, ever.

  Anita was stroking his hair, very gently. She looked up as we stood in the door but her own expression didn’t change—her ancient, soft, sad adoration.

  May stopped. She stood, frozen. I was behind her and suddenly wanted to spin her around, to see for myself what expression was on her face, what realization. We stood there for several long moments. I put my hand on her shoulder, and she turned, and we left, and she closed the door gently behind her.

  We went back down the stairs, and by the time we’d reached the bottom I had no choice. I took her gingerly into my arms. Her head dropped onto my shoulder and she started to sob, burying all her sounds into my neck, hanging on to me for dear life, the nearest piece of flotsam. She was saying something. I wasn’t even sure she was saying it to me. “What? What, May?”

  “He’s gone. He’s gone.”

  “May, he’s right here.”

  “You shouldn’t have given him to me, Charlie.”

  “May-May,” I murmured. “Shhh. May-May.” I held more tightly. “I didn’t mean to.” She said something into my sweater. “Shhh.”

  “Yes you did. You did.”

&n
bsp; “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, sweetheart, I’m sorry.” I stroked her back. My cheek rested on her hair. I said, “He is the best I have.”

  Twenty-four

  A storm was coming, and, this being the twenty-first century, we knew it, down to the hour of its arrival. The school was battening down the hatches. I was teaching one more class but then I’d leave, ahead of the snow. It was almost March, and the snow would be heavy and wet, weighing down trees and power lines. We were supposed to get at least a foot.

  But then Nancy Beamer appeared at my door, head down, tapping the glass with one knuckle, and I knew. I went down the hall to the phone at Nancy’s desk, where May was waiting on the line. “I didn’t want to hang up,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  “I’m at the house. I came by … she’s unconscious. I thought she was asleep but then I realized—”

  “She’s breathing?”

  “Of course she’s breathing!”

  My hand relaxed on the phone. I hadn’t realized how tightly I’d been holding it. And then I knew how much harder this was going to be than I’d wanted to believe. “Don’t call nine one one,” I said. “We have hospice set up.”

  “I know.” There was a long pause. “I’ll get the number for you—”

  “I have it.”

  We had been waiting for exactly this moment. This stage. We’d been clear-eyed, planning for nothing else, Anita and I, and now she wasn’t here. For all intents and purposes absent. I hadn’t realized. I hadn’t known this was part of the plan.

  “I’m here,” May said. “I’m with her. I just happened to come by. She would have been alone.”

  “Okay. Yes. Thank you.” Hospice would send someone. Someone to be in charge.

  “But there’s that rattle, Charlie. All of a sudden. You need to come home.”

  I let myself shake for one more second. Then swallowed, steadied. “May, it’s all right.”

  “I remember when Daddy sounded like that—oh God, Charlie.”

  “May-May.” I heard myself, went on. “Is Nicky there?”

  A small hesitation. “No. I haven’t called him yet.”

  “All right. You try to reach him, and I’ll find him.” All of a sudden I wanted to see her. To imagine her, that is, as realistically as possible. “Where are you?” I said.

  And she understood. “I’m in the hall. Downstairs.”

  “I was just wondering,” I said.

  “I’m standing by the bottom step. Looking at the front door. I don’t know why. I’m going back upstairs as soon as I hang up. I didn’t want to disturb her, talking on the phone. I know that’s ridiculous.”

  “It’s not.”

  “You’ll find Nicky.”

  “Yes.”

  “Hurry.”

  “Yes.”

  UPSTAIRS SHE KEPT BREATHING. And she was still a presence: I’d been wrong; and, weirdly, I relaxed. I felt the completeness of the house, how she was still absolutely here, however feeble. Her body was still so active. She looked a little surprised, lying there, her mouth slightly open, air rushing in and out thickly, like the tide.

  We waited for Nick as the snow began. Just a few flakes at first, gentle but inexorable. The sky was gray and heavy with what was coming. We called hospice and while I was on the phone I heard myself saying not to send anyone. Whoever came would be stuck for the duration of the storm, and I realized I didn’t want that. As I was explaining to the concerned woman at the other end of the line I looked at May, and she nodded.

  Then I hung up, and we were alone.

  I’D TOLD NANCY we were looking for Nick, and she said she’d find him, and I’d believed her as I always did and put it out of my mind. But he didn’t come, and we called, his apartment and his cell, and left messages.

  At the school they’d be hunkering down. They had generators for the gym and the cafeteria, so if the power went out it would be a giant sleepover on the basketball court. “Sorry I’m making you miss that,” I said.

  “I would most certainly rather be here,” she said.

  WE SAT AT ANITA’S BEDSIDE. We’d brought two comfortable chairs up. May left periodically; she’d return with a mug of tea, or a glass of water for me, but I knew she was calling Nick, from my land line, because cell reception at my house was almost nil. When she came back, I’d look at her and she’d shake her head. Outside the snow was now falling in earnest.

  She chased me out when Anita needed cleaning up. “I’ll do that,” I said, the first time.

  “You will not. She would hate that.”

  It was far, far easier not to argue, and I had to admit it was not a memory I wanted to have.

  As soon as I left the room and the rattling breaths, and went downstairs where I couldn’t hear them at all, I was filled with almost overwhelming relief. The non-rhythm of them had nearly made me crazy. In the living room, however, there was no sound but the wind outside and the sense, not a sound at all, of the falling snow.

  I put on my coat and boots and brought in load after load of wood from the porch. I wanted to do it only once. I hadn’t stopped for any food on the way home and now I checked the fridge, the cupboards: we would make do. If the power went out, we could still light the gas stove, and besides—“God damn it all to hell,” I said.

  “What?” It was May, at the door of the kitchen.

  “I don’t have gas for the generator. I used it up in the snowblower. I was going to get more and I completely forgot.”

  “You’ve had some things on your mind.”

  “I could go out now, quick,” I said, but I knew it was too dangerous— I could get stuck on our road and then May would be alone.

  “We’ll be all right,” May said softly.

  “Is she—”

  “All cleaned up,” she said.

  I shook my head. “I’m so—”

  “It’s all right. I am glad to do it.”

  “You aren’t going to let me finish a sentence, are you.”

  “Probably not.” We both smiled and then she said, gently, “Charlie, you know this can take a while. It might not even be tonight.”

  “I know. But that breathing is so bad.”

  “It can get better. Go back and forth. I remember, from my dad.”

  “I know.”

  “I checked her feet. Her foot, I mean.”

  “Jesus,” I said. For a moment we both tried not to laugh. I leaned over the counter and gave in, felt tears coming to my eyes, but they were strange, removed tears, more of exhaustion, already, than anything else. And it was too early to be so tired.

  “I’m sorry,” May said, but there was a little laugh still in her voice.

  “It’s all right.”

  “Do you remember? The nurse who kept checking Daddy’s feet and hands? Who wouldn’t shut up about it? When his extremities were cyanotic. God, that awful nurse.”

  I knew who she meant, the officious one who liked her presence to be felt, who liked to offer advice on grieving, who told stories of the grisly deaths she’d attended and how it was her calling to ease the pain of families during this life transition. Florence had welcomed anyone who would take control and, even better, let her be an extra patient in the bargain. But May had had to leave the room whenever that particular nurse had appeared. I remembered her crying on me, out in the hall, and beating my chest with her hands, and laughing too—and how at one point we went up to her room and locked the door and she attacked me, resulting in the fastest, most explosive intercourse I’d ever had. Afterward May had said, over and over, “Fuck her. Fuck her. I hope she heard every bit of that.”

  “All one hundred and eighty seconds of it.”

  “Fuck her! That is how I am going to fucking grieve! God I fucking hate her! I hate her, Charlie! I hate her!” I hadn’t asked if she meant the nurse, or Florence.

  And the wonderful thing, now, would be to look at May and acknowledge what we were both thinking, but I just couldn’t do it,
I was afraid this time the dam wouldn’t hold. She seemed to know this, and sighed, shakily. “Where is he, Charlie? I don’t want to leave any more messages. He’ll see all these missed calls and know—”

  “Isn’t that the point?” I said, more sharply than I’d meant to.

  “Yes,” she said miserably.

  “He’s let his phone die,” I said. “Or he’s turned it off, or it’s under some pile of laundry. In his fucking undergraduate-lifestyle pigsty of an apartment.”

  “Charlie.”

  I clenched my teeth; but I was so, so tired of not saying things. “This is unconscionable, and you know it.”

  “Stop it.”

  “And you’re right,” I went on, unable to shut up. “He’s finally going to turn on the fucking phone and he’ll see those messages and he will fall apart, it will be ugly—poor, poor little Nicky—”

  “Stop it! Please stop! Please stop,” she begged, and she bent over, her face in her hands, but she wasn’t sobbing, just breathing deeply, shaking her head, and I knew she was trying to hold it together for me. Or, more likely, for Anita. She was decent enough to want to treat me well, for Anita’s sake. For Nicky’s.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I mean it. I’m sorry.” It didn’t matter anyway. Nothing mattered.

  And she knew that too. “It doesn’t matter.” Her eyes still closed, her hands still on her temples.

  “The roads will be passable awhile longer,” I said. “He’ll show up here any minute. You’ll see. Or the phone will ring. He knows. He’ll be here. He’ll come.”

  MAY MADE US SANDWICHES. We picked at them in Anita’s room in the air of a fragile truce. Her uneven breathing continued but did not grow worse, and gradually we became used to it. But the front door did not burst open with Nick’s arrival, the phone didn’t ring; finally I went to check once more to make absolutely sure we hadn’t missed a message, and found the line was dead.

  The sun had gone down but I turned on the floodlights on the patio, and we saw that the world was pure white. “He wouldn’t try to come now,” I said.

  “He knows I’d kill him,” May said. “He’s a horrible driver.”