The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  Inside, it was cold and quiet. The place was not quite as messy as usual. I glanced in the open door of the bedroom: bed empty—not made, exactly, but the covers pulled up. What passed for made with Nicky. In the living room, there was a stack of papers and textbooks on the floor. The coffee table was clear. “Nick? Nicky?” I didn’t call loudly; I didn’t keep calling.

  On the kitchen table, propped up against a dirty glass, was a manila envelope, addressed to me.

  He was going to Congo. There were refugee camps, he had contacts. Anita had told him to go. It is awful there Charlie its horrible and they need people. Not me I kno that but just peopl and you don’t need me here and I kno that to. No one needs me here. This place was perfect when I got here your kind of place Charlie but I need distratcion that is bad but that is the way I am.

  I do not know from what I need to be distracted from. I do not think about it.

  Mom understands

  I am sorry you will have to deal with all this shit Im leaving. Its better thogh. No one will want to see me or talk to me. There is a letter here for May

  Im going to write it all down and this is the truth. You can do whatever you want with it. Everyone wanted so much from me and I was giving it to them I didn’t sleep with Celia until after she and zack broke up that IS the TRUTH you should know that. She came over here all the time I didn’t invite her she just showed up but then afterwards she was so sad and I couldnt stand it it seemed right jesus maybe it was. I thout he knew and I thout he would tell you and then he died I don’t fucking know I don’t Charlie. I loved her your going to ask what it was, well her feet, the way she walked so carefuly, delicately like she doesn’t want to leave footprints, I get that. I tried not too.

  I loved May too more it was more real maybe. more adult I know that is the point charlie. I meant it please tell her I told you that. Maybe I could have stayed w/ her and I loved her and Charlie you know I don’t say it if i don’t mean it. This is not the place for me. I knew but i tried and you should have known but it was beautiful wasn’t it charlie? In the snow. That night at Divya’s after christmas with mom I will always remember it was perfect it was the peek the top of the mountain thank you charlie there are not many nights like that thats all i wanted. It was too much though too much and so i say thank you and i am sorry

  I had never known before how he did it. How he pulled himself away, bit by bit, his beautiful face shining all the while, until before you knew it all you could see was his waving hand, the cloud of dust.

  AFTER I PUT MY LETTER back in the manila envelope with May’s, unopened, I became efficient.

  I went through every room. I found bottles in the trash and in the closets. In the bathroom I found four empty prescription painkiller bottles with my mother’s name on them. I put them in my pocket.

  I called Salter’s house and talked briefly to Bethie. Everything was fine, the generators were working in the gym, and they thought the power would be back within the hour. I told her my mother wasn’t good and I wouldn’t be in, nor would May. I let her assume Nick was with me. “I’ll tell Adam,” she said. “And there’s nothing we can—”

  “Nothing right now. Nothing at all.”

  I closed the door to Nick’s apartment and locked it behind me.

  I strode purposefully down the street, waving but not speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. I got to my car and drove to the nearest open gas station, where I bought gas for my generator, two coffees, and two enormous cardboardish blueberry muffins. It was not until I was back on the road to the house that I let myself think that Anita could be dead by now. And that May was waiting not for me, but for Nick.

  The road had been plowed again and was easily passable. My street had room for one car to go down it; Vince had done a decent job on my driveway. The sun by now was bright, almost celebratory.

  May was at the door almost instantly when I walked through. “Charlie. She’s still here.” And I was surprised at the rush of relief. It frightened me, how glad I was. “But she’s bad again. Where’s Nick?”

  “He’s not here,” I said. “I can’t find him.” The manila envelope was folded fat inside my coat.

  She looked at me and I expected her eyes to be frantic and lost, little-girl eyes worrying over little-boy Nick. But they were resigned, unsurprised. “Did he tell you he was going anywhere?” I said.

  “No,” she said. “He didn’t.” The question seemed to mildly annoy her, a mere distraction. “Charlie, you have to talk to her.”

  I followed her back into the living room. The peacefulness was gone, and the look of gentle surprise; my mother was gray, her mouth roundly open. There was silence, and then finally a breath—or rather a rasping, barely human, the sound of a body reduced to failing machine, running on the engine of the reptile brain. I sat down next to her and smoothed her forehead. “Oh, Mama,” I whispered.

  “Do you think she’s waiting for Nicky?”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t think so.”

  May sat down on the floor, at my feet, looking up at my mother. “Then you have to tell her it’s all right to go,” she murmured. “Daddy did this. She’s hanging on. She’s hanging on for something.”

  “You’re so stubborn,” I whispered.

  Another rasp, cheeks sunken in, her mouth a lipless gape.

  “Mama,” I said. “Please listen. I’m going to tell her. Listen, Mama, listen,” crooning now, It’s all right. Hush little baby. “I’m telling her everything.”

  Her lungs were dry as cliffs, her throat full of stones.

  I turned to May. “Nicky is gone. He’s going to Africa, probably. Anita told him to go.”

  Her mouth opened a little. And closed.

  “I don’t know much. I’ll tell you everything I know. But there’s something else. Please listen. I need to tell you about my father. Anita didn’t tell you, because I wouldn’t let her.”

  That gentle little furrow of her eyebrows. “He was a priest,” I said. “Or, rather, a deacon. He was in St. Annes, Georgia, for a summer posting. It was good for him because his fiancée was in Savannah that summer. With her family. She was from Savannah. But he fell in love with my mother, and she got pregnant.”

  “Charlie.”

  I was in a trance. I was holding it away from myself. I was dismantling the house piece by piece. “But he went back to the fiancée anyway. He went back to Virginia. To seminary. Where his fiancée’s father was a bishop. And then eventually he became a chaplain. At a school.”

  “Stop. Please stop.” She was whispering.

  My mother’s terrible breaths. One. Then the next. “There was a man named Jimmie Garrett. He died in Vietnam. But he wasn’t my father. My father didn’t die in Vietnam. He didn’t even go there. His name wasn’t Jimmie Garrett. But Anita didn’t tell me. She didn’t tell me until it was too late. Until he was about to die. And until I had fallen in love with his daughter.”

  One more breath. “Don’t tell it like a story,” May whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If it’s not a story.”

  “It’s not a story.”

  “Charlie. Charlie.” I didn’t reach for her. I couldn’t. Instead I kept my hand on my mother’s arm. Not moving or stroking. Just a connection. I felt her there. I felt her receding.

  May could not get her breath. Sound wouldn’t come. Then, finally, “I don’t believe you,” she said.

  Silence. For a long time. And then we both realized: silence.

  I FOLDED ANITA’S HANDS on her chest. I wanted ancient gestures. Where were pennies for her eyes? Who would pay the ferryman? May stood up, looking down at her, not at me, and then walked out of the room. I heard the back door open and close—she had gone out to the patio. I let her be.

  The body of my mother didn’t make sense: Was it presence and absence together? How was the absence so large? The body itself seemed to call for action. So I went down to the cellar with the gas, started the generator, and turned the water back on.
I went and got more wood from the pile on the porch, brought it in, stacked it in the brass wood box. I found my charger and plugged in my phone; maybe I’d get a signal.

  I stood next to my desk and made a list of people to call: the funeral home. Adam, Divya, various Satterthwaites. At the plugged-in phone, there was one bar, appearing and then disappearing. I called Nicky again, got patchy voice mail, didn’t leave a message.

  Then I remembered the breakfast I had bought what seemed like days ago, although it had been only a bit more than an hour. I got the bag of muffins and May’s coffee from the car—I had drunk mine on the way—and, back inside, heated hers up in the now-functioning microwave. Then I got my coat and boots and went out the kitchen door.

  She was sitting in the middle of the snow-covered patio, in one of the Adirondack chairs. The snow was a foot and a half deep, at least. Only the top of the chair and its arms showed. She was cradled in snow. Her red coat pooled around her like a train. It was early enough that the sun hadn’t yet risen over the peak of the roof, but the shadows and light on the mountains in front of us were stark, and I had to shield my eyes against the glare.

  It was ridiculous, comical, the way the chair was barely visible, the way she looked like she was floating in the white. Absurd.

  I began to slog toward her, using the deep prints she had made. She didn’t look at me when I came close. I set the coffee cup and the bag on the wide arm of the chair, at a level with the snow. Something about her stillness made me think I should stay, that she wanted me to stay, but the other chair was completely consumed, so I backed up and then just stood, the drifted snow past my knees. After another long minute she took the coffee and wrapped her gloved hands around it. She drank. She took the white bag onto her lap, peered into it, and brought out a piece of muffin, which she ate without comment; then she rolled the top of the bag closed again as though she’d just had a full meal.

  I felt giddy. I realized a weight had been lifted. I thought about how this was Anita’s gift to me. Somehow my horror and mortification had dissipated, for good, as I had spoken inside; the reality, out loud, somehow seemed smaller than my years of florid shame. I wanted to say these things to May, but I knew I was far, far ahead of her. The reality was still enormous. And there was the matter of Nick—all that she didn’t even know yet. The envelope was still pressing against my chest. But suddenly I thought that maybe we could find him, bring him back, that now that the worst was over we could all be sensible, that he would be able to survive Anita’s death as I was, already, splendidly—see, I was fine! And he would be too. It would be the three of us again. Somehow it was all right. I wanted them together. Yes, that was what I wanted! Now that the truth was out, how marvelous that there was this second act possible at all, that Nick and May could be together with my blessing, a real blessing. I had to figure out how to say all this to her. “May-May—”

  She held up a hand, as though I had interrupted her listening to something far away. I waited. Her hand drifted back down and she said, “Did I tell you I went to Savannah this summer?”

  “No, you didn’t.” The wind picked up and I hunched in my coat, my hands in my pockets.

  She was speaking very slowly. “To see my mother. To check that box.”

  “And did you check it?”

  She smiled at the mountains. “Oh, yes. I checked it.”

  “Well, that’s good.”

  “Although I guess it was also checked for me.”

  I was eager as a puppy. I was practically bouncing up and down in the snow. I had plans, I had to tell her.

  “Charlie.” Her gaze hadn’t moved from the view in front of us. She still hadn’t looked at me. Her eyes were narrowed against the bands of blinding light. “I need to tell you about this lunch we had.”

  She was in shock, probably. I would let her natter on for a while. Where did we need to be? What was the rush? I needed to remember there was no rush. I hadn’t called the funeral home. No one was coming, no one knew anything. We were in this suspended time. The two of us. It was a lot to absorb. Everything I’d told her. I’d known for years, she had known for an hour. When she gave me the chance, I would gently say that, and that we were in completely foreign terrain with no guide.

  But for now I’d just listen. “It was in a ladies’ tearoom—can you imagine such a thing?” she was saying. Looking straight ahead. “Did you know such things still exist?”

  “Well, I’m not surprised.”

  “It was like a time warp, Charlie.”

  “I bet it was.”

  “You sit across from your mother and you behave. That’s what you do.”

  “I expect so.”

  “You use all your good-girl training. Every bit.”

  “Every single bit.”

  She started a little and finally turned her head in my direction, although she didn’t meet my eyes. I thought maybe I’d angered her. But I wasn’t laughing at her—oh no! I was taking it all with utmost seriousness! Her face worried me. A strange softness to it. And also a slight, unnerving curl to her lip. The two things not matching at all.

  “But you know about behaving,” she said. “Oh, Charlie, you know all about it too. You know how it works.”

  “I suppose I do.”

  “No matter what your mother tells you.”

  “Right.”

  “Or doesn’t.”

  “Yes.”

  “No matter what your mother says.”

  “May-May,” I said. “What did your mother say to you?”

  “She told me a story.”

  “Tell me, May.”

  She nodded. Said nothing.

  “May.”

  She was still nodding. Absurdity had been confirmed. I went to her chair and knelt before her in the snow. She finally looked up and her eyes terrified me but that made no sense and I kept my voice calm. “Sweetheart, what did she say? Don’t worry. It’s only a story.”

  WALLPAPER WITH A BAMBOO DESIGN; chicken salad, on chinoiserie plates, iced tea in footed glasses: the decorum of ladies who are keepers of old codes. This was where Florence had taken May, a tearoom in Savannah: a good choice for a mother and daughter whose main intention is to behave. But the bamboo wallpaper, the blue-and-white china: some colonialist fantasy? A flimsy gazebo on a tropical river, fluttering white linen: helplessness? Is that what they were meant to invoke? But I don’t know about such things.

  May has gone to Savannah. She’s checking the box. Savannah not the place where she grew up—it’s her mother’s home, her grandparents’, yes, but she herself is a stranger in a strange land, made even stranger because her mother has transformed herself back into a native, and her friends, the old childhood friends who have welcomed her back, are surrounded by their southern children who are living lives like their parents, girls May’s age who are married and now the mothers of children in smocked outfits and hair bows. And May strides in tall and olive skinned and speaking French and wishing she were in Paris or Massachusetts or anywhere else. And at the same time filled with that failure, the failure to marry, to have the blond children, to have lunch with her mother every week. But she’s doing it today. Yes, today she is checking the box.

  She’s come from Dallas, where it’s just as hot now, in June, but a dry heat, and all the blond ladies have a lacquered edge to them that isn’t here in Savannah. She’ll admit that. She will not admit, though, at least not to her mother, that Dallas feels like a long detour to her, or that she doesn’t love her fiancé enough, that she has tried and failed and that he is not the answer to whatever her overarching question is.

  She would rather take off the ring he gave her, it makes her feel cheap with falseness and subterfuge, but she doesn’t want to discuss it with Florence so for now she leaves it there on her finger, glittering, Texas-sized. Her mother admires it every few minutes: yes, she does, and that doesn’t help, no it does not. Her mother wants to plan a wedding, is talking about lovely venues in Savannah, about the club, this is why w
e’re members, May, about the best months of the year, March being best, with the humidity low, the azaleas blooming—oh yes lovely, and the boys would be so glad to get out of New England, she can’t believe they all stayed there, March had always been the worst, well that and April, oh and February too, she had barely been able to stand it but it hadn’t bothered Preston, it had been so infuriating—her mother talks of her father lightly now, in this way, and as usual May can’t decide whether she should be annoyed or furious or relieved.

  Florence can’t understand why they haven’t set a date; probably this lunch has been designed to address the question. But what’s on May’s mind, along with her failing engagement, is her talk with Adam Salter just a few days ago, the call out of the blue, the remarkable idea that she could go back to Abbott—another thing she will not discuss with her mother. She has many things to keep to herself. Luckily she is a bafflement to her mother and always has been. Florence won’t detect anything besides the usual discomfort. She’ll criticize May for some minor aspect of manners or dress and May will let her, thinking, as always, of her father, to whom she was not a bafflement. As she grew up, his flaws had gradually uncovered themselves, and by the end he was autocratic and absurd—but when the three of them were together, May alone at the mercy of her parents, he had been ballast and safety.

  Afterward, May is sure her mother brought her here because she’d known how hard it would be to make a scene. Florence must have known how in this time-warp of a place May would feel the weight of all her mother had ever wanted to be, all her mother had ever wanted her to be, how well behaved, how knowable; if she was going to have a daughter then it was going to be this kind; and Florence looked across the table at her, over their iced tea and their chicken salad amandine, and said, There is something you are old enough to know, you are getting married and beginning a new life and I suppose one needs to know these things, it is part of being an adult, to be very clear on one’s family. No, I have never believed in secrets.