The Half Brother: A Novel

by Holly LeCraw

  All right.

  I was very unhappy, you have to understand, I was miserable up there. I had found myself about to not be young anymore, I was just—well I hope you never wake up and think, my God, how did this get to be my life?

  Yes, that’s exactly what I don’t want.

  He’d said he would get a church in the South, we’d have to move around but I was expecting that, my own father was a bishop and I knew how it worked. But then it was not at all what Preston promised, what I’d been led to expect. Your father was not what I’d been led to expect. I am not proud of it. Things happen. You fall into things—but it was a choice, I have to admit that. It is always a choice.

  Mom. What are you saying. Mom.

  Did you know his first wife was killed in a terrible wreck? So sad. They were barely married any time at all. A sweet girl. He was beside himself—the strong silent type, you know, but he was beside himself, and I remembered that. And he and I had always liked each other, we’d always had this little zing— that happens even when you’re married, you should know that, you meet someone and you know that, well, in another life—You can’t be attracted to just one person. It doesn’t work that way. I’ll do you no favors by not admitting that.

  And he was so different. An outdoorsman, you know, good with his hands—Preston could barely change a lightbulb. We knew it was a mistake, we felt awful. Your father and I were barely speaking anyway. It’s a wonder no one ever knew. In that tiny town where everyone had their nose in everyone’s business, oh, people think southerners are gossips, but a little academic town, you have no idea—

  Please.

  Preston is your father. In every sense that matters. He adored you from the moment you were born. He’d always wanted a girl. He’s the only father that matters.

  But—

  Win never knew. He never did. I’m sure—it was timing, I won’t get into that, God no. I never did show until the fifth month or so. I was terrified it would be different with you. Because it had been four years and the fourth baby and what if my body had been different? But you cooperated and he never knew. I don’t think he even suspected. And he met Divya and forgot all about me, it all worked out. He was so in love with her he never would have stopped to think. No, I’m sure he never did.

  But Daddy said I looked like his mother. I’ve seen pictures! He said that I looked just like his mother!

  I know, it’s funny, so strange how things can work out that way. You do, a little. Your coloring. And she was tall. But Win was always tan. He said his grandmother was black Irish. Who knows.

  Here’s a napkin.

  The powder room is that way, May-May, if you need it.

  What you should remember is how much your father loved you. I’ve always felt bad about leaving you alone with him but also I knew you would have that time. Just the two of you. I suppose I thought it balanced things out.

  You’re an adult, and I thought you needed to know this. But it seems I should have kept my mouth shut. Stop that and drink some tea.

  May-May.

  No, thank you, we are just fine. Nothing right now. Oh, she’s okay, aren’t you? Thank you so much. No just the check. We are just fine. No, really. We are just fine.

  Daddy was only seeing what he wanted to see, May says. In despair.

  Sweetie. Sweetie, people do.

  Twenty-five

  The house was empty, for the first time since before Christmas.

  I had longed for solitude, and now I had it.

  The power was still out—they were saying a day or two more, out where I was. But the generator chugged, the phone was back, and I had made all my calls. Deferential men who moved with near silence had come with a gurney and a van from the funeral home, an ambulance but not quite, and had wheeled my mother away.

  Divya didn’t want to leave me alone. “I’m okay,” I said.

  “Come over for dinner.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “I’ll bring you something, then.”

  I knew I would never convince her. “Tomorrow, okay? I would love that tomorrow.”

  “Nicky’s with you,” she said, not a question.

  “He’s in and out.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I would deal with that tomorrow, too. The storm had given me cover.

  “Charlie—”

  “Tomorrow, Div. Please. I need to sleep.” And that was the truth, and it would also be impossible.

  May had the envelope. All the evidence. I had handed it to her, that morning, before she left. She had said she had to leave and I had said all right. She had said Charlie I can’t stay and I said I know. She had said I just have to go I just have to leave and I could not read her face, not at all, and then she had embraced me. Or rather just stood in my arms. It was a purely formal gesture. I was sure she was, like me, at the end of astonishment. Everything was ended, everything thoroughly, thoroughly over.

  And I had left her alone to deal with what was in the envelope. I had left her alone for more shocks—unchivalrous, if nothing else—this was just occurring to me—May sitting in the rooms I’d never seen, sitting on some sofa, at some table, the letters spread out in front of her, knowing she’d lost Nick, that she’d never had him, we’d all lost the Nick we’d imagined we had, the Nick we had created. How destroyed it all was.

  I had been sitting for hours by now, in front of the fireplace, the ashes paled to gray. I’d drunk two whiskies for my supper. I had no idea what time it was. I was sitting where my mother had died. I let myself fall onto the sofa, my head where hers had been.

  Ghoulish and strange but I felt covered, for just a moment or two, as if a blanket had drifted down over me. And then I was abruptly cold again. Perhaps the generator had stopped—but the lights were on, fool, fool.

  I began to wish I had agreed to Divya’s invitation after all. I wanted to walk into that front hall, see the colors, the stairs going up, remember Win’s hands on every piece of that house—as he had touched mine, that very mantel, there—we had stripped it and sanded it down, he and I.

  Then I’d have to come back home to my own empty house. But I would have to get used to that again. Abundance had been temporary.

  I got up and went into the kitchen to look at the clock: midnight. And there were evening and morning, the first day. The wrong order, that was. But at any rate the first day nearly over, the first day of Anita’s death—could you say that? The moment of her dying, of the storm, had seemed endless. But now we had moved along into the period of my mother’s death. Now this was ordinary time.

  I took my keys from the hook by the door.

  SNOW COVERED THE LABYRINTH. In the path it was up to my knees. The boxwood was invisible. All white.

  The sky was clouded over too; good. I put my hand out to guide me.

  But even though it was night I could feel the temperature rising. Every now and then a thud as snow slid off a branch. Fog was gathering, low to the ground, as I moved close to the center, then back out, the maddening pattern, enforced patience. Win trimming the green. Oh the hours. Where had Zack pushed through? Over there? Maybe he’d thought, as he broke the green down to the root, I am not playing this game anymore, and I am destroying the board.

  Such a long way.

  I had never been good at prayer but I was good at thinking, it was in fact the only thing I was at all proficient in (oh let me think these thoughts, let me; I will let myself; enough), and I moved my feet and I thought of Anita. Of Nicky. Of May. Of Preston, Win, Zack. Hugh. I turned the pages.

  I tried to crack myself wide to them. To spare myself nothing.

  May’s voice in the darkness, Nicky’s baby fists on my knees, Hugh in his study, at his desk where a yellow pool of light shone down, my mother in a yellow dress, leaving, leaving, my mother in my arms, heavy and incomplete. When I got to Zack, I thought of Booker, digging, and had to stop.

  I saw my students, hundreds of them now, there rea
lly had been hundreds. I saw them as rosy babies and as gray shriveled sexless crones, their lives and all the possibilities folding and blurring.

  And the center. Here it was. Was it the still point of the turning world? No answer. Neither flesh nor fleshless. And do not call it fixity.

  The weight of the clouds pressed on me and I sank to my knees, just gave down. As Anita would have said. The snow began to melt under my knees and soak through my pants. I thought of ascetics seeking such things out. Bloodied flagellants. Nuns binding thorns into the belts of their habits, monks in lice-ridden cilices. Oh, a little cold water was nothing. Bush league.

  Whose woods these are I think I know. Let me not to the marriage of true minds. Love bade me welcome. Time present and time past are both perhaps present. And now good-morrow. There were secrets in the spaces and in the rhythms of the spaces and the vowels and the consonants. There had to be. I kept rocking along with the meter. With that music. Ba dum ba dum ba dum ba dum.

  But to what purpose Disturbing the dust.

  These are the feet. I’m marking the feet with the chalk.

  I was sitting in the pew next to my mother. In the beginning was the Word. She said lay your head right here Charlie. And the Word was God.

  Yes exactly.

  Up at Divya’s a light went on. A minute, two, three. The back door opening, closing. Then footsteps on the wooden stairs of the deck.

  “Charlie?” A sigh. “Charlie.” That lilt. The warmth of another world. Chaah-lee. I wasn’t sure if she could see me. But why would there be cause for alarm? With good old Charlie?

  “Charlie, May called me. Come out of there. Charlie.”

  “Hello, Divya.”

  “Charlie.” Her voice didn’t change. “You mustn’t feel so sorry for yourself.”

  “That is a fact,” I said, more grateful than ever for the boxwood walls. A child in a fort.

  Divya’s outline at the bottom of the stairs was becoming clearer. Or rather her shapelessness. A puffy lump with a head. She’d have on her big down coat, her ridiculous wearable sleeping bag. And snow boots. May had called and she had come downstairs, to the coat on the hook, to the boots by the door.

  May knew now that Nicky was gone. She knew we’d made Nicky because we wanted glimpses of the bright beyond. We had given him his own glamour. But the rest of us were getting older. And all we had was the warmth of one another’s decrepit bodies. And time would not stop, even for Nicky, especially for Nicky—that was the horror and the beauty, we were in it, circle or line, we were in it, we were in it. Around and around, all of us.

  “Charlie,” Divya said. Was she whispering? Singing? “You must come out now.”

  May who had known where I would go.

  The snow was water now. I was kneeling in water.

  “This is the hard part,” Divya said. The lights behind her, in the kitchen, were so warm. “You cannot stay. You must come back out.”

  I began to stand. Both legs asleep—not an ascetic, not close. I paused, one hand in the wet, ass in the air, a ridiculous tripod. Blood roared down to my feet. Electric shocks for my negligence. Oh how real the flesh. Then I stood, I was up, I could see.

  “May is at your house,” Divya said. “She is waiting for you. She said to tell you that. She said, ‘Tell him. Tell him I’m here.’ ”

  AND IN THE DARK, the warm dark, one more story.

  When I was two weeks old, Anita received a small package. She removed the brown paper—a grocery sack, cut to fit, carefully taped. Inside was a picture book, the kind with the gold spine, from the dime store. Inside the book was the letter she’d written for Ann Fusco, unopened.

  Holding the baby—holding me—Anita felt suddenly unsteady on her feet. She sat down in a kitchen chair and felt that both she and the chair were floating unmoored, out into a great void. Then there was a horizon, as when the Lord separated the heavens and the earth; and then on the horizon was a towering wave of tears. It came toward her, a tsunami of feeling, and passed over her while she somehow withstood it, ducking under it as she used to duck under the surf as a child, feeling the suck of tumult passing over, disappearing.

  With one hand, she somehow slit the letter open, giving herself a paper cut. She spread the letter she had written out on the table, and then stuck her finger in her mouth before the blood smeared.

  Dear Memaw and Granddaddy,

  If you are reading this, I am dead, and my baby is alive.

  She didn’t read any more. She simply read those lines over and over and held me, who was asleep on her shoulder, and the waves, calm now, lapped gently at her heels. She realized that all this time she had been making a decision. It had been the roiling in her heart, in the middle of the night when, exhausted, she had laid me down beside her in her own bed and instead of falling into oblivion had lain awake watching me and feeling in herself a great duality. She hadn’t known she was making a decision but she had been and now it was done, and now she knew I was well and truly hers, and no one else’s. And that she was not her mother. But mine.

  She folded the letter back into the envelope and carried it to the range, where she kneeled down, awkwardly, keeping the bundle of me balanced on her shoulder, and opened the broiler at the bottom with her free hand and pushed the letter in. When smoke curled out from the edges of the closed drawer, she turned off the gas, and when the smoke died away and she opened the drawer, it was empty save for gray flecks of ash that disintegrated when she touched them. Then she stood up, with me, and began our new life.

  Twenty-six

  We cremated Anita’s body and I scattered some ashes in the back of the house, beyond the patio—flinging them toward the mountains, pretending they were going far beyond where they landed, that they were winging away like birds. I told myself that this was the last vista she had seen on this earth and that she would understand if I wanted to look out and know she was there—although I thought also that she would not have cared at all where the last physical bits of her ended up. And it was true also that someday people would live in this house and look out its windows and have no idea of this particular aspect of their view. Perhaps sooner rather than later.

  I took the rest to Atlanta, where I put them beside Hugh, in a small graveside service. There was a plot waiting, and there was no reason not to do what was expected. She wouldn’t have cared either way, and for the rest of the family it was neat and tidy, and anyway burials are for the living. Although I did beg out of a bigger one by saying she wouldn’t have wanted any fuss, which no one disputed.

  I saved out a baggieful of ashes for Nick. If he showed up back in the States anytime soon, he could scatter his own pieces of her where he wanted, too.

  Once I was back in Abbottsford I considered a spoonful or two on Preston’s grave. (And thought that Anita would have rolled her eyes at this doling out of herself.) I even went there, bringing Nick’s bag along, as a sort of test, and stood there a long time. I told myself I was deciding, but really the decision was already made, and I kept the bag in my pocket.

  It was late March by now and we were in a glorious thaw. The sky was a brilliant blue, and the air was thick with snowmelt. On Preston’s grave, shadowed by the headstone, a crystalline patch of snow remained, icy at the edges. I’d come here only a few times before, and this time was no different—the sense that I was trying to manufacture emotion and wisdom far different from whatever portion of those things I possessed. I tried, dutifully, to remember what he’d looked like, to summon his actual person, and for a moment he rose before me, standing in the snow, shadow-faced, the rest of him Disneyfied: robes and gray hair flowing, something almost obscenely fine about him. In a mythical way. An untouchable way.

  I’d tell May about that vision, one of these days, but not yet. I turned away from Preston and went to look for her, and found her where I expected, at Win’s grave, just over a little rise. His stone was one of those twofers, with a blank on the other side where Divya would go, her name and birth date already engr
aved, the hyphen ominous and a little absurd. May stood there, looking down at it, a hand shading her eyes. She was wearing her red coat with the proud black velvet epaulets and I thought she looked magnificent.

  I went and stood next to her. We were silent a moment and then I said, of the stone, “Divya swears that isn’t creepy.”

  “I know,” May said, surprising me. “She calls it ‘the other side of the bed.’ ”

  “You’re kidding,” I said, and May just gave me a look. We stood awhile longer. The silence began to grow. Finally I said, “Do you think you’ll tell her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t ever have to.”

  “I know.” She sighed, tolerantly. “I suppose it would be interesting.”

  The gelid wind was picking up, and May brushed her hair out of her face. “I’m cold,” I said.

  “Me too.”

  Halfway back to my car she took my hand in her gloved one, briefly squeezed, let go.

  Once we were in the car and I had cranked the engine May said, “Are you ready?”

  I nodded, and headed slowly down the narrow road to the cemetery gate. As I drove, May twisted in her seat to face me. “I have the one class,” I said. “And then my meeting. Then I’ll go home.”

  I kept my eyes on the narrow road but in my peripheral vision I could see her face held out to me, still bright from the sodden wind. “Charlie.”

  “Yes.”

  “I could go with you. Wherever you go.”

  “Yes, you could.”

  We had said such things already; we would say them again. We took careful steps on a long and winding bridge, and did not look down.

  I EXAMINED THE FACES of my seniors. “Don’t stew too much. Try,” I said. Most of them would be hearing from colleges over break. “Write your final papers instead. As a stress release.” Eye rolling.