I haven’t been around too many crying men—not men who mattered to me. Bryant was shy and quiet and often picked on—for general nerd reasons—but he wasn’t one to cry about any of it. Benjamin never once shed a tear in my viewing. When he broke his femur in a bad hit during a football practice, he winced, he punched at the air, he cursed like a drunken pirate (or like the fourteen-year-old that he was), but he didn’t cry. Something he learned from our father, I guess. With the shitty cards that my poor dad was dealt—squeezed into the sides of a derelict life in Trinidad, always without enough food, shoes, help, love, luck—if Bertram Lightburn chose to sob for hours each day, it would be completely understandable, maybe even expected. But once—and my memory sometimes clouds around the specifics on this, twenty years later—I woke up in the wee hours to the sound of what I processed in my kid’s brain as a hurt cat mewling. It was coming from downstairs. Groggy, confused, I made my way through the darkness, following the hurt cat’s call. There was light in the kitchen and the whimper was coming from there. Both things were strange, out of order, and it frightened me. I remember stepping toward the kitchen, right up to the edge of the archway, my body flat against the wall, as if I needed to sneak up on whatever was making that noise. Just as I was about to bend my head around the corner and capture the intruder, I heard it clearer: It was my father. I recognized his voice beneath the snivel and mumble. “I’m sorry. Lawd Gawd have mercy. I promise to change. I promise.” He was pleading, begging with all that he had. I ran back to my room, tucked my body into a tight ball, and buried myself under the blankets at the foot of the bed. The rest of it is blank. I don’t remember how the next morning went, or the next week. Sometimes I do think I recall this one detail: my mother warning him about “next time” and his drinking, but I’m never sure that part is real.
I still make like a ball and hide under the covers when something freaks me out. And tonight, even with Grant sniffling in his sleep right next to me, that’s exactly what I plan to do.
The simple silence of the Connecticut morning wakes me. Not a garbage truck, not a car alarm, not an elephant-footed upstairs neighbor, just a deep quiet. It kind of startles me; I pop up looking around the room, disoriented. Grant’s gone. No surprise. I felt him get up in the night, but I pretended I was asleep. I pulled a Benjamin. That guy was always faking sleep. Like when I was fifteen and tried to sneak out of our house via Ben’s bedroom window. He knew I was there. He had to; I used his back as a stepstool. He knew I was heading out to the see the ass clown (as he called him). And he knew I was going to steal our dad’s car to do so. Benjamin’s room was on the ground floor, sharing a wall with the garage. He heard everything: the reliable Honda in neutral rolling backward, and that clear crackling sound of the unpaved driveway under the wheels. He heard. He knew. But he still acted utterly shocked when I was busted by a couple of my dad’s police buddies eight streets over. (Sneaking around in a crime reporter’s unmistakably pristine white car—the only black crime reporter, to be sure—is just never going to work out.) I was grounded for months and barred from going to driver’s ed for longer—an entire year—because of that failed midnight escape. And despite the fact that Benjamin knew I knew that he was faking deep sleep, he never once copped to it. But then he was the one who taught me about mutually-assured destruction.
Rosalie set out a spread for breakfast with everything a person would want to see arranged on a bright white tablecloth when they wake up. And the Filipina chef, who keeps slipping in and out of an unseen door, would obviously prepare that one missing thing you desire, without a second word. Rosalie likes hosting. That was clear from the gate. The table is set for six. She pulls out a chair at the head of the table for me. Uncle Dick obviously ate already and retreated. His white, cloth napkin and newspaper sections are in a sloppy pile at the other end of the long table. My cursory scan for signs of Grant produce nothing. So I stay on alert.
“Good morning, Best. How did you sleep?” Rosalie is replenishing a basket of jumbo croissants. “I hope you were comfortable.”
“Very much so. Thank you, Mrs. Copeland. You have a lovely, lovely home.”
“Please—” she refolds an already crisp napkin. “Call me Rosalie, dear. Can I get you something warm, tea or coffee? I’m happy to make you a latte or hot chocolate.”
The way she says chocolate, her little mouth forming a tiny O, and the accent cheerily clipping away the hard consonants. I’m tempted to say “pardon?” just to hear it again.
“Tea is great, Mrs. . . . Rosalie. But I can make it myself. You’ve been through enough—you’ve done enough, I mean.”
She smiles, but it’s pinched. “It’s no trouble, dear.” And she’s off before I can finish nodding.
Quiet classical music serves as the steady background noise throughout the rooms. I keep looking over my shoulder for Grant to pop up, but only Rosalie returns, carrying a beautiful teapot.
“He’s outside,” she says, and sails that same stiff smile my way.
“I figured.”
“I’ll leave you to fix it—your tea.”
This style of conversation, coded and awkward, continues a little while longer until finally Rosalie excuses herself, something about running into town for this thing or another. It doesn’t matter. She wants out of this performance and I don’t blame her. I’m going to grab a shower after breakfast, although the wide, footed tub is alluring. But soaking in one’s dirt was never really appealing to me. I still don’t get why it’s the thing to do if you’re a woman in any movie and need to think or calm down or cry. Showers are my jam. That’s where I start my writing, although for the past six months, my mind has been drifting off on its own, traveling back in time to places I’d rather not go, so now I usually spend my shower time coming up with quips for Twitter. I have a public, you know: 209,000 followers and growing. But even that has been tainted. Now I think, What if this is the last tweet anyone will ever read from me? Do I really want it to be some shit about saggy breasts (tough break) or my real thoughts on blow jobs (kind of against them)? It’s like when Lana Scott attempted suicide earlier this year. People were combing through her old tweets for months until her account was deactivated, hoping to be the one who spotted the first signs of a struggle or discovered the deeper meaning behind her words, especially her last ones:
Even after all this time/ The sun never says to the earth, “You owe me.”
That half-poem stayed with me, stalked me, and—somehow—attached itself to these lingering thoughts about my brothers. I started to wonder: if they had a chance to leave their own epitaphs scrawled across the internet skies in that permanent ink, what would they have said? With Bryant, I know for certain it would be something brilliant and complex, speaking to the intricate cause and chaos behind all that this universe has shown us. And Benjamin: He would have kept it simple and cool, but funny, probably quoting some professional jock. Straight cash, homie, or something perfect like that. Instead, they were refused that chance and left this earth in vicious silence, terror steeped in their bellies.
The night Lana Scott’s Twitter account went dark and then disappeared, my old and buried panic returned. I was alone at home, pretending to care about the piece I was working on (“How to Make Him Beg for More”), when I went to her page to read those fifteen words for the thousandth time. There was nothing there but an error page. I closed and reopened the app over and over before it settled in my brain that the words, this rough tether that I had been clutching, was gone. The rumor that she had attempted suicide earlier that day started to spread throughout Twitter in the seconds after I—and everyone else—realized that this vanishing wasn’t about an online glitch. The tears rushed in so fast and hard my eyes stung, and before I could catch my hot breath, I was on the floor, curled into a trembling ball, praying to a god I despised to make it stop, and my brothers—their destroyed faces, their swollen bodies–were all I could see. I was still holding my phone, trying to think whom to call, but also how to do
it, how to physically move my locked-up fingers to press the right buttons and beg for help. I had finally removed Dr. Monfries’s contact info from my quick-dial emergency list two years ago; my parents’ home phone was the only in-case-shit-happens number that remained, and I knew I couldn’t call them, not like this.
I think I passed out or fell asleep right there on the cold hardwood. When I opened my eyes, it was dark in the room and the light was just building in the skyline outside. I was still balled up in the corner, still gripping my phone, now dead, but the vile visions were gone. I spent the rest of that early morning trying to pull my shit together in time for work. This meant hot, extended showers where I actively push my mind into a different space and tried to apply the idea of a triumph of hope over experience not to a second marriage, but to this second life I was given, this fresh and restored start. Nobody plans to backslide or wants a relapse when it comes to drinking or drugs. Same wishes apply to those of us who have come up against soul-shattering terror. The aggressive nightmares, the mental breaks, the bottomless sadness—I didn’t want those, not again. So I let the hot water wash over me and then carefully patched up my force field—makeup, clothes, obscenely expensive shoes—and reentered the world with my forehead toward the sky, ignoring the storm roiling inside.
I’m barely dressed when Grant comes knocking.
“Come with me?” His eyes are wide, alert, close to sparkling.
“Grant, I’m not even all the way dressed.”
“Well, get all the way dressed, and come with me.”
I grab my shirt, slide it over me and go, without another pause or question. He’s taking the stairs two at a time and I’m trotting behind him, like a nervous child.
“Going for a drive, Richard,” he says, talking to the air. I hear some kind of acknowledgment, maybe coming from the grand living room, but the door closes behind us before I can be sure.
“I don’t have my stuff, my wallet.”
“It’s okay.” Grant reaches back, takes my hand. “Don’t need it.” He opens my door and kisses my shoulder as I get in the car.
We pull off and I notice, for the first time, the horizon behind the Copeland compound. It stops me, stops my busy thoughts, and makes me stare at it.
“It’s beautiful, right?” he says. “Makes me wish I came up here more. Well, before. Anyway . . . I wish a lot of things.”
We drive along the rolling hills with our top down, only the cool breeze mixing in with the quiet in the car. It’s peaceful. He is too, not agitated and pained like yesterday.
“You know, there’s a difference,” he says, finally. “There’s a line between feeling vulnerable and feeling afraid. I know that line. I have to, as an actor. But lately, it’s gotten all fucked up, conflated, and I can’t sort it out. Nothing’s connecting.” He shakes his head. “I think about this teacher at Circle in the Square, she would always say that once you become aware of something it changes. Bullshit. I’m aware. I’m aware of this, but I’m still a mess. Nothing’s changed.”
“Grant, sometimes it has to look like a complete shit show before things come into a finer focus and you start making connections, start making sense of it. That acting teacher’s kind of right. It’s going to change. I don’t want to sound like some AA-work-the-program wonk, but it’s a process. You do have to work through it. Figure out what’s making you feel so sad and what you can do to make it stop.”
“But it’s not about sad. I don’t feel sad. I don’t feel anything. I feel nothing, just . . . nothing. How am I supposed to figure out nothing? How do you make nothing stop? I’ve been putting all this energy into forcing myself to feel something, put meaning back into this empty, bottomless bullshit. The nothing is bigger than all of that. It’s bigger than all of it. And I’m tired of trying to make a connection or make sense of it. It’s like it’s winning this thing, you know?” He rubs his scalp. “I mean, fuck. It won.”
The hopelessness is choking the life out of him. I want to reach for him, but as I do, Benjamin’s face jumps into my view—partially immersed in those dark, calm waters, frozen detritus bubbling up slowly around his eyes, by the bridge of his nose. I draw my hand back.
“Look,” Grant says, pulling me back into the right-now. “I’ve got a lot of shit to work through. I don’t know where to start, but, seriously, you don’t need to stay for this.”
I’m still rattled by the vision of Benjamin, but I don’t want betray the earnest moment we’re having. I want Grant to know that I’m listening, that I understand, because I am and I do. I rub his leg. He tenses up a little, but I stick with it.
“Rosalie and Richard, they really want to help too,” I say. His leg muscles pulse.
“Rosalie wants to help me or adopt me or whatever the fuck, I don’t know. But Richard, nah; he just wants me to get better and get gone. He doesn’t need me hanging around, rubbing his dead sister’s mistakes in his face. I don’t blame him.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t want you gone, Grant. Maybe he’s just weird about people in distress. Feels helpless, so he shuts down. My brother was like that.”
“Your brother?”
“Oh, no, sorry, I meant my mother. But you know what I meant. We’re talking about your Uncle Richard anyway, not my mother.”
“Now who’s being weird?”
“I’m just saying I get it. I can see how that happens. Nothing weird.”
“But you said brother. You don’t have a brother. That’s weird.”
“Slip of the tongue. Mother, brother, they sound alike. Cancel the page for Dr. Freud, okay? It doesn’t matter.”
“All right. Sorry. Look, everything’s fucked-up enough already. Don’t want us to be too.”
“All right. It’s fine.” I move my hand from his leg and rest it on the end of the leather seat instead. Things were indeed fucked-up enough. “So, what are you going to do . . . about the fucked-up enough already stuff?”
“Well, today I’m going to the doctor, like a physician, then I’m off to some shrink Rosalie says is phenomenal. Maybe he does magic tricks or some shit. After that, I’ll figure it out. But I’m going to stay here, at least for a little bit.”
He turns into a miniature-golf place, complete with a grand, spinning windmill at the 18th hole near the gate.
He smiles at me; the first uncontaminated moment in days. “Are you sure you want to do this, Grant? I mean, I’m a master at mini-golf. A master.”
“Somehow I knew you’d claim that shit.” He turns off the car and his little smile vanishes. “One thing: I want you to take this back with you.”
“What, the car?”
“Yeah. It only adds to the bullshit with Richard. When I bought it, he dropped some racist bullshit line about black men always being flashy and not frugal. But notice he can’t take his eyes off it now.” He shakes his head once more. “That guy stays being the crusty jerk.”
“How are you going to get around? Them-there hills look hardcore.”
“Rosalie has cars. It’s fine. I’ll be fine.”
He put some weight behind this, like he’s convinced that a few weeks away from the grind of his New York life, away from his shiny, showy car, and he’ll be fine, mended. But I don’t buy it.
Something real happened to Grant; something unhooked inside of him. People don’t just bounce back from that after a few chats with a shrink, no matter how carefully the pieces of the cup are glued back together. It’s all still there—the damage, the veins and fissures—they’re still there. The best you can hope for is that later on, whenever someday soon comes, you can still hold water and it doesn’t just leak out through the seams. Like with my mother after losing Benjamin and Bryant like that. It was too much, too fast—it was a rupture. Now she’s just hollow and fragile, unable to bear even a feather’s weight. My father’s different. He’s like one of those fat, bursting wallets held together by a sturdy rubber band. I don’t know if that’s better, but at least he can move through the days, carry on a conversati
on, look people in the eyes, and appreciate the sun on his balding head. His way, he’s connected to the breathing world around him. Her way? She’s dead to it all.
My mother has looked the same ever since the funerals: glossy eyes, stone-faced, everything flat, just checked out, never to return. When I was leaving for York University, she barely blinked when I said bye that afternoon. I hugged her—more like, she let me hug her stern body. My father, so sad to see me go, looked overcome. He didn’t want to let our embrace end. He held on to me, wrapping me tight in his thin arms. Granted, it was only eight months after everything, and my parents were losing another child—this time temporarily and to another province, not some frozen abyss.
I had to pack up everything myself. Uncle Dobbs helped me with some of it, as much as his bony, bowlegged little body could. He hadn’t gone back to Trinidad yet. Uncle Dobbs only left because he had doctors’ appointments he could no longer put off. He would have stayed forever; it was his little brother, his only living sibling, who had to bury his two sons at once, and Dobbs couldn’t stand seeing how he was suffering. What’s more important than that? Cancer, it turned out. Uncle Dobbs’s funeral was in Trinidad that November. Being the eldest, he was buried next to his parents (my grandparents) and his sisters Aunt Henrietta and baby Josephine—both gone decades ago—were next to him. That was the last trip my parents and I took together. It was the last thing we did as a family that didn’t involve memorializing Benjamin and Bryant. It’s entirely cruel that it was for yet another funeral that we huddled together. We sat in the same row on the plane, my father in the middle, and held hands going and coming back.
Over the last two years, I’d say my father has been trying to find ways to smooth out the cracks in his splintered soul. Mostly this involves being lubricated—Mount Gay rum, neat—but he’s tried others things too, like returning to a longtime love, one that ranks higher than the drink: Food. Cooking. He’s started taking classes at Académie Culinare. He even mailed me a couple of handwritten recipes ensured “to put some fat on my bones.” I use one—the lamb ragù with pappardelle—as a bookmark. His penmanship is exquisite and I don’t eat red meat anymore. That man could send me a thousand recipes featuring meat soaked in meat with a side of meat, and I would treasure each one.
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