“Hi, Frankie,” said Henry, quietly.
Andre said nothing. He hung back, arms folded so that each hand clutched the opposite bicep.
Frankie looked Henry and Andre up and down, as if counting every button, evaluating the location of their eyes, ears, and fingers, scrutinizing the laces in their shoes. He seemed to decide that they could not be his brothers. They were imposters. He leaned against the doorframe and crossed his arms. “What do you want?”
To this, Henry couldn’t think of a thing to say. This was the boy who, as a toddler, wrapped his arms and legs around Henry like a chimpanzee, who wailed, and smelled like the lavender lotion that their mother slicked over his limbs before bed. The idea that Frankie would really want nothing to do with him hadn’t crossed his mind before. Of course he was angry with him. But would he really not let him in the door?
They heard their father’s voice. “What are you doing, Frank?”
“Nothing,” Frankie shouted over his shoulder. Henry returned Frankie’s scrutiny. His skin was pale, and there were blue shadows beneath his eyes.
“You should come out for a second. Tell him you’re going for a walk,” said Henry, still in a low voice. He saw an opportunity here. If he could get Frankie to find their mother’s things and bring them out, then no one would need to talk to their father. Henry would then take Frankie out for a hamburger to put the flesh back on his bones, and blood back into the flesh, and he would tell him to do like Kylie’s beloved Talking Heads song says and run, run, run away.
“I don’t want to come outside,” said Frankie. His eyes were owlish behind his thick round glasses. What his little brother meant was, I want you to leave.
“Hey, help us out, man, would you? We’re here for Mom’s shit,” said Andre. He knew their father was within earshot but didn’t seem to care. “We know it’s here, somewhere. You gonna let us in, or what?”
Frankie stared at Andre for a moment. “You’re here … because you want to pick some stuff up?”
Henry shuffled his feet. Andre had been gone for nine years, and Henry had been gone for three, and he understood how this must sound completely ludicrous: We just need to pop in and grab some things.
Frankie uncrossed his arms and stood to the side, and Henry and Andre walked in. The house smelled yeasty and stale. Henry wiped his feet on the square of carpet in the entryway.
Everything was the same except the television, which was sleek, black, and foreign made, and the equally sleek black VCR below it, positioned awkwardly on a shelf too small to hold it, a garden of wires sprouting from its back. The carpet was the same trampled moss-colored shag that his mother had died on. The walls, half-covered in faux wood paneling, seemed to squeeze closer together as Henry entered, funneling him toward the southmost corner, where his father sat in his faded blue chair. Henry stopped at least seven feet from him, but they were so close, sharing each other’s breath in that room, which was much smaller than Henry remembered.
His father wore an open work shirt and pajama pants, as if he’d given up halfway through changing his clothes. He needed a haircut and a shave—he had a purposeful-looking moustache and an accidental-looking beard. The wrinkles around his eyes were not so numerous as they were deep, like someone had cut them into his skin. He was still a big man, though his shoulders seemed a bit narrower than they were the last time Henry saw him.
Seeing Henry, his mouth dropped open. The shape of his father’s mouth was always how Henry judged his safety in his presence, but this drooping jaw was not a familiar expression to Henry. His father started to stand but sank back down into his chair, his mouth still wide open, when Andre followed Henry in. There they were, in one room, all the living Bells.
“I’ll be goddamned,” said his father. “I’ll be. Andre.”
He stood up, made it all the way to his feet this time.
“Hi,” said Henry, though their father was staring straight at his older brother.
“Henry,” he said, squinting. He tried to keep the tears gathering in his eyes from falling. “Goddamn. It’s like I’m seeing ghosts.”
“Sorry to drop in out of the blue,” Henry said. Already, the apologies tumbled out like they were nothing, when the one Kylie got from him had to be wrenched, dragged, forced through his lips.
His father seemed to choke. “Out of the blue. What does that matter?” He kept his eyes fixed upon Andre, whose breathing sounded heavy. Then, their father spread his arms, palms facing toward them, and Henry couldn’t decide whether the gesture meant Welcome or I surrender, or both. “Should I put a frozen pizza in the oven?” he asked.
Henry looked back at Andre, eyebrows raised: Should he put a pizza in the oven? That would be okay, wouldn’t it? It wouldn’t take very long.
Their father moved even closer to Henry. Henry saw all his whiskers now—the patch of bristles beneath his lower lip was gray. He was close enough to smell: metal and water and oil from machinery. Faint body odor mingled with Speed Stick. He was glad his father didn’t try to touch him, but this dry metallic scent gave him the sensation that there was order in the world.
“I’ll put in a pizza,” Henry volunteered.
He expected Andre to say no, to demand their mother’s things, to start swinging. But he didn’t. So Henry pulled a pizza out of the freezer, and Frankie was beside him before he could even take the plastic off the pizza, chopping a head of lettuce for salad. Henry leaned against the stain-mottled countertop and watched Frankie chop, then cut some onion into thin, uniform slices. The kitchen was small, but they were practiced at maneuvering in it.
There was a half-wall separating the kitchen from the living room, so while Henry stood in the kitchen, he could still see Andre and his father on the other side of the half-wall. Andre stood with his hands in his pockets. His father busied himself picking up the room, refolding the newspaper and stacking the wooden coasters.
“Can I smoke?” asked Andre, though he made it clear it was more an announcement than a question by pulling a cigarette from the pack.
“I’ll open the window,” their father said.
Once Andre got a lungful, his shoulders relaxed a little, and he offered up the information that he had been living in Prague. He didn’t ask how their father had been or say hello. He simply started stating facts.
Their father nodded. “Oh yeah? Where’s that? How do you like it?” He moved a throw pillow from one end of the couch to the other.
Andre told him about the job, the money, the architecture of the city, the green river, the language that sounded like the murmurings of witches around a cauldron. Their father laughed at this, a low-pitched chuckle.
Frankie looked up from a bisected tomato and saw Henry staring into the living room. “You can go talk to them. I don’t need help. Besides, you’re not helping. You’re just standing there.”
“I want to talk to you, too,” said Henry.
“Whatever you wanna do, man.”
Henry slid the pizza in the oven and walked out of the room, angry at Frankie and annoyed at himself for it. Whatever Frankie could muster to punish him, shrugs and silence and fuck-you stares, Henry knew he had it coming. Still, he found himself wanting to shake the tough-guy out of him.
“What about you?” asked his father, when he joined them in the living room. It was all so polite, but the three of them were fidgety as criminals, all standing, all eyes darting. The air was toxic, could curl the paint from the walls. “What do you do these days, Henry?”
Andre answered for him. “Henry joined the circus.”
AROUND THE TABLE, THEY WERE seated close enough to touch elbows. It turned out all four were ravenous. Their napkins, pocked with pepperoni grease, accumulated between plates, and they had to heat another pizza after polishing off the first. They ate all the salad, too, and half a bag of pretzels dragged through sour cream. Both Andres, the senior and the junior, sucked down two cans of beer, and Frankie dug out four paper-wrapped pies, folded into moon shapes and shellack
ed in sugar. When those were gone, they picked at a bag of stale mini marshmallows. They said “more, please,” and “pass the …” and nothing else. This didn’t feel like peace to Henry, but it was worth prolonging, worth taking another marshmallow and letting it melt in his mouth. Frankie frowned at him, but his mouth was full of mini marshmallows, too.
When their father stopped eating, the rest of them followed suit. His inevitable question—“Why are you here, now?”—came out strained. Their father had no aptitude for the delicate language required to ask this question in a nice way, but Henry could tell he tried.
“So,” his father said, “it’s Wednesday. You have nothing to do on a Wednesday but come to Edgefield?”
Henry looked at Andre, and saw that his brother was reluctant to break whatever spell had been woven out of politeness and fear and love to keep them all sitting amicably at a table. Andre still had no imagination. He only foresaw one possible outcome of this visit and that was the retrieval of his mother’s memorabilia. Maybe he considered that he might have to break one or two of their father’s bones to get it, but nothing beyond that. It never crossed his mind that it would hurt to say that he wanted physical things rather than to see them again.
Frankie didn’t seem to realize there was a spell at all. Or maybe he wanted to watch them all get a cannonball to the heart. “They want Mom’s stuff,” he said, and Andre’s expectant silence confirmed that this was the truth of it.
Their father nodded and rose from his chair, slowly, gracelessly. He bumped his knee on the table and ignored it, though the force of it clearly warranted an oh shit. “Well. Write down your address, and I’ll go through it and send some things to you.”
“No. I want it now. I want everything you have,” said Andre.
His father looked away, and Henry wondered if what Andre wanted was even there anymore. He recalled the empty dresser drawer he found the last time he looked for the floral box.
“Do you still have it?” asked Henry.
Henry could see the tiny ripple of clenched muscle near his father’s ear. “Of course I have it,” he said. “I still have to go through it.”
Frankie began to clear the dishes, the pile of napkins.
“You’ve had twelve years to go through it,” said Andre.
Their father was still and quiet, and Henry saw he was reaching for words that slid out of his grip. He had reached the place where he had no words, and Henry knew this because he had been here, too. It was a place where there was violence or nothing, and the nothing was too excruciating to bear.
“That came out wrong,” said Andre. He might have thought a moment ago, with his quarterback’s arms, his six feet of muscle, that he could speak his mind, but now he seemed to shrink.
Henry sucked in his breath, like he was blowing out a birthday candle in reverse. He breathed like he wished his father would breathe.
“I know how long it’s been,” his father said.
Andre stood up.
“Come around,” their father commanded.
Andre couldn’t back down now with any dignity, so he walked around the table to their father, swift, ready to fight. But he misinterpreted their father’s meaning. This was not kung fu. Henry had, perhaps for the first time ever, gotten his wish: his father breathed. Henry saw it in his chest, but Andre didn’t, and he was about to ruin it.
But their father cleared things up before Andre managed to take a swing. “No,” he said, and touched Andre’s arm. It was just the tips of his fingers that made contact, and it lasted not even a second, so brief that someone looking on might not have seen the touch at all and wondered what magic stopped Andre’s rumbling forward.
Their father turned and walked to the door that led upstairs to the bedrooms. “It’s in the attic. You’ll have to hold the ladder for me so I can get up there.”
Andre hesitated, visibly trying to shake off his adrenaline. He followed his father, slowly.
Upstairs, Henry stood at the base of the ladder while his little brother smirked at him. They were in the room the two of them once shared—shared not out of necessity, but because no one wanted to move into Andre’s bedroom after he ran away. They thought, any day, he could come back.
Now, it was Frankie’s room, and Andre and their father were in the attic above it, scooting around on their bellies.
Frankie’s room was cleaner than the rest of the house. Pinned to one wall were pieces of fabric in different shapes, almost like a quilt, except Henry got the impression that Frankie was not a quilter. On another wall were columns of awards and certificates: honor roll, honor roll, honor roll, first place Academic Decathlon, first place Math League, medals for spelling and geography bees, accolades for leadership, student government. On top of his dresser was a lava lamp where an electric-green cell divided and reformed itself every fifteen seconds or so, and a pile of video cassette tapes. The furniture was the same, but Frankie had it arranged so that the lines of the bed led into the lines of the dresser. Everything was simple and bright, and all traces of Henry—his crumpled love notes from Cassie, dirty laundry, the bare mattress Henry stripped the sheets from to make a pair of pants to clown in—all this had been eradicated. Frankie’s room looked like a page torn from one of Adrienne’s homemaking magazines.
Seeing all this symmetry, and seeing how their father was indulging Andre, Henry thought he might come back and see his little brother and father regularly—attend all the ceremonies for these awards that Frankie seemed to be racking up, ask his father one or two things about his job (“How exactly do you make those hitches, and what are they made of, and how many pounds can they drag behind them?”). It seemed like his father and Frankie got along. Without three mouths to feed, without three boys kicking and spilling and occasionally yelling, his father appeared to have grown into a sort of sanity. The idea relieved Henry one second, made him burn with envy the next.
Frankie and Henry listened to the heavy limbs thumping around above.
“You should have been the one to get up there. Aren’t you some kind of acrobat?” Frankie said.
Henry said, “Sort of. It doesn’t really make me any better qualified to mess around in an attic. Can I look at your movies?”
“Sure.”
Henry picked up the stack and examined them. They were all kung fu classics he’d watched when he was Frankie’s age. Drunken Master. Way of the Dragon. Police Story. All still wrapped in plastic.
“Wow. These are all yours?”
“Yes.”
“Really? Where’d you get the money for them?”
Frankie swiveled on his heel, a nervous movement. He’d done a good job of being stoic since Henry walked through the door, but now he was antsy. “He bought them for me.”
“Dad?”
“Of course, Dad,” he said, rolling his eyes.
“Christ almighty,” muttered Henry. “He really … he really does like you.”
“Why wouldn’t he?” said Frankie, a little loudly. He pushed his glasses up on his nose. “Can I ask you something?”
“Sure.”
“Are you really in a circus?”
Henry didn’t answer right away. He wanted to say something funny and self-deprecating because he felt exposed and needed to show Frankie he knew his job was a silly one, maybe even one to be ashamed of. But he couldn’t think of anything.
An arm caked in brown dust extended from the hole above their heads. It held a stack of photos, still in a drugstore envelope. “Hey, asshole, help me out,” said Andre.
Henry put the videotapes back on the dresser and ran to the hole in the ceiling to take the stack of pictures. The arm retracted, and he heard Andre shimmying away.
“So—do you like, wear a wig and have giant shoes and make animal balloons?” Frankie asked. He was doing his best to sound snarky, but Henry could tell he was genuinely curious.
“Sometimes.”
“Oh.”
There was the sound of more shimmying, a muffled shout, and
Andre handed down two books that Henry didn’t remember, and a floral-print box that he remembered very well. Henry stacked these things at his feet.
“I looked for you, y’know,” said Frankie.
“What?”
“I had it sort of figured out. Cutting up the bedsheets. The towels with melting ice in them. I thought it was a sport at first, I thought you were going to practice. But I’d catch you sometimes. Making these weird faces and gestures. And, y’know … you juggled.”
Henry kneeled beside the box, touched it, and felt an electric dread.
“I went to Chicago,” Frankie continued. “I bought a paper and found all the theatre productions. I asked about you in the alleys behind all the little shitty theatres, and the bigger ones, too. I showed people your picture. I walked right into rehearsals. You wouldn’t think a twelve-year-old would be able to get in places like that, but I think it helped. If you act confident, people are curious. They wanna know what your deal is.”
“You must have the biggest balls in history.”
“I didn’t think about the circus.”
“I was on the street. I was busking. You were close.”
“Not close enough,” said Frankie, swiveling on his heel again. The movement was awkward. The spin couldn’t be sustained because he was using a heel and not a toe, and he nearly tripped every time. Henry could tell he was using the swivel to distract himself, to diffuse the power of the memory he relayed. “The cops caught me. Dad came and picked me up.”
Henry cringed. Deep in his throat, just above his heart, he felt everything constrict. Frankie skipped the last part of the story, the part where their father beat Frankie, but Henry couldn’t imagine their father, keyed up on fury and panic after his third son ran away, would have any other response. The vision he had, of coming home now and then, receded back into the guilty place it sprang from. It was a stupid fantasy. Thinking things were different for Frankie. Stupid.
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