A Common Loss

by Kirsten Tranter

  I sighed.

  ‘Elliot. After Dylan passing — I think it’s really important for your father for you to be here.’

  Somehow my parents had managed to turn Dylan’s death into a tragedy that affected them more than me. They remarked often on how terrible it was for parents to lose a child, the reversal of the natural order, and at those moments they would look away from me and stare fixedly at some other object, shaking their heads, or take a couple of seconds of intense silence if we were talking on the phone. It made them think about losing me, about what that would be like. That was the unspoken thing.

  I agreed to go.

  My parents live in a town near the Jersey Shore, not far from Atlantic City, a couple of hours from New York. ‘There are some really nice parts of Jersey,’ people liked to say when I mentioned it, as if consoling me, or trying to impress me with their open mind. Sometimes followed by, ‘The woods around Princeton are so lovely.’

  My father, a lawyer, works in his own small office above a storefront downtown that he shares with a partner, Lawrence, and Lois, their secretary. His name, Nathan West, was on the window in gold and black, blockish capitals that had started to peel and speckle over time. For as long as I could remember, Lois and Lawrence had been having a secret affair that my father ignored. Lawrence had turned sixty the year before, and my mother had told me all about his party, dismayed at the poor quality of the wine, full of ideas about how we should do things differently for my father.

  The sun was a weak orange haze in the far-off horizon when I arrived at my parents’ home after hours on mind-numbing miles of expressways and turnpikes. The familiar sound of the piano came from the house as I turned into the drive, and the front of the car scraped on the curb as it always did, no matter what kind of car I drove. It seemed to be worse with this recent one, a newish Volkswagen. Somehow my father managed to negotiate the drive smoothly every time, while my mother had given up trying years ago and accepted the dent in the front of her old red Honda.

  The scratch of concrete against metal; a flamboyant trill on the piano keys in a high register; quiet as the engine switched off; a resonating final chord; home. It sounded like Mozart. An aggressively cheerful sonata.

  My mother had been a music teacher at the local high school ever since I’d started kindergarten, attached to the pupils who showed real talent, resigned to the lack of musicality in her own children. When I poked my head around the door to the music room, she was there at the piano, straight-backed, hands still touching the keys, arms relaxed. The notes still sounded in the air. She reached up to close the book of music, and I saw SCHUBERT in green capitals on the familiar yellowed paper cover.

  She came and kissed me, and said, ‘That sounded like a terrible scrape!’

  ‘You have to get that driveway fixed.’

  She sighed. Every visit began with the same exchange.

  I followed her to the kitchen, where she picked up an apron that was hanging over the back of a chair. A large joint of beef sat fatly in a baking dish, bristling with rosemary. She started peeling potatoes, letting the spirals inch down into the sink.

  I rinsed out the coffee maker and opened the cupboard. ‘Where’s the coffee?’ I asked.

  ‘Right there.’

  ‘It’s decaf.’

  A half-full packet sat on the shelf next to innumerable boxes of herbal teas: Tension Tamer, Blueberry Hill, Peppermint Patty, Green Peach, White Peach, Peach Mango. The cupboard smelled of peach flavor and stale coffee.

  ‘Oh, we’re all drinking decaf now.’

  ‘Is Lily here yet?’ I couldn’t picture my sister joining in the decaf drinking.

  ‘She’s upstairs. There’s instant if you want, you know, the real thing.’

  Behind the teas was a small glass jar with some brown sediment along the bottom.

  ‘Lily!’ I called upstairs.

  A door slammed somewhere. Lily called back down to me. ‘Elliot! Can you go get some coffee?’

  ‘Sure.’ I picked up my keys from where I’d tossed them on the dining table. Its surface shone, giving off the scent of lemon.

  Lily thumped down the stairs. Brown sheepskin boots came into view, then jeans, a draped black sweater. The glassy smell of shampoo surrounded her, and her hair was still wet.

  My sister carried herself at home as though she were fighting a return to a teenage way of being in her body, awkward and tense and confrontational and insecure all at once, with a permanent pout and more of a glare than usual. Away from here, in New York, in Brooklyn where she lived, she grew up by years. I kept my eye on it once — the subtle transformation seemed to begin and end a few steps from the door, halfway between the porch and the sidewalk.

  It was probably the same for me, I knew with gloomy certainty. This was one of the reasons it was so anxiety-making to think about bringing women home to my parents’ house: they would see for themselves a version of my adolescent self, more embarrassing and beyond my conscious control than any set of old photographs my parents could dig up and display.

  ‘Oh, Elliot,’ my mother said. ‘If you’re going to the store can I get you to pick up a few things?’

  I left with a list; once it got to be more than four things my mother decided it ought to be written down, since they were all important things, and then it stretched to ten. Forty-five minutes later I returned, dazed from too much driving and the overbright supermarket lights, the trunk full of groceries and alcohol in plastic bags. I’d remembered coffee while standing in the checkout line, and had pushed the shopping cart tiredly back through the aisles, then back to the line again. By the time I carried the bags into the kitchen it felt like time for a drink rather than coffee, but I spooned some into the machine in any case.

  My father turned his key in the lock at the moment the coffee started to release its aroma to mix with the other ones filling the kitchen — that peachy tea, the roasting meat, plus a kind of chemical burning smell the oven always seemed to give off, as though some non-essential part was slowly melting. I recognized the sound, the way he opened the door, his unique signature. There was the sound of his briefcase being placed onto the floor, his coat being hung on its hook, and the sigh he gave when he had completed those two actions and loosened his tie.

  ‘Elliot,’ he said when he saw me, and smiled. ‘Are you making actual coffee?’

  ‘Hi, Dad,’ I said. ‘Yes, it’s the real thing. Happy birthday.’

  He laughed and embraced me.

  My parents retired for the night by ten. I heard the sound of the television in their room, the static blips as the channels flipped. Lily and I finished tidying the kitchen, stepping around each other in familiar ways, passing plates, drying glasses, stacking and clearing. We drank the last of the red wine and I felt the dull blade of the inevitable headache begin to edge its way around the inside of my skull. I poured a glass for each of us from one of my father’s birthday presents, a well-aged single malt, and we sat out on the steps of the back porch in the cold night while Lily smoked.

  ‘So, are you going to see Dylan’s, you know, “real” family while you’re in Vegas?’ Lily asked. ‘Do some reminiscing, or whatever?’ She dragged on her cigarette and looked at me sideways.

  I didn’t know what she meant. ‘What?’

  ‘I guess it would be weird. You didn’t ever mention seeing them before.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’ My glass felt heavy in my hand. ‘Dylan doesn’t have any family in Vegas. They’re all in LA.’

  Lily’s eyes gleamed with satisfaction. ‘Well,’ she said, drawing out the word, and turned so that she was facing more toward me. ‘You know Dylan and I had a kind of thing, right?’ She batted her eyelashes.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ I said. ‘Yeah, I know you made out with him once. Whose party was it?’

  ‘It wasn’t just that once,’ she replied. ‘But that party — you remember, it was that one in Brooklyn, you came as well and spent the whole night arguing with my frie
nd Mitchell — we took acid together. It was amazing. And he told me a whole bunch of stuff about himself. Stuff that maybe you don’t know.’

  ‘How do you know he wasn’t just spinning you a line? Especially if he was on drugs?’

  ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I thought of that. But the thing is, he was worried about it. Not worried exactly, just … concerned maybe? Next time we got together — he took me out for a drink — he wanted to talk about it, as if his memory of that night was kind of fuzzy. He said,’ — she looked at me from under her eyelashes and mimicked Dylan’s voice, the hushed, intimate tone he used when he was trying to be especially convincing, or seductive — ‘“I hope I didn’t totally embarrass myself. What terrible secrets did I tell you?”’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  She smiled and shook her head. ‘Oh, I didn’t say anything. I don’t like to go over those times with people afterward in that kind of detail. It spoils the magic. And anyway, I kind of enjoyed the situation, seeing him squirm a little, wanting to know exactly what he’d told me. I just told him he’d been a regular cliché, you know, seeing the music and all that, hours absorbed in the patterns in the driveway gravel. And there was plenty of that, too, let me tell you.’

  ‘OK. And the rest?’

  ‘His real family, you mean?’ She exhaled slowly, her lips pursed, a thin stream of smoke. ‘He was adopted. You know that, right?’

  This was news to me and I still only half-believed her. I wasn’t sure how much to let on to her about what I did and didn’t know. It was embarrassing to not know. ‘No,’ I said eventually. ‘I didn’t know that. He never mentioned it.’

  ‘Really.’

  ‘I didn’t know,’ I said again, letting her relish my ignorance. ‘But I’m still not sure whether I believe this or not.’

  ‘It happened.’

  ‘OK, something happened, but, you know, you were both high. Are you sure you remember right?’

  ‘I’m sure. It’s the kind of thing you don’t forget.’ She shrugged. ‘It made me feel, well, sorry for him.’

  ‘Sorry for him?’

  ‘You remember what he was like — this sense that there were old secrets and wounds simmering away there under the surface …’

  I started to say that no, I didn’t remember that about him, but then thought that he must have seemed different to girls.

  She continued. ‘He had this other life — another family, at least, that wasn’t part of his regular life. I couldn’t tell why — I couldn’t tell why he didn’t tell you or anyone else. Why it was a secret.’

  ‘Why did he tell you?’

  ‘I don’t know. The drugs must have been stronger than he realized.’

  ‘So tell me about it. This family.’

  ‘It was his brother that he mentioned. Colin. A younger brother.’

  ‘In Vegas?’

  ‘Yeah, in Vegas. He lives there. “I have a sister,” he said to me — we’d been talking about you, what it’s like for me being your sister — “she’s a little bitch, but I love her,” and he laughed. “But I have a brother too,” he said, “I bet you didn’t know that,” and then he went on about how he and I both had brothers, but his was a younger brother, and you’re my older brother, and how different that must be … I asked him when was the last time he saw this brother of his, and he said it was the last time you were all there, in Vegas. “I go to see him once or twice a year,” he said. And he said that his brother looked just like him. Same mother. But she’s dead. That’s what he told me. He didn’t seem that sad about it. I asked him what her name was, but he gave me a weird look as though he’d suddenly woken up and realized what he was saying. That was what made me think he really was telling the truth. I wasn’t sure up until then. Like you said, I thought it could have been the drugs, something in his imagination. A hallucination. But it’s a weird thing to hallucinate, isn’t it — that you have a brother?’

  ‘And a dead mother,’ I said, after a pause.

  She was quiet for a moment. ‘The only other thing he said about it — he gave me that look, and then he turned away from me and said, “I did OK.” I asked him if he meant he did OK with his family, with the family he ended up with. He said, “Yeah. They’re OK. It’s better than winding up in Vegas for life,” and we both started laughing then, we couldn’t stop.’

  She gave a small, secretive smile. I guessed that the kissing part of their evening together, or whatever it had included, had started after that.

  She ground out her cigarette on the bricks next to where we were sitting, and picked up her glass. Then she said just what I had been thinking. ‘I wonder if his brother even knows he’s dead.’ Her smile was gone. ‘I don’t know how often they were in touch, if they talked on the phone or anything. He must know, though, right?’

  I shook my head. ‘I don’t know. Someone might have told him — Dylan’s parents? Greta and Leo, I mean.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘They would have to know that Dylan had been seeing him. They would have found a way to tell him.’

  I nodded, but I wasn’t sure at all. The more I thought about it, the more likely it seemed that Dylan wouldn’t have told his parents — his adoptive parents (now I would forever have a kind of stammer in my brain when I thought of them as his parents) — that he was in contact with his brother. It seemed to me that it was the kind of secret he would have enjoyed keeping. This was back before I really understood just how much he loved secrets, and how many he carried around, but I knew something about it.

  I thought back to the funeral. There had been some unfamiliar faces there, but I hadn’t paid any attention to them. The whole event had been so surreal that every face had an unfamiliar cast. Had there been a young guy who looked like Dylan? I could remember someone in a dark blue suit, toward the back, as we came in. Shorter than Dylan. I didn’t know why he was standing out in my mind now. All I could recall was a back turned toward me, a stiff, athletic stance, half a profile, a sharp line of cheek and jaw. The image faded into the bright sunlight that had pierced the room for a short while, angling in through the high windows, before the service had started. It could have been anyone.’

  ‘He would have told Sally,’ I said, meaning his sister.

  Lily nodded. ‘Probably. And she couldn’t have cared less about telling this brother of his when he died.’

  Girls tended to hate Sally. Lily was no exception.

  ‘I’ll ask her,’ I said.

  Lily raised one eyebrow artfully. ‘You do that,’ she said out of the corner of her mouth as she lit another cigarette.

  I was unsteady on my feet as I stood, legs stiff and numb. My cell phone was inside the house, in the pocket of my jacket, slung over a chair. Sally’s number was in there. I thought about calling her, and then it seemed like such a complicated task to go in, retrieve the phone, scroll through the names until I found hers … It wasn’t that late but I was suddenly as exhausted as though it were the early hours of the morning.

  This was what it was like, being around my family, worn out after only half a day in their company.

  The glass sliding door stuck when I tried to open it, and eventually gave way with a thud.

  When I did find Sally’s number in my phone it went straight to voice mail. She sounded young and old at the same time, girlish and rough and Californian, like a twelve year old who has been smoking a packet of cigarettes a day for years. ‘It’s Sally.’ Other voices sounded in the background, a muted shriek. ‘Leave a message.’ And it ended abruptly, cutting off the end of the last word. There was a long beep.

  I hadn’t thought it through — I probably should have hung up, but some kind of politeness training took over. ‘Sally, hi, it’s Elliot. Dylan’s friend.’ Lily gave me a withering stare over her shoulder. I paused. ‘Give me a call when you get a chance. OK, bye.’

  I picked up the bottle of whiskey to take it out to Lily. Sitting there on the porch, she reminded me strongly of Sally for a moment, with her straight h
air tied back like that in a long ponytail. I wondered whether Lily was thinking about Dylan. She had been so quietly triumphant just then, with her revelations about him, pleased to be able to claim an intimacy that I couldn’t. I wondered about this ‘thing’ they’d had, but it seemed to amount to just that time at the party on drugs and a drink another time, probably a night together. I found that I wasn’t that interested.

  There didn’t seem to be any reason to doubt her story. When I tried to remember who had originally come up with Las Vegas as the place for our first post-college get-together, it wouldn’t come clear. It could have been Dylan, but I couldn’t remember him making a concrete suggestion. It would have been like him to guide the conversation in that direction in a subtle way, so that it felt as though it had been someone else’s idea, or an idea that just suggested itself naturally. Dylan had never shown any strong feelings about it one way or another. He hadn’t seemed too upset the one year we had gone somewhere else; we had ended up in California that time, convenient to his family — his adoptive family; the unconscious correction again. He could have paid a visit to Vegas himself easily from there in any case. And he hadn’t seemed overjoyed when we decided to go back to Vegas the following year — or had that been his idea, as well?

  Lily stood and stretched her arms out wide, showing her yoga-trained poise, then raised them above her head and swung them down again. I’d been standing there, lost in thought, and hadn’t taken the bottle out to her as I had intended to do. She turned around to face me and smiled, then yawned.

  ‘TV for me,’ she said. When she came through the door, she stepped over to me and stood close. I thought she was going to put her hand on my arm, but she didn’t. ‘I know you miss him,’ she said, meaning to be kind.

  I thought of Dylan, sitting in the bar at the Flamingo with his gin martini in front of him, and tried to picture this brother there next to him, a younger twin. It didn’t work. I couldn’t imagine that he’d hang out with him at the hotels on the Strip. Somewhere downtown, maybe. Somewhere out of the way.