He lets out an honest-to-god guffaw before realizing that she isn’t joking, then buttons himself back up. “No, I’m sorry, you really don’t remember at all?”
“No.” She sits back on the couch, still watching, waiting for her answer.
“Okay, then,” he says simply, sitting down beside her. “We were hardly boyfriend and girlfriend.” He clears the phlegm from his throat. “I don’t know how else to say this, but, in fact, I’m your brother.”
If she is astonished from the revelation, she doesn’t betray it too much. Wes sees her wince, then her face goes totally ashen, and then, for a moment, he thinks she’s going to pass out.
“It’s a lot to take in, I know,” he says.
“This is the tip of the iceberg,” she says.
“Listen, it’s a big thing, what I’ve just told you, and it’s okay to kind of want to fall apart.” He watches her, wondering if she’ll cry, thinking that in the same circumstance, certainly, he would.
“I’ve done a lot of that lately,” she says. “Falling apart.”
“And?”
“And what?” she says. “And now, I’d like to put myself back together.” She squints and sees it then, the connection—that, in an odd sense, in the right light, he looks like Jamie. The blond hair, the creamy skin. Yes, of course, she can see it now. No wonder she had trusted him. It wasn’t that her instincts were so off, it was that they were blurred, misguided. She considers it a moment more: it wasn’t just that. No, she wanted to take that leap, be entirely different from who she was before, so while she can point to the connection—that Jamie shares an odd resemblance to her newly discovered brother—she shoulders some of the blame, too. Not blame, really. She shakes her head, deep in thought. Responsibility. She gambled. She wanted to roll the dice. She did. She lost. There needs to be an ownership in that.
A knock on the front door jolts them both, so Wes rises to unlatch it.
“I’m sorry,” Anderson says. “I was freezing out there.”
“Come in,” Nell waves. “Meet my brother.”
Anderson does a double take as Wes extends a hand.
“Half brother. And let me go get us drinks.”
Nell stands slowly and trails Wes to the kitchen, halting abruptly in the precipice, staring up at the painting over the farmhouse table.
“Your dad’s?” Anderson says, the same question that was posed so many weeks back in Nell’s apartment, back when she reentered her new life, frozen, skeptical, alone.
Déjà vu, she thinks, only now armed with the hindsight that comes with standing on the ledge, taking a leap.
“No, not his,” Nell says, before Wes can answer. Because she already knows. “It’s mine.”
“You left it behind when you guys left so abruptly,” Wes says, rolling out the wineglasses, pouring the cabernet too close to the rims.
“It’s of the same dock, isn’t it?” Nell asks. She’s gazing at it wide-eyed, unblinking. Finally, she reaches for her glass and swallows fully, leaving just a puddle toward the bottom. Like a ripple, Wes does the same, the wine loosening them almost immediately. Anderson watches them but sips slower, more deliberately.
“Your interpretation of the dock,” Wes answers, which seems self-evident, given the gray overtones, the wood planks that look more like daggers than anything ever originating in nature, how the water appears menacing with shots of light radiating in ways that the sun could never create. “When you left, I begged my mom to send it back to you, because I knew how much it meant to you, but she wouldn’t let me. Well, I mean, she made it clear that we couldn’t be in touch. That your dad had gone back to your family, and whatever was left behind was”—he hesitates, trying to articulate it—“well, whatever was left behind was a necessary casualty. The cost of their warfare.”
“She put it like that?” Anderson asks.
“No, my words, not hers.” He rises to refill the wine. “All of them—my mom, our dad, your mom”—he gestures toward Nell with the corkscrew—“it was like playing a giant game of Battleship. Sunk sometimes at our own expense. That’s how I remember putting it to my mom when you guys left: that she sunk my battleship. Well, that and a long string of swear words. I was angry through the entire fall.”
“It’s sort of a depressing piece for the space,” Nell says. “Or, maybe it’s just depressing that I’d paint something so bleak at thirteen.” She exhales. “Jesus.”
“Bleak or not, I liked that it reminded me of how things were before everything changed,” Wes says.
“Changed for good,” Nell says, a period to his sentence.
He looks at her, perplexed for a moment, and then half-laughs.
“You’re here. So nothing is ever changed for good, Nelly.”
She half-laughs back in response, and because she is trying to prove this theory correct—that there is nothing and no one that can’t be undone—she listens to her instincts and believes him.
28
J esus, I have had too much wine. The second glass was perfect, but the third was too much, and now the walls are moving, and the ceiling is cresting like a wave. I can see how quickly this can become habit, an easy slope to slip down into a numbed abyss, and I no longer blame Anderson for desensitizing himself to what feels like nerve endings that are too raw.
It’s eerie: this room. It smells like vanilla potpourri, and the walls are covered in stark portraits, like Victorian death paintings, of people I don’t recognize. They used to do that: paint someone after he died, eyes closed, the pallor already drained from his cheeks. I lie in bed, trying to ignore the macabre stares, and wonder what my own death portrait would look like: Who would draw it? How would I be remembered?
Wes has the house to himself, and it’s too big for one person. He hasn’t done much with it since his mom died. As he made up the bed, he mentioned that this was where Rory and I slept when we came that summer, the one that started me down this spiral. I stuff my head under the pillow and try to remember those days whispering late into the night, but of course there is nothing.
I slide out of the covers and off the bed. The floorboards moan when I tiptoe down the stairs, the kitchen light still on, the wineglasses dirtied and left on the table. I grab my jacket off the back of the chair and take a long inhale at the painting, jarred at how dark a thirteen-year-old can be. Jarred, really, at how dark I’ve been all along. Eleanor Rigby. Ice Queen. The shadow chasing me my life through.
I chew on my lip, the alcohol making me lucid in the way that alcohol can. This shadow, it feels like too heavy a weight to carry. Like it has drained me, sucked out life’s possibility. I want to slice it away, cut it from my existence, and emerge from its cocoon to see what else there might be. I tried before, with the new couch and the new sweaters and even that new beret. But there is more: that’s window dressing, nothing substantial, nothing substantive. I stare at the painting and consider this: maybe it’s not that we can’t change—that we can’t shed the inheritance of our destinies—it’s that to do so, we have to be brave enough to risk exposing ourselves, with the understanding that we might not like what we find. Maybe it’s just that the only way to evolve is to force yourself into the wind when you’d so much rather take shelter. Yes, I think, maybe that is it. Maybe I can walk into the wind, with Anderson, with Wes at my back. Maybe now, I am strong enough, brave enough.
I sigh and shove my arms into my coat. My mind is tired from digesting. After so many months of digesting, digesting, digesting, I just want to cut the rope, even with this bait dangling so close I can nearly swallow it whole.
I swing the front door open, and the blackened outside air hits my face like a salve. I ease my hand along the wood siding to find the porch bench.
“Hey,” a voice says, and I jump.
“Jesus! You almost gave me a heart attack,” I say, my eyes slowly adjusting to the darkness, making out Anderson’s figure on the bench.
“Couldn’t sleep?” he asks.
I shake my head.<
br />
“Me neither,” he answers, “though what else is new?”
I plunk down next to him and curl into his underarm, which smells a little like Speed Stick.
“I’m a little drunk,” I say.
“And I’m actually a little sober,” he says. “I stopped at one glass.”
“There’s a first for everything.” We both laugh.
We sit there, with only the air between us, for who knows how long. I can hear his heartbeat through his chest, slow, steady, calming, and for a moment, I wonder if he’s nodded off, finally finding sound sleep. But then I hear him sigh, and before I can think clearly, I turn my head, cradle his cheek, and kiss him, the alcohol my armor, protecting me if I royally fuck this up but illuminating things like I’ve never before seen them. He’s momentarily surprised, but then softens, and though I know he’s done this with a thousand girls before me, I close my eyes and pretend that this is fate, that the plane crashed, and that my husband cheated on me, and that my father screwed me over, and that it has all led up to this one moment, this moment that can change everything. I taste the cabernet on his tongue, and the firmness of his lips, and just as I am pretending this could go on forever, he gently pushes me away.
“Wait,” he says, then runs his fingers over my face, like he isn’t about to ruin everything. “This is too messed up.” He stutters for a moment. “I wanted to tell you before. I tried to tell you before—in the car, but now, before this goes any further, I need to tell you about Rory.”
I wake up with a jackhammer of a headache, my temples scolding me with every pulse at last night’s overindulgence. With my side serving of humiliation at mauling Anderson, it is enough to make me want to down a bottle of Tylenol PM and call it a day, a week.
“It’s not like I own you,” I said last night, when that cabernet was still floating on my taste buds, when I could still feel his heat electrifying my nerves. It’s not like I had a claim on you! Ha, ha! Don’t be ridiculous! I said, though my intestines were broiling, and the anger was rolling through me like a cannonball. But still! Was it too much to ask for a little loyalty from someone around here?
“Frankly,” he mumbled, “I’m a little surprised you made a move on me. We adore each other, Nell, but maybe we’re confusing things.” By we, I was certain he meant me.
And so I said, “I’m pretty sure that you have women throwing themselves at you all the time, you’re a little bit of a man-whore, aren’t you, so I can’t believe you’re surprised.” Which was a dig, of course, because I was so pissing mad that I’d made such a fool of myself, but he deflected it, because at its heart, it was also true.
So he replied simply, and maybe a little sadly, “Nell, I think we’re all pretty messed up right now. I mean, you left your husband twenty-four hours ago. And anyway, you’re the one true friend I have now—you’re the girl who saved my life—maybe we shouldn’t risk it.”
This morning, I roll over with my eyes still crusted shut, my mouth tasting like petrified grapes, and throw my arm over my face. I can feel the sheet marks on my cheeks, the burn of the old cabernet on the back of my throat. There is an incessant noise coming from downstairs that is making my veins throb, so I peel the covers off, toss my coat over my sullied clothes, and wander toward it. It sounds like disharmonious church bells until I realize that, in fact, it’s the doorbell. I check the grandfather clock in the hall. It’s 9:15 a.m. Anderson and Wes must still be asleep from the late night, the wine.
I push a glob of sleep from my right eye and roll my tongue over my teeth, wishing very much that I’d thought to use a toothbrush in the past day.
“Coming!” I stage-whisper. “Coming, coming, coming!”
I unbolt the lock, which Anderson must have flipped when he came in at whatever hour he finally retired, and swing the door open, a cool gust coasting in as way of greeting.
“Well, thank god!” my mother exclaims, her wrist bangles jangling as she flares her arms. “I found you in time to talk some sense into you and bring you home.”
She glides past me without invitation, and just as I’m about to slam the door tight, I notice Peter lingering just beyond the porch, and then Rory two steps behind. My mother, my goddamn mother, just can’t leave well enough alone. Not then, not before, not now. Nothing changes, even when it does.
I refuse to talk to any of them, and instead half-dress, and grab my music and headphones and bolt out the back door before anyone can reprimand me for doing something other than what it is they want me to be doing. Making amends with my husband. Apologizing to my mother for pursuing a history she wanted to long ago leave behind. Ignoring the fact that my sister had to one-up me in a game that I was no longer participating.
Well, fuck those expectations! I think, as my feet crunch on the near-dead grass down the slope to the water. Maybe they should walk a mile in my shoes, where there ARE no goddamn expectations because you have no idea what came before this, no idea what lies ahead.
Before I surrender to the pulse of the music, I pause and absorb the setting, letting the atmosphere sink into me like maybe I once did when I was thirteen. It’s eerily quiet out here—the occasional bird chirps, the occasional tree stirs, but other than my breath and the impact of my sneakers, there is nothing. Total silence. A coma. Back at the house, I’m sure that there is a cacophony of overzealous, sensational noise. My mom in pretending that her New Agey methods can temper this storm; Rory exploding at Anderson that he unfurled their secret; Anderson defending himself in a sincere, albeit actorly fashion.
Poor Wes.
The hell I’ve unleashed on him. Until I remember that he sent me a letter, offered me his keys—though in the confusion of it all last night, I forgot to inquire why: Why, after all this time, did he do so? Why didn’t I reply back then? I add these to my list of unending questions.
I reach a footpath enclosed by a thicket of trees. It’s steeper here, so I slow my pace, sidestepping down, hooking my insoles on the coarse roots that poke up through the soil. And then, without warning, the trees give way to an untouched, beckoning, Eden-like body of water. I freeze for a moment. I realize that I’ve stopped breathing, and that while I should be exhilarated at its beauty, what I sense instead is dread, fear, an undercurrent riding through me issuing warning that nothing is exactly as it seems.
Still, I force my lungs to find my breath and push on, down to the dock, which juts out fifty feet into the placid, unmoving water, the fog from the morning still hugging the low-lying posts that sink into the lake. The planks echo into the still air when I start down them—thunk, thunk, thunk—and I start to laugh at the melodrama of it all: it feels so much like a horror movie I’ve seen on cable recently, like someone might run out of the woods with a buzz saw and hack me in two. I reach the end, remove my sneakers, and plunge my feet in. It’s frigid, and I lose sensation in my toes almost immediately.
I pop the headphones into my ear, pressing them in to vacuum out even the stoic silence of the woods and ignoring the pain of the icy water that is radiating up to my ankles now. I lie back, close my eyes, and allow myself to imagine where I was once upon a time, at thirteen, when nothing was what it seemed and before even that illusion was taken from me, too.
29
W es finds me there long after my toes have turned so dead-person white that I finally caved and tucked them beneath me, a flimsy attempt to warm them after instilling intentional damage.
I hear him coming from behind me—thunk, thunk, thunk—but don’t turn to greet him, so unsure as to whom it could be. My list of grievances with my supposed loved ones is long. Peter? Please kill me now. My mother? I might drown her in this lake. Anderson? Ask again later.
But then Wes taps me on the shoulder and says, “Hey,” and whatever is cramped up so tightly inside slowly uncoils, and I turn, blocking out the weak October sun with my right hand, and force a weary smile.
“I slipped out before they realized I was gone,” he says.
“I’m sorry to b
ring the circus with me.” I pause the music. “Obviously, I didn’t realize they were coming.”
“No one ever does.”
“I’m sorry? I don’t follow.”
“Family. They never give you much warning. That’s all.” He gestures toward the iPod, stating the obvious: “Music.”
“Rory gave this to me right after the accident.” I shrug. “Old songs from my old life. They’re starting to spark something, bring things back.”
“You were always good with that—making up songs to make fun of me, little lyrics to jab me when, you know, I’d kick your ass swimming out to the dock.” He smiles, and so do I. “So,” he says after a pause, “what do you want to know from me?”
I laugh, in spite of myself. “I’m done with people telling me their stories. Turns out, everyone has their own perspective of your life, but that doesn’t mean that it’s the right one.”
“You were always wise beyond your years. But I’m certainly happy to help. To, you know, fill in some blanks, if you can’t come up with it on your own.”
I grin at his kindness, and we ebb into silence, the trees settling in around us. I stare at him for a beat while he loses himself to something across the lake, and I can see it now, see it clear as this Virginia air—that those bluish hazel eyes, even with the ever-so-fine wrinkles that too much sun and two decades can bring, even with the flop of burnished blond hair that sweeps over his forehead to mask them—that those eyes are the same ones my father had drawn in his sketchbook. That they were watching over me, and that maybe my dad was sending me a message, even if that message was obscured through his murky encryption. It was his wayward code to let me know that someone was out there, that someone had my back, even when he couldn’t. My father couldn’t have known that the book wouldn’t make its way to me. My father couldn’t have known that when it finally did, I’d have lost the ability to remember what the message was about in the first place.
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