I’m not sure what my excuse was at twenty-one. Overconfidence: it’s a problem. It’s probably why, when Jill came to me and told me she was pregnant, I took it in stride. Part of me was definitely freaked, but by then I’d spent so much time knocking on doors, talking up candidates, that my gut reaction in an uncertain situation was to project total confidence. Here Jill was caught in this fight-or-flight response between hightailing it to some camp in the woods or else to the abortion clinic, and I’m all, hey, it’s gonna be great! I’ll teach the kid to play hockey!
It definitely wasn’t like that when it happened with Piper, when for the first few days I was in denial, mulling over all the reasons it wasn’t even possible, along with these spikes of cold-sweat, hyperventilating panic. I’d envision this showdown in the living room with my folks, my dad grabbing me by the collar and shoving me up against the wall like he used to do with Elias, my mom all stoic, but radiating utter disappointment. After about a week I couldn’t take it anymore. I drove down to the U-Store-It to talk to my brother alone. I didn’t know who else to go to.
When I got there the parking lot was empty except for Elias’s green Jeep, which was a relief. If he’d been driving the van I would have suspected my brother-in-law, Dodge, would be there, too, but the Jeep was Elias’s own, and he didn’t want Dodge Powell to so much as breathe in the smell of its air freshener. I parked next to it and went around back to find him. The storage units were basically garages, three sets of four arranged in a U shape around the little office building. We had this one customer who kept a weight bench and a full set of weights in his. Lately Elias had taken to driving down there and letting himself into that unit with the master key so he could lift weights. It went against policy, and if he ever got caught either by Dad or Dodge or the customer, he would have been in trouble. But Elias was nineteen and kind of in a “fuck it” stage at that point. He’d graduated high school a year before and had been working with Dodge ever since, managing the U-Store-It, and since then he’d gotten a lot quieter—part Clint Eastwood, part serial killer.
Sure enough, I found him in the last unit on the right, lifting. He was lying on his back on the bench, with an impressive amount of weight on the crossbar. His shirt was hiked up and under it, his gut was jiggling with every pump of the bar. Elias’s body was like one big temper tantrum. If Dodge brought home doughnuts one Sunday, Elias would eat as if his own execution was the next day, and I swear he’d go up by five pounds overnight. But now that he’d taken to secret weight lifting, in no time he was bulking up like the Incredible Hulk. Unfortunately it still had all the doughnuts on top of it, so mostly he just looked fatter.
He clunked the bar back in place and sat up once he noticed me there. It’s not as if I ever dropped by just to say hello, so he knew something was up. He fanned out his shirt at the front—it had a big V of sweat down it—and asked, “You need something?”
“I got a problem, man.”
Now, Elias was a good guy. He was the guy you called in the middle of the night if you snuck out to see your girlfriend and then inadvertently locked yourself out of the house, or if you needed an emergency ride back from, say, Massachusetts, or had to borrow fifty bucks. Stuff like that didn’t shake him. He’d just go. And so it surprised me when he shot me this glare. The kind where a person’s eyes look to be two different sizes and one of them is twitching underneath. He got up and started yanking weights off the bar.
“I’ll bet you do,” he said. “I sure as hell bet you do.”
For the life of me I didn’t know what was up his ass. Mentally I went over anything I might have done wrong to him lately, but nothing came to mind. Whatever it was, I figured he had to be on the wrong track, so I said, “Piper’s pregnant.”
“Oh, I know.”
That was unexpected. “No, you don’t. How would you know that?”
“A friend of a friend told me.”
“Who?”
“None of your business.” He clunked the weights back on the storage bars.
Asking more wasn’t going to get me anywhere, so I gave up. “I don’t know what to do. I’m completely freaked.”
“Shoulda thought about that before you nailed her, shouldn’t you?” The bench was between us now, and even though he was standing normally his bigger arms made the stance look threatening. I stood there feeling all sheepish, and his face shifted to this look of total disgust. “Fuck you, Cadey,” he said, using Dodge’s asshole nickname for me. “Fuck you sideways.”
By then I didn’t know what to say anymore. I’d sort of figured out what his reaction was about, but I didn’t know where to go with that. I didn’t know where to go at all. There were a lot of boxes lying around, and I sat down on the closest one behind me and planted my elbows against my knees, dropped my head down and started to cry.
“Jesus Christ,” said Elias. No chance was I going to look up at him, but I could feel him standing there looking at me, stuck on what to do. When he was much younger, eight or nine at the most, our father used to come down really hard on him for crying. He’d shove Elias down into a chair and bend over him, screaming himself hoarse, one fist up all threateningly, like someone about to beat a dog with a newspaper.
Elias came around the bench and sat on the box next to me. All I could see were his shoes, beat-up sneakers stretched all wide at the bottom. I was still making little gasping, sniveling noises and wiping my nose against my shoulder. It was bad. Years later the memory still makes me cringe.
“What am I supposed to do about that problem?” he finally said. “I can’t unfuck her for you.”
“Don’t tell Mom and Dad.”
“I won’t.”
“If Dad finds out—”
“He isn’t going to do shit to you. I’ll knock him out if he does. But you’re his favorite anyway. He won’t.”
“I just ruined my life.”
“Naw. Least it’s Piper. Worst thing that happens is you’re stuck with her—that doesn’t count as ruined.”
I didn’t say anything back, and kind of awkwardly he put his arm over my shoulders. He never hugged anybody, so that was a stretch for him. He didn’t have any real answers for me. There wasn’t anything he could do but sit there and assure me Mom and Dad weren’t going to kill me and bury me in the backyard. But he did that. And for a really, really long time I felt like shit about all that, because I knew—I always knew—that he loved her.
* * *
When I was home for Christmas, almost right away I noticed the hacked-up tree in the backyard. It was over by the barn. What had still been a giant oak when I’d last come home was now a four-foot-high pile of splintered wood, with these long raw shards sharp enough to kill a man sticking out in all directions like some kind of lethal haystack. I asked my mom, “What happened—that tree get hit by lightning?”
She shook her head. She was standing at the stove with the teapot, raising and lowering a couple of tea bags into it to steep them. “That’s Eli’s.”
“That’s Eli’s what?”
“His tree for when he’s mad.” She closed the lid, letting the tags and strings dangle down the side of the teapot. She nodded toward the back-porch windows and said, “Your father and Dodge cut off most of the limbs a few years back anyway, you know, because it had a disease. When Elias needs to blow off some steam he goes out there and he chops at it. Doesn’t bother me any. I wanted that tree gone years ago.”
I looked out the back window again and saw the ax wedged in a hunk that used to be a branch, off to the side, almost buried beneath the snow. We’d tried to build a tree house in that oak years ago when we were kids. “That’s a lot of steam to blow off,” I said.
She shrugged. “Olmstead men,” she said. Then she poured a cup and drank it black, without any sugar.
A little while later Elias came downstairs. He’d been locked up in his room all day, sleeping off a migraine. When he saw me he said, “I need your help with something.”
I glanced up at
a motion behind him. My mother was pushing a big cellophane-wrapped plate piled high with Christmas cookies across the kitchen island. It had an oversize red bow on top.
“Need to run over to the Larsens’ real quick,” he said. “Be good if you could ride with me.”
The Larsens were Piper’s family. “Sure,” I said, and he shrugged on his coat and picked up the plate of cookies. The cellophane was bunched up so high it got in the way of his face.
“Take your car,” he said. “I don’t like driving anymore.”
“Why not?”
“Too many distractions.”
That seemed like a weird reason. In Frasier, New Hampshire, there’s really nothing but woods and fields and the occasional rotting house here and there. But whatever, I didn’t mind driving. It was only a couple of miles to Piper’s. When the house rose up along the road, a boxy white Victorian at the end of a long drive that curved uphill, Elias said, “Pull up on the shoulder a sec, all right?”
I parked on the gravel, right behind the family’s old fruit stand. The wood was gray, like driftwood, with a darker slush slopped up against the decaying boards on the bottom. You could still see the shadows of the painted watermelons, and the yellow letters, faded almost invisible but not quite, that read Fine Fresh Lemonade.
“How come you didn’t bring Jill up here for Christmas?” he asked.
“Dodge.”
He nodded. Looked out at Piper’s house, squinting. “You’re still engaged and all that?”
“Yeah. What, did you think I was going to try to move in on Piper?” He made a face but didn’t answer. “That one’s dead, junked and sold for parts, man. She’s all yours.”
“I just want to say hello.”
Sure you do, I thought.
“You’re not going to feel awkward about seeing her, are you?” he asked. “After that stuff that happened?”
I shook my head. “’Course not. Maybe if she’d had an abortion I would. But a miscarriage isn’t anybody’s fault.”
“Maybe she was never even really pregnant in the first place.”
I shrugged. Sometimes I’d wondered that, too. One day she had a positive pregnancy test, and then another three weeks went by and all of a sudden she told me not to worry anymore, she’d had a miscarriage. I’d gotten used to living in despair over it and then ta-da, the whole problem was gone. It was as if someone had kidnapped me at gunpoint and driven me all over town with their boot against my neck and then, without warning, dropped me off in my own front yard. Except that the whole experience made things so weird between us that we broke up over the phone and never really talked much after that. It had made everything too heavy, too fraught.
“Probably not,” I said, for my brother’s sake. I knew it was what he wanted to believe.
I turned the car back on and pulled up into her driveway, and we crunched through the snow and up onto the porch. Elias rang the bell with one gloved finger, trying to hold that huge plate of cookies in both arms like a squirming calf. When Piper opened the door she saw me first, because the cellophane was blocking Elias, and smiled.
“It’s the Olmstead boys,” she said, noticing my brother under there and taking the plate out of his hands. “Aww, thank you. Come on in.”
We stepped inside and Elias unzipped his coat. The woodstove pumped out blazing heat that shimmered the air in front of it like a mirage. I stomped the snow from my boots onto the rug. Piper crossed the room to set the cookies down on the dining table. She still had a fine little ass, but not for me.
“Elias, you must have just gotten back,” she said. “How was it?”
“Not too bad,” he said. I cut a sideways glance at him. He’d had his thigh torn open down to the muscle by a piece of shrapnel, seen friends die, killed people. But around Piper it came out like an underwhelming vacation.
“Slimmed down a little, didn’t you?” she said, and he looked at the ground and chuckled even though getting her to notice that had been the sole reason he’d opened up his coat. I gave him a bemused sort of look, because this was as close as Elias got to pulling out his A-game. But then something in his face changed and when I looked over I saw a guy had come in from the back porch with his arms full of firewood. As he arranged it in the fireplace, Piper asked Elias about where he was working now (he wasn’t) and if he thought things had gotten better for women now that the Taliban was gone. Latch onto that one, I thought, c’mon, dude, because Piper was a curious person, the type who really wanted to know about international politics and women’s issues. I could see in her eyes that she was hoping for a substantial sort of answer. But Elias had shut down. He just shrugged and said, “Nothing’s ever going to get better there. They all just want to kill each other. Far be it from me to stop ’em.”
The guy got done kindling the fire and came over. Piper introduced us. His name was Michael. I was going to ask where he went to school, but then he wrapped his arm around Piper’s waist and said to my brother, “Army vet, huh? Thanks for your service.”
Maybe all siblings have this problem, but sometimes with my brother I might as well consult a Magic 8 Ball to figure out what’s going on in his head and other times it’s like I know everything. These tiny cues of his, they become like a code. As soon as that guy touched Piper I glanced at Elias, saw him looking at the guy’s hand for a split second before he zipped up his coat. “It wasn’t for you personally,” he said, and Piper laughed uneasily while Michael shot Elias an offended glare.
I didn’t say anything during the drive home. Nothing about him smoking in my car. We stomped back into the house, right into the kitchen where my mom was washing dishes and my sister, Candy, was fussing around with a jelly roll cake. She had a big bowl of frosting on the island and was spreading it onto the cake in the pan. Mom asked, “You give the Larsens those cookies?”
Elias grunted a yes.
Candy licked her thumb and looked at Elias with reproach. “Well, you’re not giving them my Yule log cake.”
“Nobody wants your Yule log cake, Candy.”
“I’m just making sure. Since three-quarters of the Christmas cookies in this house just went down the street and now my boys hardly have any.”
“Don’t worry about it, Candy,” Mom scolded, low voiced. To Elias she said, “Did she like the cookies?”
“She,” Candy blustered. “Is there only one Larsen now?”
“Goddamn it, Candy,” said Elias. “Lay off.”
She shrugged and sucked the frosting from her index finger. “Don’t bark at me, Eli. Cade’s the one I’m surprised at, getting engaged while he’s off at school and then coming home to visit a girl he had a relationship with.”
I set my gloves on the table and didn’t dignify that with a reply. She hadn’t brought it up for any other reason except to imply to Elias that he was pursuing my sloppy seconds. Elias, though, took the bait like a raccoon to a tin of cat food. He kicked out the chair he’d been unlacing his boot against so it skidded across the kitchen floor just past Candy. His voice projected in a straight line. “What part of ‘lay off’ don’t you understand?”
“Eli,” said our mother in her soft voice, soothing, imploring. She said it again, and for a second I flashed on the time he fell out of that oak tree while we were building the tree house, knocked himself unconscious. She had pulled his head onto her lap then, whispering to him while we waited for the ambulance.
“She doesn’t know when to quit,” he shouted, still looking at Candy. “Mind your own damn business, will you? Bake your stupid cake and shut your freakin’ mouth for once.”
He shoved another chair across the floor for good measure, then stormed off through the back porch, his bootlaces ticking against the floor. The back door slammed. A minute later we all heard the whack of that ax slicing into what was left of the tree. Then again, and again.
It was things like that that made me leave Jill back in Maryland for the second year in a row. And it wasn’t even Christmas yet, and Dodge hadn’t even s
howed up.
I still remembered the day Elias announced he’d enlisted in the army. It was during that whole Piper pregnancy scare. Mom looked really startled, and Dodge gave him this peeved-off look and said, “What the hell’d you go and do that for?” That was the giddiest I’ve ever seen Elias look. I knew what he was thinking: I’m finally getting out from under your thumb, you redneck motherfucker. He and I had both left home for damn good reasons. We didn’t belong here in this house. It was like the year Dodge built Candy a garden edged with pressure-treated lumber—it didn’t look too bad from the outside, but all season the chemicals leached in and leached in, poisoning everything that grew there. And here we all were again, boxed in by the same dirty lumber. But not for long. Not together.
* * *
Maybe half the reason I was so smooth about it when Jill broke the pregnancy news to me was that last time all my histrionics had turned out to be nothing. Maybe I felt that this time would have the same outcome, because the panic with the Jill situation was more of a slow burn. But this time it wasn’t going away, and in addition to that, after a few weeks she was so sick. She couldn’t even go to class anymore, and her stupid roommate was complaining. I called up Stan, and he said it was fine if she crashed at his place for a little while until we figured out what to do next. At first it was a good solution. Stan was out a lot and worked weird hours, so when I came by after work every day we usually had the place to ourselves. We’d cook dinner, watch TV, try to work out a better plan. She kept talking about going to live at her camp around Deep Creek Lake, and I wouldn’t have anything to do with that idea. I couldn’t stomach the idea of her calling in that kind of favor from her camp friend Dave—a man I’d barely even met—and asking him to carry us until we could get on our feet. Even her living with Stan galled me every single day—seeing her purple toothbrush in the holder with his, watching him walk in the door with a bag of candy for her mixed in with his groceries, and worst of all, getting a call from him late one night and hearing him say he’d taken her to the emergency room because she looked dehydrated. The little while that Stan and I had agreed to wore on into two months, then three, and I hated feeling as if I was turning into a third wheel in the coming of my own child.
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