Later, when the window has been black for hours and they finally pack up for the day, Jo says: “Leave the books. Someone will re-file them.” Jeremy stacks them neatly in a tower and she watches. Out the corner of her eye. He sees her looking. She turns away.
—
Ghost of teenager past:
1. Honour Roll
2. Last voice to crack/first face to break out
3. Slayer of imaginary closet monsters
4. Addict, thief, liar
First, their parents had worried about Jeremy having no friends, then they worried about him having the wrong kind of friends. And then he was gone.
Why did he insist on being the odd man out? Always. After a while, he didn’t even fit in with the stoners. Pot was a gateway only Jeremy blew through.
—
A week without classes. What it looks like: Campus quiet. Empty and anxious. Libraries. Common rooms. Dining halls. Writing. Cramming. Muttering. Maslow’s hierarchy (physiological/safety/love/esteem/self-actualization). J. Alfred Prufrock (objective dramatic monologue, correlative of melancholy, bathos). Cloud classification (cumulus, stratus, cirrus, nimbus). Atomic number of nitrogen (7). Everyone orbiting around their own nucleus.
Guys wear the same pair of wrinkled jeans day after day. Girls pull back their hair with their hands, not even bothering with brushes, tie it up, and then tuck the ends under, into something that is a cross between a ponytail and a bun. Jo wakes up every morning and puts on an oversized navy blue hoodie. Jeremy wears one of two different-coloured versions of the same shirt. They often walk in a not-uncomfortable silence. Technically, this is grammatically incorrect but it is also true. He is working out different ideas in his head. The things he has read being weighed and assessed. She knows this look.
—
Joan’s university selection criteria:
1. far away
2. far away
3. far away
4. far away
Limestone buildings. Ivy. A guy on a rooftop picking out chords on his guitar. Dress code: cargo pants, GAP sweaters. Scarves: the more colours, the better. Perfect. She would live in a recruitment poster. She would be girl in V-neck cable-knit on stone step, textbook in lap.
After Jo moved away to school, her parents—suddenly, conveniently—remembered they had a daughter. Inquiries: classes, Alice, weekend plans, prospective boyfriends (Is there anyone special? Be careful. You know condoms are not always…Mom! Enough!). And exams! Always exams! As if they were a daily occurrence, as if 99.9 per cent of university wasn’t about floating aimlessly with no real conception of how you were faring until after the final. Until after it was too late. Calls, emails; please, God, may no one tell them about ICQ (oh-oh). For the first time, Jo had felt the burden of being an only child.
There is no photo of Joan shaking Principal Harris’s hand in a blue gown and stupid hat. Some woman on an online chat room claimed to have seen Jeremy in Seattle.
“Hey, where were you in June? Were you in Seattle?”
“Seattle? No. June, I was in Toronto.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yeah. May is pretty foggy but June I know for sure. Toronto.”
It is Tuesday and they are walking to the other cafeteria. The one in Leonard Hall. Just for a change. Jeremy wears a thin jean jacket. Jo has given him a scarf and a pair of mitts. She doesn’t have anything warmer that would fit. She wears something insubstantial too, an autumn-ish jacket. She wishes he would leave so she could wear her wool coat, but this is a passing thought, one that comes and goes so quickly, it leaves no time for guilt. Jo does not know when Jeremy plans to leave. Or what he is doing here. What she does know: when Alice returns on Sunday, Jeremy will have to go. And: he has been sober since he arrived.
On the first night, she had shoved her vodka to the back of her underwear drawer. Every time she is alone in the room, she takes a ruler to the bottle. Then unscrews the cap and sniffs.
The residence in Leonard Hall is men-only.
“Have you ever been upstairs?” Jeremy asks as they swipe their cards.
“Once. It smelled like Dad’s spaghetti.”
“What?”
“Dad’s…the time he put cumin in the pasta?”
Jeremy’s face blanks out. An unplugged TV. Someone else’s brother. “Nevermind. It smells like a locker room upstairs.”
The air in the dining hall is also ripe. Boiled cabbage. Fried liver. Sweet and sour pork. Jo looks around. All week, they have run into people she knows—floormates, lab partners, occasionally a teaching assistant.
Jeremy introduces himself as her cousin. He does it with a straight face and Jo can’t tell if he is pissed off or hurt or what. Part of her feels bad but another part of her doesn’t want to care.
“The burgers here are good,” Jo says. Actually, the food at both dining halls sucks. They should have taken a bus to west campus, where the food is actually half-decent. Tomorrow. Will he still be here? She’s afraid to ask. Afraid to spook him. She can’t bear to think of him in a shelter.
Jeremy is a ginger, freckles. He does not look like someone who would survive on the streets. And yet, he has.
“What happens next?” Jeremy asks.
They sit across from each other and pick up their forks. Every time they do this, Jo thinks of all the meals she ate facing an empty chair. Her parents at either end of the table. Or more often, absent.
“Next?”
“After this…after graduation.”
He was her older brother. He was fifteen and she was nine and he knew twelve went into one-forty-four twelve times.
“Something in science, I think.” The potatoes are tasteless. She looks for the salt shaker. “But not…I don’t want to be a doctor.”
“What’s your major?”
“Bio for now but we’ll see. I might switch to biochemistry.”
“Biochemistry.” He repeats the word and she tries to remember if biochemistry was part of her vocabulary at age sixteen.
She complains about her lab partner instead. “She doesn’t trust me. We split up the work and then she does my half before I can even get started.”
“Sounds like a pretty good set-up.” Jokey.
“She doesn’t even give me a chance! She wants to be a nurse.”
Jo could just see her butting in during surgery, snatching the scalpel from the surgeon’s gloved hand.
“Nurses are bitches.”
Jo smiles. It takes her a moment to see he is not joking.
—
They walk along the lakefront. Jo shows Jeremy the outdoor sculpture—two rectangles rising out of the ground, tilted and leaning toward each other—and explains how they were built on a fault line.
“They’re supposed to touch at the turn of the century.”
Jeremy looks up. From some angles, from farther away, the two columns can look like they already connect. Lovers in mid-embrace. But from here, from close range, what is most evident is the gap. A peaked roof with a hole in the middle. An imperfect shelter.
“I think they miscalculated,” he says.
He takes the incline at a run. Jo wants to yell for him to be careful. For a moment he’s at the summit—right shoe on the edge of one rectangle, left shoe on the other. Poised. Suspended at the top, between two mountains. Behind, trees. Naked branches. His head becomes a moon eclipsing the sun. Backlit, his body is a shadow. Jo’s hand forms a visor. She squints. Then he runs down the other side. Fast.
—
When he is most like Jeremy: first thing in the mornings, last thing at night. Reading aloud from Tolstoy. The steady cadence of his voice, a sleigh drawn by horses through a snowy Russian landscape.
When she watches him with others—librarians, people on her floor, and later, at the bus station ticket counter—then, he is a stranger.
Sometimes Jeremy takes off. Needs air. To be alone. Never very long. An hour. And a half, tops. On Thursday Jo puts on her wool coat. Pulls up the hood. Keeps her di
stance. He walks with his head down. Man on a mission. Years since she’s watched him walk. All week she has only seen it side-on. Now she sees the place where the rubber soles of his shoes peel away. The stick-thinness of his legs. The hunch of his shoulders.
Earlier that day, she had come into the room with an empty laundry basket to find him standing by her desk, holding a photo of Mom and Dad.
“How are they?”
“Broken.” The word had left her mouth. It could not be taken back.
Jeremy slumped into himself. He put down the picture frame.
“I screwed up, Joannie.”
“It’s not too late. Why don’t you—”
“No. I can’t.”
“You came here.”
“I didn’t plan that. It just happened.”
Jo is a magnet. Jeremy was drawn. Against his will.
“They’re better off without me,” he had said.
Did he think that was noble? It was selfish. No one was better off.
University Avenue past the library. Three students come out. At the corner, a handful more. An impromptu crowd and for a step or two she loses track of which one is Jeremy. Another cold day. Jeremy’s hands fist up. She knows without seeing. Halfway down Johnson Street: church bells. Jeremy walks a little faster. Jo stops. Up ahead is St. Mary’s. People on the steps. Walking in. Grounding out butt ends. They look like Jeremy. And they don’t. After that, there is no need to check for track marks.
—
Heroin is different. Is what Jeremy says. It’s like nothing else. “When the smack was in me, I had no problems.”
The problems of middle-class two-parent suburbia. Jo tries to think what these could be.
All the bad things, being high is the opposite. Anxiety, inadequacy, they’re clustered up here. At the cold North Pole. And way over there, Antarctica, is being high. Nothing could be wrong in the world when Jeremy was high. He could do no wrong.
“It was like everything before was darkness and being high was the light.”
And now? Was life black?
More like grey. “I’m learning to live with grey.”
Jo still doesn’t know what any of this has to do with Mom and Dad and why he won’t call them. She has patiently waited. Since the first night. Now, it is Friday and time is running out.
Simultaneous: “What’s with this tree stump?”/”Call them. They won’t be mad or whatever.”
Jeremy shakes his head, stares at the poster that hangs like a headboard over her bed.
On their walks through campus, Jo has only shown Jeremy the nicest parts. She wishes he had come in September, when everything looked scholastic and preppy instead of dismal and plaid. She has been hawking an idea, a subtle suggestion. She does not think he is buying.
Jo gives up. “Alice whittles.”
“Whittles?” The beginnings of a grin.
“With a pen knife. Swiss Army.” Jo flicks a shaving of bark with her toe. “The shape has yet to reveal itself.”
Laughter. Relief.
—
Sometimes they speak of the past. Before the drugs. Always before. The time he taught her to ride a bike. Holding the handlebar and seat. Then just the seat, by the very edge. Until she lost track of the moment he was holding on and the next when she rode free. A split second that moved from present into past unacknowledged.
When Jeremy ran away, out of her present and into her past. When? The exact time un-noted. How long before anyone realized? Her parents in meetings. Markers on flip charts. Until someone knocked on the door. Excuse me. Urgent phone call. Joan at the chalkboard. Conjugating irregular verbs. Until the vice principal walked in. Bring your books with you. A classroom of eyes on her back. Then and after. Always after. And now here is Jeremy. Catapulted out of her past and into her present. Three-dimensional. A guy who both is and isn’t her brother.
Her whole life. Every moment ever after. An exercise in re-creation. Taking up the pieces, working out how they fit. Liquor bottles topped up with water. The sharp chemical smell like concentrated detergent that made her head spin. The piggy bank. Smashed. Slamming doors. Red eyes. Long-sleeved shirts in summer. Report cards. Calls from the principal. Things she witnessed but only later understood.
Jeremy’s old room is there still. A museum no one visits. She wants to tell him but holds back, waiting. A reckoning. On one side, her hurt. On the other, his. Make the two sides equal.
—
There is a schedule. Little boxes shaded in different colours. Taped, it hangs down from the shelf that juts out over Jo’s desk. She does not worry about midterms. She works hard. Of course, there is hard work. But there is also a formula. Scantron. Due dates. These are things over which she has control.
Evenings are for revision. Jo and Jeremy sit in her room and he reads quietly or drills her. A tape is in the machine. Volume on low. Portishead on one side. Tricky on the other. The music is languid and lazy. Like floating underwater. Like drowning. Like dying.
In Jo’s textbook there are diagrams of viruses. Each one is a funeral wreath made of different kinds of flowers. She closes the book, stares at the ceiling above her bed, and tries to recall the genomic structure of HIV. A retrovirus. Genus lentivirus. Measured in nanometres. The size of a speck.
“Why not medicine?” Jeremy asks.
“Too much school,” Jo says. Two strands of RNA at the centre. Protein shell like a pearl necklace. “Too much expensive school.”
“Dr. Joannie Halsham. I like the sound of that.”
Average latency: ten years. A squatter taking up residence, settling in for the long haul. HIV is small and cunning. It knows how to hide.
“There are easier ways to be a doctor.”
Jo has thought about graduate school. But not in any serious way. She is eighteen and time is still a luxury.
Jeremy sits on Alice’s bed. Cross-legged, bodhisattva-like. Jo’s psychology text is in his lap. He has quizzed her on Piaget (Four stages of childhood development. Go!), but now she’s moved on to biology.
Sometimes, Jo can fool herself into thinking. Sometimes, she can look at Jeremy and think: If my brother had never been an addict, this is how he would be.
“You’d be a great doctor.” Jeremy scratches his chin and turns a page. “You have the people smarts. Bedside manner.”
“Yeah, you’re the expert, right?” The words that tumble out are those of a younger sister teasing an older brother. Normal people. But after she has spoken and it cannot be taken back and Jeremy has not lobbed back a joke of his own, she remembers. That she does not know. Anything about him.
—
Jeremy leaves on Sunday. Overnight it snows but only very lightly, and in the morning the temperature spikes and everything is dripping and melty. At the bus station, Jeremy skirts the puddles without looking. Jo is glad about the twenties. An envelope shoved to the bottom of his bag. No time for a letter and anyway, what would she write?
The bus hasn’t arrived yet and they stand awkwardly by the folding plastic chairs. One week ago he had gone to church and left her a note. This. This is the moment when present becomes past.
Alice is due back in the afternoon. Jeremy used her card for the last time at breakfast, and afterwards, they’d snuck out bagels and fruit and a couple pieces of cutlery for the road. Jo told him about how when it snowed students would steal trays and use them to go sliding down the hill beside the dining hall. At the exit, Jeremy and the woman in the hairnet had exchanged good mornings. Old friends now.
“I’ll be here in the summer,” Jo says now at the bus station. “I got a job. There’s an ice cream parlour downtown…”
Already there’s a fantasy—she’s scooping rocky road, hand cramped up, and her brother saunters in, cool as you like. Jo feels furious. Angry at herself for indulging in this daydream and angry at him because he will not come.
“It’s nice here,” Jeremy says. “I’m glad you’re a part of it.” He nods his head and glances around, as if they ar
e standing on the green in front of Theological Hall instead of the sticky floor at the bus station. He reminds Jo of their father, of something he would say and the exact way he would say it. Her anger turns a little to the left and then it is regret.
She wants to pummel and shake him. Take a class. Why not? Don’t leave.
He does not say: Sorry for interrupting your cramming, or, Thanks for putting me up. There are unsaid things between them but also no platitudes.
I’m glad we had this week, is what he says. “Now when I think of you, it’ll be in context.”
The bus is announced at the same moment it pulls up. Around them, people stand and heave up bags. It is not quite nine and the other passengers go through these motions with exaggerated exhaustion, as if they are Herculean efforts.
“You know where to find me. For the next three and a half years anyway.” Jo will not see him again. Already, she knows this. “Just. Send a postcard or something.”
They go outside. Jeremy has his ticket in his hand. It is white and perforated. This time the hug is just right. The way she remembers. The way she imagines. Jo holds her brother close and inhales the scent of her own soap, her Pears shampoo. He is thin and insubstantial. In Montreal, he will disappear. A speck in the crowd.
“Wait,” she calls as he turns to leave. She peels off her sweatshirt and holds it out to him. She hasn’t got a jacket and now the February air bites her bare arms. “It’s cold in Montreal.”
Jeremy holds it close for a second, hands crossed, knuckles turned in. Then he shrugs off his jean jacket and pulls it on over his head. The university’s name is splashed across the front. The tail of the Q trails out like a ribbon. The sweatshirt has always been big on Jo, but on Jeremy, it is a perfect fit.
She does not ask why he is going to Montreal. Why not somewhere warmer. Instead she touches the lines around his eyes. “You need to wear sunscreen.”
“It’s February.”
“At least SPF 15.”
“Bye, sis.”
He’s trying to keep things light, to be silly. But Jo’s feelings have seized her and now she wants to seize him too. Don’t go. Not yet.
Everyone is on the bus. The luggage compartment underneath has closed and the driver is waiting.
The Journey Prize Stories 29 Page 8