I nodded enthusiastically. Sometimes I got caught on a gust of feeling that told me I had something important to say.
“That’s good,” I said. “My mom doesn’t say it, but I know she thinks me and Duck have wasted our time, that we should be farther along in our careers or at least have families, and maybe it’s true that Duck’s wasted time, God help him, but not me, I don’t think. I think people who believe in wasted time also usually believe in destiny or a set path or something, as though they think they had someplace to be and they didn’t get there soon enough. It’s dangerous to think that way. It makes you feel badly about yourself.”
Byron’s eyes were still wide, but they weren’t looking at me anymore. I wondered what I’d said. For me, the conversation was energizing, and I felt I’d spoken well, that what I’d said about myself and my brother was true.
My brother. I’d mentioned Duck, and for the first time he was here in the room with us.
Wind was caught in the chimney; it sounded fierce. The heat vent had gone cold. The snow still purled outside, falling silently except when it was picked up by the wind. Duck had chosen not to play by the rules that night but as the years between then and now had piled up the rules had started to seem less important to me. I still wouldn’t have done what Duck had done, but I almost understood the recklessness that had carried him away and made him play the trick. But maybe for Byron the rules had only become more important, and with each year that passed Duck’s actions had become more and more senseless—so perhaps the love I couldn’t keep out of my voice when I spoke about my brother bothered Byron.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean to mention my brother.”
“It’s okay.” Byron barely moved his mouth when he said the words. “You don’t believe in fate?”
I didn’t, not really, but because of the way Byron asked I assumed he did, at least a little bit, and I didn’t want to alienate him so I said I wasn’t sure. I added that a lot of things seemed to happen by accident, and that I didn’t like thinking that terrible things were meant to be.
“What about the two of us meeting again?” he said.
“I don’t know,” I said. “There was a lengthy series of choices that made it so we lived in the same place and were acquainted with some of the same people. You see it on the train all the time, you know. People saying, ‘Oh my God, hi!’ One thing done differently and we wouldn’t have met again.”
The silence that followed chewed me up. I felt suddenly as though he was interviewing me, and I was giving all of the wrong answers. Byron looked as though he would prefer for us to sit in silence—he didn’t meet my gaze, though I searched for his—but for me the silence was unbearable. The way your body fills a silent space is very personal. I tried to bear the silence but I hurried again to break it. I asked Byron what he was thinking, and he whispered that he was thinking about nothing. I felt it was dangerous for us if his mind was empty.
“I’m tired,” he said. “Maybe we should go back to sleep.”
I felt if he fell asleep I would lose him completely, as though sleep would cement his misgivings.
“You seem unhappy,” I blurted out. “What made you so unhappy?”
Byron released a shuddering sigh. He’d made himself very small next to me. He shivered, though when I threw some of my blanket over him he didn’t receive it; it slipped from his knees and he let it fall. I remembered all the times we’d grazed the surface of this same tension between us, how we’d relied on our bodies to diffuse it, how eventually our bodies couldn’t keep up. I hoped Byron would take me in his arms but the old traditions we’d had didn’t hold up anymore.
Why didn’t I just let him sleep?
My phone vibrated from near Byron’s elbow, where it was plugged into the wall, and I would’ve ignored it but Byron pinched it free from its charger and extended it toward me, saying, as he did, “Your brother texted you.”
I looked at my phone. Illuminated on the screen was a simple note from my brother, asking if I was okay in the storm. Similar to the one I’d gotten from my ex-husband, notes that had taken ten seconds to compose and send but that made Byron’s face harden.
“He’s just checking in,” I said.
Byron closed his eyes. His mouth was a thin, stern line. Had his anger really not diminished? What was it about my brother’s grip on him that couldn’t be loosened, that still held him so tightly? Sitting there, mostly naked, I felt stupid for trusting and loving my brother, and maybe it was because I felt attacked, too, that I started to defend Duck. Not just attacked, but cheated—as though by coming to my house Byron had implied he’d forgiven us.
“He’s not evil. He wasn’t evil then. Just young and stupid.” I swallowed tears.
“I don’t really want to talk about your brother,” Byron said quietly.
“Duck has suffered, too,” I said, carried away with my argument. “He may have gotten off easy then but he’s paid for it every day since. I had to forgive him. I worried what would happen to him if no one forgave him.”
Byron looked at me squarely. After a long silence he said, “There’s just something so sinister about what he did. The nature of it.”
“It only seems so sinister because of what happened after. Which Duck didn’t intend and didn’t play any part in.”
“You’re letting him off too easy.” Byron shook his head as he spoke.
Because he wouldn’t look at me I looked at the side of his face. The color had drained even from his acne scars. I loved my brother and Byron both. I believed they’d both been through something awful—were both, in a way, victims of Carl Sands’s, though it was becoming clear that I couldn’t tell Byron this, as Byron thought there’d been two bad guys that night in Florida, three if you count me. There would be no changing his mind.
The more adamant he seemed, the less I agreed with him. I thought it was important that I not condemn Duck, who was often depressed and almost always lonely. If I stopped having hope for him there would be no one left in the world who did—and I worried sometimes that Duck would kill himself.
I felt, and still feel, that I meant what I said next earnestly, but I said the thing no person seeking forgiveness should ever say: “I don’t see why this is so hard for you after all this time.”
Byron launched himself to his feet. He stood by my books; he looked like he wanted to tear them from the shelves. He rubbed the back of his neck so hard his skin turned red. “If I were meant to forgive him, I would have felt forgiveness by now. I haven’t.”
I saw then that I was in a position to end the conversation. I could’ve deleted Duck’s text, tossed my phone aside, and if not agreed with Byron then at least accepted that his inability to forgive came from an honest place inside him. I could’ve offered him my body again, a language we’d always spoken well, and at least I could’ve made an attempt to be close with him. But I couldn’t. I felt Byron was fooling himself. He was being too harsh. I drained my drink. I stood and grabbed the bottle of bourbon from the buffet where I kept my liquor and filled my glass with a few healthy splashes.
“Look at you,” I said. “You’re hiding behind this idea that everything is meant to be. Some things just happen, and it’s shitty, but they do.”
Byron rubbed his fists into his eyes and blinked away stars, as though trying to make my living room disappear. “Oh my God,” he said. “Oh my God, oh my God.”
He was panicking, but I was so caught up in myself I barely registered it.
“It makes you feel important,” I went on glibly. The blanket was still wrapped around me. I would’ve dropped it, almost had, except beneath it I wore only a thigh-length robe, a robe meant to be worn around someone you have sex with, and I had a hard time keeping my confidence while wearing so little. “You like feeling like you’re off the hook, like you don’t have to work to forgive people. You’ve made no room in your heart for anyone else. You kicked me out as soon as things got hard, as soon as—”
“As soo
n as I found out you’d lied? You’d let it happen, you let him take me?” Byron shook with anger, or maybe fear.
“I was a kid!” I said, close to tears now. I couldn’t stop talking, though I should’ve stopped and listened to him, agreed with him, because we had to spend the next however many hours together until the roads were cleared. Since he was my guest, I was the one who should have conceded. I still felt, though, that I could turn things around, that if I just kept talking he would admit to loving and forgiving me. This hadn’t worked with my husband, it hadn’t worked with the poet, and I didn’t know why I thought it would work with him—but we were so deeply connected, he and I. We were so, dare I say it, meant to be.
I spoke quickly: “I would just think that fate and forgiveness would go hand in hand. If things are meant to happen for a reason and the force behind that is a force of good, then why not forgive the people who have apologized? I’m not saying forgive Carl Sands. I’m saying it might be good for you—and me and Duck—if you forgave my brother, who played a dumb trick on you, whose trick by chance spiraled out of his control, and who has regretted it ever since.”
Byron’s eyes kept flitting toward the door. He pulled at the joints in his fingers. They popped one by one. “Okay,” he said, breathing with loud inhales and exhales. “Okay.”
He was going through exercises, methods of calming himself, and this bewildered me because there was no danger here, no danger with me. Still, I immediately felt like backing down. I could see I’d taken it too far again—where had the feelings of love and connection from the previous night gone, and why had I replaced them with a need to be right and to have Byron agree with me? The unhappiest people are the ones who need to have everyone agree with them, and that was me right then. I went to Byron, reached out a hand to touch his shoulder. He let it rest there for a minute, he looked at it and blinked, and then, as though waking from a paralysis, he twisted away from my touch.
“Jesus,” he muttered.
His rebuke made me feel like I was floating, like sadness had just lifted me away, so when my phone rang and I saw my brother’s name on the screen, I answered without thinking, as though a ghost had slid the answer icon across the screen instead of me.
The call connected and Duck began speaking—asking if I was there, if I could hear him. Byron sighed—a loud, windy sound. I had brought Duck into the room with us.
“Duck,” I said.
Byron turned from me. He positioned himself squarely in the window, his head tilted back, his gaze fixed on some point in the sky.
“Frances.” Duck said my name again. “Calling to make sure you’re alive. How much snow have you seen so far?”
I could hear him moving through his apartment, which I’d only visited once; usually he came to see me. He’d visited when I first moved here, and we’d gone to a play. Duck had grown to like musicals. I could hear the low chatter of his television, the rattle of glass bottles in his fridge as he opened the door and peered in. Standing in the light of the fridge as Byron stood in the blinding white light of the blizzard.
“Almost a foot already,” I said, “and it’s still coming down.”
“Are you by yourself? Do you have, you know, water, flashlights?”
“No,” I said. “I’m not alone.”
Byron turned to me. He raised both hands, palms up. He shook his head slowly, looked around as though Duck was in the room once again, approaching him with the blindfold. Calm down, I wanted to say. I was the lightning rod between my brother and Byron, and part of me wanted to step aside and allow the past to strike them.
I knew that with a few words over the phone I could bring them into the same space, they would exist for each other through me, but neither of them wanted that. It would destroy Duck to know Byron was here, unless I had news of forgiveness, which I didn’t and wouldn’t. And Byron felt, would maybe always feel, that Duck didn’t have a right to know anything about his life.
“A new guy?” Duck asked.
“Yeah,” I said. “A new one. Got stranded here, poor thing.”
“Well I hope he knows he couldn’t get stranded with anyone better.”
Duck had turned so soft, he could melt me with his kindness. I don’t know how deeply he meant it, but he always remembered to fill me up with compliments like this, trying to boost my self-esteem, and sometimes I thought that if we both ended up alone—Duck didn’t date much, he was too nervous for it—we’d move to the same city and meet every day for breakfast so we wouldn’t start our days alone.
“I’m not sure he feels that way, but it’s complicated,” I said.
Byron rolled his eyes. His frustration pulled me away from my brother but not closer to him. It pulled me from my own life, the one I sometimes felt proud for having built after my divorce. My things, all the floor lamps and the world map and the painting of a Newark cemetery I’d bought from my neighbor, now seemed silly and shabby. I felt completely alone and out of place, though I was in my own house with my own cat tracing figure eights around our legs. My heart dipped deeper into my chest like a hammock into whose sling somebody had suddenly dropped a heavy weight.
Duck took me rapidly through the past week of his life. He never talked in depth about a subject, didn’t like to linger on the details of his life, though in my imagined breakfasts with him we spoke honestly and without fear. Soon I could tell Duck was getting tired of talking. He wasn’t good at being on the phone. I didn’t want to let him go because having him on the phone gave me an ally in the room, but Duck was impatient, and Byron was still staring me down from his station near the window. Behind him, snow obscured the hospital and the street. The streetlight offered one fist of light that revealed details of the storm, individual flakes, wind whipped. Everything else was a blur.
I clutched my phone tighter while Duck’s voice inched away from me. I finally let him go. He was alone with his television, and though I knew Duck craved solitude, I wished we could pass long hours on the phone. There was no one, really, who wanted to spend that long talking to me. I felt almost desperate to sink into the couch cushions and indulge in self-pity, a feeling I enjoyed very much, but Byron’s anger pounced the second I pressed the button on my phone that ended the call.
“Unbelievable,” Byron said. “God, this fucking storm is never going to end.”
“Sorry. I’m sorry. Turning my phone off, see?” I held the power button, dangled the dark phone between my fingers, let it fall to the floor.
Byron snatched his sweater from the floor, pulled it over his head, swore when he couldn’t find the armholes. He ferreted around the room, finally retrieved his watch from the corner where it had ended up, but his fingers were shaking and he couldn’t clasp the strap.
“Don’t you get it? What you’re doing here?” he said, but I didn’t know what there was to get.
“You were right,” I said desperately. “Let’s just go to sleep, start over. I’ll make lunch, or more coffee. Maybe we drank too much.”
Byron didn’t answer. As I stood with him, as he finished dressing, he looked less clear to me than he’d been in my memory, and I was struck by panic, as though by being with him I’d made him disappear. The peace was evaporating, lost in the white of the blizzard. I thought if I cried he might stay, at least for a little longer, as my ex-husband had stayed with me longer than he meant to because I was so sad, and because he hadn’t meant to fall in love with someone else, and anyway, what had one more night been in the grand scheme of divorce?
“I know what I did to hurt you back then,” I said. “I don’t know what I did to hurt you today.”
He didn’t say anything, and his silence made me hopeful, because it wasn’t a rebuttal. The hopeful silence before someone makes a decision about you. I’d felt it with the poet, with my husband. I wondered if I’d ever made anyone feel that way. Probably I had, but it’s not something you notice about yourself, is it?
“I need some space,” he said suddenly. “Do you have a shovel? I’l
l start digging my car out.”
“It will just get covered again.”
“You can’t keep me here,” Byron said, his voice the loudest it had been all day. “If you don’t have a shovel I’ll ask one of your neighbors.”
“It’s under the porch stairs,” I said, and as I spoke I reached for him again. There was so much that needed to be said still, so much I needed to fix. I needed for him to see I was trying to fix things.
He pulled away. “Don’t touch me.”
He left. I watched him reappear outside, emerge from beneath the porch steps with a shovel in hand. He began to dig his car out, working in a frenzy. Down the street one of the fraternity houses was carrying on with its partying; as Byron worked, people spilled out onto the porch. They tossed red Solo cups in the air, maybe to see if the beer would freeze before it hit the ground, and the cups landed lightly in the big piles of snow. I drank. I filled my glass again, threw it back, and again, and with renewed energy I put on my long down jacket and my boots, underneath which I still only wore a robe, and stormed outside.
“I wish we could talk,” I said, joining Byron by his car. He didn’t answer so I yelled, “Why won’t you talk?”
“We’ve been talking all fucking day,” Byron said.
“Then why did you come?” I said, my voice a thick loud sob.
The frat boys were looking at us while trying not to seem like they were looking at us. We were making a scene, and it was probably time to go inside. But I was a little crazed, and more than a little drunk, and maybe I wanted the frat boys to be afraid of me. They felt they owned the neighborhood sometimes, with their parties and shenanigans, like Halloween last year when they’d smashed dozens of pumpkins in the middle of the street. I had this urge to rattle them, I wanted to show them how much baggage one can accumulate in fifteen years—behold your future, boys—so I kept going, kept yelling at Byron. I told Byron he had to tell me why he’d come home with me. Why he’d fucked me, and when I said the word it came out viciously, in an unfair way, as though I hadn’t fucked him, too. My voice, a hoarse scream, brought neighbors to their windows. I was even louder than the wind.
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