He was neither awake nor asleep. A mostly empty whiskey bottle lay at his feet. If he heard the sound of the door opening and Pup’s muffled footsteps on the rug, he gave no indication. If he saw Pup standing before him with a phone in one hand and a sad-looking lime in the other, he did not react. Pup circled Luke for a moment, like a diver approaching a new and dangerous species. He didn’t want to loom, didn’t want to startle. He squatted on his haunches, level with Luke’s knees, so that if his brother woke up suddenly and took a swing, he would catch air.
“Hey,” Pup said in a low voice. “Luke.”
The eyes fluttered for a moment, but Luke did not answer.
“Luke.” Pup reached out and shook a knee. His brother’s jeans were slippery with grease and cold to the touch.
The eyes fluttered again, and creaked open. They rested on Pup without seeming to see him.
“Luke,” Pup said. “It’s me.”
He opened his mouth. His lips, dry and cracked and whitish with dead skin, pulled apart so that he could speak.
“Leave,” he croaked.
Then he closed his eyes.
Pup jiggled a knee again, without any response. But he hadn’t shared a bedroom with Luke his whole life for nothing. He knew by the consciously unmoving way Luke held his body that he was awake now, and that he was only pretending not to be.
“I’m not leaving unless you come with me,” Pup said.
No response.
“I’ll carry you out of here over my shoulder if I have to.”
That did the trick—Luke’s dry white lips cracked themselves into a half smile at the idea of his skinny, noodle-armed little brother heaving two hundred and twenty pounds of booze-soddened limbs up that massive flight of stairs.
“So this is where you’ve been staying,” Pup said.
Luke smiled again. His eyes were still closed. “Nice digs, huh?”
“Luke, just come with me. Please. Just come home.”
“Home?” Luke leaned down slowly, like a very old man. “Home is here, at least until I finish this whiskey. Or until my egg timer dings and I have to buy another. Ms. Mayor up there.” He reached around for his bottle, and Pup quietly pushed it out of his arm’s reach with his toe. “She runs a tight ship.”
“Mom’s not even mad anymore,” said Pup. “I swear. You were barely out the door before she’d forgiven you.”
“Leave.” Luke’s eyes had snapped open suddenly, and they were blazing blue, feverish, but strangely clear. They weren’t so much the eyes of a drunk as the eyes of a person who’d been crushed by some unspeakable sadness.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No. Not without you.” He tossed the lime into Luke’s splayed lap. “There’s about twelve hours’ worth of limes up there rotting in the bowl at the cash register and I’m gonna buy all of them, one by one, if that’s how long it takes to convince you to come home with me.”
“Fine.” Luke got to his feet slowly, the lime rolling off his lap and settling into some dingy corner. “Then I’ll leave.” He fumbled around in his pockets and pulled out his car keys.
“Don’t you dare,” Pup said. His voice was rising. One of the sleeping drunks on the far bed had awoken, rolled over, and was watching the two brothers from the mattress, his eyes gleaming like an animal’s. “Don’t you even dare. You’ll kill someone.”
“Good,” said Luke. His eyes were yellow-cast, bloodshot, and very, very far away. “Maybe it’ll be me.”
He lurched toward the door.
Pup grabbed him by the shirtsleeve, twisting it up into his fist. “You leave, I’ll call the cops. I’ll report you.”
“I bet you’d like that.” Luke’s face was very close to Pup’s, the bottom half of it obscured by the thick black growth of a beard, and his unbrushed teeth were filmed over with yellowish gunk. “You. Mom. Dad. Our sisters. Carrie. Everybody. Not one of you even knows the worst things I’ve done. Not one of you. But still you’d love to see me locked up, wouldn’t you?”
“You’re goddamn right I would!” Pup yanked Luke closer by his shirt, twisting it around his fist so tightly his knuckles went white. He didn’t even care that he was crying. “I’d lock you up forever before I let you die!”
Luke tried to shake him off, something he could have done easily under normal circumstances, but Pup’s grip was strengthened by sheer fury, and Luke’s had been weakened by his bender. They stood there for a moment, grappling with each other, as Pup reached again and again for the keys. Luke got a foot between Pup’s legs, taking advantage of his little brother’s innate clumsiness, and in an instant Pup was tripping forward, still clinging to Luke’s shirt. He heard a terrific rip as the fabric tore down the front and then Pup was falling, holding nothing but a torn strip of cloth, and as he went down his face caught the sharp glass corner of the coffee table. A sudden avalanche of pain rocketed through his head, and he felt a hot spill of blood ooze from the torn skin at his temple. He tried to pull himself to his feet, feeling gummy and light-headed, but it was too late. He heard the slam of a door, the dull, uneven thud of drunken steps up the concrete stairs. He staggered forward, wiping the blood from his eyes, and threw open the door. With the pain whoomping and contracting in his skull, running up the stairs was like trying to run up an undulating rope bridge; he had to keep stopping to catch his balance, and by the time he’d made it to the top and run through the maze of bottles in the liquor store and passed the enormous woman with the gun and the raw-turkey skin and made it outside onto the sidewalk and into the alley, Luke was already gunning the engine. Pup could only watch as Luke jerked the Jeep into reverse, slamming into the dumpster behind him as a river of startled rats darted out in all directions. Then he veered crazily into the street and turned around the corner and out of sight.
Standing in the middle of the alley, Pup took a shaky breath, wiped the blood from his eyes again, and pulled out his phone. His finger smeared red across his screen as he tapped in the number with trembling fingers.
“911,” the operator said. “What is your emergency?”
By the time he’d reached the bus stop, he could already hear the sirens.
33
PUP WAS TOO AGITATED AND AFRAID to stand still and wait for the bus, so he found himself half jogging, half sprinting the two miles to Sal and Annemarie’s apartment. By the time he arrived he was dripping with sweat, his hair looking like he’d stuck his finger in an electric socket. The two women were waiting for him on the front steps.
“I’m so glad you called me,” Annemarie said, meeting him on the sidewalk to grab him in a fierce hug. “You did the right thing.”
Inside, Sal dabbed at his gash with a warm cloth, then covered it with a square of gauze and a Band-Aid while Annemarie made him a ham sandwich and poured him a tall glass of iced tea. Then they sat with him at the kitchen table and watched him eat. When he was finished, pressing the crumbs with his finger, he told them about his day: Judy Flanagan in her pantsuit waiting for Luke to come home for his graduation. Pup’s journey into the bowels of Mayor’s Packaged Liquors and Tap. The empty whiskey bottle, the fight, the 911 call. He didn’t tell them how he had known where to find Luke, though. He didn’t tell them about breathing Patrick’s hat over his face, how it had triggered a memory-dream. That part was too private, and anyway, logical, practical Annemarie would probably never have believed it.
“You did the right thing,” Annemarie repeated.
“What you did took real guts, Pup,” Sal added. “You should feel proud.”
“I don’t feel proud,” Pup said. “I feel like shit.”
“Most hard decisions in your life leave you feeling like shit in one way or another.”
“Now what do we do?”
“We wait,” said Annemarie. “Someone’s going to have to bail him out. He’s not going to call any of the oldest sisters. He’s not going to call Mom and Dad. He’s not going to call Carrie, and he’s not going to call you.” She tapped a f
inger on her phone screen. “All that leaves is me.”
“But how do we even know he got arrested? Those sirens might not have been the police. They could have been an ambulance. What if he . . .” Pup couldn’t bring himself to speak the thought that had been mushrooming in his head during his run to Annemarie’s place. A fender bender had become a T-bone crash had become a crumple of hot metal against a brick wall. Massive internal injuries. Grave, profound, catastrophic injuries.
“If it will make you feel better,” said Annemarie, “I’ll call Mary. She’s working the ambulance tonight. She can tell us if something came over the radio.”
“Why don’t I call her?” Sal said gently. “You two stay here and talk.”
Annemarie nodded as Sal picked the phone up off the table, squeezed Pup’s shoulder, and went into the bedroom to make the call.
“He failed out of law school,” Pup said as soon as Sal shut the door behind her. “Last year. He’s only been pretending to go to his classes and his study groups. He’s mostly just been drinking. Did you know that?”
“No,” Annemarie said. She picked up Pup’s empty plate and brought it to the sink. “I didn’t. But now I know why Jeanine’s been blowing up my phone all day.”
“Patrick died a month after Luke started law school. He still managed to survive that year, and with an A average, too. So what changed? What happened?”
“I don’t know if anything happened, necessarily.” Annemarie ran the plate under hot water and stared out the window into the neighbors’ kitchen across the courtyard. “Grief isn’t the same for everyone, Pup. Some people just can’t move on.”
“And some people can’t move on fast enough.” His voice was neutral, but as soon as the words came out of his mouth she whirled around, dropping his plate in the sink with a clatter.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
Pup shrugged. “Nothing.”
“Oh, no. You don’t get to ‘nothing’ me, kid. You’re gonna make an accusation, you better be prepared to back it up with evidence.”
“Fine. You want evidence? How about the time you and Sal gave away all of Patrick’s stuff when he was barely dead in the ground?”
“We didn’t give away his stuff. We donated his textbooks to an organization that needed them. Hoping that some tiny shred of good might come out of something that was so irredeemably horrible.”
“You could have waited.”
“For what, Pup? For him to come back to life and finish out his degree?”
“See?” Pup shouted. “Even now, you’re being, like, sarcastic. But you’re just as bad as Mom and Dad. You never even talk about him. Never! And you hate Luke for being an alcoholic . . . but you know what? At least the fact that he’s turned into a drunk lunatic proves that someone in this family is as messed up as I am about Patrick. It proves that someone else cares!”
“You think I don’t care?” Annemarie looked at him, her voice breaking. “You think I’m not messed up about it? How could I not be, Pup? Patrick was my little brother, and I . . .” She stepped toward him, raising her hand. For a moment he thought she was going to hit him. Instead, she slid her fingers down her own face, brushing against the tiny purplish lines that squiggled along her cheeks.
“Do you know what these are?”
“They’re broken blood vessels,” he said. “Dad has them too.”
“Dad has them because he’s old. You know why I have them?” Tears were standing in Annemarie’s eyes. She let her fingers fall away from her face. “I got these from hurting myself. Slapping myself, to be specific. So hard and so much that I burst the blood vessels beneath my skin.”
Pup sat at the table and gaped. He felt sick.
“After Patrick died, I was in such darkness, Pup. I started to get this feeling that I was dead too, that I was stuck in some in-between place that wasn’t quite hell but that also wasn’t—that couldn’t be—my real life. So I’d go into the bathroom and I’d stand before the mirror and I’d smack myself, over and over, until I felt like I’d woken the fuck up, until I’d hurt myself so much I’d convinced myself that I was still alive, that it was my real life. That Patrick was dead and he was never coming back, so now I had two choices: either give in to the darkness, or gather every ounce of strength I had and move the fuck on. And guess which one I chose?”
They regarded each other there in the kitchen, neither of them moving, neither of them breathing. The tears that stood in Annemarie’s eyes began to streak down her face.
“Guys?” The door creaked open. Annemarie turned away toward the sink, hiding her face as Sal poked her head out into the kitchen. “I’ve got Mary on the line. Police pulled him over maybe half an hour ago. Arrested him without incident.”
Pup felt his knees buckling with relief.
“She wants to talk to you, Pup. She’s going nuts. Wants to know what the hell’s going on.”
Annemarie turned back to face them. She’d wiped her tears away. She took the phone from Sal’s outstretched hand. “I’ll handle this,” she said. “Pup, you just relax. Finish your iced tea. Have a shower if you want. The bed’s all made up for you in the guest room. After I get off with Mary, I’ll call Mom. I’ll let her know you’re staying here tonight. Okay?”
“What are you going to tell her about Luke?”
“I don’t know.” She went into the bedroom and put her hand on the door.
“Annemarie?”
“Yeah?”
“Tell her the truth.”
She nodded, once, then closed the door softly behind her.
Sal put a plate of cookies in front of him, refilled his iced tea, and disappeared out the sliding glass balcony doors to give him some privacy. She was good like that—it was one of the reasons she got along with Annemarie so well. Pup ate the cookies and finished his tea. Then, too tired to wash the stink of Mayor’s Tippling Lounge off his body, he went into the guest room, peeled off his sweat-streaked clothes, and climbed beneath the covers. Touching the tender place at the side of his head, he took out his phone and placed it beside him on the pillow.
Abrihet, he wrote.
A minute later, she responded:
James.
His mind rushed with words, with all the things he wanted to tell her about Luke, about what had happened that day, about what had been happening for years even though they’d all tried so hard not to see it. But he was too exhausted. Too exhausted and too sad.
Good night, he finally wrote.
And only when she wrote back a few minutes later: Good night, could he allow the exhaustion to wash over him into another night of dreamless, fitful sleep.
34
MANY HOURS LATER, Pup awoke to a soft knocking on his bedroom door.
“Yeah,” he mumbled. His mouth was dry and his forehead thrummed with a dull headache. He lifted his fingers to the Band-Aid at the side of his head and felt the flaking crust of dried blood.
“Good morning,” Sal called from the other side of the door. “Eggs?”
Pup pulled on the clothes he’d tossed to the side of the bed the night before and stepped out into the kitchen. Sal had opened the glass balcony doors to let in the warm air of the morning and the room was bright and clean and sunny. Pup sat down at the kitchen table as she placed a glass of orange juice and two aspirin in front of him, and now she bustled around the kitchen busily, frying eggs and turning slices of organic bacon with a silver pair of tongs.
“Is Annemarie at work?”
“No.” Sal slid the eggs and bacon in front of him, then sat across from him with her mug of coffee. “She went to go deal with your brother. He called her just before dawn.”
“What happened?”
“Well, they charged him with aggravated DUI, and he’s got a court date next week. She bonded him out and took him to the emergency room. They’re there now. When you’re done eating, I can drive you home, and then I’ll go meet them there.”
“The emergency room,” Pup repeated.
“Don’t panic. He’s going to be fine. He’s just been pretty hard on his body the last few weeks, and Annemarie wants him to get checked out. Assuming he gets the all-clear, she’ll bring him back here, make him eat something, put him to bed. And tomorrow? That’s when we start having the tough conversations that your family—no offense—is so good at avoiding.”
“Does he hate me?” Pup squinted down into his eggs, bracing himself for her answer. Sal wasn’t a Flanagan, and he knew she would give it to him straight. She had grown up in a normal, modern family, with a golden retriever, high-speed internet, and a socially acceptable number of siblings. A family where people didn’t deal with the bad stuff by pretending it didn’t exist.
“No, Pup. He doesn’t hate you.” Sal’s voice faltered for just a moment as she reached across the table to grab his hand. “If anything, he loves you best of all.”
35
WHEN PUP GOT HOME, his mother was waiting for him in the same place on the couch where he’d left her the day before. She had changed out of her pantsuit and washed the makeup off her face. The curls she’d set in hot rollers for Luke’s graduation were starting to wilt around her shoulders.
“You found him, Pup.” She pushed herself to her feet using her good arm. “I knew you would. I knew that only you could.”
Pup nodded. “I guess Annemarie told you where he was.”
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