Half Brother (2 page)

A colourful mobile hung above the empty crib.

I was still in my sleeping bag flipping through
Popular Mechanics
when I heard the sound of a big truck pulling up outside the house, then honking as it backed down our driveway. I ran to my window just to make sure it was really the movers, then out into the hallway in my pyjamas. “Our stuff!” I hollered.

Dad staggered out in his boxers. “The truck’s here?” “Yeah!” I was thinking:
My camera equipment, my records, my bed.

Dad lurched back into his bedroom and pulled on some pants and a T-shirt. I did the same, and then we were both running down the stairs, throwing open the front door, and rushing out to greet the movers. They already had the back of the truck open and the ramp down.

We didn’t bother with breakfast. We were too busy telling the guys where our stuff should go. I was watching for my boxes. It seemed like forever since I’d helped pack up my room in Toronto. The guys worked pretty fast, and I was amazed how quickly our entire life was moving from the truck into the new house.

After a few hours they were done with most of the big stuff and were working on the rest of the boxes. I was unpacking in my room. I’d been worried about my photo enlarger and records, but nothing was broken. And I’d have a bed for my birthday after all! Better still, the movers would be gone in an hour or so, and Dad and I would definitely have time for a swim, and dinner at the pizza place.

Outside, a car horn gave a couple of honks. I went to the window and saw a taxi pulled up behind the moving van. The driver was taking a suitcase out of the trunk, and then he came around and opened the back door. Inside was Mom.

“Dad!” I yelled. “Mom’s home!”

“What?” I heard him call out in surprise.

I ran downstairs and outside. Mom was walking towards me, beaming. In her arms was a little bundle of blankets. I’d been missing her, but I hadn’t realized just how much until I saw her. With her free hand she pulled me close.

“Ben,” she said, kissing the top of my head. “Happy birthday, sweetie.”

“Thanks.” Dad hadn’t even mentioned it yet.

“You’re early!” Dad said, striding out of the house and kissing her.

“They thought he was ready, so I got an earlier flight,” Mom said. “I left a message at the department, but I guess you didn’t get it.”

“I didn’t. Our phone’s not hooked up yet either. So how’s our little gentleman?” Dad asked.

Mom pulled back the blankets and there in her arms was a sleeping baby chimpanzee.

He was ugly. His tiny body fit in the crook of Mom’s arm, his head resting on three of her fingers. His skin was all wrinkly. His nose was squashed flat and his jaw stuck way out. Frizzy black hair covered his whole body, except for his face and fingers, chest and toes. He had long skinny arms. His short legs were pulled up, and his toes were so long they looked more like fingers. He wore a little white T-shirt and a
diaper and smelled like shampoo and Mom’s perfume. As we watched, he stirred and opened his eyes. They were brown and seemed huge in his small face. He stared at me and Dad, and then up at Mom, as if for reassurance. Mom held him closer.

“He was a little angel on the plane,” she said. “Not a peep, even when he was awake.”

“He’ll do just fine,” said Dad, smiling. “If he’s this agreeable all the time, we’ll have no problem with this little guy.”

I looked from Dad to Mom. They seemed really happy. And I suddenly wondered:
Was this how they brought me home when I was born? When Dad first set eyes on me, had he smiled, just like he was smiling now?

I looked at the chimp. He was the reason we’d come.

I’d moved all the way across the country so my parents could be with him.

So they could teach him how to talk.

Dad was a behavioural psychologist. That meant he studied the way people acted. Animals too. Dr. Richard Tomlin. In Toronto he taught at the university. A few years back, he did something clever with rats and published lots of articles, which led to invitations to other universities to show people what his rats could do. Everyone got very excited about it.

Then he got bored with rats and got interested in whether humans were the only animals who could learn language. Dad said there were some scientists in the 1930s who actually tried to teach chimps to speak, but it turned out chimps didn’t
have the right kind of tongue or larynx or something, so they couldn’t form human words.

But Dad knew how smart chimps were, and wanted to see if they could learn American Sign Language, just like deaf people.

So for the past couple of years he’d been asking the university to get him a chimp and fund the experiment. But even though Dad was a bit of a hotshot, and very good with rats, the university wasn’t so sure it was interested. I knew Dad had been getting frustrated because he talked a lot about how short-sighted the psychology department was, dragging its feet like this.

But then he got a job offer from the university out here in Victoria. Not only would they give him a big promotion and make him a full professor, but they’d get him a chimp. Dad said yes. I didn’t think he even asked Mom. He certainly didn’t ask me. He would’ve moved us to Tibet if they’d given him a chimp.

It turned out finding one wasn’t all that easy. You couldn’t just buy one at a pet store.
I’ll take the cute little one over there.
And it couldn’t be some scraggly old chimp from a zoo. Dad wanted a brand new chimpanzee. A fresh slate; that’s what he’d called it.

It took about six months. When he finally got the call, I could tell just from his voice that it was good news. After he hung up, I’d never seen him so excited.

“Borroway has a baby they don’t want!”

He’d talked about this place lots before. Borroway was an Air Force base in New Mexico. They had lots of chimps. In
the fifties and sixties they brought a whole bunch into the country to use them for the American space program. But that was twenty years ago, and now it seemed like they didn’t need as many. One of their adult females was about to have another baby and they didn’t want to take care of it.

It was perfect for Dad. He needed a baby chimp that could be taken away from its mother, days after birth.

He wanted a baby he could raise like a human.

We ordered in pizza that night, and ate it in the living room, on the orange shag carpet. We had our sofas now, but it seemed more relaxing—and kind of decadent—to sprawl out on the floor with our shoes and socks off, like hippies. Mom especially looked like a hippie, with her long hair, bell-bottoms, fringed vest, and the Native medallion hanging from a leather necklace.

Dad was pretty straitlaced. I’d seen some of the other professors in Toronto wear jeans, but Dad always liked a proper suit and tie for work. His hair was short. He didn’t go in for all this touchy-feely stuff; he preferred facts. Like Mom, though, he was good-looking, even though he was getting close to forty. They were certainly a lot younger than most of the other parents I knew, because they got married so early, when Dad was a grad student and Mom was still in undergrad. Mom was just twenty-one when she had me.

And now she had another baby.

I looked over at the little bassinet, where the baby chimp
was fast asleep, his tiny fingers twitching every now and then. I’d never even had a pet before. No cats or dogs in our house. Dad hated the idea of pets.

“What’re you going to call it?” I asked.

“Well,” said Mom, pouring herself some more red wine, “they’d already named him Chuck at the base, after Chuck Yeager.”

“The guy who broke the sound barrier?” I said. She nodded. “But I don’t think he looks much like a Chuck.” “The name’s not important,” Dad said. “He just needs one.” “Well,
I
think the name’s important,” said Mom. “How about naming him after where he came from?” “New Mexico?” I asked.

“No, the place he would’ve been born in the wild.”

“A bit sentimental, don’t you think?” said Dad. He hated sentimentality. He said it got in the way of the truth. It was the enemy of science. He wanted to strip it all away and show things and people as they really were. It was better that way, he said. Healthier and more honest.

“Congo,” said Mom.

I frowned, trying to remember my map of Africa. “Isn’t the country called something else now? Zaire?”

She nodded. “But the Congo’s also the river that runs through central Africa. There’s a theory that the river separated two different groups of chimps. And that’s why they evolved into different species.”

Dad shook his head. “Congo sounds a bit too much like Bonzo—the chimp in that awful Ronald Reagan movie. I don’t want the association.”

“How about Kong?” I suggested. It was sort of fun, thinking up names.

Mom chuckled. “King Kong? For this tiny little thing?” “Tarzan, then!” I said.

This time Dad laughed. “Keep in mind, I have to use this name in all the scientific papers. It’s a bit hard to take Tarzan seriously.”

“For someone who said the name didn’t matter, you’re being awfully picky!” Mom said, giving Dad a playful jab with her finger.

I thought some more. “Just the last bit, then. Zan!”

“I like it,” said Mom right away. “Does that meet with your approval, Richard?”

“Sounds like something out of
Star Trek,”
said Dad, “but sure, I can live with Zan.”

I wonder if can,
I thought, looking at the sleeping chimp.

Mom poured a little splash of wine into my empty cup.

“You’re old enough to have a sip,” she said. She raised her glass. “To our new teenager.”

We all clinked glasses and drank. It was probably the worst thing I’d ever tasted.

“Sorry we didn’t get you to the lake or the pizza place,” Dad said.

“It’s okay,” I lied. It had been a crazy day, with the movers and Mom arriving all at once, and getting the house in order, and making sure the chimpanzee had everything he needed. At least Dad had remembered to get me the bike—he’d been keeping it hidden in the garage. And it really was an excellent bike.

“Let me get you some more ginger ale,” Mom said, after I’d choked down another sip of wine.

She went to the kitchen and when she came back she was holding a birthday cake, thirteen candles lit up. She and Dad launched into “Happy Birthday to You.” Normally it made me kind of embarrassed when they sang, but this time I couldn’t help smiling, because I honestly hadn’t thought there’d be cake. Mom must have made a special trip earlier to get one.

I blew out the candles and made a wish. I wished that we’d be happy in our new home.

Then I looked over at baby Zan, all swaddled in his bassinet, and thought:

We are the weirdest family in the world.

O
ver the next few days Zan mostly slept, and Mom kept him in his little bassinet while we unpacked boxes and shifted furniture and put our books on the shelves. I could tell that Mom wasn’t thrilled with the house. She said things like: “Well, it’s no beauty, but it’s very spacious.” She liked the backyard (even if it was enclosed with a high chain-link fence) and the trees, and the farms all around.

I was pretty excited about setting up my new room with my posters and big floor cushions. Even better, the walk-in closet was big enough for a table to hold my enlarger and trays, so I had my own personal darkroom.

When Zan wasn’t sleeping he wanted to be held. He needed bottles every two hours. Mom carried him everywhere with her in one of those colorful African slings. She changed Zan’s
diapers and bathed him and dressed him—I didn’t think I’d ever seen her so happy.

“Would you like to hold him?” she sometimes asked me.

I shook my head. I didn’t want to touch him.

When Mom held Zan it looked completely natural; when Dad held him it never looked quite right, even when he made cooing sounds and rocked him. Usually Zan would start whimpering, and Dad would look at Mom and go, “Am I doing something wrong?” and she’d say, “No, no, he’s probably just hungry or wet. Let me see.” And Dad would hand him over, looking relieved.

I rode my bike a lot.

Dad spent most of the time on the university campus, getting his office ready, and preparing for the courses he had to teach in the fall. And Mom was busy taking care of Zan and, when he was asleep, working on her thesis. Unlike Dad, she still had to get her PhD, and to do that, she had to write a thesis—a really long book. She was going to write it on Zan, while running the research project with Dad.

My favourite time to go for a ride was in the evening right after supper, with the sun slanting through the tops of the trees and the shadows all long on the road. Toronto got so hot and humid in the summer sometimes, you just felt soaked stepping outside, no matter what time of day it was. Here, there always seemed to be a breeze, and in the mornings and
evenings, the air cooled down so you didn’t get hot or thirsty.

The road smelled like tar and dust and cut grass. It smelled like a promise. Whenever I passed a cluster of houses I’d slow down, hoping to see some other kids hanging out in the front yards. I guess I was hoping they’d wave me over and we’d all go tooling around on our bikes and buy Freezies at the local corner store. So far, no luck.

Not far from our house was a construction site and a big sign facing the road, showing what the houses in the new sub-divison would look like. Right now it was just big machines perched crookedly on piles of rubble and lots of concrete cylinders. One evening I thought I saw a couple kids moving around near the machinery, but it was dusk by then, and I didn’t feel like wandering out there.

So I headed for home. In the distance I saw the lights of the city, and felt a hunger to be down there, to be a part of that light. Back home in Toronto, Mom and Dad had just started letting me go downtown with my friends on the streetcar. I wondered how long it would be until I had someone to do that with here.

A few days ago, Mom had let me call up Will and Blake on the phone. It was good to hear their voices, but sometimes it got awkward and we didn’t know what to say. Sometimes the line was crackly and there were delays in our voices and it made them seem even farther away. I’d probably never see them again, thanks to Dad.