My Brother's Keeper (10 page)

“Pizza sounds good,” I say.

She calls in the order then goes upstairs to take a shower. The Domino’s delivery guy rings the doorbell while she’s drying her hair.

“Toby?” she calls out from upstairs. “Reach inside my tip jar and grab some money, will you?”

I take the jar down off the top of the refrigerator and count out $7.12.

“Ma,” I call up to her. “There’s not enough.”

The Domino’s guy gives me a suspicious look and clutches his insulated red delivery pouch to his side. I’m standing there feeling like a criminal when I remember that there’s only $7.12 in the jar because Jake took the rest.

“Count it again,” my mom calls out. “I know I put a twenty in there.”

I give the Domino’s guy a just-a-minute look, then I dig around in my pocket for the money I earned at Mr. D’s other day. I give him enough for the pizza plus a tip in mostly nickels, which you can tell he doesn’t especially appreciate.

My mom comes downstairs and we sit down to eat, finally, and the phone rings. She grabs the receiver, then stands there letting it ring one more time before she picks it up. “I don’t want to look like I was waiting for him,” she says.

“No,” she says into the receiver. “You’re not interrupting.” Then she tucks the phone under her chin, goes up to her room, and closes the door.

“Must be His Heinie,” says Eli, who’s wearing the Pokey Reese T-shirt “Stanley” bought him.

“It was funny the first thousand times, Eli,” I say.

Eli looks at me, then opens his mouth as wide as he can so I can see his predigested pizza.

We sit there chewing, not saying anything for a couple of minutes. “Where’s Jake?” Eli says after a while.

I smack my lips and rub my stomach, like I’ve just eaten him.

Eli rolls his eyes. “It’s only funny when Jake does it,” he says.

Our mom comes down wearing a dress and perfume.

“Where’s Jake?” she says.

I shrug.

“Okay, Toby, you’re in charge till he gets home,” she says. “Make sure Eli does his homework.”

Then she’s gone, and Eli goes up to do his homework. Which is sort of good, because I don’t have to bug him about it, but which is also sort of bad since, to tell you the truth, I could’ve gone for a game of Nintendo right about then.

A
fter Eli falls asleep, I sit at the front door playing the headlight game. The nobodies have twelve points when a car pulls up and drops Jake off. He weaves up the path then stops like he’s forgotten where he was going. I open the door, and he takes a step toward me, then trips, grabbing the air for something to hold on to.

I reach for him. His chin crashes into my shoulder as he grabs hold of my arms. Then he starts slipping toward the ground, and for a minute, I think we’re both going to fall down. I yank him up from under his arms, and he grabs hold of me like we’re practically hugging, and I drag him into the house. I brace myself with my back foot so I can get my balance, and then lean Jake up against the wall. I let go for a second, and he starts slipping toward the floor, knocking my mom’s flower wreath off the wall.

I try to get a good look at his face, thinking he’ll laugh, like knocking the wreath on the floor is the funniest thing in the world. But he doesn’t laugh; he doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even notice. Because he’s there but not really
there.
And you can tell from the look in his eyes, he’s not coming back soon, either.

By the time our mom gets home, Jake’s in bed and—in between getting up and putting my hand under his nose to make sure he’s still breathing—I’m lying in my bunk looking at the Stargell. My mom comes in and kisses me on the head, then stretches up on her toes to check on Jake.

The car alarm starts blaring in my head. I want to tell her everything: about Jake not trying out for baseball, about driving around with Andy Timmons and almost getting killed by a bread truck, and about Mr. Miller and Coach Gillis saying things that make it sound like even they know what’s going on.

Instead, I say that Jake wasn’t feeling too good.

She puts her hand on his forehead, says “Hmrnm,” then turns out the light and leaves.

T
he next morning after breakfast, I see Jake in the bathroom squirting Visine in his eyes. He blinks in my general direction a couple of times and I stop in the hall like I have something important to say. Something about last night, like how I’m not gonna cover up for him anymore. But he looks like he feels so rotten, that I can’t.

“Wanna come to my game this afternoon?” I say.

He just stares at me.

“It’s a home game,” I say.

He shakes his head. “I don’t think so, Toby.”

He walks past, socks me in the arm, and then calls out to me from our room. “Here,” he says. “Wear this for luck.”

He throws me his lucky baseball jersey from the division championships. Even though I’m a total sucker for that sort of sentimental baseball stuff, it doesn’t make me feel at all elated or even grateful. But I still say thanks.

I
wear the jersey that day. Not because I’m the Miss Manners of baseball or anything, but because I figure it might be bad luck not to. Which means I have to wait around while the assistant-assistant coach scribbles out my old number on the clipboard and everyone else goes out on the field to warm up, which means I have a minute to check the stands and see
if
maybe Jake came after all.

Which is when I see Andy Timmons’s car screeching through the parking lot, with Jake in the driver’s seat. Jake, who doesn’t even have a license. He swerves, then slams on the brakes, just barely missing a bunch of chess geeks. One kid spills all his chess pieces on the pavement. Jake yells something at him, then he speeds off, and I trudge out to Outer Mongolia trying to look like I didn’t see what everybody just saw.

I sit on the bench for the whole game until the bottom of the eighth, when Sean, the usual catcher, keeps messing up and Coach Gillis subs me in. I put the catcher’s gear on in a hurry, wondering if a person having a heart attack at age thirteen would set some kind of Guinness World Record. I snap the face mask down and pray that Jake’s jersey brings me luck after all.

The first pitch rolls between my legs. The second one sails over my head. And the third one pops out of my glove. I scrabble around in the dirt on my hands and knees, trying to find the ball and wishing for an earthquake or at least a hailstorm or some other act of God to put me out of my misery. Then when I finally find it, I throw it back to the pitcher, winging it so far off to his right that the shortstop has to toss it back to him.

I get back into position and prepare to die a long, agonizing death of embarrassment. Then the ball is whizzing toward me again. There’s a tinny sound as the batter smacks the ball. I can see the ball arcing off into the air directly overhead. I throw my mask off, take a step forward, then a step back, then make a dive for it. I end up on my knees in a cloud of dust, staring at the ball in my mitt and wondering if I’m having a stress-induced hallucination.

But people seem to be cheering. Then I see the batter kick the dust and walk back to the bench. I still don’t move, though, until the ump comes over and tells me that I need to throw the ball back to the pitcher so we can continue the game. At which point I wonder if a person can die of relief.

Which I don’t. I just catch. I don’t drop the ball, I don’t miss it, I just catch, like I’m in a zone where it’s just me and the pitcher playing catch. And then the inning’s somehow over.

Before I can even recover from my near-death catching experience, I’m up at bat. I take a swing at the first pitch and then watch it cross the plate while my bat slices through the empty air. I swear not to do that again. Then I do it again. The pitcher winds up again and the ball comes hurtling toward me. Then I’m watching the bat connect, then watching the ball fly back across the field, then watching my legs pump as I run toward first. In my peripheral vision, I also see the shortstop miss the ball, and I keep running, rounding first, then taking second. When it’s all over, I’m standing there panting and thinking that if I do die, at least the school paper will say that it was after I got a hit.

The next two batters strike out and Badowski hits a pop fly, so the game is over and my double didn’t really count for anything. But at least Coach Gillis comes up and gives me a “good game” smack on the back.

Then he sort of does a double take at my jersey, like he’s just realizing that it’s the one he let Jake keep after last year’s championships. He shakes his head and walks away.

O
n the bus on the way home, I’m sitting there wondering how a person can have a good game and still feel so rotten, when Arthur reaches over and gives me a Little Debbie.

“Good game,” he says, nudging me in the ribs.

I just nod.

He tugs on my jersey.

“Is this Jake’s old jersey?”

I sort of nod.

“What’s with your brother, anyhow?”

“What do you mean, what’s
with
him?” I say.

“I don’t know,” Arthur says.
“You’re
his brother.”

I shrug.

“I heard he got in-house suspension for cutting class,” he says.

“I know,” I say, even though up till now I didn’t.

“He hangs out with Andy Timmons all the time now.”

“So?”

“He’s different. That’s all.”

“So?”

Arthur looks at me like I’m dangerous or something. Like all of a sudden I might go postal, which makes me
feel
sort of like I might go postal—which is not something I want to do, especially to the person who gives me his Little Debbies every day and who’s been my best friend since fourth grade.

But which doesn’t mean he’s the kind of person you can talk to about things like your brother turning into someone who comes in at 1:16 all the time. Or about your mom turning into someone who doesn’t notice, because she’s always on a date with the Food King. Or about how you’ve turned into someone who’s always lying and covering up about your brother coming in at 1:16. And about how you wonder if what you’re doing is making things better, or just making them worse.

At which point I give him back the Little Debbie and tell him I’m not really hungry after all.

T
hat night after dinner, I kick Jake’s chair when I get up to put my plate in the dishwasher.

“What’s your problem?” he says.

Normally, when one person says “What’s your problem?” the other one says
“You’re
my problem.” After that, either person has the right to punch, head-lock, or pinch the other one, which pretty much always leads to a full-fledged wrestling match. Which pretty much always makes both people feel better.

“You’re
my problem,” I say.

I wait for him to punch, headlock, or pinch me. But he just stares at me.

“So deal with it,” he says.

W
hich I do. I get up from the table, go upstairs, open his dresser, and pull out the plastic bag. Then I walk into the bathroom, turn the bag upside down, and dump everything in the toilet. I flush twice just to be safe. I’m back at the table in time for dessert.

L
ater, after our mom leaves on another date with the Food King, Jake comes in our room and starts rummaging through his bottom drawer.

“It’s not there.” I say this like it’s something that just happened, not something I had anything to do with.

He gets down on his hands and knees like a dog and throws everything out of the drawer. Then he smiles at me like he figures I’m playing a joke on him. “Okay, Toby,” he says. “Where is it?”

I smack my lips and rub my belly.

“Seriously,” he says. “Where is it?”

I put my hand on the doorknob.

“I threw it away,” I say.

“Are you serious?”

I don’t say yes or no. Which means yes.

I start to walk out. Then I turn around and look at him.

“What’re you gonna
do?”
I say. “Tell Mom?”

A
fter which I go downstairs and turn on the TV. A couple of minutes later, I hear the front door close. I look out the window and see Jake running across the parking lot.

So I do the only other thing a person can do at a time like this. I go upstairs and pull my card collection down from the shelf and open it up to the page where the Stargell is. Usually it sort of falls open to that page because I look at it so much.

Except that it isn’t there.

Bill Matlock is there and Tim Foli and Phil Garner and the other guys from the ‘79 World Series team, but right in the middle, where Willie Stargell’s hopeful young rookie face is supposed to be, is blank.

I flip back and forth thinking maybe I accidentally moved it, but I know, the way you just know some things, that it’s gone.

A fast-moving sweat spreads all over me, like when you go from cold to hot in a split second right before you throw up. But I don’t throw up.

I just sit there and stare at the not-there-ness of the Stargell.

I don’t know how long I’ve been staring at the empty page, when Eli comes in and taps me on the shoulder.

“Toby,” he says. “Mr. Furry’s missing again.”

I don’t say anything.

“What if he went over to the highway?”

“So?”

“So, it’s a death trap.”

All at once I feel as mean and rotten and hateful as a person can feel. “So,” I say, “maybe he’ll get killed.”

Eli’s mouth drops open. He takes a step back from me. Then he runs out of the room.

I
still don’t move. I feel like I’m standing far away from my actual self—watching myself be mean and rotten and hateful and not even caring that I don’t care. Finally, after a long time, I get up and go downstairs. I don’t know what I’m expecting exactly. I just go downstairs. I look around for Eli but there’s no sign of him. I go in the kitchen, wander around, then go back to the den and flop down on the couch.

I wait for Eli to come in and fight over the remote. But he doesn’t.

“Eli?” I call out.

There’s no answer.

I get up and look around to see if he’s hiding behind a chair or under the kitchen table like he does sometimes. But he’s not there.