The Half Brother
Authors: Holly Lecraw
Tags: #Fiction, #Contemporary Women, #Family Life, #Sagas
Also by Holly LeCraw
The Swimming Pool
This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2015 by Holly LeCraw
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Doubleday, a division of Random House LLC, New York, a Penguin Random House company.
DOUBLEDAY and the portrayal of an anchor with a dolphin are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Jacket design by Jaya Miceli
Jacket images: (foreground) Doug Menuez / Photodisc / Getty Images; (background) Gregory Olsen / E+ / Getty Images
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
LeCraw, Holly.
The half brother : a novel / Holly LeCraw. — First edition.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-385-53195-5 (hardcover) — ISBN 978-0-385-53196-2 (eBook)
1. First loves—Fiction. 2. Brothers—Fiction. 3. Sibling rivalry—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3612.E337H35 2015
813′.6—dc23
2014027382
v3.1
for my parents and my brother
first teachers
Contents
I learned to walk into a classroom wondering what I would say, rather than knowing what I would say. Then I learned by hearing myself speak; the source of my speaking was our mysterious harmony with truths we know, though very often our knowledge of them is hidden from us.
—Andre Dubus
Love bade me welcome: yet my soul drew back,
Guiltie of dust and sinne.
—George Herbert
One
Mid-August. On the quad, the only sound is a far-off angry machine, a leaf blower, somewhere in the vicinity of the library. Otherwise I’d say I have the whole place to myself, except for the bees. They’re delirious in the heat, in the flowering shrubs and trees, buried head-first, ecstatic. As I walk by a seven-foot-tall rose of Sharon I hear their intoxicated hum and realize the whole little tree is vibrating, throbbing with them.
Summer here in the North still surprises me. The heat, when it finally comes, is heavy and thorough, and must be appreciated while it lasts, which the bees know. I walk slowly up one of the diagonal paths. I could stop right here, lie down in the hot green grass; do a dance; get naked. Of course there’s sure to be someone in the quiet buildings, behind a window closed for the AC, someone who’d look down and see Charlie Garrett pulling a nutter—but if I had to lay money, this very moment, I’d bet no. I’d bet I was all alone.
Into the cloister. Or cloister-let. Ah, the Anglophile benefactors of the Abbott School! My shoes whisper against the flagstones. The air is suddenly chilled, almost wet. There are stone benches along the walls, and ahead, the heavy wood of the chapel’s side door, closed today. And, just before that door, a girl—or rather a girl’s legs, long brown legs stretched out, and I know them. Most definitely, I know them. “Miss Bankhead,” I say.
I call her that automatically, without irony, although there’s no need for formality anymore. May Bankhead is twenty now, no longer my student; I’m twenty-nine; I can be her peer. In the letters we used to write, during her first two years of college, we’d been edging toward that equality, but I haven’t heard from her in months. “Hi, there!” she says.
“Mr. Garrett.”
Quicker than I. Of course.
“You look so cool,” I say. “You always look so cool.”
She smiles, a private smile. Otherwise she doesn’t move, but she gives the impression not of complete stillness but of an almost imperceptible undulation, as though she were an underwater plant.
“I’m ruining your solitude,” I say.
She shakes her head, dreamily. “I love it here in the summer,” she says. “I love the silence.” At that exact moment the leaf blower revs again, and we laugh, and whatever spell was on her is broken. “Aren’t you going to sit down?” May says, and scoots over a little on the bench.
I sit down and now we are spectators together, looking out at the empty green. “So you come here too?” she says. “To indulge your monkish fantasies?”
“What, do you have nun fantasies?” I say. Her incongruous dimple appears. Normally, she looks rather serious. “Well then.”
“I come here and pretend I’m a stranger. Trespassing. I lurk around.”
“Well, that’s … interesting.”
“It’s nice,” May says. “I’ve never been anonymous here.” May’s a fac brat, daughter of the chaplain. She’s lived here all her life.
“So you must be looking forward to Paris.”
She gives me a quick, penetrating glance. “Exactly. You knew about that?”
“I hear things.” And I wonder, for the dozenth time, if the letters dribbled away because she’s got a boyfriend. “You’re going for the whole year?”
“Yes.” She sounds proud.
“Will you come home for Christmas?”
“No, Mom’s coming over.”
“That’ll be nice.”
“Possibly.”
I almost say,
You’ll be gone a long time
—but she’s already gone. Her returns from college to Abbottsford, and her father and his moods and
that otherwise empty house, are a slender thread to hang anything on; my disappointment is deep down, familiar, almost invisible. For the moment, it is even easy to believe that it’s the same thing I feel whenever an alum turns up without warning, a kid I was fond of but have, without meaning to, forgotten: discomfort at the reminder that my eternal present, filled with eternal teenagers, is an illusion. (Although the cycle still has some novelty. The alums don’t yet feel like ambassadors from another country, the country of my youth.)
The leaf blower whines up one last time with that ruthless insistence, corralling whatever detritus it has managed to find in August, and then stops. We are poised for its beginning again, closer to us, maybe; but a minute passes, two. The quiet gradually takes hold but we stay alert, scanning the empty quad. It’s as though we’re waiting for an exotic animal to pad into view, or an enormous bird, in a brilliant swirl of plumage. Some interruption, or prize.
“Where have you been?” she says abruptly. “I’ve been home a whole month. I thought I’d see you.”
The nauseating depth of my disappointment surprises even me. A month! Wasted! A month where she was just waiting to bump into me! “I was home,” I say. “In Atlanta. With my mother and brother.”
“What did you do?”
“Hung out. Taught him to drive.” Pretended I still live there. Assuaged my guilt.
“To drive? How old is he?”
“He just turned sixteen,” I say. “He’s my half brother.”
“Oh.” There’s a slight awkwardness at this hint of how little we know of each other—how little she knows of me. “Is he a good driver?”
“He’s awful,” I say. “He gets distracted. By things that strike him as wonderful. My brother is frequently amazed.”
“That’s sort of cute.”
“He’s sort of cute,” I say. Which is a ridiculous understatement. My half brother, Nicky, tall and auburn haired like our mother, turns heads on the street. He has a profile like a prince’s on a coin.
“You’re a good brother,” May says. “To spend all that time.”
“If I were a good brother, I’d live there. I guess.”
“But you live here,” May says, shrugging, as though I were as native
to Abbottsford, Massachusetts, as a toadstool that has sprung up in the night. “People leave home.” She shrugs again. “As a matter of fact, I’m on my farewell-Abbottsford tour right now.”
That plunging stomach again. “What, you’re never coming back?”
“Who knows? I don’t know why I would,” she says. “Anyway, I’ve done the town. I’ve done school. I’ve been sitting here for an hour.” She’s suddenly languid, older. She uncrosses, recrosses her legs, and I almost expect her to lift a cigarette to her lips. “All that’s left is to go to the pond. But I’ll have to do that later. Daddy has the car.”
“I could take you,” I say.
“You have your car here?”
“Well, I didn’t walk,” I say.
“I thought you lived with the Middletons.”
Those are my old landlords, who used to own a two-family, just off campus. “They moved,” I say. “When Booker got the promotion. They live on campus now—didn’t you know? In the Averys’ old house. And I bought a house of my own. Outside town.”
“Daddy never tells me anything,” she says. “So you’re all by yourself?”
“I like it,” I say, shrugging, and this is not a lie, not at all; but as I say it I also realize that I believe my solitude will be temporary. That I’m poised on the brink of something else.
SOON WE’RE WALKING DOWN
the trail to Abbott Pond. From here, we could walk to my house, which I don’t mention. I might later, when I can point through the trees in the exact direction. But I might not. May’s cheeriness has taken on a determined edge, and its meaning is clear to me: she really did want to be alone. I’ve ruined a ritual. I’m mortified that she agreed for me to come out of mere politeness.
It’s past noon now and hotter, even in the shade of the trees. Cicadas sing shrilly, up to that pitch of emergency, and stop, and start again. May is ahead of me on the path. Her hair was up in a messy knot earlier, but now it’s come down; it’s the longest I’ve ever seen it. It swings and shines. She seems to be tramping along to some rhythm.
She told me she’s traveling around Europe before school begins. I
was taken to Europe by my mother and my stepfather, Hugh, when they were newly married, and I’m remembering myself there, age twelve, sensing some beckoning clarity of experience and freedom, but pretzeled by puberty, timidity, indecision. The sheer
foreignness
. And then replacing that boy with this May, striding forward, grabbing at the world—oh, she will burst across that chasm, away from me and my kind, and go glimmering.
I hear, “The
woods
are
love
ly,
dark
and
deep
.” I haven’t seen her like this, so careless and open. She’s put her arms up above her head and as she walks she taps the low-hanging whippy branches. They sway in her wake. “And
miles
to
go
be
fore
I
sleep
.” She’s trying to take in as much of the forest as she can.