The Half Brother (12 page)

On the other end of the line my mother was quiet and then she said, “Preston is dying?”

Yes, melanoma, spread to the brain. Terrible, too young. I was still flying. Away from that house, my happiness was unfettered. But there was something—at the edge—“Why did you say ‘Preston’ like that?”

“You’re in love with Preston’s daughter?”

“Why do you know his name?”

“Preston has a
daughter
?”

“Yes! Yes!” The happiness again. I would sing it. Shout it. When this small trouble was settled.

“But you are Preston’s son,” my mother said. “You are his first son.”

I SAT AT THE FUNERAL.
With Win and Divya, not the Bankheads, which was understandable, I wasn’t wanted (oh no, not at all), that was now a relief, a blessing. I watched, in the front pew, that row of blond heads. At the end, one dark. May turned and looked at me, her eyes pits of need.

A hymn, tunefully British, saints going to tea. Laird reading scripture. Too many eulogies.

“I thought there was time,” my mother had said. And, “He didn’t deserve you.”

Avoiding her had been difficult. May. She had called and called. She drove to my house and I stayed hidden inside. Because I wanted her too much. Because I was afraid I wouldn’t tell her.

“I fell in love,” my mother said. “In a little town. Called St. Annes. He was in seminary.”

I didn’t care. I didn’t want a story.

“He loved me. He wanted to be better than he was. But he left,
he couldn’t do it. He didn’t know you were born. He didn’t know he was your father. I was going to let you decide. I thought there was time.”

My mother had never apologized to me before, for anything. Her doing it now turned my stomach along with everything else. Her begging on the phone. Her becoming a different person. We are all now entirely different people. Preston has a
daughter
?

“Charlie, you look awful,” Divya whispered.

Yes I’m sure I do
and I pushed out of the pew and headed blindly up the side aisle and out the door, through the snow to the woods beyond the chapel, slipping in my good shoes, and once I was in the thick of the trees I began to vomit, over and over and over, down to the bile.

And in the middle of this pure sickness, I understood. There had been a decision to be made, and now it was done.

I saw that if I told May I would become a victim, like her, of this stomach-churning fate. But what if I were the villain instead? Then the villainy would be the consolation. May hating me would be part of the sacrifice. Throwing myself on the grenade: that was the route I wanted.
I
would be the sickness. I would choose it.

I would end it, and tell her nothing.

Once the past had happened, once it was past, it seemed in stone to me. I was like my mother in that way. It was done.

I straightened up and slid, on my tractionless soles, out of the woods, away from the chapel, to my car.

I loved May. We
were
love. It was a thing that existed in its own time and could not be changed. And now I would be leaving that house. I would abandon it but I didn’t want to tear it down, to change the landscape of the past. I didn’t want May to know it was a place that never should have been built.

Neither did I care for her to know that Preston was a coward and a cad—old-fashioned, true word. I didn’t want to destroy that house either, that shrine, where she would still go for comfort. I would save her. Leave me that little bit of control. Leave me that.

So I made my decision and didn’t think about whether it was my
right. I left the past. I started the car and drove away. I let the wood of that house we built petrify, transform, become hard and lasting. Whether we wanted to be or not, we were our parents’ children, and I was my mother’s son as well as my father’s. So forward, forward, forward.

Eight

The house—my own house—saved me.

It was lifeboat and anchor. I needed the tangible. I could believe only the corporeal. The walls around me, the house’s rising sturdiness on the hill. It seemed a loyal, patient entity, the immovable thing I could care about. It wasn’t a house of the past or even, oddly, of the future (as maybe it once had been) but of only the absolute present, of one moment and then the next, which was all I could face.

And so I let it become an all-consuming distraction. I needed an obsession, and the house was ready. It turned itself inside out for me, its own labyrinthine puzzle, becoming larger and larger the more closely I looked. It might have even overcome me, become another antagonist, if Win hadn’t been there. He too was loyal and patient, and gradually in some way my own house and Win Lowell became almost interchangeable: one was the other, each and together they were safety.

The house seemed steeped in the histories of other people, and that too was a help. Additions had been made along the way—a wing, a lean-to, an ell—making it thoroughly asymmetrical. It was filled with nooks and oddities that were decisions embodied. (Why was there an old knob-and-tube outlet in the crawl space under the stairs? Why were the windows in the kitchen different sizes? What had happened in the living room, where the wide-plank pine was patched?) My fascination
was sudden and strange and deep: the house was a country I was ready to claim.

I was astonished at all the forms wood could take: clapboards, shingles, floorboards, banisters, crown moldings. Pine, spruce, hardrock maple, oak. Win taught me the patterns of the different woods, and I began to notice both the grains exposed in the house—the old gumwood cabinets in the kitchen, the attic stairs—and the chalky texture of the paint where the wood was painted. I would run a finger along the groove of a chair rail and think of the rough board before it was cut. I thought about how the shingles had been nailed on one by one. Sometimes I imagined all the pieces of my house flying apart and then coming back together as if drawn by a giant magnet. It moved me that the house had existed for so long before I’d ever known of it.

I began to buy tools. For the first time in my life, I read nonfiction with complete absorption—how-to books, handyman books, carpentry manuals. I learned how to hang doors. I bought a secondhand lathe at an auction, and, after dozens of tries, was able to replace a broken spindle in the staircase. I learned how to mud in sheetrock and how to plaster. After some hesitation, I bought a book on masonry and eventually, several summers in, repointed the chimney.

The house was in danger, of course, not of spectacularly disassembling in a magic reverse cyclone, but of disintegrating piece by piece. Parts of it seemed to be held together with only varnish and brown age, so I felt a certain legitimate urgency. And Win never told me I was crazy to spend so much time. He knew what I was doing—knew, that is, that I was erasing May, or filling her absence. I never told him, or anyone, the rest.

“Where’d you go after the funeral?” he said once.

“West.”

He nodded, unsurprised.

I’d been gone three days. I’d been thinking of the Pacific, had made it as far as Iowa, a flat, white, unending world, close enough—and finally I’d been calm enough, or numb enough, to turn around.

I didn’t tell him that either, but if I had, he would have understood.

WIN WAS OF THE GENERATION
that understood what ownership was, that had been raised to fix things, and the more intractable the problem the more patient, or stubborn, Win became. He decoded plumbing, wiring, collapsing cabinets, crumbling concrete. All was a series of rational steps, for everything had an explanation, and mysteries were solvable.

The only thing that really made Win irate was plastic. Luckily, there was very little of it in my house. Win would say, “You’re lucky, Charlie. I’d rather fix honest wear and tear than mistakes.” Or, “No one’s gone and ruined this place, Charlie.”

The largest job we undertook was shoring up the staircase. His directions were sure and instinctive. “Had to do this before,” he said. “Cellar stairs. Did it for my mother, summer after my dad died. Bad heart. He’d started it, and I finished it. I was seventeen. Didn’t end up pretty. But it was solid as a rock.”

These bits of information came out over the space of long minutes. His monologues were slow, but I’d learned that if I was patient, the words would accumulate.

“Later on I did it at my first wife’s parents’ place. That had to be a prettier job, you know. Boy was I sweating it. Had to pretend I knew what the hell I was doing. Think I fooled ’em. Hand me that level.

“And then had to do it over on Summer Street.” That was his and Divya’s house. “Thought that would be the last time.” He smiled at me, which I took to mean he was glad to have been wrong.

After a minute, I said, “What was your first wife’s name?” I knew she had existed, but this was the first time he’d ever mentioned her outright to me.

“Girl named Jennifer King. Jennie. Beautiful girl. Love of my life.” He noted my face. “You can have more than one. I found that out.”

“Oh.”

“She was just a good, good-looking girl and we were in love, and you know, Charlie, I was cocky, I thought I’d dodged a bullet. No mediocrity for me. Found the perfect girl, was going to have the perfect life. I’d gone to Vietnam, I was back. I deserved it.”

The story, such as it was, could have ended there. Win spoke very completely: that is, every pause seemed like the end of a story. But he
must have sensed I needed detail, and took pity on me. “She looked like a magazine ad. Blond hair, blue eyes. What they used to call an Ivory girl. We were married two and a half years, and she was pregnant. Six months along. January. Hold that right there. That end. No, just a finishing nail. Good.

“Driving on the icy roads, you know. Hairpin turn, that one up by the pond. Textbook. Hit a tree.”

“God, Win.” Did you say you were sorry? Years later? When a person was in another life? “I’m sorry.”

He nodded. He didn’t seem affected, but he didn’t meet my eye. “So your life ends one day, but you’re still living it. So you have to get used to that. I tell you, Charlie, thinking the universe is angry at you—that is its own kind of hubris, Charlie. No puppet master upstairs pulling any strings. You just have to get on with it.” Long pause for hammering. “I did some stupid things. Because I was angry. Then I stopped.” His tone had hardened with something both stern and long dead, and I knew I wouldn’t press, although it was hard to imagine Win and any sort of dissipation together. If I couldn’t respect secrets, then who could? “And then I met Div and straightened up.”

“I imagine she wouldn’t have it any other way.”

He grinned, which involved mostly his eyes. “You imagine correctly, sir.”

There was another long, companionable, productive stretch. I loved how I was beginning to anticipate his movements, like a surgical nurse.

Then he said, “You ever talk to May anymore?”

“No.”

He nodded slightly. “But you were kind to her.”

“I was as kind as I know how to be,” I said.

“Well. It’ll be all right, then.” He stood up, creakily. Contemplated the new treads we had put in. “You know, Charlie,” he said, in the tone that meant he was finished for the day, “you made a real find with this place.” He looked at me. “I mean it.”

“Thank you.”

It was an honest compliment—Win made no other sort—and I always remembered it. Sometimes I even said the words to myself like
they were lyrics to an old song:
You made a find. Although you didn’t know that you were looking
. Win never asked what a young fellow like me needed with fourteen acres. Never said or even seemed to think,
What are your intentions, Charles Garrett?
(As if I were defrauding life.) The empty bedrooms upstairs. Decisions not yet made, life not yet lived. Win believed in doing; he assumed I did too.

NORMALLY I WENT HOME
to Atlanta for a good part of the summer. But this year I decided Nicky could come to visit me. “You need to see my place,” I said to him, on the phone.

“What about Mom?”

“She has to work.”

“That’s what she
said
,” but then Nicky’s voice trailed off. He hated conflict. He wasn’t going to ask, because he didn’t want to know.

“Just you and me,” I said. “It’ll be great. We could look at colleges too.”

“Yeah. I want to come up there for school anyway,” he said quickly, as though he’d been waiting for me to mention it first and now was afraid I’d disapprove. “I’ve been thinking about it.”

“See?” I said. “It’ll be perfect.”

The first night he was at my house, at sunset, he strode to the edge of the patio and threw his arms wide, a yawp to the world. “My God, Charlie!” he cried, as the red boiled up in the sky, and the green of the mountains turned dark. “I love it here! I’m never leaving!” He turned to me, his arms still outstretched. “I understand why you’re here,” he said, and he was taking me in, along with the mountains. “I get it.”

His reddish-blond hair was shaggy, his T-shirt full of holes, his bare feet dirty as a pilgrim’s. He was still just a twice-a-week shaver, but he’d grown again and was a full six inches taller than I was. He had Hugh’s slender, ropy look; but he was far more golden, vital, thoroughly seventeen. Muscles popped under his skin whenever he moved as if they couldn’t contain their exuberance.