The Half Brother (24 page)

Then as my mother and I sat in our car in front of that squat whitewashed cinder-block building she told me a story, about being right there, on those steps, when she was about my age. Though I don’t remember the sound of her voice and the story has grown in my mind and is probably as tainted as everything else now, still I know that as she spoke, I saw her there, snapped into focus—a little girl, long skinny legs, red hair, utterly alone on those steps, in singing heat, the white of the church in the noon sun nearly blinding, and I knew that little girl was also a truth, and she joined us.

I hadn’t thought of that little girl in years, until my mother came to my house in Abbottsford, that last winter.

“
WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO?
” Nick said.

No one else was there, but still we muted ourselves. We were in the lounge area on the surgical floor. It was dinnertime. I was lightheaded from adrenaline, the wine from the previous night at Divya’s, the sudden reversal of fortunes.

“They said she’ll be in the hospital for a week. Then rehab. For I don’t know how long.”

“And then?”

“Then she can come back to my house.”

“She’ll want to go home.”

“Well, I don’t know how that’s going to work,” I said.

“What about all her stuff? She needs her stuff. What about the house?”

“We’ll figure it out.”

“Maybe she should live up here. We can find her a place. For when she’s ready.”

“Yes,” I said. “We absolutely can.” I had already accepted this obvious reality.

“But in the meantime she can stay with you.”

“Yes.” And that one too.

“We’ll get her one of those things that goes up and down the stairs. Those seat things. That attach to the banister. That they advertise on the crappy TV stations.” I didn’t answer. “I’ll pay for it.”

“Nikko, don’t worry about that.”

“But I guess it would wreck your stairs.” He said this without reproach.

“No it won’t,” I said. “A house is to live in.” Someone seemed to be handing me these lines; it was merely my job to read them. To not lose patience. To let him talk on, and on, frantically weaving his fragile little rope bridge of control.

If Anita were here, awake, listening, we’d exchange a look. We would be stronger than Nicky. Our bridge would be wood or stone.

Then I noted I was actually wishing for her presence; felt my surprise for a moment; moved on.

My mother, as it turned out, had had several operations already on her leg. When she came up to Massachusetts, dry gangrene was beginning to set in, because the arteries had closed almost completely and there was no blood flow. She had been taking painkillers the whole time. She had known she would lose the leg, eventually. All she said to me was, “This was not supposed to happen here, Charlie.” In stiff, silent fury at herself. She had wanted to have Christmas. She was more sentimental than I’d thought.

The operation could have waited, but not long. She couldn’t fly. It was better to have it done here. Better to have her here. A surgeon was available. She didn’t want to go to Boston. “Just go ahead,” she said.

The doctor said to me, outside her room, “She’s done her research. She’s ready. You need to know she is in extreme pain right now.”

I said that I knew.

We had gotten in the car, in the soft early morning, we had driven to the hospital, and the whole time her mouth had been a grim matter-of-fact line and she’d resembled nothing so much as a nurse with a dull, textbook patient, somewhat slow, the patient being herself. I’d waited until after eight to call Nick. Because I’d known I would have to call him at May’s. Although I told myself that I was just letting him get a good night’s sleep before it all began,
it
being as yet amorphous and mysterious, and open-ended.

And now he was here. With me. Under the fluorescent lights, sitting on teal pleather chairs. “Charlie. What’s she going to
do
?”

“She’s going to recover and get a prosthesis and be fine.”

“She quit smoking!”

“Well. I think the damage is done,” I said.

I would let Nick talk on and on, I would let him install this thing on my stairs, let him remodel, even dismantle and rebuild my whole house, so he would not have to talk about her now-missing leg, or wonder why she hadn’t told us, or about what the doctors had said, what I hoped he hadn’t heard crouching in the jargon, enfolded in the boilerplate of their speeches—which was that this was just the beginning of a long string of bad luck, if you could call it luck, something random, which you could not.
What we see in this population
, the doctors said, which meant smokers, in other words a population that turned onto the wrong road and then just kept going, hell for leather, like there was still a chance they might end up somewhere pleasant.

Well, she had ended up in Massachusetts. In my house. So, maybe I missed her, here in the teal waiting room, with its out-of-date magazines and sturdy potted plants and soothing water feature (bad things happened in this room) plashing in the corner. But I wouldn’t have to miss her for long.

“Charlie, what the hell are you smiling about?”

“It’s just strange.”

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

“Nicky. It’s okay.”

“No it’s not!”

“I mean that we are all here together. I am just glad. Even though it’s like this. That’s all.”

He looked searchingly at me, not that he ever would have disbelieved me. Rather he was looking for the quality of my reassurance. I shifted in the chair and tried to look solid, imperturbable. I am a rock. I am an island. An island broken off, because the solid ground itself of my solitude had turned out to be unmoored, and I was now marooned on a renegade sliver of it, floating away.

Then Nick stood up, because May was there, in the door. “How is she?” she said, her eyes going from me, to Nick, to me. She was wearing the long red coat.
Ah, here to take charge
. Then Nicky was beside her, had her in his arms but really he was in hers, his head was on her shoulder, she was murmuring to him. He folded himself around her. I saw what he did, open, porous Nicky: he infused himself with the other person, made himself whole and strong that way, or at least a little closer to whole, a little stronger. I saw how thoroughly he had absorbed her. So she would be with us too. All of us together.

I HAD THOUGHT
life was full, but I had been woefully, laughably wrong.
Now
it was full: after only four days in the hospital and another four in rehab—surely losing an entire limb was more involved than
that?
—Anita was back home with me. There were physical therapy appointments to drive to and decent food must be available and a small cadre of nice women must cycle in and out of the house, at least for now, helping my mother with the things she temporarily (that was the attitude we were taking) couldn’t do, many of which I need not inquire about, and odd equipment appeared, and I had to account for my whereabouts, and plan. We had set up a bed in the dining room so she wouldn’t have to contend with stairs, but after the first week she nixed it. The stair chair, as Nick called it, was installed, and she said she could manage just fine with that thank you very much. Her arms were surprisingly strong. She scooted the wheelchair around and handled the crutches without complaint. Nicky and I rolled up all the smaller rugs and put them away so she wouldn’t trip. I tried not
to look at the pinned-up pants leg, or the remaining, still-shapely leg emerging from a skirt. The stump was an obscenity. She shooed me away from it herself. She had taken it on; it was her job.

One evening, when Nick wasn’t sleeping over, I seized the opportunity and said, “Just how did you think this was all going to work? Were you going to do this all by yourself?” She didn’t answer. “You’ve been planning. It’s why you were going to retire.”

“Of course it was,” she said. “And there’s money. That’s what we have, Charlie, money, and I would have worked it all out.”

“And you weren’t going to tell either of us.”

I was baiting her. We both knew it. Telling me anything would have been breaking our rules of engagement.

“There was no sense in worrying you,” Anita said.

How many hundreds of times in my life had I heard Anita begin a sentence with
There’s no sense in …
? I nodded. “And then you started working out,” I said. “For the crutches. Since when do you have arms like a weightlifter? You can’t fool me.”

Her face had its usual stubborn, inward look. Then all at once she lifted her arm, shook her sleeve down toward her shoulder, and flexed her biceps for me. “That’s pretty good. Isn’t it.”

“Yes, it is,” I said, both smug and, finally, surprised.

She pulled the sleeve back down. “Well, it was something to do.”

“It was smart, all right.”

We were in the living room, with a fire going. I was grading papers and Anita was doing Sudoku. In deference to me, the TV—a new addition—was off, but she didn’t seem to mind. I told myself we were not in limbo. I told myself this was the new normal. We were waiting for nothing.

As if determined to contradict my fragile peace she said, “Charlie, I am not going to stay forever.”

“You can’t fly, Mother.”

“Well, I will be able to soon.”

“I was talking with Nicky. We’ll drive you down at spring break.” She didn’t answer. “I know it’s a long time to wait. Maybe we could take a week sooner.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“Well, one of us is going to fly down and check on the house for you though.”

“Dodie’s taking care of it. Lord knows she needed a project. It’s fine.”

A silence. “You need to sell it.”

“I know.” I started to speak again; she waved a hand. “Nicky’s been talking to me, Charlie, I know all about it. You two have it all worked out.” I saw that the
you two
gave her pleasure. “Now. It’s about time for me to turn in.”

“It’s only eight thirty.”

“I’m tired.”

But I had seen her face hardening as we talked, a barrier to a different feeling. “Mother. You need to take one.”

“No, I don’t.”

“It’s only been two weeks. Good God. Take the pain meds. They prescribed them for a reason.”

“I’ve seen what that stuff does to people.”

“Those are people who don’t have legitimate pain.”

“I’m fine.” She reached for her crutches. I helped her up off the sofa and then let go at the first possible moment, the first instant of her balance, so she wouldn’t bark at me. She inched over to the stairs, not looking back at me, pretending she didn’t know how closely I was following her.

Just before she got in bed, she relented, and took a pill. Just one.

THINGS ARRIVED FROM ATLANTA.
Aunt Dodie, Hugh’s sister, had overpacked. “I don’t know what Dodie thought I was going to do with all of this,” Anita said. “She sent everything. Summer clothes too.”

“We do have summer up here,” I said.

“Summer’s a long way off,” she said, exasperated. “Does she think I’m never coming back?”

“Aunt Dodie likes to be thorough,” I said.

“She likes to over
do
.”

Anita was sitting on her bed, taking things out of the boxes.
Smoothing the folds, stacking clothes in piles. It was something to get used to, her staying in one place for minutes at a time; I hadn’t realized until now how she had always been moving—not restless, just purposeful. Now she purposefully planted herself somewhere, gathered her energy in, resisted asking for help as long as she could. “Well, the dresser over there is empty,” I said. “You can fill it up, and the one in the other bedroom too, if you want.” Although Anita had never had that many clothes in her life.

“I’ll get May to help me,” Anita said.

“May?”

“She wanted to come visit. She called.”

“Oh.”

She looked up at me. “I wanted to tell her not to come but I wasn’t sure how to put it.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“This is your house, Charlie.”

“I’m aware of that.”

“So she doesn’t have to come here.”

“There’s no harm,” I said. “She’s been here before.” I let that marinate.

But Anita would refuse to acknowledge a sexual innuendo even if it came and sat in her lap. Instead she regarded the stacks of clothes in front of her with a casual disapproval. Then she opened another box, leaning awkwardly over her stump. If her leg had been there, the box would have been sitting on top of it. This one was full of odds and ends—toiletries in a quilted bag, books, and several pairs of shoes. She took out a pair of sneakers and looked at them sternly. In the olden days, this was when she would have taken a long and contemptuous drag on her cigarette. I thought I saw her fingers twitch.

She set the left one on the bed next to the clothes and tossed the right one into an empty box on the floor. “I don’t need the visiting nurses as much now. I’m going to redo the schedule.”

“You’re the boss.”

“And I’m going to have the PT come here. It will cost an arm and a leg but what is the point of having all this money?” Money again. She sounded fretful, aware of yet unwilling to acknowledge her joke.

“Anita, you can do whatever you want.”

She ignored me. “Lord above,” she said. “She sent bathing suits.”

“You’ll use them eventually,” I said. “What? You’re never going to swim again?”

She kept looking into the box, her face filling with something like surprise, lips pressed together, toughness gone. It was a sudden self-pity, the first I’d seen, and who could blame her? That handsome body, the shapely leg. Still it made me wild. I didn’t know if I could stand it. I clutched my hands at my sides, wanting to shake her, to throw something—then I realized she wasn’t on the verge of tears, not at all; instead she was trying not to smile. “
What?
” I said. “Goddammit, what?”

She started a little at my tone, but still looked amused. “The problem,” she said, “is that I might go in circles.”

“What the hell—oh.” I felt myself deflate. “Swimming?”

“That’s right.” Her shoulders shook. She covered her mouth with her hand.