The Half Brother (8 page)

Anita said she didn’t mind. She long ago accepted that here, Nicky would be spoiled. He reminded them too much of Hugh.

“That’s where Big Hugh went to boarding school,” Bobo said. “Way up north. Don’t ask him about it or he’ll start talking and he won’t stop. He wanted Little Hugh to go there but I said no, there was no need, because by then we had good schools right here in Atlanta. I just didn’t want him to go so far away. There was no need.”

Anita knew it was small of her, but she didn’t look up right away. The expression on Bobo’s face would be the bleak, brave, moist-eyed look she got when she mentioned Hugh. Whom Anita also mourned, but didn’t miss. She steeled herself, turned another magazine page to stall.

And there was Preston Bankhead.

He was in robes and a collar. That was not a surprise to her. Neither was this: he stood with a lovely blond wife and three blond sons,
the only word for whom was
strapping
. They were all radiantly healthy and solid. With the green hills in the background, the well-cared-for northern trees, the pure air.

“I know it’s a wonderful school,” Bobo was saying. “It’s just so far away. But not far from Charlie, I suppose. How is Charlie? How is he doing, Anita? He’s a senior, isn’t he? Is he looking for a job yet? How is that wonderful boy doing?”

The blond boys in the picture have a great deal that I do not. But once again the way is clear for my mother, and she can make sure I get what I deserve.

Six

May graduating: I see it over and over. Boys in navy blazers, girls in white dresses, processing. In my memory the line is endless. The girls and their wreaths of white flowers.

I was standing right along the path where they walked after the ceremony, everyone grinning, the boys high-fiving me, and some of the girls too, but I was waiting for May. When she walked by me and her eyes landed on mine it was as though she’d spoken my name aloud.

In the milling about afterward we found each other—but is that true? I was looking for her, and then there she was. She had a lot on her mind; she was eighteen years old. I doubt she was looking for me.

The flowers were a cloud around her face. Snow in her hair. “You look beautiful.” I said it. There was a division, before and after, and now it was after. Now she had graduated. She knew it, that was the look, we were in perfect agreement.

Except now she wouldn’t meet my eye. “Have you smelled this stuff?” she demanded, pointing to the flowers. “It’s baby’s breath. But who knew that baby’s breath smells like old cheese? Smell it!” And she leaned forward so the wreath was touching my nose.

Possibly she was right. But I couldn’t smell a thing. Or see, or hear. I was frozen.

She sensed it; she froze too. The air around us twined and thickened
and I didn’t want to move and didn’t but then I did. “You’re right,” I said, stepping back. “Camembert. Roquefort.”

“Crazy, right?”

“Miss Bankhead?”

And finally she looked. “Yes?”

“Write me a letter every now and then.”

“I plan to,” she said.

A YEAR OR SO EARLIER,
B.J.—Booker Junior—had taken up the drums, directly over my head. I kept my mouth shut, though, because Booker ran a tight ship, and I didn’t want any complaint of mine to spell the end of B.J.’s musical career. Who knew where music might take him? Then he started a band. They moved up to the attic, but still, every Saturday afternoon, sometimes into the night, the entire house shook, not always in a discernible time signature.

But then the solution appeared. Booker was promoted to head of facilities, and a faculty house opened up for them on campus. They’d sell their house and Angela would help me find a new, quiet one of my own. “Early spring,” she said. “You hit it exactly right, Charlie.”

At first she showed me houses in Abbottsford proper, the historic district, but buying there seemed so audacious. Yes, I loved the Lowells’, the Bankheads’, but could I claim such a spot? No, I thought, so we kept going. We headed northwest, where Abbottsford dwindled to a dinky strip mall, a garden center, a hardware store that serviced snow-blowers, a last service station, and then the county highway turned straight and fast.

We spent a couple of Saturdays this way. I found out she and Booker had met at U Mass. They were each the first in their families to go to college. “Booker’s family wasn’t too happy when we said we were raising the kids Jewish,” she said. “And my family wasn’t happy about him being the wrong color.” She glanced at me and I realized it would be okay to laugh, and so I did, with her. “And that’s why we like it out here in the country, away from the in-laws,” she said, in her city Bahston voice.

I told her the money for the house came from Hugh. “I don’t really feel like it’s mine.”

“But he must have wanted you to have it.”

“I suppose.”

“So we just have to find the perfect house, then, don’t we.”
Puhfect
.

One Saturday afternoon I went outside to wait for her and found Zack in the driveway, shooting baskets. I lowered the goal for him all the way so he could dunk, and then I put it back up at B.J. and Cassie’s height so they wouldn’t get mad, and picked him up so he could dunk that way. This was our routine. But he wasn’t smiling and cheering like he normally did, and when Angela came out he took the basketball and went and sat on the front steps and didn’t look at me.

I went and sat down next to him. “I’m looking for a house with your mom,” I said. “She’s really good at finding houses.”

He didn’t say anything.

“Your new house is really cool. Have you seen it?” No answer. “Hey, Zackie Bear. Want to come with us today? Will you help me pick out a house?”

A very slow nod. Angela rolled her eyes but looked pleased. “He’s
not
happy,” she said. “He does not like change.”

“I know how he feels,” I said.

We were still looking outside town, going farther and farther down that highway, and I was beginning to worry there was nothing to find. That day, as we drove around looking at ranch houses, exposed in the country way on large windy lots, worry gave way to bleakness. I had no idea what I was looking for. Plus, early spring depressed me. The trees were still leafless and the bare ground brown but the light was higher, intrusive, dragging us awake, out of hibernation. I liked hibernation.
Midwinter spring is its own season
. But it was also the first weekend that the local dairy bar was open. “Let’s get ice cream,” I said. “My treat.”

I got rum raisin and Zack got vanilla with jimmies, and I sat down next to him on the bench attached to the picnic table. “I think I should just get another apartment,” I said. “What do you think, Zackie? Little place in town. Little bachelor pad. It’ll be hip. It’ll be a happening place.”

“I thought you wanted a house,” he said.

“Well, we can’t find one.”

“I liked the one with the pool.”

It had been a sagging above-ground pool. “That was pretty spiffy,” I said. “I think I’ll keep looking, though.”

What I didn’t say was that I wasn’t sure I should stay in Abbottsford at all, even though my mother was in favor of the house plan. “You’ll have room for us to visit,” she said. “You seem happy, Charlie. You seem to have nice friends. Don’t come back here on our account. I’ll take care of Big Hugh and Bobo. Nicky’s fine. He’s fine.”

But I was looking for signs and portents. If there was no house, my way would be clear: I wasn’t meant to stay; Abbott had been a way station.

Angela was going through papers in the car. Then she got out and came and sat on the bench with us. The dairy bar was close to the road, and cars whooshed by. “There’s one last place,” she said. “It’s way too big for you. And it needs a ton of work. But who knows,” and her face settled into the vatic calm that I have since learned is the special province of talented real estate agents.

“It’ll be dark soon,” I said. Behind us, they’d put out the Closed sign.

“Well, it’s not much farther. And it’s empty. The owner died.”

“He
died
?” Zack said.

“A while ago. Don’t worry, sweetie. He was very old. He was ninety-two,” she said to me. “It’s been in the same family for a zillion years.”
Yeahs
.

We left the dairy bar and drove another couple of miles. The sun was lowering fast. The landscape grew hillier, hovering in anticipation. Finally we made a left turn, west off the highway. At first it was just another road, with more ranch houses, but then the suburban feel died away along with the pavement, the road narrowed, and then there on the right was the last big aluminum mailbox, with the smaller plastic newspaper box beneath. No house was visible from the road. “Hmm. Mysterious. What do you think, Zack?” I said.

No answer.

The gravel driveway bumped slightly downhill through thick trees, where it was already dusk. We rattled along the ruts for a minute or so and then the driveway flattened and we shot into open pasture; an eighth-mile ahead of us, on a little hill, silhouetted against the sunset,
was the house, long and white. On its hill, although there were low, gnarled apple trees to the side and in back, the house was completely exposed. The tree branches, still bare, were black against the sky, rose fading to deep blue, stars already appearing.

It was a clapboard farmhouse, Federalish, with tall windows and a porch with columns, a thoroughly New England mishmash that, even so, struck me as a little southern. The house looked like a true destination. A place you’d be relieved, over and over, to reach. We pulled into the half circle of pea gravel by the front steps and got out. Zack stood close to me. I said, once again, “What do you think?” and this time he nodded. He climbed the steps with me, and we looked around at the porch and then turned to face the woods, the meadow beyond. “I think maybe you’re right,” I said. “I think maybe this is the one.”

Eventually I realized what my earlier misgivings about owning a house had been: that somehow I did not deserve certainty. For years afterward, as I drove down the driveway, I’d sometimes let myself imagine that the house wasn’t really there, that I’d made it up. Then I’d turn the last corner out of the overarching trees, and there it was. In its sudden space of air and light.

THE LETTERS WEREN’T FREQUENT
but they were regular. She sometimes wrote in purple pen. They were often fat letters. When one arrived in my box I would let it sit for a while. An hour or so. I’d look at it and hold it. Then finally open it.

They were always chatty, sometimes a little coy. Perky as the minutes of a student-council meeting, and I would think,
Just stop
. She would mention parties and dances but not boys. She signed them
Yours
. Maybe she meant to be old-fashioned, or formal; maybe not.

THE SECOND YEAR,
when the letters dropped off, I felt deep contempt for myself and my surprise. I heard she was going abroad for her junior year, to Paris, which would make no difference in my life whatsoever, other than her letters, if she ever wrote again, having foreign stamps.

She came home for the summer, but I didn’t see her until the
week before she left, when I drove her to Abbott Pond, and she went skinny-dipping in front of me.

A FEW WEEKS AFTER MAY
went to France, Preston, who had a chronic cough that had gotten worse and who’d begun losing weight, learned he had melanoma. There were two different moles he’d been ignoring—he’d always tanned, never burned, that’s what he said, absolving himself. But the cancer had spread. There was little to be done.

Divya told me the details. She’d heard them, in turn, from Win— Win, of all people. Preston had gone alone to his appointment, gotten his test results, gone home, sat with it for an hour, and then called Win Lowell. It was the oddest thing I’d ever heard. And yet not. Preston was in a situation; Win was a fixer. It was possible that Preston thought of him as the only worthy comrade left at Abbott, since most of the old guard—Strickler Yates, Larry Saltonstall, the legendary hockey coach, and Fred Hueffer, the previous head—had left by then. Win became the liaison, at least temporarily, the mediator between this abrupt hand of fate and the rest of Preston’s ordered world; he was the one who, like some kind of glorified servant, had called May in France, and then handed the phone to Preston.

Family descended, briefly. I went over once, before May arrived. I was given lemonade and a cookie. Preston informed me, regal in a recliner and a red plaid bathrobe, that he couldn’t play chess that day, as though we’d had a plan, which we hadn’t. I wanted to say that he’d gotten a tough break, or something like that—something manly, but no southern manners bullshit. But in spite of myself I felt stupid and years younger, there in front of Laird and his pretty pregnant wife and Florence, who had greeted me with that enthusiasm that makes you think you’ve broken some rule; the air of emergency in the house seemed mild, almost jovial, slightly embarrassing, a brief thing that was just an obstacle to normalcy, and so I said very little.

“Chemo once a week,” Preston said. “They’re fixing me up. We never know how long we have, anyway.” He didn’t even sound brave. He sounded amused.

I hadn’t seen many people die.

Seven

And then she was back.

She hadn’t written or called. I just heard about it. I didn’t know what to do. But I knew people brought food. Whatever else people do, they bring food, so I went to the trendy little bakery in town and picked something up and drove over there.

When she opened the door she didn’t look surprised to see me. Or she pretended she wasn’t. Instead she presented herself like she was the guest: “Well, here I am. Charlie.” She smiled a little. My name still had the whiff of a joke. Or—it had lost that scent, but now it was back?

I followed her into the kitchen and handed her the white box. “Éclairs,” I said.

“Éclairs? Oh,” she said. “Do you want one?”

“Sure.” Then I looked around, foolishly, as if I expected Preston to pop out of a cabinet and join us for an éclair.