What They Always Tell Us (2 page)

Alex stares at Henry, shakes his head. “We have a swing in our backyard,” he says, almost not believing his own words. “You can come use it if you want.” Henry nods as if mulling it over, then steps across the street, already accepting the offer. For a moment Alex is uncertain what to do, but then he walks up to the front door, and out of the corner of his eye he sees the flash of red hair beside him.

Alex must lift his legs because he’s too tall and gangly for the swing. The blue plastic seat strains underneath him, pulls into a tight U, pinches his hips. Henry sits in the swing next to his, a perfect fit. They both cut through the air, and because of the combined weight, the back end of the swing set sometimes lurches out of the ground. Alex imagines swinging high enough so that the swing set gets completely yanked out, sending the two of them sprawling onto the grass.

“You have very red hair. It’s not natural,” Alex says in flight.

“I like it. My mother did it. I told her I wanted red hair, not orange hair. Everyone said I had red hair, but that wasn’t really true. Mom said she could make my hair really red if I wanted.”

“Well, it looks funny,” Alex says.

“I like it,” Henry says again, tossing his head back as he rises into the air.

“I do too, in a weird way,” Alex says. Besides the hair, Henry is normal-looking, though his nose is lightly freckled and his eyes are a deep, almost black brown. He is probably small for his age, too—not short, but slight.

Alex’s own hair is light brown and short, trimmed close to his scalp so that he hardly ever needs to brush it. James tells him he looks like a dying sick person with such a haircut. But he likes it this way—it sets him apart from James. Since there is only a year between them, people always used to think they were twins, especially when they were younger and less developed, with their big brown eyes and thin but wavy chocolate brown hair, their long legs and arms, their fair skin and prominent brows. But now, Alex thinks, they don’t really look much alike—James is a little taller and a lot more muscled, and his hair is cut at a normal, short length, wavy but always in place.

“Where are your parents?” Henry asks.

“They went to some dumb wedding. In Tennessee.”

Alex slows down and hops out of the swing, and Henry follows him onto the back deck. Alex wants to tell him to go away, that their time together—twenty minutes of swinging—is over, but then he remembers the smell of the house, the electric silences of it, and decides that company would be okay for a while, but just for a while.

Alex is hungry for a snack, but the things he sees in the fridge and pantry don’t really appeal to him. He settles for crackers and butter, which is what he ate a lot when he was younger. He sets these delicacies on a plate—a plain blue one, not the wedding china this time—and shares with Henry. They sit on the blue couch in the front living room, which his mother calls “the parlor” and where food of any kind is usually forbidden, especially something like crackers. From their adjacent seats they can see Henry’s house across the street. It’s a nice but unkempt house, two stories of painted-gray brick, with a gray-tiled roof. Overgrown and dying boysenberry bushes cover many of the front downstairs windows. It used to be a well-kept place, when Mr. Pembroke’s son lived there, but not anymore. Henry’s mother doesn’t bother to cut the lawn, doesn’t bother to repaint the cracking paint of the trim. She leaves the garbage can on the curbside even after the trash has been picked up. The house is large, and Alex wonders what Henry and his mother do with so much unneeded space.

Henry presses his knife, which holds one square of butter, down too hard on the cracker, causing it to fracture like a sheet of ice. A chunk of cracker topples to the floor.

“Oops,” Henry says, picking it up and popping it into his mouth.

“Where does your father live?” Alex asks.

Henry places the cracker into his mouth and doesn’t speak again until he has chewed and swallowed. “Mom says that I don’t have one,” he says.

“You have to have one.”

Henry shrugs. “I don’t know. She never talks about him. She doesn’t like it when I ask her. So I don’t.”

Alex stares out at the house. Henry’s mother drives a yellow Volkswagen Beetle, but it’s not there at the moment. Alex tries to remember if he has ever seen any other cars parked there, early in the morning, or late at night, and he is sure he has. Boyfriends, maybe.

“You must be happy to have a brother,” Henry says.

“I guess.” But the truth is Alex hasn’t felt comfortable around James for some time now. He remembers when they were younger, how even though they fought they seemed closer, more at ease with each other. They used to walk back into the woods together, constructing forts made out of downed tree limbs and pine needles, which they would hide in and pretend they were escaping dangerous bad guys. But that was when they were kids, really. When he was Henry’s age and younger. He could laugh with James back then, when James still looked him in the eyes and Alex could return such a look without feeling like he was being intrusive. Without feeling the need to apologize for something. That seems like so long ago. When did it all change between them?

“Does your brother tell you dirty jokes?” Henry asks.

“Sometimes. He has a girlfriend named Alice. He’s with her right now.”

“I read this book about two brothers and one was always telling the other one dirty jokes. I thought if I had a brother we could do that.”

Alex closes his eyes and leans back in his seat, resting his head. He doesn’t know why, but what Henry has just said makes him feel overwhelmingly sad. The same feeling of sadness he got when he saw one of the janitors outside in the back parking lot after school one day. It had been a windy day in the spring, and the janitor, overweight in a huff-and-puff-breathing and doughy way, had his hat blown off by the wind and he chased it across the lot, bending just in time for the wind to carry it away again. Alex’s friends, sitting on their car trunks, had laughed at the man and said, “Fat fucker.” Then they had yelled it so the janitor could hear, though he pretended he hadn’t. Alex hadn’t joined in, but he didn’t tell them to leave the man alone, either. He just sat there and got a sinking, gloomy feeling in his gut. “You’re no fun,” Kirk had said.

“Have you ever had vodka?” Alex asks.

Henry laughs and says, “No, I’m a kid.”

“Oh yeah.”

Later, on the back deck, Alex sits on a lawn chair, holding James’s bottle of vodka. James was always good about sharing his booze at least, and that seemed to be the only activity that could bridge their silences. On Alex’s sixteenth birthday in April, James had shown him how to mix drinks that tasted good—whiskey and Coke, or vanilla-flavored vodka and Sprite, screwdrivers with just the right amount of orange juice. When he had thrown up later from drinking too much, James was there to give him a hot towel to wipe his face with. He had thrown up after the Pine-Sol incident, too, burning his throat so bad he couldn’t open his eyes. And then, at the hospital, they had pumped his stomach, shoved a tube down his nose and throat. He had kept his eyes closed then, too—because he was ashamed, but also because the tube felt like some monster trying to strangle him, and Alex didn’t dare look at it.

Henry sits down on a wrought-iron chair and drinks from a small glass of Coke. “That stuff smells,” Henry says, pointing with his glass to the vodka bottle. “My mother doesn’t drink it anymore. She used to, though. It gave her bad headaches in the morning.”

“Vodka doesn’t smell,” Alex says, remembering that he heard that somewhere. But Henry is right, it does stink, like a powerful medicine. “Anyway, one day you’ll learn that it makes you feel good.”

“My mother likes to drink wine.”

Alex thinks of his own parents. They are probably dressed up now, sitting in the church. They are watching the bride and groom exchange vows, trying to enjoy themselves. After, they’ll go to the reception. They will both have wine, maybe cocktails. Dad will eat too much from the buffet. Maybe they will dance, but probably not, and then eat pieces of icing-heavy cake. All that time, Alex figures, they will be wondering if he is okay and if they should have brought him along. Then they will remember James is keeping an eye on him, and they will remain calm.

In September, right after he checked out of the hospital, Alex and his parents spent a weekend at the family beach house. His father wanted him to get some rest—and to get away from Tuscaloosa, the scene of the crime. Alex still had his full head of hair then. Lang had told him that he had beautiful hair. For four months he had let it grow. His bangs covered his eyes, and the sides hung over his ears like tassels. But that night on the deck of the beach house, Alex cut his hair with some scissors he found in the kitchen drawer.

“I just don’t know what’s wrong with him,” he heard his mother tell his father the next morning, after she had seen his unevenly shorn head. “I just don’t.”

Alex had walked along the beach the next day, the still-strong September sun burning his once-hidden forehead.

“My mother didn’t come home last night,” Henry says.

Alex takes a swig from the bottle, closing his eyes as he swallows.

“I stayed up for her, but she didn’t come home. She stays out on Friday night a lot. At her boyfriend’s place. But she usually comes home by now. Or calls me.”

Alex looks at Henry, this ten-year-old boy with red hair who wears a yellow sweatshirt and black pants. “You look like the German flag,” he says.

Henry looks at him as if he hasn’t heard a word. “I hate my house when it gets dark outside.”

“I’m still hungry,” Alex says. “Want to go somewhere? We could go for a ride.”

Henry nods, then looks up into the darkening sky, like something awful is floating his way.

Alex drives his mother’s Volvo, not his own Honda Accord. It’s a bigger car, smooth and fast. He drives to the mall but decides not to stop because it’s crowded.

“I hate the mall,” Henry says.

“Me too,” Alex says, but he doesn’t hate it as much as he hates all the people there and the easy chance of running into someone he knows. Tuscaloosa’s like that—you’ll run into people everywhere. When he eats out with his parents, they can’t make it through the restaurant without having to stop to talk with some acquaintances. His mother always introduces him to people he’s met ten times already, people he used to see at church every Sunday or at James’s soccer games or tennis matches.

Alex drives past other strips of shops, past a string of chain restaurants whose lots are half full, past the hospital where he was born—and where he went the night after Marty’s party. The hospital is modernized now, with a new, glassy wing. A big but undecorated Christmas tree is perched in front of the new wing, in the patch of grass before the circular drive to the main doors. It’s not even Thanksgiving yet, but already this early holiday decoration. Alex can’t even remember what he got for Christmas last year, and he hasn’t asked for anything this year. His mother has talked about spending the holiday at the beach house, for a change of scenery, but no one else seems enthused about it.

He drives into neighborhoods off the main streets, narrow lanes of dull ranch tract houses with yards of natty yellowed grass, tucked cozily away from the busier roads. A few men rake leaves in their front yards, but mostly the streets and houses seem devoid of life.

“Are we ever going to stop?” Henry asks. Alex sees the clock—it is now 4:12—and realizes he has been driving for almost thirty minutes.

He turns around and goes back the way they came, past the same shops and landmarks, then over the bridge that stretches across the muddy Black Warrior River. Soon he sees Burger King up ahead. It’s the same Burger King where, months ago, he hung out with his friends. It was such a lame thing to do, but it was a good place to collect before going to parties. They’d park their cars, turn up their stereos, buy big paper cups of Coke or Sprite and then mix alcohol into them.

He was there the night he swallowed Pine-Sol.
That night.
They had all hung out in the parking lot, tying on a buzz before the big party. That whole night, starting at Burger King, Alex had felt a bit off. Like he didn’t belong. He sipped his drink as his friends talked around him, barely noticing his presence. When they did notice him, it seemed to Alex like they were mocking him, knocking him back and forth like a piñata. Still, he laughed along with them and kept drinking and pretended that everything was okay.

From Burger King they went to Marty Miller’s party, out on the winding roads by the lake, down a curvy hill where they had to park on a muddy shoulder. Walking down the hill, he could hear the lake waters slap against the wood of the docks, a peaceful sound that hadn’t matched his uneasy mood. The lake house was big and made of dark wood, and inside, it was decorated with mix-and-match furniture—pea-green couches, wicker side tables, lamps made from logs. Alex remembers a musty smell, the crowd, the blaring stereo that kept being turned on and off while people fought over which music to play. His friends quickly broke away from him. He drank cups of beer from the keg, walked around the house. He felt invisible, like he had wandered into the party by mistake.