My head felt hollow and sore from crying but now my eyes were dry. I couldn"t keep from looking into Jack"s room as I pa.s.sed. His leather jacket was gone. The pile of clothes on his floor looked smaller.
Once, when we were children, I spilled chocolate milk on the Persian rug in the study and Raeburn shook me until my nose bled. Then he shoved me into the bathroom so I wouldn"t bleed on anything important. Seven hours later, after Raeburn had drunk himself into a stupor and I"d cried myself out, it was Jack who pried off the bathroom doork.n.o.b with a screwdriver. That was the first time we slept in the same bed. I guess he was probably ten years old then, which would have made me eight. I remember that he put me next to the wall, let me curl up against his chest. I remember his warm body, the stretchy feeling of dried blood on my skin, and the chill of the wall against my back.
If Jack were there, he would have come to help me. But Jack was gone.
5.
WITH JACK GONE, I felt like I"d lost half my brain. I hated him for leaving me.
I figured this much out eventually: the letter that Jack gave to Searles was the same letter that Margaret Revolt had sent to the college administration, but my brother had found his copy in my father"s study. I don"t know how it linked Raeburn to Margaret. Maybe there were notes in the margins in his handwriting. From what I could piece together from listening to Raeburn on the phone, both Ben"s future at the college and my father"s hinged entirely on whether or not Margaret Revolt admitted that it had all been a hoax, that Ben Searles had never made a pa.s.s at her. It remained to be seen whether or not Margaret-Margaret the Brilliant, Margaret the Incomparable, Margaret the Deep and Profound-was also Margaret the Loyal.
When I finally met her, over a year later, I realized that Margaret had (of course) been the girl out on the porch with Jack at the Christmas party, the one with the thick gla.s.ses and bobbed hair. The one who had said that I could have gotten the alcohol anywhere because they weren"t carding. The one with whom Jack had insisted on finishing his conversation. The one I"d forgotten to ask Jack about-or, more accurately, the one that I hadn"t asked him about, because I suspected that he"d lie to me and I didn"t want to hear him do it. Only then, when I met her, did it occur to me to wonder what Margaret was doing at the party, which was supposed to be faculty only.
Understand, though, that all of this was happening miles and miles below my radar. I absorbed it because it was in the same s.p.a.ce that I was, the way that my clothes absorbed cooking smells in the kitchen. When it was all happening, I didn"t really care about Raeburn or Searles or Margaret Revolt. I was too busy slowly going insane.
I guess that there must be all kinds of going crazy. Some people talk to trees; some cook compulsively; some sit and stare blankly at walls for hours on end. Most people retreat into themselves; I retreated into the world, which was as far away as I could get from my own reality. I started hitchhiking. I"d go into town during the day and wander for hours, staring in shop windows and watching the world go about its terribly normal business. For the first few months it was cold, and that"s how I discovered the card store. I"d never sent or received a greeting card, with the exception of the few that arrived before Christmas every year from distant relatives or Raeburn"s colleagues-but even those were the boring, generic kind sold in boxes. My favorites, I discovered, were the modern ones, intended for very specific situations: Sorry that we"re getting a divorce. Congratulations on deciding to enter rehab. It"s time for me to tell you I"m gay. The confessional nonpoems in these cards were stilted and sincere: "I know that the decision that you"ve made was difficult for you, and I want you to know that I will always be there for you." I read them, one after another, with a hard place in my throat.
I never found one that I could send to anyone. Sorry my father tried to ruin your life? Or, sorry my brother beat the s.h.i.t out of you? Sorry I was such a pathetic daughter that you didn"t want to take me with you when you left? I could never think of a good one to send to Jack. The closest I came was: I love you, I hate you, I miss you and I never want to see you again, how am I supposed to live without you?
That spring, I also discovered movies. Jack hadn"t liked movies-too manipulative and common, he said-so I hadn"t seen many, but there was a movie theater downtown, and in the afternoons it was cheap. Tragedy, horror, and blow-things-up action movies, I soon discovered that I had no use for. My favorites were romantic comedies. That world, I could live in. Everyone was beautiful, everyone was rich, everyone was witty, and if anyone left the story, it was because they were mean or shallow or otherwise undeserving of the glamour of it all. Every hooker had a heart of gold, and the underdog always ended up winning.
Sometimes, after the credits rolled and the lights came up, I"d stare at the red exit sign, think about the glare of the sunlight outside, and be completely unable to move. So I"d sit through the movie again. After a few weeks, the ushers stopped asking me for money when I sat through show after show. The same was true of the woman who worked at the greeting card store. She never ha.s.sled me, no matter how many hours I spent sitting cross-legged on her carpet, reading the cards. Once, she even gave me a cup of coffee when I came in, saying that it was cold out there and I could probably use it.
During the day, I actually felt okay. But I never found a way to deal with the nights. For a while I tried going out at night and sleeping during the day, but the outside world was even scarier than the house in the wee hours of the morning. At least in the house there were walls around me. I might see weird things in the corners, but at least there were corners: places where the walls met. A limit to the s.p.a.ce surrounding me.
One night, when I couldn"t sleep, I poured a tumbler full of whiskey from the bottle in Raeburn"s liquor cabinet and carried it upstairs with me. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I took steady, medicinal gulps until the walls began to spin. I wanted to be unconscious, and that"s how I ended up. But in the morning I was sick, and the world was still there. I didn"t do it again.
By the end of February, the situation at the college had turned into a campuswide frenzy, complete with student pet.i.tions and strident demonstrations. Raeburn was so distracted that he hardly even seemed to notice that I was there, and that was fine with me. He didn"t fly into any more rages, but I gave him no reason to. I didn"t clean anything, but I didn"t dirty anything either. I barely ate. There were some weekends when Raeburn and I only saw each other in pa.s.sing. He"d nod at me, I"d nod at him, and we"d continue on our respective ways.
So I was surprised when he sought me out. I was standing at the front window, staring out at the dark woods; he stood behind me, his reflection ghostly in the window. He said, "Josephine, would you like me to tell you something that will make you feel better?"
Would I like it? How would I know? "I guess so."
"Palomar just found a new supernova. It"s less than five light-years from the edge of our solar system." He stopped and waited, as if he expected a response.
I didn"t know what to say. "Thank you."
"A supernova is a major cosmic event," he said patiently, as if he were explaining to a child. "The shock waves could disrupt the earth"s...o...b..t. Do you know what that means? It means-it could mean-the complete decimation of life on earth." Then he did something I"d never seen him do before. He winked.
"The world really doesn"t deserve to survive," he said.
From that night on, I lay in bed and imagined the supernova, millions of miles from the edge of our solar system, eating itself alive in a bright blaze, every stray molecule adrift in the lifeless vacuum being used to feed the fire. I imagined shock waves, huge and invisible, rippling through the galaxy, knocking the stars out of alignment and tearing into the thin atmospheres of any stray planets in their way. And oddly enough, it did make me feel better, because the night wasn"t so empty. There was a supernova out there, and nothing was going to last much longer.
After a while I began to lose my brother.
He became a mythical figure. I had trouble remembering the days when he had been a living, breathing, talking ent.i.ty in the room next door to mine; they seemed like a dream. Instead, I imagined him in scenes from the movies I watched: sitting in the corner of a bar full of glamorous people, smoking enigmatically and staring into his drink. Wandering the streets in the rain, looking for something he couldn"t find. Hauling lobsters in the North Atlantic, pausing only to wipe the sweat from his brow and stare wistfully at the horizon-thinking, perhaps, of the sister he"d left behind, long ago and far away.
It must have been in early May that Ben Searles called, because when the phone rang I was standing on the porch, watching the rain falling on the elms, and the rain was warm. The phone was loud and shrill in the empty silence of the house. For some reason I thought, It"s Jack, and my heart surged. The sudden wave of wanting my brother hit me viscerally, making my chest hurt and my eyes water. I think I flew into the house without once touching foot to floor; I grabbed the phone, took a deep breath, and couldn"t say anything because I wanted it too badly.
"Raeburn?" a voice said. It was Ben Searles. I had forgotten about him. I slumped down to the floor, taking the phone with me.
"Josie," I said finally.
"Josie, let me talk to your father." He sounded cheerful and excited.
I stretched the phone cord out and let it snap back. "He"s not here."
"Will you give him a message for me?"
I didn"t answer.
"Tell him Margaret Revolt confessed," he said. "Taking my cla.s.s, writing the letter, everything." He started to laugh. "She confessed. It"s over."
"No," I said.
"What?" He sounded confused.
"I won"t tell him that. He"ll kill me."
There was a pause. When Ben spoke again, his voice was kinder. "I heard your brother is gone. "
I didn"t answer.
"Why didn"t you leave with him?"
I opened my mouth to tell him it was none of his business, and what came out was, "He didn"t want me to."
There. There it was, lying baldly on the kitchen floor in front of me like a shattered mess of egg and orange juice and broken china. Jack didn"t want to take me; he didn"t want me to come; he didn"t want me. He didn"t want me.
Another pause. Then Ben said, "This isn"t the way the world is. People acting like this. You know that, don"t you?"
"It doesn"t matter," I said. "Nothing does."
"Is there something you need?" Ben sounded confused and helpless. "Is there anything I can do?"
I reached up and put the phone into its cradle.
Summer came and the semester was over. Nonetheless, every Monday morning Raeburn threw a pile of clothes and books into the back seat of his car and drove away, just as if the college were still in session. He said he was teaching a summer cla.s.s. I didn"t believe him. I didn"t care.
One day, I tried to climb out onto the roof, but the vast expanse of shingles was too wide, the slope was too steep, and I was too scared. After I crawled back through the dormer window into the room on the third floor, I spent a while picking desultorily through the boxes in the room. Below a layer of thick, inscrutable critical-theory texts I found a pile of composition books full of lecture notes written in a precise, delicate hand.
Mary was a margin jotter. The edges of the pages in her notebooks contained her response to the entire education process in general, and each cla.s.s in particular. "WASTE of my time. Shut up, for the love of G.o.d." Once she"d filled an entire margin by keeping careful track of how many seconds were left in the cla.s.s. She hadn"t managed to take any notes on the cla.s.s itself, beyond the date at the top of the page and a few cryptic scribbles.
The ink of her downstrokes was thick and a.s.sertive. She"d used a fountain pen. Raeburn used one, too. I turned to another page. This was a philosophy cla.s.s-part of it was about Aristotle-and it looked like she"d made it through at least half the cla.s.s this time before getting bored. From that point on, the page was covered in doodles, swirls and skulls and musical notes. Except at the bottom, where she"d written "Mary Chandler Raeburn" and then crossed it out, as if it embarra.s.sed her.
The cla.s.s notes filled a little over half the book. I didn"t find any other references to my father among them. With my thumb I sent the remaining pages by in a yellowing, college-ruled blur. A musty smell rose from the pages. The paper was slightly stiff with age.
As the pages turned by on my lap, I saw a flash of blue. Quickly I flipped through the book until I found it: a page mostly ripped out, wrinkled and torn, with only a few inches remaining at the top. The preceding page had been ripped out completely; it looked very much as if someone had seized the two pages in an angry fist to tear them out, and hadn"t noticed that they"d missed part of one. There were a few lines of blue ink still legible at the top of the torn page, written in a messier version of Mary"s hand with a cheap ballpoint pen.
look at her I think about how she"ll grow up and meet some man who"ll eat out the middle of her like a sandwich and leave the crusts to rot on the plate and I shut the notebook. I didn"t want to read anymore.
Around the Fourth of July, I found a pink flier tacked to our front door, asking us to join the Citizens" Watch program "to help combat the crime wave that has. .h.i.t our hitherto peaceful neighborhood."
"The police are doing nothing," the flier read. "It is up to Hill residents to patrol our own streets, to look out for each other, and to continue to foster the sense of community and belonging that has always set us apart from the crowd."
I threw the flier away and started locking the doors.
Not long afterward, Raeburn went to the campus to meet with the board of trustees, who were going to let him know the conditions they"d decided on for his return in the fall. I spent the evening in the parlor, reading a copy of Wuthering Heights that I"d found in one of Mary"s boxes and listening to Jack"s Wagner. The music was loud and encompa.s.sing and kept my attention away from the silence that had rushed like water into every part of the room.
At three o"clock in the morning I heard a noise on the front porch. I stiffened with fear. Then I heard m.u.f.fled swearing and the jingling of keys at the lock.
It wouldn"t be him, I told myself. It would be Raeburn in the doorway, glaring, home and drunk because the meeting had gone badly. He wouldn"t explain and I wouldn"t ask. I"d turn off the Wagner and go back to my book and the silence, and later on I"d go to bed, and time would continue to pa.s.s. When I woke up, my book would be sitting next to my bed and the day would be half over. Maybe I would walk to the pond.
The door opened. A single set of footsteps made its way down the hall.
And even if it was Jack-what did he think, that he could vanish, abandon me, and then drop back into my life six months later like a summer cold? That he could walk in the door and ask for a drink and a sandwich and that would be the end of it?
G.o.d, how I hoped it was him.
When Jack walked into the parlor, he was thinner than he had been-so was I, I guess-and he was wearing a navy blue shirt that I"d never seen before. His hair was longer, long enough that it fell softly behind his ears, which were now pierced with small silver hoops.
For a moment we neither moved nor spoke. Looking at him was like looking at a stranger who"d somehow stolen my bone structure. There was an expression on his face that I couldn"t identify, part wariness and part surprise. Who was he to be surprised? Where did he expect me to be?
And, of course, I loved him again immediately. I didn"t seem to have a choice.
"Hey," he said.
I heard myself say, "Hey yourself."
"Came back to get some things." He took a step into the room and stopped. Now his face was carefully blank. I tried to remember when I"d last washed my hair.
"Oh?"
"Upstairs."
"Oh."
When I didn"t say anything else, he said, "I guess I"ll go get them," and turned away from me. I followed him upstairs and we stood at the door of his old room, staring through the doorway. The room was empty. The furniture was gone. A few dustb.a.l.l.s gathered in the corners.
"Jesus," he said. "Guess I"m out of the family for good, huh?"
It hurt me to be so close to him. "I saved your books," I said. "And some of your alb.u.ms. He threw everything else away. I think some of your clothes are in my room, if you want them." I tried a smile, to see how it felt.
It felt strained, and Jack didn"t smile back. He pushed past me angrily and walked down the hall to the room where Raeburn stored most of Crazy Mary"s things. The door was locked. Jack tried to kick it in, but it didn"t budge.
"It"s locked," I said.
"I see that." He pulled a pocketknife out of his jeans. In a moment he had the lock jimmied and was inside the room.
Every surface in the tiny room, which had once been our mother"s sewing room, was covered with leaning piles of boxes and old clothes. Jack went straight to the box on the table that held what was left of Crazy Mary"s jewelry. He pawed at the contents for a moment. "Do you have those pearl earrings? The ones you wore at that party?"
"They"re in my room."
"Get them for me."
"Why?"
"Because," he said, "that"s all we have that"s worth anything. I think she took all the good stuff with her when we went to Chicago."
My chin went up. "They"re mine. If you wanted them, you should have taken them with you when you left."
He stuffed a handful of cheap jewelry in his pocket. "That won"t get you anywhere."
"What won"t?"
"Trying to make me feel guilty. You think I wanted to leave you here alone?"
"You must have," I said, "because you did. You left me here."
After all the long months, after all the times I"d rehea.r.s.ed this conversation in my head, that was all I could say. But he was there; he was finally there. He was looking at me. He was listening to me. So I said it again: "You left me here."
"Josie-"
"You left me here."
He dropped the box lid and came over to me. He tried to take my shoulders. I shook him off.
"Would you just-"
"You left me."
"Listen to me for a moment."
"No," I said. "You left me."
"Shut up!" He grabbed my upper arms, hard. "Shut up! For G.o.d"s sake, Josie, be quiet!" With each word he gave me a hard, quick shake. I let him. My head was rolling and limp.
He let me go.
"Jesus." He frowned. "What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" There was a lost, confused look on his face I"d never seen before.