The Things a Brother Knows Read online

  I slowly slide my finger under the back flap of the envelope and take out a single sheet of white paper. I unfold it with the precision experts must use in dismantling a bomb.

  What do I expect?

  A whiff of perfume? A lipstick kiss? A declaration of her undying love in feminine cursive?

  Or maybe what I’m hoping for is all those sad little things—perfume, kiss, cursive—not for me, but for my brother, like somehow she’d find it necessary to communicate to me that her love for him didn’t die when he chose to leave her for a war.

  What I read instead is a note. All business: Here’s how to reach me in Washington if you need to. Here’s my e-mail, my new cell phone number and the address where I’ll be living, it’s a studio in Georgetown, with Max.

  On day eight I go for a run.

  Mom started a new job. She’s doing graphic design for an advertising firm. Two months is all she’d commit to. By then she figures, Bo will be back, brand-new digital camera filled up with pictures of the Appalachian Trail. By then she figures, maybe he’ll need her.

  Dusk’s arrival hasn’t done much to cool off the day. About every other house has its sprinkler system on, and I go out of my way to run through the drops of water, which disappear from my skin as quickly as they land.

  I run through the same streets Boaz took on his way out of the neighborhood, but when I get to the intersection where his route went west, I turn the other way, in toward familiar places.

  This is the way to school. To Pearl’s. This is the way into Boston, where I go sometimes when I need a reminder that the world isn’t tiny. That there are places where people look at you just because you happen to be walking by, not because they think they know something about who you are, or what you’ve been through.

  I come up on my school. The gate to the athletic field is open.

  I run down to the track and knock off eight laps. Two miles. I’m pretty sure this is what guys on the track team do. They run around in circles. Around and around with no place to go. It starts to do my head in, all those circles, so I leave. Back through the gate, out onto the street, and up toward the front of the school.

  The streetlamps have switched on even though it isn’t all that dark yet. Big pools of yellow light scatter down the sidewalk ahead of me. I’m closing in on the main building.

  We’ve been out a few weeks now. The front of the school is deserted except for one car.

  I don’t have to get any closer to see that I know this car. Not as well as Dov’s lime-green Caprice Classic, but that’s only because Dov’s car was my first, and cars, like I imagine it must be with girls, leave their mark on you.

  I slow to a walk and try to catch my breath before approaching from the rear.

  I made that dent in the left bumper, and afterward Mom wouldn’t let me drive her car for a week.

  Something must be terribly wrong.

  Why else would she come out in this disappearing dusk to look for me? When has Mom ever come looking for me?

  I catch my breath but my pulse won’t slow. I stand for a minute, thinking maybe she’ll see me in the rearview mirror. Then I notice her head in her hands. Her body is shaking.

  I come up on the passenger side. I rap the glass lightly. She jumps, but then she sees it’s me. She fumbles for the button on her door and unrolls the window. She wipes her eyes with a tissue she pulls from her purse.

  “What are you doing here?” she asks.

  I crouch down and lean on the doorframe. “You aren’t looking for me?”

  She shakes her head and then blows her nose. She reaches for her keys and finally turns off the ignition. I open the passenger door and climb into the car, moving her new briefcase to the floor by my feet.

  “If you aren’t looking for me, what are you …”

  I stop once I catch a glimpse of her view through the windshield. School’s out. Nobody’s around. Summer’s in full swing. Another class has graduated and gone on to start bright futures, but rather than wishing them well, those magnetic letters on the sign in front of the school still welcome Boaz home.

  “I’m sorry,” she says.

  “For what?”

  “For this.” She gestures to the wadded-up Kleenex on the floor of her car. To her tear-streaked face. “I know I should be happy. I should feel relieved. Lucky. We are lucky. So incredibly lucky. I know that. I know there are mothers everywhere, all over this country, all over this world, who would give anything to trade places with me. Who would love the chance to cry because they’re worried about their sons. There are mothers lost in the wilds of their own grief, who miss the days of worrying. I know. I know worrying is far better than grieving. But, God help me, sometimes I don’t know the difference. I can’t separate the grief from the worry.”

  “Mom.” I know I should say more, but in some way it’s as if I’m not even here. Like anyone could have stumbled into this passenger seat in his sweaty running gear and caught her soliloquy.

  She’s talking to herself, or to the universe, more than she is to me. But it’s good. It’s good. Because Mom isn’t as clueless as I thought she was.

  “It’s good,” I mumble.

  She looks at me sideways. She checks her face in the mirror and wipes away the mascara trails from her cheeks.

  “You know, this is so far from how I imagined things would turn out, sometimes it seems I’m living someone else’s life.”

  “I think I know the feeling.”

  She leans back into the driver’s seat. “I never let you boys play with guns or toy soldiers when you were little. When Boaz was a baby, I dressed him in pink striped pajamas. I fed you hot dogs without sulfites. I thought I was doing everything right.”

  “You did, Mom. Look.” I point to the sign. “He’s an American Hero. You must have done something right.”

  “I know. It’s just … this isn’t what I wanted for him. I never wanted this. And now, I just want him back.”

  “He’ll be back.”

  She searches my face until she sees me.

  “Where do you think he is, Levi? I mean, where do you think he is right this minute?”

  I have no idea if she’s testing me. If this is my chance to share what little I know. Or what little I think I know.

  “I gave him a cell phone,” she adds. “A new one. But he doesn’t turn it on.”

  No, this isn’t my chance. It’s not what she wants, and sometimes, I guess, it’s just better to do what someone wants of you.

  “Mom, there’s probably no reception on the trail. I’m sure when he gets somewhere with service, he’ll check in.”

  She nods. She looks up at the sign. Her lips move, just the slightest bit, as she reads those words over to herself again.

  “Where is he?” she whispers.

  All the light has left the sky. The yellow streetlamps make a pathetic effort to tame the darkness.

  “I think maybe he’s lying in his new sleeping bag,” I tell her. “I think he’s waiting on the stars.”

  TEN

  I’M SITTING IN HIS ROOM. On his bed. The mattress is back on the frame now. I can picture Mom, struggling underneath its unwieldy size.

  I can see the marks on the wall from where he taped up my Rand McNally map before returning it to me in the dead of night. His computer, with its broken motherboard, still sits on his desk. The radio, quiet, tucked on the shelf between a set of barbells and books with worn-out spines.

  I’m cataloging the place. Trying to make some sense out of everything by figuring out what’s here and what’s gone.

  He’s gone.

  That I know. He took those printed out maps. And all the new stuff Mom bought for him except for the cell phone. I found it, still in its package, behind a row of shoes in his closet. That box from Marty Muldoon’s is nowhere to be found. I know because I looked for it everywhere.

  I roll out my Rand McNally map, pin it to the bed and stare at it.

  I could wait for the second destination. Or the one a
fter that. He has all sorts of addresses scribbled into the baby-blue Atlantic.

  Or I could go now. Today. Tomorrow might even be safe. If I go soon, I could catch up with him in Poughkeepsie.

  There was a short period after Boaz left for boot camp when I imagined that as soon as I turned eighteen I’d follow him. I’d walk the path he’d blazed. I’d get fitted for a uniform. Pummeled into a muscled physique. Shaved close to the scalp.

  This wasn’t because I wanted to become a marine. And it certainly wasn’t because I believed, like Boaz did, that part of becoming a man is fighting for your country. It was as simple as me assuming, as I had all my life, that someday I’d be like my brother. That I’d follow right behind him.

  I got over that quickly enough. I grew out my hair. Took up smoking. Once Boaz was gone, I started feeling my way through a life outside of my brother’s shadow, only to learn that shadows grow even bigger when cast from half a world away.

  It’s today, I decide. It has to be today.

  I cross the street to Zim’s but he isn’t home. I look around back, figuring I might find him shooting baskets. Nope. Propped up against the garage I see Zim’s old skateboard, and I grab it. It’s the same one he used to ride back in the days when there was nothing more important to either of us than skateboarding. I don’t even have a board anymore, and I figure that’s part of my problem. Not that I don’t skate, but that nothing ever took its place. There’s nothing in my life as important to me as skateboarding once was.

  I ride Zim’s board over to Pearl’s. Mama Goldblatt answers the door.

  I don’t have a thing for women in their late forties, but if I did, I’d be totally hot for Mama Goldblatt. She’s smart and beautiful, and she’s got some big job at the public television station where she produces shows on world music and culture, and I know how Pearl likes to pretend her mother is totally lame and out of touch, but the truth is, if Pearl grows up to be one half as hip as Mama Goldblatt, she’ll be doing just fine.

  “Levi. Darling,” she says in her deep lullaby voice. “How are you?”

  It’s the first I’ve seen her in weeks.

  “I’m okay.”

  “And your brother, he’s home now?”

  “Not exactly.”

  “No?”

  “He was here, but now he’s left again.”

  “He got called back?”

  “No, no. He’s just gone off to, like, collect himself.”

  “Oh. That doesn’t sound so good.”

  Here’s another thing about Mama Goldblatt: she’s got a serious rack, or as Mom likes to call it, an “ample bosom.”

  There’s something about her, and I don’t think it’s just her chest, that makes me want to tell her everything. When I’m around her I fight the urge to crack myself open like an overripe melon, and it’s lucky for Pearl I fear her wrath more than I’m undone by Mama Goldblatt’s lullaby voice, or else by now I’d have shared Pearl’s secrets, and Mama Goldblatt might have locked her away in a real convent.

  “Is Pearl here?”

  “Out back. But grab something from the kitchen first. She tells me you’ve been living off a diet of peach frozen yogurt.”

  Pearl is reading in the sun under a ridiculously large hat.

  She shrugs. “What can I say? I burn easily.”

  “I need a ride.”

  “Where?”

  “Poughkeepsie.”

  “Isn’t Poughkeepsie like three hours away?”

  “About.”

  “I’m due at work in forty-five minutes.”

  “Maybe it’s time for a sick day.”

  She thinks this over. “I do love the dramatic prospect in that idea.”

  “Have I mentioned that you’re looking a little peaked?”

  She coughs. Rubs her temples. She groans. Then she coughs again. “How’d that sound?”

  “Perfect.”

  We take I-90, which couldn’t possibly be a less interesting route. I-90 is nothing but a big slab of concrete cutting the state of Massachusetts in two, and here we are, barreling down it. The very act of driving down the interstate seems so absurdly unsafe suddenly. We’re just suckers in a little cocoon made of tin.

  Every choice we make is a risk. Every single choice.

  Pearl puts in a CD she made for road trips. She’d had it sitting on her shelf for over three years. This is the first chance she’s had to play it. Two songs in and she pops it out again.

  “Jesus, I had bad taste at fourteen.”

  “Didn’t we all.”

  I have the address and directions folded into my lap. So much information, one small click away. If only there were a Web site that could answer the why of it all.

  “Has it occurred to you,” Pearl asks, “even if only a little, that maybe Boaz actually is hiking the Appalachian Trail, and that we’re going to show up unannounced on the doorstep of some guy named Laura who’ll look at us like we’re totally insane?”

  “Loren.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Yeah. It has. But if I’m wrong at least you learned your road trip mix sucks the big one.”

  “True that. Another question, if I may.”

  “Go on.”

  “What makes you think he’s going to come home with us?”

  It’s not as if I haven’t thought about this. I’ve thought about it plenty. It’s just that I don’t get anywhere with that thinking except back to the floor of my room staring at my toes.

  In other words: nowhere.

  I shrug. “It’s a shot in the dark, I guess.”

  “Better than not taking any shot at all.”

  That’s why I love Pearl.

  We trade in I-90 for the Taconic Parkway. A major improvement. Still no walker’s road, but pleasant enough. Only two lanes in either direction lined with trees full to bursting.

  Pearl lights a cigarette and the smell turns my stomach. I haven’t had much to eat today. I open the window and stick my head into the oncoming rush of air like a golden retriever.

  We find the address without any trouble. It’s a big house, peeling white paint and three stories, sitting at the end of a cul-de-sac, an American flag hanging from the front porch.

  Pearl is dying for a pee. We haven’t stopped since Framingham. We get out of the car. I do a big stretch and freeze right in the middle of it. For the first time since this whole plan occurred to me, I’m hit hard by fear.

  Not a creeping fear.

  A paralyzing, didn’t-even-know-it-was-coming-and-now-I-can’t-move kind of fear.

  But then Pearl comes over and links her arm in mine, and that fear starts to recede. She whisks me up the porch steps to the front door, where one of the two buzzers is marked with the name L. Cowell. She pushes it before I have a chance to hesitate. She pushes it three times.

  “C’mon, c’mon …” She’s hopping up and down.

  I go back to that exercise we learned in yoga. I close my eyes and try to imagine myself in my safe place. I try picturing the slope of my roof, a warm evening, Pearl stretched out next to me.

  Instead what I see when I close my eyes is a fist punching me full in the face. I’ve never taken a punch to the face, but I always suspected it isn’t like it looks in the movies. Guys always get up and go about the fighting in the movies. They stand up. Shake it off. Wipe the blood from the corners of their mouths and then, with narrowed eyes, dig in harder. But I’m pretty sure I’d be done for. Leveled flat. Game over.

  “Hello?” A voice on the intercom.

  “Hi.” Pearl waves, not seeming to care that there’s no camera attached to the speaker. “I gotta pee.”

  I push Pearl out of the way and step closer.

  “Hello?”

  My voice cracks and I sound like a Girl Scout making her cookie rounds.

  “Um, I’m looking for Boaz? Boaz Katznelson? I’m his brother.”

  The door buzzes. Pearl pulls it open and we stand faced with another door and a narrow staircase.

 
“Up here,” the voice calls.

  The stairs are creaky and the carpeting stained. We make our way up two flights. By the time we reach the top, Pearl is out of breath.

  Loren stands in the doorframe wearing nothing but plaid boxers and a white T-shirt. If I’d had any question about how Boaz knows him, which I didn’t, the haircut is a dead giveaway.

  “Hi,” Pearl says. “I know you don’t know me. But I seriously have to urinate.”

  “Come on in.”

  He points her toward the bathroom. I step in behind her. The ceiling is low and slanted and the place feels like an attic hideout. The kind of spot I’d have died to go as a kid and pretend I was all grown up.

  “You’re Bo’s brother?” he asks like he doesn’t quite believe this could possibly be true.

  “Yeah. Levi.”

  There doesn’t seem to be any air-conditioning. All the heat from the whole massive house gathers in this tiny collection of rooms.

  “So, Levi. What are you doing here?”

  Sweating. I’m sweating. That’s what I’m doing here.

  “I’m looking for Boaz.”

  “I hate to break it to you, but you’ve come to the wrong place.”

  “He’s not here?”

  “Nope.” Loren disappears and returns pulling a pair of shorts up over his massive thighs. I guess it finally occurs to him that when meeting people for the first time, it’s advisable not to do so in your underwear.

  Pearl comes out of the bathroom. “My bladder and I thank you.”

  “Can I get you guys something to drink?”

  I sit down on a small and wildly uncomfortable sofa.

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “We don’t mean to … I don’t know … I just thought he was …” I put my head in my hands. “Shit.”

  “Water would be nice,” Pearl says. Loren heads for the kitchen. She sits down next to me and leans in close. “I guess we should have called first.”

  “Ya think?”

  She pokes me hard in the ribs. “You owe me gas money.”

  Loren returns with two lukewarm waters and a cold beer for himself. He settles himself into the chair facing us. He’s far too tall for the low ceilings. Too big for his chair. There are many traits Loren possesses that any reasonable person might find menacing: shoulders like a cow’s hindquarters, permanent scowl, deep-set eyes and a scar from his eyebrow to his scalp.