“You’re home.”
I drop my bags by the door, pulling it shut behind me. “Yeah.” I shrug off my coat and drape it over the back of the couch. “I am.”
She nods, biting her lip. “Hey, if you... We made dinner. It’s in the microwave. We didn’t know if you’d be hungry.” She perches on the sofa, next to my jacket, fingering the sleeve. “I missed you,” she says after a moment, brushing a strand of hair out of her face, staring awkwardly at the ground. “And I’m sorry.”
I reach out a hand. She looks at me questioningly.
“Show me.”
She sighs, her breath shaky. “Yeah, okay.” She unhooks her thumb from the sleeve of her sweater. Pulls the fabric up her arm. It’s bigger than I remembered. Halfway to her elbow, easily. Raised up like a mountain range on her forearm, pink and swollen and scary. It looks better, though, than the last time I saw it. The one on her left arm was shallower. Together, though, I thought they were going to fill the whole house up with blood. Thought I might drown in it, waiting for the sirens. It was a long night. A long week. It’s been a long, long year.
We’re standing like that, her arm nestled in my palm, when I hear squealing. She smiles. “Go on. She missed you, too.” I drop her arm and turn around, just in time to miss being bowled over by a cyclone of a nine year old.
“I missed you!” The whirlwhind latches onto my waist, pressing her cheek into my stomach. “Virginia said you might never come home but you did, you came, you did!” She squeals in delight, squeezing me as hard as she can manage. “You’re home you’re home you’re home!”
I turn around and glance at Josephine, who’s examining her fingernails, her sleeve pulled safely back over her wrist. She smiles at me. “I told you.”
Meanwhile, Helen lets go of me and looks up at me expectantly. “You’re getting too big for this,” I admonish her, but scoop her up by the armpits nevertheless, spinning her around twice before I set her down. Josephine winces as Helen’s foot scrapes the wall.
“You spoil her,” she notes, rolling her eyes, then glances at the stairs. “I don’t know where Mom and Virginia are. Mom said she was coming...”
“I’m right here.” My mother emerges from her bedroom, navy bathrobe wrapped firmly around her bony torso. “Oh, honey, it’s so good to have you home.” She embraces me, resting her head on my shoulder. I hug her back, reluctantly, wondering how she could mean that when she was the one who sent me away.
“Hi.” My mother backs away, revealing the girl standing behind her. She’s taller than I remembered, and her hair is pulled back sloppily, but it looks freshly highlighted. She has her reading glasses on, and a red tank top, with lime green pajama pants rolled up at the waist. She looks me up and down critically, finally settling her eyes on my day-old scruff. “You need to shave.”
Helen puts her hands on her hips. “Mom, you said she had to be nice.”
“I’m being nice,” Virginia says, rolling her eyes. “God. Way to be annoying.” She shrugs, turning her attention back to me. “It’s good that you’re back though. I guess.”
I nod. That’s about as much as you can expect from Virginia. On a good day. Even when we were kids, she was, by her own estimation, way too cool for everything. Including, and especially, her family. But what happened to Josephine changed her, I think. She’s just figuring out how to transition without making it look like there was something wrong with who she was before.
My mother claps her hands. “There’s dinner in the microwave, sweetie. Are you hungry? Oh, and I picked up Mountain Dew today at the store, so you’ll have something to drink...”
I nod. “Yeah. Great.” It’s been months since I drank anything but water or liquor. But it’s nice that she remembers who I used to be.
Mom flees for the kitchen, leaving the rest of us standing there, awkwardly, in the living room. “So,” Josephine says finally.
Virginia sighs heavily and rolls her eyes. “I’ve got homework.” She turns on her heel and takes off up the stairs without another word.
Josephine shakes her head. “She’s a charmer.”
“She’s had a tough year,” I say, shrugging.
“Yeah, well...” She sighs. “Yeah. I guess she has.”
Helen tugs on my pants leg. “Will you help me with my homework?”
I smile down at her. “Yeah, sure. What are you guys doing? Solar physics? Advanced political theory?”
“Worse,” she says, shaking her head with a scowl. “Multiplication. With three digits.”
I shudder. “Tough stuff. Let’s see if we can help each other figure it out, right? Go get it and bring it in to the kitchen. I’m going to go eat.”
“Alright.” She takes off at a million miles an hour. I’d be surprised to see her move at anything less.
And so we’re left, standing alone together. The twins. I have known her for as long as I have known myself. And still I have nothing to say.
“They love you,” she observes, smiling wanly.
“They love you, too.”
She shakes her head. “Helen barely even noticed when I came home. Virginia certainly didn’t hang up her cell phone to come greet me.” She shrugs. “You’re their big brother. They need you.”
“To do what? Break noses? Disfigure? Narrowly escape lawsuits?”
Something dark passes over her face. “You know that wasn’t your fault.”
“Then why did I spend the last four months up at Nana’s, Josephine?”
She shakes her head. “Because Mom was --”
My mother emerges from the kitchen, wiping her hands on her bathrobe. “I was what?”
“Nothing.” Josephine glares at me, her jaw set. “Go eat, Pookie. We can talk later.”
Friday, August 15th, 3:40 PM
“You’re here!”
I peered across the front lawn at my grandmother; watched her waddle down the stairs of her big yellow house. Here. It wasn’t home. Home was three hours away, the brick house on the corner that always seemed too small for all of us. Here was the middle of nowhere, a lonely little town where everyone knew everyone else and didn’t want to know anyone new. And here was where I was stuck, until I was deemed sane enough to go back to my sisters and my problems and the other things I had left behind.
She wrapped her arms around me the way grandmothers do, with an exaggerated zeal. As if seeing me were some special sort of reward, rather than a favor to her daughter. “It’s so good to see you, sweetheart,” she murmured in my ear, squeezing me tightly before letting me go. She smiled at me, looking me up and down, something dark behind her eyes. “Now, get your things from the trunk and we’ll get you settled, okay?”
I nodded and did as she said. She chattered on the whole time, about the school I’d be starting at the next week – where the total enrollment was smaller than my graduating class back home – and what she was cooking for dinner – tuna noodle casserole, which she’d heard from my mother was my favorite – and who even knows what else. I barely listened, grappling with my three suitcases and several boxes. I’d packed almost everything. I had no idea how long I would be staying.
“I know you usually sleep up in the attic when you all come to visit, but since you’ll be here for awhile, I thought you could have your mom’s old room.” She beamed at me, and I managed a tiny smile over the boxes I had balanced precariously in my arms. I had left the suitcases out on the lawn. Most people around here didn’t even lock their doors. I doubted anyone would take them.
Nana led me through the house and pulled open the door leading upstairs. “It’s been so long since you all have been here. I wish you all would come down more often.” She paused and sighed deeply before continuing up the stairs and pulling open a door down the hall.
“Here you go.” She smiled, standing back. I set the boxes down by the door and followed her inside. It was a small room, with blue wallpaper and slanting ceilings. A blue bedspread adorned a white bed, with a white whicker night table and dresser and a white desk in the corner. Light flooded the room from two windows, one porthole over the desk and one stretching from the floor to the low ceiling on the wall beside the bed. White, translucent curtains billowed out and away from the air conditioning unit and into the scant floor space. I had spent hours in this room with my sisters, searching for the elusive secret room – a boarded up old boiler room we had quested for earnestly in our childhood, sure that it held some sort of magical secret and that somewhere, there was indeed a door. It was different, this time. Lonely. There was nothing to find, and more importantly, no one with whom to search. Just me. Three hours away from home. Here.
Nana smiled hopefully, obviously dissatisfied with my lack of enthusiasm. “Dear, I know you miss home, but you’ll be fine here. It’s not such a bad place.” And to her, it wasn’t. She had lived her entire life in this town. Was used to its stifling smallness, to the streets with no traffic lights, to buying her gas and her groceries in the same tiny store on the edge of town. This was where she had been born, had met my grandfather, had raised four children. Where she felt safe enough not to lock her doors. To her, this was not a bad place. It was the best place. The only place. And she would never understand differently.
“No, it’s nice. I’m just a little homesick.” Candor. It had gotten me a lot of things in life – from girlfriends to jobs to scholarship nominations. The trick is to tell the truth and still, somehow, avoid it all together. To let go of the little secrets until people think you have nothing big left to hide.
As always, though, it soothed Nana. A touch of homesickness was the least of her worries, after everything I’d “been through” -- though I was hardly the one who had suffered. She enfolded me in a quick hug and pulled away, smiling again, this time seemingly genuine. “Sweetheart, you’ll be fine. You’ll get started at your new school and before you know it, you’ll be back home.”
It was a reward, home. For when I started acting sane again. When I stopped flying off the cuff, stopped hyperventilating in the face of crisis, stopped worrying about her until it hurt. But I couldn’t picture that ever happening. It didn’t matter, in the end; as it turned out, home wasn’t a reward. It was the only option. In the months that followed, I proved that tragedy could follow me anywhere, even a tiny town on the outskirts of nowhere; the town where I was supposed to find a fresh start.
The truth is, you aren’t safe anywhere, at home or two hundred miles down the road. They’ll find a way to break you down. You can never run far enough.
Thursday, December 11th, 11:36 PM
“You should sleep.”
I look up from my book. Josephine leans against the door frame, resting a spoon on her chin. She cradles a pint of Ben & Jerry’s in her other hand, the lid dangling from her pinky.
“So should you. You have school tomorrow. I don’t.”
She shrugs, taking a spoonful of ice cream and eating it slowly, watching me. “You’re coming back after Christmas, right?”
I nod. “Finishing out the year. Yeah.”
“And then college?” She raises her eyebrows, chewing the inside of her lip. It hits me, all of a sudden. How little we know each other, now. We could always say anything to each other. And now, suddenly, we are afraid to say anything at all.
“Yeah. Of course.”
She nods slowly, gently stabbing the ice cream. “Look, Pookie, I...” She sighs. “I don’t know.”
“You can ask about her if you want to.”
She glances at me, obviously surprised. “It just happened a couple of weeks ago, though. I wanted to give you time.”
“Yeah.”
I know she wants more from me than that. Some comfort, some prompting, anything. But the truth is, I don’t want her to ask. I don’t want to talk about Poppy Law. I want to forget her. To erase her completely from my memory, from my history. Or at the very least, to allow her to fade into the background, until her face doesn’t glare back at me every time I close my eyes.
“I should...” She sighs again, staring at the ground. “You know, I’m just going to go to bed. Alright?”
“Sure.” I reopen my book, as if that’s what I’ve been waiting for all along. The truth is, I don’t know what I’m waiting for. Don’t know what I want her to say. I just want things to be like they used to be, somehow. When we could talk without worrying. When we had nothing real to hide.
She pauses, then walks away and disappears down the darkened hallway. I close my book again and stare at the wall, my eyes tracing the bloodstain on my carpet, remembering all the things I wish I hadn’t seen.
Saturday, August 16th, 10:27 AM
“Did you sleep well?”
I took a slow sip of my coffee, shrugging. “Sure.” I had tossed and turned all night. At about six thirty, I’d finally fallen asleep, but even those four hours had been fitful, at best. I wanted to go home. It was hard to imagine that anything less would soothe me.
“Good.” She glanced down at her crossword. “Say, dear, was ‘Aida’ set in Egypt?”
“Yeah.” I had no idea, actually, but I wasn’t about to tell her that. Nana liked to believe that her grandchildren were cultured. The kind of people who go to operas, or at the very least are familiar with them. She wanted us to be bigger than the small-town world she lived in. So we humored her. When she was around, we spoke of classic novels and Tchaikovsky, documentaries on PBS, the pitfalls of the Times and the Post. Not that she would have known if we were making it all up – a fact we frequently counted on. But she hoped for us, and we didn’t want to disappoint her.
We sat in silence for awhile, save the scratching of her pencil against the crossword, the occasional murmur of a word under her breath. She was a fascinating woman, my grandmother. There were so many things she had never done, so many dreams she had never realized, and yet she still looked perfectly content. Worried, of course. After Josephine, it would have been insane not to worry. But there was something resolute about her mouth, something that overshadowed even the smear of bright orange-red lipstick. It appeared that she knew something none of us did; something she was unwilling to share, though she knew we worried, too. Maybe we just weren’t ready, yet. Maybe we never would be.
Finally, she set the puzzle aside. “We’re having the neighbors over for dinner tonight. The girl is about your age, I think. It would be good for you to get to know someone before you go to school. They’re a nice family, really. A very nice young woman. Extremely bright.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Extremely bright” didn’t sound like a promising prospect. I sincerely doubted that this girl, however bright she may be, really wanted to get to know me. She certainly didn’t want to spend a Saturday night with her family, to the old lady’s house next door, and meet her grandson. I was sure that I had been described as “a handsome young man,” and probably “a very nice boy.” Sweeping phrases, old-people phrases, that pretend to mean something though they really mean nothing at all.
“I was thinking I might go to the movies or something.” It wasn’t much of an attempt. I knew she wouldn’t let me off, but it seemed like I might as well try. The only thing I really wanted was to go home. To see her. To sleep on the floor beside her bed, as I had done for the previous week and a half. Just listening to her breathe. Knowing she was safe.
Nana shook her head with a roll of her eyes. “A very nice man and his daughter are expecting you this evening, sweetheart. Besides, I’ll need your help to grill the steaks.”
It wasn’t like I could have escaped, anyway. In a town this size, there was nowhere to escape to. And I could hardly go home, no matter how much I wanted to. She wasn’t there, anyway. And so I was damned to dinner with this “nice young woman” and her father, our bland and respectable neighbors. Or at least, that’s how I thought of them at the time.
Later, when I recounted this scene to Poppy, as we lay naked on her bed, her head on my chest, she would laugh. “ ‘Extremely bright.’ Jesus. And Tobias, a ‘very nice man’? What crack was your grandmother smoking, and where do I buy some?”
As it turned out, the Laws were many things. They were stubborn. Angry. Sad. Lonely. Dysfunctional. Secretive. They were impossible to understand. But they were not bland, and they were not respectable. And as for that girl, that “nice young woman” who seemed neither young nor nice? I loved her. Everything. Her virtues and her faults. Her hatred. Her bitterness. It hit me, and I was powerless to stop it. She stole my heart.
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