Ask Him Why (12 page)

So I asked him, “How was your appointment with your new therapist?”

He made a face that looked as though he was still busy deciding. Then he came and sat on the edge of my bed.

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was . . . I don’t know.”

“It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about that if you don’t want.”

“No, I don’t mind. I just can’t decide. I sort of like her. And then, in another way, I sort of don’t. Like, I feel like she’s being nice, but I also feel like she could be scary. Like any minute I could be scared of her. But mostly I’m not. Does that make sense?”

“I think so,” I said.

Then we both went silent for a long time, and I realized I’d had more actual conversations with my brother Aubrey since Joseph came home than in the two or three years before that all put together.

“Is that what you came in here to talk to me about?” I asked after a time.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

“I’ve been looking online all day.”

“I told you not to read that stuff.”

“No. Not that stuff. Well. That stuff, too. But that’s not what I want to talk about. Because why talk about it? What’s the point? You know how bad it is, and it’s all the same. I was online reading about court-martials. Only turns out that’s saying it wrong. You’re supposed to say ‘courts-martial.’ Which sounds weird. But it’s right. Technically. But I still don’t think I’d say it that way, because people would think it was wrong. Even though it isn’t.”

“You want to jump to the part that got you in here?”

“Right. Sorry. I read that they can give a soldier the death penalty.”

Silence for a moment while we both listened to the phantom thump of that information landing on my bedroom carpet.

“Not for this they wouldn’t, though. Right?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “It was that kind of legal writing, mostly, and it was hard to tell.”

“I think that’s for when a guy does something really bad on purpose, like gives secrets away to the enemy. You know, like a spy, a betrayer. And he gets other soldiers killed by betraying.”

“But everybody’s
saying
Joseph’s a betrayer who got two guys killed.”

“But they can’t prove that those two guys wouldn’t have gotten killed anyway.”

“That never stopped anybody else,” he said, and I had to admit—at least silently, to myself—that he had a point about that. “Some of the people who leave comments are even saying now that Joseph should get the death penalty for what he did.”

“Aubrey . . .”

“What?”

“I told you not to read the comments.”

“Yeah. You did. You just forgot to tell me how to stop.”

I sighed. I almost laughed, but I knew it would come out wrong, and Aubrey would misunderstand it, because everything was so very unfunny in his world. Well, in all of our worlds.

“Things will be better when we get to Aunt Sheila’s for the summer,” I said.

“Why will they be better?”

“Because even if there’s a reporter or two calling, most people who live around there won’t know who we are. So when we go places, we don’t have to go around telling everybody our last name, and we’ll just be her niece and nephew visiting. And then we’ll go see Joseph, and he’ll tell you for himself that they don’t give out the death penalty just for talking to a few guys about not going out on duty. And then you’ll believe it, and things will be better.”

“That does sound better,” he said.

And he even got to his feet, like what I’d given him was enough.

“Thing is,” he said, “it’s only May. Till June is a long time to wait.”

Strong as I was, and expert as I’d suddenly become at calming things to say to my little brother, I had nothing in my bag of tricks to help either one of us through the seemingly endless maze of the days we’d have to wait.

Part Two

Before You Jump, a Hearty Breakfast

Remembering Summer 2003

Chapter Ten: Aubrey

I had to ride in the back. It was a two-door. So Ruth had to stand there holding the passenger seat forward so I could get in.

Aunt Sheila’s car was an old Nissan. Not old like from another generation. Just old like ten or twelve years. It was a foreign concept to me. If my parents kept a car for three years instead of two, they were deeply ashamed by how ancient it was. Unless it was one of my dad’s “classics.”

The Nissan was yellow and had rust on its hood.

I wasn’t ashamed to be riding in it. And I wasn’t trying to judge it. I just couldn’t focus off it. Not only the age but the fact that it was cheap and light. The doors made more of a ping when you closed them. Less of a thunk.

Looking back, I’m a little ashamed. Of myself. But I just couldn’t help it at the time.

At least I had the back of the car to myself.

I turned on my CD player and stuck the earbuds in place. Then I cranked it up high. I don’t remember the band or the song. I remember the mood. Pounding and loud. It was the kind of music that can make everything else go away. Because it
drives
it away. It forces everything that isn’t itself to leave.

I waved at the reporters and cameramen as we pulled away from the curb. Not because I liked them. Because I was happy to be saying good-bye. It was meant to be more like a taunting wave.
Going where you can’t get to me. Bye.

Maybe. I hope.

Nobody waved back.

My sister threw an empty plastic water bottle at me, and it bounced off my forehead.

“Ow,” I said, pulling one earbud out. The left one. Letting it dangle. “What?”

“Aunt Sheila is trying to talk to you. Are you deaf?”

“I was listening to my music.”

“Well, listen to me,” Aunt Sheila said. “For a minute at least. We’re not going all the way to Texas to see Joseph until I can talk to him first.”

Joseph had landed in Texas, not Kansas. That much I knew. Only the subtext of Aunt Sheila’s caution was unfamiliar to me.

It set something off in my stomach. I didn’t know what it was yet. I still had the thumping music in my right ear. But, just my luck, it coexisted with this new feeling. It couldn’t drive the new stuff out. It didn’t even feel as though it was trying.

“Why not?”

“Because it’s too far to go if we’re not going to get to see him.”

“Why wouldn’t we see him?”

“I don’t know, Aubrey. I don’t know what’s going on. I just know you’ve sent him three letters and he hasn’t written back.”

“He didn’t get them,” I said. With some strength. To preempt whatever might come back around to me. Maybe even to overpower it.

“You don’t know what he did or didn’t get. You just know there’s been no word from him.”

“If he got them, he would have written back to me.”

“In the past, maybe. But maybe things are different now.”

I felt myself starting to get mad. The kind of mad that normally landed me in the principal’s office. “
Things
may be different,” I said. “But
Joseph’s
not.”

“A thing like this can change someone,” she said.

“He didn’t change!” I shouted. I hadn’t meant to shout it. And part of me almost felt like I hadn’t. More like it had shouted itself. “Why would he change into someone who wouldn’t even answer me? That’s stupid. That could never happen.”

“I can think of a lot of reasons,” she said. As if I hadn’t just called her stupid.

I watched the back of her head at an angle. Hoping she wouldn’t tell me any of them. She had her hair up, but loosely. She had a big head and face. Huge glasses. She looked nothing like Dad. They didn’t look like they could even have been related. Didn’t act like it, either.

And she was older than Dad. More like fiftysomething to his late forties.

“He might just be trying to keep this whole mess away from you,” she said.

I heard my sister snort a little.

“Too late for that,” I said. I guess I said it
for
Ruth. For both of us.

“But he might not know that. Or maybe Brad told him not to get in touch with you. Or the letters might be censored going out and he might be worried what they’d sound like after the censors got through with them. Or a dozen other reasons we don’t know about because we’re not in there with him. I’m not going to waste the trip if he’s not going to come out and see us.”

“He’ll come out and see us,” I said, trying to keep my voice calm. Failing. I wanted to scream at Aunt Sheila. Throw something. Put tape on her mouth. Anything to keep her from talking. “Besides, it’s my money that would be wasted. Not yours.”

“But it’s a big deal, a long trip like that. Especially when you consider the risk I’m taking, doing this behind your parents’ backs. If they find out, I’ll never hear the end of it. Which is a risk I’m willing to take if we can see him. But it’s too much risk to take if it turns out to all be for nothing. I’m only going if it’s going to do any good. So I’ll call when we get home. I can’t call Joseph. But I’ll call and get a message to him, or get him to call back collect. Or at least I need to get a message back from him that he’ll see us if we come.”

“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life!” I shouted. Completely losing the battle to disguise my panic. “He’s going to
see
us!”

I saw Ruth and Aunt Sheila exchange a look with each other. Aunt Sheila’s look seemed to say,
Has he been like this all along?
and Ruth’s seemed to say,
Oh yeah
.

“Humor me,” Aunt Sheila said. “I want to hear it with my own ears.”

I put my earbuds back in and steamed and fumed all the way back to Aunt Sheila’s house.

I looked out the window. I don’t remember what I saw. If I even saw it in the first place at all.

My new room for the summer was the basement. I thought that was ironic. I mean, after the way Joseph had been banished to the basement and all. When he came home. Brief as that turned out to be.

I didn’t feel punished, though. I didn’t mind at all. It made me feel closer to him. Like the world had given us one more thing to share in common.

Aunt Sheila had brought down a little foldable cot. It sat in one corner, with sheets and a pillow and a pillow slip and a coarse blanket all folded neatly on one end.

One concrete wall of the basement was covered with shelves. Floor to nearly ceiling, wood shelves. But the only thing they stored was Aunt Sheila’s bottle collection. All the bottles were empty. I got the feeling that every one meant something to her, though I couldn’t imagine what. Only about one in ten had anything to do with alcohol. Sure, there was the odd champagne bottle here or there. I tried to imagine that one was left over from when her now-grown daughter was born. Or some other huge life milestone like that. There was the occasional brown bottle from some rare imported beer. But there were also Coke bottles. Root beer bottles. Sparkling water bottles. I couldn’t imagine why they all had meaning to her.

After a few minutes, I realized it was giving me a headache to try. And I didn’t want to wonder or care anymore.

I walked over to the high windows. There were two kids kicking a soccer ball around in the yard next door. All I could see were their legs through the chain-link fence.

Last time we’d been here, there had been no kids next door. Just an old couple. I wondered if they’d died. Or maybe they just had grandkids I hadn’t seen yet.

I watched their legs and wondered what it felt like to be them. Not to have to hide from reporters every day. Or write to your brother in federal prison and wonder why he never wrote back. Never once wake up to find the word
COWARD
painted on your house. Or still not be sure your brother wasn’t going to get the death penalty. And have no idea who to ask or how to find out.

I’d been them just a couple of months ago. But I swear I couldn’t remember how it felt.

In more normal circumstances, I might have wanted to go over and kick a soccer ball around with them. But these were not normal circumstances. And now nothing could possibly have seemed more pointless.

It was like suddenly I wasn’t a kid anymore.

After a while, I realized I had to go to the bathroom. I looked around, but there was nothing down in the basement. It wasn’t a converted rec room, like our basement. It was just exactly what it was. A water heater and a washer and dryer on one end. A bottle collection and me on the other.

I padded up the basement stairs to the kitchen.

Well. Not quite.

The kitchen had been my goal. But I didn’t go all the way
to
it. Because Ruth and Aunt Sheila were talking in the kitchen. And when I heard what they were saying, I stopped cold—in more ways than one—and just listened.

“I didn’t actually talk to Joseph,” I heard Aunt Sheila say. “You can’t just ring up an inmate. But I called. I had to call three times, actually. It’s a very complicated process. They bounce your call from person to person. And you’re on hold for what feels like hours. But I finally got a real person. And he told me Joseph definitely got the letters.”

“What if this person was wrong?” Ruth asked.

“I don’t think he was. He looked into it and then called me back. He talked to a guard on Joseph’s block. The guard said he goes by there a dozen times a day, and all three letters are sitting opened out flat on his bed, next to his pillow, all the time. The envelopes are gone. But the letters have been opened. And he must have read them. Maybe even more than once if he keeps them on his bed.”

“But he never answered.”

“No.”

“What if he answered and the prison system lost what he wrote?”

A short silence. I wondered if Aunt Sheila was nodding or shaking her head. Or if they were just giving each other a look. Or God forbid maybe they were saying the most important stuff too quietly for me to hear.

I wanted all of the conversation. Every facial expression. Every glance. But there was nothing I could do.

“The same guard goes around every day collecting outgoing mail from all the inmates on that block. He says Joseph never handed him anything. Nothing could have gotten lost because there was nothing to lose.”

Another maddening silence.

Then I heard Ruth ask, “So that’s why you’re worried about whether he’ll see us?”

“It does make you wonder,” Aunt Sheila said.

“When did you find this out?”

“A couple of weeks ago.”

“Why didn’t you tell Aubrey in the car?”

“Oh, kiddo. So many reasons. I wasn’t sure he’d believe me. I thought he might freak out. There’s a
way
to tell him. Something that’s more like the right way. But I’ll be damned if I can figure out what it is.”

I swallowed hard. Just for a moment, I felt bad for Aunt Sheila. In a few minutes, I would feel bad for me, and the feeling would last for a very long time. Years. More than a decade. But in that moment, I felt sorry for her. Because she had to figure out a way to tell me a thing like that.

And I didn’t know what the right way would have been, either.

I just knew I’d found out. And the way I’d found out sure wasn’t it.