Ask Him Why (2 page)

But Aubrey seemed to find something up there—something he needed enough, I guess, to make it worth the sacrifice.

Usually dinner at our house was a stony silence. Sometimes it was broken up by weirdly generic and meaningless questions from my mom. Questions that, on the surface, reflected an interest in our lives, but if you were paying close enough attention, you might note that she sounded like she was reading lines from a memorized script.

And that was the tension, right there. That was the aspect of family dinners that was ruining my little brother’s corneas—not what was said at dinner, but what wasn’t. Or what was said but not deeply meant.

This dinner was different.

Joseph was stabbing his prime rib with his fork. Isabella, our housekeeper and cook, made terrific dinners. I had to imagine that the food on his plate was about a million times better than those premeasured army mess meals the taxpayers were paying Halliburton—or whoever was delivering meals at that point—to serve in the field. But Joseph had apparently lost his appetite but good.

He looked small to me, my big brother. Well, he
was
small. Bigger than I was, but small for a grown man. But that day he looked smaller than usual. Maybe even small compared to me.

The silence was so loud that it rang in my ears like noise. Then my father startled everybody with a hurled comment that sounded like the middle of a conversation, not the beginning of one. I swear, it didn’t sound like the first sentence of anything.

“I just keep wondering what you were thinking, Joseph. How does a thing like this happen?”

Joseph opened his mouth to answer, but my father shouted him down.

“I don’t want to hear a word from you! I’ve had quite enough of you for one day.”

We were all smart enough not to point out that you shouldn’t ask questions of someone if you don’t want to hear a word from them.

Then all went quiet again for a long time, and my appetite started to go wherever Joseph’s had gone.

“You won’t be able to get a job!” my father shouted. “Nobody’s going to hire you. How do you expect to make something of your life if you can’t get hired anywhere?”

Joseph looked up at him briefly but said nothing, as instructed. Aubrey stared at the chandelier.

“I just want to know if you thought of that first. Did it occur to you that you were making a decision that could bring your whole life to a halt?”

Joseph set down his fork. It’s not like it had been doing him much good anyway. “Am I supposed to answer that?”

Amazingly, our mom spoke up for the first time that meal. “Brad, the decision’s been made. It’s done. The time to ask these questions was before he did what he did. It’s too late now.”

“I know that!” my father bellowed. “Don’t you think I know that?”

“But the point I’m making, Brad, is that it’s not very useful to ask.”

“Especially if you’re not going to let him answer,” I said.

It was brave, and it froze me, and everybody stared at me, which was unnerving. Even Aubrey looked away from the chandelier for a moment. I wondered if he saw white spots in front of my image.

I waited for my father to come at me—verbally, at least.

He never did.

He dug back into his prime rib. Literally, viciously, as if the meat had caused all this trouble. Whatever the trouble was.

My brother Joseph’s gaze flickered up to me one more time. He had a look in his eyes as if he were staring up at me from the bottom of a very deep well. I’d say it was desperate, except desperation usually means you’re trying to save yourself. Joseph was not trying to save himself. He had accepted his fate.

Whatever it was.

It was my job to do the dinner dishes—not because we didn’t have the staff to cover such tasks, but because my father had strong opinions about instilling a work ethic in children. And I adored doing the dishes. That may sound strange, but picture this: At dinner, we were all forced together at the table. Then I was freed by a word from my dad, and I headed straight for the kitchen, had the whole room to myself, and then life was good again.

When I washed the dishes, I could always feel the stress rolling off me like chlorinated water when I jumped out of the pool.

Oh, I suppose I could have gone to my room and gotten the same silence there. But I didn’t, because I couldn’t, because it was my job to do dishes. And I guess the dishes had gotten all mixed up in my mind with the rolling-off of stress, so they were my friends, those soapy dishes.

After a while, Joseph came into the kitchen and leaned on the counter between the toaster and the espresso machine. His elbow was maybe five inches from mine, but he didn’t look at me. He looked over the sink and out the kitchen window, and I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to be with me or just didn’t want to be with the rest of them.

I stopped washing. Moving. For a minute, I had to remind myself to breathe.

“Hey, Duck,” he said.

I looked at the blond hair on his arm. It was hard to look at his face, his head, because it was so weird to see his hair military-short. Some people can pull off that look, but this was my brother Joseph. It made him look like some alien had come down to Earth as a Joseph impersonator. Not only would he never voluntarily do that to his hair, it was hard to imagine he would ever go someplace where anyone would force it on him.

At least, the Joseph I’d always known.

I wanted to ask him,
What the hell happened?
Because there was a hole in the room the size and shape of that unbelievably obvious question, and I couldn’t bear to leave it gaping open another second. But that would have been something like direct communication. I didn’t have a lot of talent in that field at the time, probably because I had no experience and no real role models.

So what I said was, “Why did you take a cab? From the . . . I don’t know. Airport or bus. Or train or whatever. Why a cab?”

He still didn’t look at me. He said, to the window, “Uh . . . to get home?”

“Why not call Mom?”

“I did.”

“She wouldn’t come?”

“She was in the middle of her book group. The ladies who lunch were here.”

“But this . . . I mean . . . it just seems kind of big.”

“It was her turn to host. You know how she feels about social responsibility.”

That was a private joke between us. When most people use that term, they mean some kind of progressive societal awareness.
Joseph used it with our mom as a way of suggesting that her number-
one priority is looking good in front of the ladies in her social circle.

“Still,” I said, unsure how to finish making my point, and also vaguely aware that I shouldn’t need to.

“Duck,” he said, “it’s Janet.”

He’d been calling our mom “Janet” since he was eighteen. He’d been calling me “Duck” since I was a baby, and nobody remembered where it came from. Lots of people have nicknames that they earned somehow as babies, but there’s always a family story about why. So I think it says a lot that nobody bothered to remember, like our family history was never worth recording.

“Joseph, what happened?” I asked, surprising myself. Surprising us both, I think.

A long pause.

“Something not very cut-and-dried,” he said. Then he paused again. “Something people won’t quite be sure what to make of. And so now you’ll get to watch people turn themselves inside out to try to make it into something very simple. Very black and white.”

I wanted to ask him what that meant. Also why people would do that. But my first question seemed a little nosy, even to me. He’d obviously already told me as much as he wanted to tell.

People think if somebody’s in your blood family, then you know them well enough to ask anything, but some families know each other better than others. We were mostly boundaries, with not a lot of permission to cross. Approaches were always handled with great caution, and the applications to do so took an abnormally long time to process.

As to the second question, well . . . it’s one thing to know what you think people will do next. It’s another to know why anybody does anything. It’s always easier to know the “what” than the “why.”

“I missed you, Duck,” Joseph said.

It was such a rare blast of affection from anyone in the house that it left me unable to speak.

The thing I’ll always remember best about that time is not how quickly our family fell apart. The memorable bit was when I first looked back at how we’d convinced ourselves we’d ever been together in the first place.

Chapter Two: Aubrey

I always broke the stereotype of an astronomer, I think. Even as a boy wannabe. Actually, I guess it would be more accurate to say that’s what everybody else thinks. Somehow astronomers have
been typecast as mild mannered. Usually wearing those thoughtful-
looking half glasses. But I never thought of having a hot temper and being fascinated by space as mutually exclusive. I think people watch too many movies.

I’m not meaning to stray off track. My temper is relevant. Because the day Joseph came home happened to have been a day I was sent home from school early for fighting.

Fighting is an exaggeration.

Actually, so is home. Because, although I left school with a note for my parents, I didn’t go home. At least, not for many hours. I skulked around town, keeping a low profile, burning with shame, the note a presence in my pocket I could psychically feel. It was hot and heavy and irritating. It meant my father would disapprove of me even more than he already did. And rather than dismiss it as unrealistic expectations on his part, I would have to admit he had a point.

Not that I would have put it in those words at the time. But it all seems quite obvious, looking back.

All I did was push Greg Butterfield. Well, hard. Well. What I did exactly, in detail, was to hit him in the chest with the heels of both my hands, hard enough that he stumbled backward and slammed into a handful of other people in the crowded hall.

What will forever be lost in the telling is what he’d done to incite it.

He had been taunting me. And taunting me. And taunting me. Because I was small, and because my name is Aubrey. But of course he called me “Audrey.”

To this very day, I wonder why, when a man wants to insult another man, he calls him a woman or a girl. Now that I’m grown, I notice that these are guys with wives and girlfriends and daughters. Don’t they see what they’re saying?

I’m getting off track again.

Greg had raised the taunting right up to my boiling point. He must have known where that was, too. Because his timing was flawless. At that boiling moment, he reached out and grabbed a big piece of the skin at my waist. Right through my T-shirt. And pinched and twisted.

Adding a sudden and unexpected stab of pain to my rage at that boil-over moment was too much. I couldn’t be responsible for my actions after that. It was wrong for anybody to expect me to try.

Once I was watching a football game with my father, and he told me that the referee will always catch the second bit of unsportsmanlike conduct. You know. When the play is over, and one guy takes a swing at another. And the guy swings back. The ref always sees the second infraction.

This little story I just recounted is amazing not so much because I actually learned something from my father that proved useful. Although that, too. But more because we were sitting watching a football game together. Like a regular bonded father and son.

I must have been very little, is all I can say. Either that or I’m remembering wrong. Maybe I was hanging in a doorway, listening to him yell at the screen. Maybe I was only wishing I was sitting and sharing the moment with him.

Yeah. That’s a much better fit with everything else in my young life, isn’t it? What was I thinking with that other ’50s sitcom thing?

When I finally slunk through the door, I saw that Joseph was home. Sitting on the couch between Brad and Janet. Nobody noticed me for a long time.

My jaw went down. My heart rate went up. Took off like my heart wanted to fly away.

It didn’t stay up long, though.

The story of my family: Everything that takes flight will be shot down. You need only soar to draw antiaircraft fire. It was the law.

After dinner, once the evening had worn on, Joseph was bedded down in the basement. The rollaway bed was rolled away, and sheets and blankets put down. It wasn’t exactly a dungeon in the basement. More like a rec room. Probably nicer than some people’s apartments. But it had a dungeonlike feel to it. You know. Being banished to “below.” Like a judgment call between heaven and hell.

Not that upstairs was heaven by any means.

The excuse was that Joseph’s bedroom had been turned into a reading room/den/library for our dad. Well, Ruth’s and my dad, Brad. Brad wasn’t Joseph’s dad, which might have been part of the problem. There was so much complexity to the problems, though. It’s really hard to look back and say.

The funny part of Brad in a reading room is that Brad didn’t read. Legal briefs, maybe. But I expect he farmed even those off to subordinates. What Brad did was smoke. Not cigarettes, but cigars and pipes. And Janet couldn’t stand the smell of it. Never could. So the reading room was really a smoking room with an overly noble misnomer of a label. But whatever you called it, no way Brad was giving it up.

Especially not for a soldier who had no business being home.

It wasn’t until years later that I realized we had a guest room that Joseph could have used. Not that I forgot we had it. I just never realized it would have solved everything. As far as I know, there was never any talk of letting Joseph use it. So maybe there was more to the Dungeon of Hell theory than I first thought.

Before bed, I wandered down to the basement. Well, maybe “wandered” is not the right word. Crept? I instinctively knew I didn’t want to get caught. I was only going down to talk to my big brother, who’d been away fighting a war. Why it should have been a crime . . . Well. I didn’t know any of the details then. I just knew I’d get yelled at, even swatted. Joseph was at the very least in purgatory. The last thing my parents wanted was a messenger of love to his quarters.

He’d moved the Ping-Pong table closer to the wall and folded out the big leather sleeper sofa. He was lying on its queen-size mattress. Propped up with pillows. Hands laced behind his head. Staring off into nothing.

Then he heard the light shush of the legs of my jeans rubbing against each other as I came down the stairs. He looked up at me and smiled. It was a genuine smile. It spread out in my gut like a hot drink on a snowy day. It glowed inside my chest and low belly. It was the polar opposite of being called “Audrey” and then pinched too hard.

“Mr. Universe,” he said.

I hope there’s no need to explain why he called me that. God knows it wasn’t because I was huge and muscle-bound.

I walked over too carefully. As if the rec room were mined. I sat on the edge of the bed and tried to return the smile. I don’t think it worked out.

“I’m so glad you’re back,” I said.

Joseph snorted a laugh. “That makes one of you,” he said.

“Why are you back so soon, though?”

“I’m waiting to see what they—”

He never got the chance to finish his answer. I heard big heavy footsteps on the basement stairs. In a rush of panic, I dove under the bed.

I curled there, a little shaky, for what felt like too long a time. Nothing moved. Nobody spoke.

Then I heard Joseph, right over my left ear. He said, “Say what you came to say, Brad.”

I winced, expecting the same bluster we’d heard from my dad at dinner. Instead, he spoke in a voice that was barely over a whisper. “I just want you to know that you haven’t only shamed yourself, you’ve cast a shadow on this entire family. You’ve shamed us all. I just thought you should think about that.”

Then I heard him clomp back up the stairs.

I waited under there far too long. Not daring to stick my head out again.

“He’s gone,” Joseph said.

I wiggled out and pulled up into a sit.

“Thanks for coming down here,” he said.

“I better go to bed now.”

I jumped up and scrambled for the stairs. Like a coward. Like exactly what I hate the most. What I try hardest never to be.

Before I could get out of that rec room, Joseph said, “I missed you, Mr. Universe.”

I stopped dead. Frozen. I wanted to say, “I missed you, too, Joseph.” I opened my mouth. I swear I thought that’s what would come out. I was surprised when all I said was, “You did?”

“Yeah,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said, and ran for the stairs again.

As I made my way back to my room, I wondered if it was true that Joseph had shamed all of us. I didn’t figure it was. Because I didn’t feel shamed.

I didn’t know how short that reprieve would be.

That’s when I remembered I had a note from the principal. And I hadn’t shown it to my parents. And I damn well wasn’t going to. Not that night, anyway.

These were extenuating circumstances, whether the powers that be at school understood or not.

I woke up at about eleven p.m. with Joseph in my room. Which was not something that had ever happened before. So I responded with fear. An icy, cutting little ball of it wedged into my gut. Though there was no real reason why I should have been afraid of my brother.

Maybe I was afraid of what he’d come to say.

I sat partway up in bed, holding the blankets against my chest with one arm. I’m not sure why.

He was leaning his forearms on my dresser, spinning the little planets on the mobile solar system that lived there. It spun around on a base. Well, not spun all on its own. It waited for someone like Joseph to come along and spin it.

It wasn’t the only solar system in the room. There was a much more elaborate system overhead. So I guess it was redundant. But I was definitely into more space-related stuff than necessary. My view on life in general, I think, was that anything would have been better than not enough.

Now that I think about it, that might have been my approach to all of life. It might still be.

“Joseph,” I said.

He glanced over his shoulder at me and said nothing.

It was dark, of course. But not too dark to see him. My room was on the second floor. And we were the only two-story house on the block, so no one could look in. So I never kept my curtains drawn. I left them open to look up at the stars. At least, those few that could overpower the light pollution of the Orange County suburbs. The moon was three days waning. Its light seeped through the window. Enough that I could see my brother turn his face to me. Not enough that I could make out his expression or the look in his eyes.

“Why are you in my room?” I asked him.