Ask Him Why (26 page)

But my bed was nothing but a blanket and pillow thrown on the couch. So going “to bed” didn’t accomplish much. Especially after it got cold and they came back inside.

I just kept my eyes closed. Didn’t interact with any of them at all.

In the morning, I sat up. Rubbed my eyes and cleared my throat. No one was around as far as I could see. Or hear.

I wandered into the kitchen and ran into a stranger. Almost literally.

He was old. Painfully old. Bent over a cane. Hair nearly gone. Frail. Looked like he might be a hundred. When he raised his eyes to me, I expected them to be glassy. Or cloudy. Half-dead.

Instead they pierced me like a laser. Clear and alive. I thought,
He’s in there, all right. Whoever he his. He’s only old on the outside.

He broke into a toothy grin.

“And you must be Aubrey,” he said. The accent was lilting. Almost old-world.

I wanted to say,
How did you know?
Started to, actually. Instead I said, “And you’re Hamish MacCallum.” It was obvious, really. How many ancient Scottish men were likely to turn up in Ruth’s kitchen?

“See?” he said. “We practically know each other already.”

He angled himself over to a chair. He looked so unsteady. Like it was such a project getting himself into it. I ended up helping.

“Thanks,” he said. “Joe’s about to come down and make us a big breakfast.”

“Joe? Who’s Joe?”

“Joe Stellkellner. Your brother.”

“Nobody calls my brother ‘Joe.’”

“Wrong,” he said. “One person does. Me.”

Then suddenly, the room was full. Sean and Ruth came in, Sean holding Maya. And my mom appeared from behind me. Sat down at the table.

I looked at both kitchen doorways. For a minute, nothing. There was no one else. No one there.

Then there was.

He looked huge. Not taller, of course, but muscle-bound. His hair was shaggy and long. He’d apparently just showered, and it was slicked back along his head. Falling to his collar in back. He was in his thirties, which seemed shocking. He never had been before. I guess that sounds like a stupid thing to say. But normally you get to watch the process. It happens slowly.

His eyes locked up with mine. I went dead inside. I felt around for a reaction. Anything. But all the lines were down.

A whole room full of people hung there in silence. Waiting.

“Aubrey,” he said. In that tone of voice cowboys use. You know. In the movies. When they tip their hats to passing ladies.

I realized I was disappointed. Because he hadn’t called me by my affectionate nickname. Mr. Universe.

“Joseph,” I said. With no inflection at all.

And then the room breathed a sigh. Well . . . the people in the room did. Though I swear it felt like the room itself resumed breathing.

“Bacon?”
my mom asked. As though it were a completely outrageous concept. “
And
eggs,
and
potatoes,
and
toast? Oh, dear God. The calories! Any idea how many calories that all adds up to?”

Nobody said a word. They’d all frozen again.

So I spoke up.

“Seriously, Mom? You’re on a diet?
Now?
”

I watched her take that in. We all did. Then a strange smile spread on her face. Half-satisfied, half-sarcastic.

“Good point,” she said. “Joseph, make mine double bacon. Two servings. My goodness. There’s a freedom in that, isn’t there?”

“Coming up, Mom,” Joseph said. Like a short-order cook.

He had four pans on the stove at once. Two just to get enough bacon on for everybody. One for potatoes and another to poach the eggs.

“When did you learn to do all that?” she asked him.

The silence that followed seemed to answer her question. I watched her glance over at Hamish MacCallum. And I realized she’d been doing it all along. I just hadn’t noticed the look in her eyes as she did. The silent daggers of disapproval.

“Summers,” Joseph said. And no more.

Then the silence grew so suffocating that I asked a question. And only after I’d blurted it out did I realize I’d just spoken to my brother.

“How did you get here so fast?”

The room reverberated. The fact that I had addressed him bounced off the walls. Through the people. I wished like hell I could pull the words back.

“I just mean . . . ,” I said, plunging in deeper as a result of my panic, “it’s such a long drive from Colorado. Doesn’t it take days?”

“I didn’t drive from Colorado,” he said, breaking eggs into a saucer. Stopping to stir the potatoes with a spatula. “I flew into San Francisco. Then I hitchhiked down to Hammy’s, and we drove down here in his car. I drove all night. I figured the sooner I saw Mom, the better.”

“My, my,” Mom said. After nearly half the meal in a stony silence. “I haven’t eaten this big a meal in years. It has an effect on you, doesn’t it? Kind of calms everything down.”

I would never have admitted it, but it was having the same effect on me. Making me believe I’d survive the breakfast. Maybe even the week.

“Nothing like some protein,” the old man said in that lilting accent. “Amazing what it can do. People don’t realize they haven’t eaten. Or that they’ve just eaten sugar or chemicals or refined flour. We’re like our automobiles. Can’t expect any work from ’em if we don’t put in some decent fuel. And that’s true even if the work is just thinking straight.”

I realized I’d been trying not to like him. For as long as I’d known his name. But, in a renewed sense, since discovering him in Ruth’s kitchen. In that moment, I gave up the goal.

Nobody said anything, so he added, “Joe’s learned to make this meal at least as well as I make it myself and almost as well as my wife, God rest her soul, made it before me.”

“Joe?” my mom said, a rise in her voice. Like a trout coming up to the surface to take the bait. “Nobody calls him ‘Joe.’”

“Wrong,” Hamish MacCallum said.

“One person does,” Ruth said.

“Him,” I said, and pointed at Hamish.

Then we all fell back into silence.

Sean had already peeled away early to get to work. The moment Joseph and Hamish got up and left the table, my mom lit into Ruth.

“Why did you invite him?” she asked. Her voice was a deep hiss.

“I didn’t! Joseph just brought him.”

“Well, he’s not family. And I don’t want him at our family Thanksgiving.”

“I don’t think you have a choice, Mom,” I said. Because Ruth looked like she needed rescuing. “I don’t even think he drives anymore. Joseph drove him down here. The only way he’s getting out of here is if Joseph leaves, too.”

“This is not the way it was supposed to be!” she said, going after Ruth again. “You said Joseph had a girlfriend.”

“I said
I thought
he did. He just said he was bringing a guest, so that was what I thought.”

“Well, I wanted it to be all family.”

I jumped to Ruth’s defense again.

“If he’d brought a girlfriend,” I said, “she wouldn’t be family, either.”

“Oh, stay out of this, Aubrey. Okay, fine. I wanted it not to be
him
!”

“How can you not like Hammy?” Ruth asked. Her voice sounded genuinely stunned. “How can
anybody
not like Hammy?”

My mom didn’t answer. She got up and left the room. Or maybe I should say her answer was to get up and leave the room.

“Use your head, Ruth,” I said. “He’s the one who has all the answers. Or so the story goes. He’s the one everybody looks up to. Mom and Brad broke Joseph, and Hamish MacCallum patched him up and got him halfway back together again. At least well enough that he lived to grow up. You didn’t think that would raise any hackles in our family?”

“I heard that!” our mom called in from the living room. Which made me wince.

I waited. But my mother chose to neither confirm nor deny. And so, in her silence, confirmed.

Chapter Twenty-Three: Ruth

I woke in the middle of the night, the way I did when I heard Maya crying, but she was silent and apparently asleep.

What had wakened me, I realized, was the sound of soft voices in the backyard. I got out of bed and walked to the window. Below me on our brick patio, I saw Mom and Joseph huddled close to the fire. They had a fire going in our little chiminea, and they had their heads close together, and my mom was talking quietly. In the years before Maya—before I’d learned that new mother’s half sleep—I’m sure I never would have heard a thing.

I stood there at the window and watched for a long time, my fingers on the glass of the one window that was too high for Maya to smear with prints. But in that moment, I wasn’t in housekeeper mode and I didn’t really care.

I wanted to go downstairs, go closer. I wanted to hear what she was saying to Joseph, but I didn’t know how to do it without alerting them and therefore breaking up the moment. Besides, it really wasn’t any of my business.

Then, a moment later, she squeezed his hand, rose, and disappeared back into the house.

I just stood there for a time, waiting to see if Joseph would go inside, as well. Instead, he reached for another stick of firewood and dropped it into the chiminea.

I pulled on my robe and walked downstairs and through the back patio door, taking the chair our mom had just vacated.

“Hey, Duck,” he said, turning his head just slightly.

“You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want,” I said, feeling how much this man was a relative stranger, “but that looked like some kind of genuine moment with Mom.”

“It was,” he said, and threw another two sticks of wood on the flames.

“None of my business, I guess.”

A long silence, long enough that I figured he agreed.

Then he said, “She’s getting her affairs in order. I think you know what I mean. She had an amends to make to me. Her assessment, not mine. She was trying to tell me it was Brad who threw me out of the house, out of the family. Not her. It wasn’t an amends like you’d hope, but I guess for Mom it was a lot. It kind of felt like she was trying to duck responsibility. Put it all off on Brad. But that doesn’t really mean none of it was true. She was trying to explain how, in those days, she went along with him a lot when she knew she shouldn’t have. Not so much because she felt subservient. More like financial insecurity. He was the breadwinner. She was afraid to make waves. She’d never been without money and it terrified her. She thought running out of money was something like dying. You know, the end of everything. Then they ran out of money anyway, and they survived. And then Brad left her and she survived. And then she felt pretty stupid. But anyway, she always regretted putting me out like that. Who knew, right? That’s why she wanted me here. Wanted to see me. She wanted to ask my forgiveness.”

“Did she get it?”

“Yeah, sure,” he said, as if nothing could be easier. As if the whole world wasn’t made up of people writhing and struggling for any kind of forgiveness, both the given and received variety. “That was nothing. I never blamed her anyway. Never really blamed Brad, either. I didn’t like him, but I didn’t blame him. I wasn’t into blame. Maybe because I had so much of it directed at me, you know? I guess you can go one of two ways with that. You can reflect it right back out at everybody else, or you can drop out of the whole blame paradigm. I guess I chose not to play the game anymore.”

“That’s a lot of honest information coming from Mom,” I said, skirting around all the honest information that had just come from
him
. Possibly because I had no space in me to understand not blaming people for hurting you.

“Yeah. Well. Running out of time will do that to a person. I’m watching Hammy do that now, too. Tie up all his loose ends. Thing is, he has so few. Not like Mom. He pretty much keeps his life clean as he goes. But still, you can feel it.”

We watched the flames crackle for a minute or more in silence. I tried not to focus on the fact that Ham was wrapping up his life, too. And something else happened in that moment—I felt a bond with Joseph again, like we were really related. Like we’d grown up together, which of course we had, but it hadn’t always felt that way. Like I’d missed him, and we still fit somehow.

“May I ask you a question, Joseph?” I asked, marveling at the formality of my phrasing.

“You may,” he said, and I couldn’t tell if he’d caught formality like a cold or was teasing me slightly for it.

“Why did you refuse to go out on duty that night in Baghdad? And why did you convince those other guys to do the same?”

At the corner of my eye, I saw him rock back in his chair. “That’s amazing,” he said under his breath.

“What’s amazing?”

“How long I had to wait. I kept waiting. I kept marking time until somebody asked me that question. It seemed like such an obvious question. Never thought I’d have to wait ten and a half years.”

“I’m really the first one who asked?”

“Believe me. If anybody else had, I’d have remembered.”

“I guess we all thought we knew.”

“You thought I was afraid.”

“Right.”

“I was. Of course I was. You almost had to be, over there. You were either so batshit crazy you didn’t understand what was going on, or if you had a normal brain and half an instinct for self-preservation, you were afraid. Fear just came with the territory. Naturally I was afraid. But that’s not why I didn’t go.”

I looked over at the side of his face in the half dark, and the flickering flames showed those little lines at the corner of his eye. I thought,
Where does the time go? Where do our lives go so fast?

“You could have volunteered the story to somebody,” I said.

“Wouldn’t have made any difference. You do what you’re told to do, and if you don’t, I’m not sure the nuance of your reasoning matters. Maybe it depends on the commanding officer. I don’t know. And the public had already made up their minds. But anyway, it wasn’t a story for the public. It’s something really only our family would understand. Maybe not even the whole family. Maybe just you and Aubrey. Anybody who doesn’t know Aubrey pretty well wouldn’t understand what I’m about to tell you at all.”

“What does Aubrey have to do with this?”

“Everything. He has everything to do with it.”

A silence, which I didn’t fill, because I realized he would tell me what I wanted to know if I would just shut up and let him.

“I have to start by telling you what we were doing,” he said. “What the duty in question involved. There was a strong insurgency. I’m sure you know that. The Iraqis mounted a resistance.”

“Which is very dangerous,” I interjected.

“Also very understandable,” he said.

I was surprised. “That seems like an odd thing to say,” I told him.

“Does it? Doesn’t seem odd to me. We were in their country. Can you imagine how we would feel if some foreign army were occupying our country? Setting up checkpoints? Shooting up cars and the people in them if they didn’t stop on command? Breaking down their doors in the middle of the night? That’s what we were doing. That was the duty I finally refused. We’d go to a family’s house. Break down the door. Because it was like a police raid—we couldn’t let them know we were coming. Then we’d charge in, split up, and go to all four corners, every room. Get the whole family together and out on the lawn at gunpoint. The women and children would scream and cry. They were terrified. And for good reason. One false move and somebody can die really fast. One of us or one of them. You just never knew. We were trying to make sure it wasn’t one of us. So we were holding guns on these civilian families. The men were absolutely humiliated and demoralized because there was nothing they could do to protect their families. Every night, that was what we had to do.”

“Why? Was it just at random?”

“No, it wasn’t that bad. There was a reason for it. It was a sweep for insurgents. It wasn’t random. It was based on intelligence. But ‘intelligence’ is a loose word. It can mean somebody overheard something, or thought they did. A family can have a problem with a neighbor and just plant the rumor that an insurgent lives next door. Sometimes, I’m sure there really were insurgents in the house. Other times, I’m pretty sure there weren’t. But you can’t know until you go in. I’ll give the army credit for one thing, though. After I left, the intelligence got much better and so did the raids. It didn’t take long to figure out that breaking down doors was going to be counterproductive. And I wasn’t the only one who was uneasy with it. I’m not saying
I
made the situation better. It just changed. So I guess it was my bad luck to be there when we were still finding our way.”

He went silent for a time. So I tried to finish the story for him.

“So you couldn’t live with the fact that maybe some of those people were innocent.”

“No,” he said. “I couldn’t live with it either way.”

“But the insurgents were killing you.”

“Yes,” he said. “Yes, they were. And that was very bad, when they killed us. And also we were killing them. And that was very bad, when we killed them. That’s the part it’s harder to get an American to see. They see one but not the other. I couldn’t help but see both. But you know, I don’t blame the Americans who were over there fighting with me for not seeing it that way. I’m less patient with the ones who were sitting safely at home, but I don’t blame those other soldiers at all. It’s very hard to empathize with an enemy while he’s shooting at you. I actually think it runs counter to human nature. But my nature must be different, I guess. I feel like my brain is wired differently or something. I swear, I couldn’t
not
think about it from their point of view. I just couldn’t stop. I kept watching them die for opposing us, so we wouldn’t die, and yes, that’s very understandable, too. I get our side’s position. But then the more of them we kill, the more we fuel the insurgency. And then more of us die, so we have to kill more of them. It never ends. It just keeps refueling itself.”

“So what’s the answer?” I asked, still wondering what all this could possibly have to do with Aubrey.

I watched his face in the flickering light for a moment, wondering if he even had an answer.

“Invade fewer countries?” he asked in time.

“But their leader was killing his own people.”

“Not as many as the leaders in Rwanda. Or Sudan. But there’s no national interest there for us. Which is just another way of saying no oil.”

I shook that off, wanting it not to be true, or at least not so black and white.

“But some wars are unavoidable. Look at World War II.”

“Why does everybody always go back to World War II?” he asked, his voice rising for the first time.

We both looked back toward the house, but nothing stirred.

“Every time I question the concept of war,” he said, lowering his voice again, “people bring up World War II. Two problems with that. First off, I’m talking about starting a war by invading. So while we might not have been wrong for getting drawn in, I still say Germany and Japan were wrong to attack and invade to get it started. Second, does that mean World War II was really our last justified war?”

“This is making my head hurt,” I said. “And besides, I still have no idea what this has to do with Aubrey.”

“Then I’ll tell you,” he said. “It was about ten minutes before I was due to go out. I was lying on my cot. I had this rare moment of break time. The rest of the guys were outside smoking, but I didn’t smoke. Not then. I started thinking. I started imagining. So imagine this with me, Ruth. Some Muslim nation has invaded the US. Overthrown the government, even if it wasn’t a very good one. The reason I say ‘Muslim nation’ is so you get the full comparison. Different religion. Different language. Totally different culture. And there are soldiers with guns when you go to work or school. There are checkpoints you have to drive through, and if you don’t stop for them, you’ll be shot dead on the spot. And then one night, the soldiers break your door down and haul your whole family out onto the lawn at gunpoint. Because they think you have a member of the insurgency under your roof. Now, let’s say for a minute you do. He’s not an evildoer, as far as you’re concerned. He’s a member of your family. He’s somebody who’s seen enough innocents killed that he’s ready to fight back. Protect his homeland. And then he sees a bunch more of his friends and relatives killed for protecting their homeland. Got a clear picture so far?”

“Unfortunately clear,” I said, because I hated those moments when life provides no clean answers, no easy-to-follow road map of who’s right and who’s wrong. In fact, it was making me feel a little queasy.

“Then here’s the big question for you, Ruth.”

Before that night, he hadn’t called me “Ruth” in as long as I could remember. Maybe ever. But I didn’t point it out. I didn’t say anything.

“What would Aubrey do?” Joseph asked.

I burst out laughing. I couldn’t help it.

“‘What would Aubrey do?’” I repeated.

“Yeah. Why is that funny?”

“It’s like those people with signs on their desk that say ‘WWJD?’ ‘What would Jesus do?’ And . . . Aubrey and Jesus . . . that’s the last comparison you’d expect to hear.”