Josie and Jack

Copyright © 2005 by Kelly Braffet

All rights reserved

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

1. Brothers and sisters—Fiction. 2. Women—Crimes against—Fiction. 3. Psychopaths—Fiction. I. Title.

Book design by Melissa Lotfy

Printed in the United States of America

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Epilogue

This is for my parents, Jim and Theresa, 

and also for Casey, who put Bunny on the roof.

When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Grethel, “We shall soon find the way,” but they did not find it.

—“Hänsel and Grethel,”
JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM

1

T
HE WORST HANGOVERS
come on the sunniest days. Even at sixteen I knew enough to expect that. The day when Jack drove me into town to buy aspirin, the sun was shining and the sky was the brilliant blue of a crayon drawing. Late summer in western Pennsylvania is muggy and oppressive enough to make your head spin even on a good day, and the air conditioning in the truck hadn’t worked for years. My stomach rolled with each curve and dip in the road, and my head was impaled on a hot hard spike that made my eyes throb. I felt weighed down by the heat and barely alive.

“Josie,” Jack said. “Okay?”

“There’s a jackhammer in my head,” I said. “Other than that, I’m fine.”

“Someone’s grumpy.”

“You’re not helping.”

“I’m driving you to get aspirin, aren’t I?” he said.

We turned onto the highway, the sun hit us head-on, and I didn’t bother to answer. Jack took a pair of sunglasses from above the sun visor. He had the radio on. The beat was jarring and obnoxious and the announcer’s voice sounded like metal on asphalt. The glare off the road made my eyes hurt, and underneath the sourness of my whiskey-burned stomach the old familiar dread was taking shape.

I hated going into town. Town people
stared.

Meanwhile, there was Jack, undamaged and cool as you could possibly please behind his sunglasses, just as if we hadn’t been up till dawn drinking everything but the drain cleaner under the sink. That was my brother: it was like he was his own species, one that had sneaked a couple thousand extra years in while evolution was looking the other way.

“You never feel a thing, do you?” I said.

“Not like you do,” he answered.

I leaned my head back against the rear window and closed my eyes. The truck hit a pothole and my head bounced hard against the glass.

“I want a pair of sunglasses,” I said.

Which was how it came to pass that instead of getting the trip to town over with as soon as possible, the way we usually did, I found myself wasting precious time at the revolving display rack in the drugstore, picking up and discarding one pair of sunglasses after another as I tried to find some that would hide me from the world and still leave me able to recognize myself in the mirror. Jack was standing by the paperbacks, reading the back covers of the novels.

There had been a woman standing at the cash register when we came in. The bell over the door jingled as she left, and Jack was suddenly standing at my elbow.

“You’ve got an audience,” he said, and I froze, the pair of glasses in my hand halfway to my face. I thought he meant the woman. Like I said, people in town
stared.

“No, it’s okay,” he said. “The kid behind the counter.”

I put the glasses on, turned the rack slightly so that I could see the boy in the mirror, and looked.

The boy behind the cash register was about my age, with longish hair and thin, rangy limbs. He wore a black T-shirt and jeans underneath his blue store apron. Jack was right, he was staring; but as I turned my head to get a better look he bent hastily over the magazine that lay open on the counter in front of him, as if he’d been reading it all along, and started flipping through the pages too quickly to see what was on them.

“So?” I said to my brother, who looked so easy by comparison in his old stained shirt and sleep-twisted hair.

Jack turned back to the rack of glasses and started to spin it lazily. “He’s been looking at you since we came in.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

Jack said, “We’re undeniably charismatic,” and picked a pair of sunglasses at random. Then he told me to go ask my new boyfriend where the aspirin was. I said I knew where the aspirin was, but he squeezed my elbow and said to trust him, so I did.

When the boy saw me coming, he pushed his glasses up his nose and ran his hands through his hair.

“Aisle five,” he said when I asked about the aspirin. I noticed, almost clinically, that his glasses hid a nice set of eyelashes, for a boy. They weren’t as thick as Jack’s, but they were straight and dark. His long, thin fingers, tapping on the counter, were tanned to a rich golden brown.

He was making me nervous, this boy, watching me too closely. I realized that I was turning the sunglasses Jack had given me over and over in my hands, and stopped.

“They’ll look good on you,” the boy said shyly.

I knew I was supposed to say something in return, but I didn’t know what. So I just smiled. The smile felt strained on my lips.

Jack saved me by coming up behind me. “I found it, Jo,” he said and held up the bottle of aspirin. He took the sunglasses and put both items on the counter. The look on his face was distant and bored.

The boy’s movements were studied, too casual, as he rang us up. His eyes kept darting up at one or the other of us. Usually me.

“You’re those Raeburn kids, aren’t you?” he asked as he gave us our change.

“No, we’re the other ones,” Jack said and handed me the sunglasses as we turned away.

As the door jangled behind us, the boy called, “See you around?” as if it were a question.

Back in the battered blue truck, Jack used his keys to break the seal on the aspirin. He pulled out the wad of cotton stuffed in the top of the bottle and threw it out the window. Shaking out four tablets, he handed two of them to me and took the other two himself.

I wished that we’d thought of getting something to wash the pills down with and dry-swallowed them.

“What was all that about?” I said when I could talk.

Jack stretched his arm across the back of the seat and tugged lightly on my braid. His green eyes were amused. He said, “He likes you.”

“You’re still drunk,” I said.

“He couldn’t take his eyes off you,” Jack said. “But he could barely talk to you, and he was afraid to look you in the eye.” He winked. “Broadcasting loud and clear, little sister.”

I pulled my knees up and braced them against the dashboard. I could still feel the pills in my throat.

“He doesn’t like me,” I said. “He doesn’t even know me.”

“He doesn’t need to,” Jack said, pinching my thigh. He started the truck’s tired old engine. “You’re good-looking. You take after me that way.”

“Ha,” I said, watching Jack, the good lines of his profile and his hair, warm and golden in the afternoon sun.

“I know, it’s hard to believe,” he said. “Are you going to try on those sunglasses I bought you?”

I’d forgotten them. They were sleek and narrow and the lenses were a deep, smoky gray. When I put them on the world went mute.

“Look at me,” Jack said as we pulled up to a stoplight.

I did.

He smiled. “Beautiful.”

We lived about fifteen miles outside of Janesville, on a winding road that led through a scattering of houses collectively called the Hill. In the nineteenth century, the Hill had been purchased, parceled, and developed by small-time industrialists from Pittsburgh, forty miles or so to the south. They came north to try to escape the toxins that their steel mills and coke ovens disgorged into the air, and when the wind was blowing in the right direction, they succeeded. When the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, they took their families and headed up to Presque Isle to take in the cleaner breezes that blew off the surface of Lake Erie. These folks weren’t Mellons, Carnegies, or Fricks; they were Smiths, Johnsons, and Browns. A century later, each of them was as long forgotten as the next, but their houses still stood: decaying old palaces that were never as grand as they wanted to be, with overwrought architecture that was both confused and confusing. Corinthian columns supporting veranda roofs trimmed with pale pink Victorian gingerbread. That kind of thing. Some of them had been kept up—there was even a “Historic Homes of Janesville” tour, which split the town’s less-than-hearty tourist trade with a lackluster establishment called the Janesville Shipping and Transport Museum—but most of them were like ours: too expensive to maintain and too ugly and weird to sell. Every now and again we found outraged fliers tucked into our mailbox about some developer who was trying to buy a chunk of land and put in a crop of split-levels. Not being particularly community-minded, we never did anything about them. Somebody must have, though, because none of the new houses were ever built.

None of the ten or so houses on the Hill was visible to its neighbors, but most of them faced the road with vast green lawns and maple trees whose leaves swayed gently in the breeze. Our house was higher up the mountain and deeper into the wilderness. It sat at the end of a long, twisting driveway, hidden from sight by a tall overgrowth of hemlock until you were nearly at the front porch and shadowed by two huge old elms that were the last Janesville survivors of Dutch elm disease. It was always late afternoon under those trees, and the path leading up to the porch was always ankle deep with dead leaves, even in the summer.

Jack and I lived there, for the most part, alone. Our father, whom we called Raeburn, taught physics at a small college three hours away. Too far to drive every day, he said, but the house had been in his family too long to sell and he’d never give up the tenure he’d spent so many years earning. So he kept a room at the college’s faculty house and lived there during the week while Jack and I stayed home together.

Once, one of the men who taught with Raeburn stayed the night with us on his way up to Canada, and he asked how we managed, staying by ourselves all the time and not going to school. Raeburn told him that since he wasn’t around, we’d cut four days out of five anyway, so why bother? “The American public school system is a doomed institution,” he told the man. “All they’d learn at that assembly-line idiot factory is how to sink to meet the lowest common denominator. If they study with me, they’ll learn things they need.” A nice theory, but the truth is that we rarely if ever actually studied
with
him; when he left the house every Monday morning, there were two piles of books on the kitchen table, with lists of assignments tucked between their pages, to be finished by the time he returned. When he was home, he preferred to spend his time locked in his study, listening to the radio, so actually studying
with
him was restricted to the two or three grueling hours that the three of us spent gathered in his study on Saturday afternoons. Raeburn’s version of education was grim and absolute: hard sciences, mostly—physics, mathematics, chemistry—with some fringe politics and economic theory thrown in, to show us what colossal messes human beings could create when they attempted to form an organized society.