I was silent, waiting for him to continue.
“She was beautiful,” he said finally, and he didn’t say anything else.
Eventually his breath rose and fell evenly, and I knew he was asleep.
I remember him leaving the room. I woke up enough to pull the blankets closer and go back to sleep.
The phone rang the next morning and woke me up. Raeburn answered it, which meant that it was early—he hadn’t left for the college yet. The faint murmur of his voice grew louder and louder until I heard the unmistakable sound of an object hitting the wall, followed by the sound of shattering glass.
Raeburn screamed, “Josephine! Get down here!” and I was on my feet, trembling and scrabbling for my clothes in the flat morning light.
Jack wouldn’t fumble. Jack wouldn’t jump. Jack wouldn’t even bother going downstairs. He’d make Raeburn come to him.
I think I knew even then that he was gone.
Raeburn stood in the middle of the kitchen. His fists were tightly clenched and his face was red. The table was on its side and there was a litter of broken dishes on the floor next to it.
Through clenched teeth he said, “Pick this garbage up.”
I moved toward the table, giving him a wide berth, and crouched down to pick up the pieces of china. My fingers shook. It was a mess. There had been orange juice in one of the broken glasses; the remnants of a fried egg were congealed on one of the plates.
I could hear him breathing heavily behind me, like an animal.
“You imbeciles,” he said. “You stupid little ingrates.”
My hand was full of shards. I cupped them next to my body and kept picking them up as behind me, something else shattered in a brilliant burst of noise.
I didn’t look around.
“Ungrateful, degenerate slut.” He was crouched down next to me now, cursing in my ear and grabbing my arm with hard, relentless fingers. I could smell the bitter stench of his breath. “Did you help him?”
I couldn’t carry any more of the shards but I was afraid to move. The garbage can was behind him.
“Did you help him? Your rotten, sneaking brother? Did you help him?” I was still crouching. He pushed hard against my shoulder. My handful of shards went flying and I lost my balance. I put a hand down to break my fall. It landed on a sharp piece of glass and I cried out.
“Idiot,” Raeburn said. He picked up a peppershaker from the floor and threw it at me. “You can’t do anything right. You’re utterly incapable of the simplest—fucking—thing.”
I was crying. There was glass stuck in my palm, sharp and hot and alien. The blood was starting to drip down my wrist, but I was still trying to pick up the shards, because that was the only way this was ever going to be over.
My father towered over me, huge and powerful, his green eyes snapping like Jack’s when he was angry. I flinched and tried to cover my face but Raeburn grabbed my wrists and pulled hard. I couldn’t stand up. He dragged me along the floor to the overturned table, where most of the mess was.
“Quit crying!” he screamed and pushed me down into the middle of it. “Your brother just ruined my life! Quit crying!” My arm landed hard on a piece of glass, something gave in my shoulder, and I cried out again. There were smears of blood on the floor. Some distant, removed part of me wondered how in the world I was supposed to quit crying.
“Clean it up,” he said, his voice cold and dead.
I couldn’t see clearly through my tears so I had to feel around on the floor for the slimy pieces of glass—the piece embedded in my hand flaming bright and hot with every pat—and when I had gathered a handful of them I stumbled-ran past him to dump them in the garbage can, feeling myself scuttle along the floor like a bug and hating him, hating him with a hate larger than anything I had ever felt in my life. My nerves were like steel wire with current running through them; I expected him to grab or kick me every time I passed him. He didn’t. He only stood, shaking and mad with fury, and watched.
“This is my house,” he said. “You repulsive little creatures, you think you’ve taken it over. You think you count for something here. You know what you are?” he said as I crawled to the sink to get a rag to clean up the egg and the orange juice, which was mixing with my blood on the floor. “You’re like viruses. Viruses your crazy goddamned mother left behind for me to deal with.” He shook his head. “I could have been a great scientist. I could have done miraculous things. But now what do I do? I work at a fourth-tier,
regional
private college so that I can feed the two of you, and it doesn’t matter how much I try to make you something useful, to make you fucking
human
—”
And now he did grab me, lifting me off my knees by my hair. A high panicked whine came from my mouth as my feet scratched at the floor. He used his double fistful of my hair to shake me, punctuating each word. “Everything—about you—is a
waste
—of my time.”
The pain was unbearable. I managed to get out, “Stop,” in a thin, terrified croak, and he dropped me.
He stood over me for a moment, glaring down.
“Your piece-of-shit brother,” he said, suddenly calm. “The one who thinks he can interfere in my business. Where is he?”
I lay collapsed on the floor, gasping with fear and aching in a dozen places. I could only shake my head.
He stared down at me a moment more. He was breathing hard. “He left you here, didn’t he?” His voice was soft. “Left you here alone.”
I didn’t look up.
“You’ve backed the wrong horse, my dear.” His feet, which were all that I could see of him, turned around and walked out of the kitchen.
Trembling, I brought my right hand up in front of my face. There was a shard of glass the size of a half-dollar buried in the meaty part of my palm. I took hold of it with my other hand. Slowly, slowly, I pulled it out.
When the kitchen was finally clean, I climbed the back staircase wearily. My shoulder was aching and there was an old dishtowel wrapped around my hand. The gash on my arm was less serious and had already stopped bleeding, but there was drying blood all over my hands and arms and clothes, and thick clots of it in my hair. I must have grabbed at my scalp after Raeburn let me drop. Dimly I wondered if the cut in my hand needed stitches. Jack would know, I thought. He’d even stitched up a cut for me once, when I fell through a window. We hadn’t had any anesthetic, but I had been drunk enough not to care.
My head felt hollow and sore from crying but now my eyes were dry. I couldn’t keep from looking into Jack’s room as I passed. His leather jacket was gone. The pile of clothes on his floor looked smaller.
Once, when we were children, I spilled chocolate milk on the Persian rug in the study and Raeburn shook me until my nose bled. Then he shoved me into the bathroom so I wouldn’t bleed on anything important. Seven hours later, after Raeburn had drunk himself into a stupor and I’d cried myself out, it was Jack who pried off the bathroom doorknob with a screwdriver. That was the first time we slept in the same bed. I guess he was probably ten years old then, which would have made me eight. I remember that he put me next to the wall, let me curl up against his chest. I remember his warm body, the stretchy feeling of dried blood on my skin, and the chill of the wall against my back.
If Jack were there, he would have come to help me. But Jack was gone.
5
W
ITH JACK GONE
, I felt like I’d lost half my brain. I hated him for leaving me.
I figured this much out eventually: the letter that Jack gave to Searles was the same letter that Margaret Revolt had sent to the college administration, but my brother had found his copy in my father’s study. I don’t know how it linked Raeburn to Margaret. Maybe there were notes in the margins in his handwriting. From what I could piece together from listening to Raeburn on the phone, both Ben’s future at the college and my father’s hinged entirely on whether or not Margaret Revolt admitted that it had all been a hoax, that Ben Searles had never made a pass at her. It remained to be seen whether or not Margaret—Margaret the Brilliant, Margaret the Incomparable, Margaret the Deep and Profound—was also Margaret the Loyal.
When I finally met her, over a year later, I realized that Margaret had (of course) been the girl out on the porch with Jack at the Christmas party, the one with the thick glasses and bobbed hair. The one who had said that I could have gotten the alcohol anywhere because they weren’t carding. The one with whom Jack had insisted on finishing his conversation. The one I’d forgotten to ask Jack about—or, more accurately, the one that I hadn’t asked him about, because I suspected that he’d lie to me and I didn’t want to hear him do it. Only then, when I met her, did it occur to me to wonder what Margaret was doing at the party, which was supposed to be faculty only.
Understand, though, that all of this was happening miles and miles below my radar. I absorbed it because it was in the same space that I was, the way that my clothes absorbed cooking smells in the kitchen. When it was all happening, I didn’t really care about Raeburn or Searles or Margaret Revolt. I was too busy slowly going insane.
I guess that there must be all kinds of going crazy. Some people talk to trees; some cook compulsively; some sit and stare blankly at walls for hours on end. Most people retreat into themselves; I retreated into the world, which was as far away as I could get from my own reality. I started hitchhiking. I’d go into town during the day and wander for hours, staring in shop windows and watching the world go about its terribly normal business. For the first few months it was cold, and that’s how I discovered the card store. I’d never sent or received a greeting card, with the exception of the few that arrived before Christmas every year from distant relatives or Raeburn’s colleagues—but even those were the boring, generic kind sold in boxes. My favorites, I discovered, were the modern ones, intended for very specific situations: Sorry that we’re getting a divorce. Congratulations on deciding to enter rehab. It’s time for me to tell you I’m gay. The confessional nonpoems in these cards were stilted and sincere: “I know that the decision that you’ve made was difficult for you, and I want you to know that I will always be there for you.” I read them, one after another, with a hard place in my throat.
I never found one that I could send to anyone. Sorry my father tried to ruin your life? Or, sorry my brother beat the shit out of you? Sorry I was such a pathetic daughter that you didn’t want to take me with you when you left? I could never think of a good one to send to Jack. The closest I came was: I love you, I hate you, I miss you and I never want to see you again, how am I supposed to live without you?
That spring, I also discovered movies. Jack hadn’t liked movies—too manipulative and common, he said—so I hadn’t seen many, but there was a movie theater downtown, and in the afternoons it was cheap. Tragedy, horror, and blow-things-up action movies, I soon discovered that I had no use for. My favorites were romantic comedies. That world, I could live in. Everyone was beautiful, everyone was rich, everyone was witty, and if anyone left the story, it was because they were mean or shallow or otherwise undeserving of the glamour of it all. Every hooker had a heart of gold, and the underdog always ended up winning.
Sometimes, after the credits rolled and the lights came up, I’d stare at the red exit sign, think about the glare of the sunlight outside, and be completely unable to move. So I’d sit through the movie again. After a few weeks, the ushers stopped asking me for money when I sat through show after show. The same was true of the woman who worked at the greeting card store. She never hassled me, no matter how many hours I spent sitting cross-legged on her carpet, reading the cards. Once, she even gave me a cup of coffee when I came in, saying that it was cold out there and I could probably use it.
During the day, I actually felt okay. But I never found a way to deal with the nights. For a while I tried going out at night and sleeping during the day, but the outside world was even scarier than the house in the wee hours of the morning. At least in the house there were walls around me. I might see weird things in the corners, but at least there were corners: places where the walls met. A limit to the space surrounding me.
One night, when I couldn’t sleep, I poured a tumbler full of whiskey from the bottle in Raeburn’s liquor cabinet and carried it upstairs with me. Sitting on the edge of my bed, I took steady, medicinal gulps until the walls began to spin. I wanted to be unconscious, and that’s how I ended up. But in the morning I was sick, and the world was still there. I didn’t do it again.
By the end of February, the situation at the college had turned into a campuswide frenzy, complete with student petitions and strident demonstrations. Raeburn was so distracted that he hardly even seemed to notice that I was there, and that was fine with me. He didn’t fly into any more rages, but I gave him no reason to. I didn’t clean anything, but I didn’t dirty anything either. I barely ate. There were some weekends when Raeburn and I only saw each other in passing. He’d nod at me, I’d nod at him, and we’d continue on our respective ways.
So I was surprised when he sought me out. I was standing at the front window, staring out at the dark woods; he stood behind me, his reflection ghostly in the window. He said, “Josephine, would you like me to tell you something that will make you feel better?”
Would I like it? How would I know? “I guess so.”
“Palomar just found a new supernova. It’s less than five light-years from the edge of our solar system.” He stopped and waited, as if he expected a response.
I didn’t know what to say. “Thank you.”
“A supernova is a major cosmic event,” he said patiently, as if he were explaining to a child. “The shock waves could disrupt the earth’s orbit. Do you know what that means? It means—it
could
mean—the complete decimation of life on earth.” Then he did something I’d never seen him do before. He winked.
“The world really doesn’t deserve to survive,” he said.
From that night on, I lay in bed and imagined the supernova, millions of miles from the edge of our solar system, eating itself alive in a bright blaze, every stray molecule adrift in the lifeless vacuum being used to feed the fire. I imagined shock waves, huge and invisible, rippling through the galaxy, knocking the stars out of alignment and tearing into the thin atmospheres of any stray planets in their way. And oddly enough, it did make me feel better, because the night wasn’t so empty. There was a supernova out there, and nothing was going to last much longer.