“I kissed him,” I said, because I felt I had to.
“You were supposed to,” my brother said.
That week was registration week at the college where Raeburn taught, and every fresh-scrubbed new face was another reason for him to long for the end of the world. The first thing that he told every incoming class was that they knew nothing. He knew everything. All questions were pointless.
“It’s ludicrous,” he said, hunched over my algebra book on Saturday afternoon. We were alone in the study; the night before, Raeburn had kicked a hole in one of the porch steps, and Jack was outside fixing it. “They stand there in front of me with their sincere, thoughtful little questions and their sincere, thoughtful little ideas. As if an eighteen-year-old girl who’d never been out of the Allegheny Valley could possibly have
ideas.”
He pushed his glasses up his nose, gestured angrily at me and said, “Look at you. You don’t have
ideas.
At least you’re smart enough to know it.”
There wasn’t much I could say to that.
“At least you understand your limitations.” He shook his head. “Forget it. Back to work. Factors of polynomial equations.” He tapped a pencil against the book in front of me.
“I understand the answer once I see it,” I said. “I just don’t understand how to get there.”
Raeburn’s pencil kept tapping, tapping against the open pages of the book, faster and faster.
“Your generation gives up too easily,” he said. “When I was eighteen, if someone had offered to challenge my brain, to
expand
it, I would have been grateful. Grateful! Even that mother of yours knew enough to appreciate the chance she was being given. Now when I tell these students about my class, all I see in their eyes is fear. Fear and laziness. And then they scuttle off down the hall to study physics for goddamned poets with Ben Searles.”
He jumped to his feet and began pacing restlessly. “They should be afraid. Knowledge is an awesome force. They should absolutely be afraid. But that fear should urge them to conquer, not retreat.”
His huge feet thumped against the rug, one after the other, back and forth, back and forth. Outside, Jack began hammering a nail into the porch step, slightly out of sync with Raeburn’s stride.
I knew Ben Searles. Jack and I had met him at one of the faculty functions that we occasionally attended with our father, the brilliant physicist with the two beautiful, well-mannered children. Searles, who was young and good-looking and immensely popular, had been teaching at the school for about five years. Raeburn had hated him from the start.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said, trying to bring him back to the algebra. “There’s no process. It all seems like guesswork.” “You’re scared, girl. You’re so paralyzed with fear that you can’t even make a simple deductive leap without a
process
to guide you.” Raeburn stopped pacing and turned to stare at me. His eyes were sharp, interested. “Josephine,” he said. “Let’s examine a hypothetical. Let’s say that you’re given a choice: study with me here at home, or go to the idiot factory and be spoon-fed theory like pureed vegetables. What do you choose?”
“You,” I said.
Raeburn shook his head. He stood over me at the table, his hands outspread on its surface; his shoulders, his chin, his eyebrows, every point of his body fixed on me.
“No, you wouldn’t go,” he said. “You’d never dare to put yourself at the mercy of the outside world.” A slow, bitter smile twisted his mouth. “But let’s say you were normal. Let’s say you were a normal girl with a normal upbringing. Dollhouses, ballet lessons, a mommy who bakes cookies, and the kind of older brother who takes you out into the backyard to teach you how not to throw like a girl. Cheerleading, prom queen, the entire kit and caboodle of the American dream: never an unhappy day in your life and never an original thought in your skull. And you head off to college, expecting the world on a platter and Most Popular Girl all over again, and instead you find yourself confronted by me.” He leaned in close. His face was inches from mine. I could smell the burned tobacco on his breath and see the unshaven stubble on his face. “What do you do?”
The hammering outside stopped and the room was suddenly very quiet. I had to look away from him, back down to the math book. I was unaccustomed to my father’s direct attention. “I don’t know,” I said. “I’ve never been that way.”
Raeburn’s eyes narrowed. Then he threw his head back and laughed, a giant uproarious sound that broke the tenuous stillness of the afternoon. He looked familiar when he did that; he looked like Jack.
“Thank God for that,” Raeburn said. He pulled out the chair next to me and sat down again. “Because if you were, the instant you were confronted with anything the least bit challenging you’d run right down the hall to that pernicious fungus Searles, Mr. Rock ’n’ Roll Physicist, to have your brain stuffed full of more strained peas. A waste of time and a waste of money.” He leaned back and smiled, and I had to look away again. It was unpleasant when Raeburn smiled. “You wouldn’t learn a thing, but it would have a good beat, and you could dance to it.” He tapped the book in front of me again. “Let’s talk about polynomials. Think, Josephine.”
I picked up my pencil again and he put his hand on mine.
“It’s easier to spot the checkmate when you’re not one of the players, Josephine,” Raeburn said. “I don’t think you know how lucky you are.”
Outside, Jack started hammering again. Between thuds I could hear him whistling a tune from the Coltrane album. My pencil went to work. The part of my mind that had no interest in factoring equations went far away.
Later that week, when Raeburn was gone, Jack and I discovered the roof.
Finding anything new was special. We’d lived in that house all our lives—well, I had—and sometimes I felt that I could close my eyes and describe in sharp detail the contents of every cluttered shelf and every overstuffed closet. All the rooms that we didn’t use were filled with sealed cardboard boxes. Some of the boxes were packed with yellowing tax records and phone bills, pointless details that had been saved for no reason that I could see, but some of them held things that I thought were amazing. Cheap jewelry. Engraved cigarette lighters. Hairbrushes with blond hair twined among the bristles. Mary’s stuff. When she left, Raeburn must have thrown anything of hers he found into the closest box, and then put the box away where he wouldn’t have to look at it. The afternoon we found the roof, we also found a shoebox, tucked carelessly on top of a pile of empty suitcases in a third-floor bedroom closet, that held nothing but a crumpled piece of tissue paper and a package of guitar strings. Jack said the strings had been Mary’s.
“She played the guitar?” I asked.
“Sometimes.” Jack tossed the strings back into a corner of the closet. “I don’t remember.”
It was a few minutes later in that same room that Jack moved a big cardboard box from the top of a stack of other boxes and we found ourselves looking out of a dormer window that we hadn’t ever noticed from the ground. Jack stuck his head out, craned his neck around to see the rest of the roof, and said, “Let’s go exploring.”
I followed him out the window and onto the steep shingled slope. We crabwalked across the slope, moving parallel to the edge of the roof, until we came to another slope that ran at a right angle to the one we were crawling on. We climbed over the top and down the other side, and discovered a gentle slope that overlooked the elm trees in the front yard.
We went there every night that week. I loved lying on the roof and watching the stars, but I hated getting there. If not for Jack climbing ahead of me and leading me over the roof, I never would have dared.
At night, on the roof, the elm trees were silver with starlight and there was a breeze that was so cool and fresh and steady that I said it felt like it came straight from the stars. Jack said being on the roof made him feel less like he lived at the bottom of a hole. I said that what I really liked was the feeling that I was exposed and hidden at the same time.
“It’s like another world,” I said.
“You’re awfully dreamy tonight for a kid who never read a fairy tale,” Jack said and lit a cigarette. “What are you, in love?”
“Please.” I took the cigarette from him.
We lay together for a long time without speaking, watching our cigarette smoke climb into the air. I thought about fairy tales: what Jack had said wasn’t true. He’d told me some when we were children. Like “Rapunzel,” with the prince whose eyes are scratched out by thorns after the witch catches him in the tower. He wanders blind in the desert until finally he finds Rapunzel, and her salty tears wash the blood out of his eyes and his sight is restored. I always remembered that one: probably because of her long golden hair, and the way that Jack liked to pull on my braid when he told it.
Eventually, still watching the sky, I asked Jack if he thought we were lucky.
“Depends what you mean by lucky,” he said.
“Lucky. Possessed of luck. Fortunate in the hand that life has dealt us.”
He exhaled a long column of smoke the same color as the clouds. “Does it matter?”
“I’ve been wondering. Trying to figure it out. It’s hard because I can’t think of anything that’s all good or all bad, you know?” A cool breath of air blew across me. It was a humid night, even though it wasn’t hot anymore, and the breeze felt good. I closed my eyes. “Do you think anything is either all good or all bad?”
“What about Kevin McNerny?”
I laughed. “Christ. He’s neither.”
“You like him. So doesn’t that make him good?”
I shrugged.
“He stares,” I finally said. “I don’t know what he wants from me.”
“I do.”
I thought about this. “No. If it was only that—I could deal with that. But there’s more to it. That’s the thing.” The cigarette was back in my hand now, but it had burned down almost to the filter. I sat up, pitched the butt over the side of the house, and watched the orange spark arc toward the ground. “Everything is like that. Raeburn’s a lunatic, but he’s gone four days out of seven and we can do anything we want. I hate doing algebra, but I’d hate school more, I think. And when Crazy Mary left—”
I stopped.
“Go on,” Jack said. His voice was completely neutral and I knew I was treading on dangerous ground.
I tried to choose my words carefully. “If she hadn’t taken you away from us, everything would be different. If you’d never lived in Chicago and I’d had a mother, we’d both be completely different people. Raeburn might be a different person. We might not even live here still. Or if she’d left later, or taken both of us, or left both of us behind. I remember when her leaving seemed like the unluckiest thing that had ever happened to me. But maybe it wasn’t, because if she hadn’t, I wouldn’t be me.”
Jack was very still beside me.
“Do you have another cigarette?” I asked him, just to say something.
“You think it’s lucky that she left?” he said.
“Maybe. Because you had a completely different life than I did. And then you came back, and now you’re here. And that was lucky. For me, at least,” I added.
“You think it was lucky that I came back here?”
“Of course.”
“I came back here because she died,” he said. “You think that was lucky?”
I rubbed my palms against the rough surface of the roof. “If she had to take you with her when she left, it’s lucky that you came back.”
“That’s not an answer.”
I stared at my toes, pale and blue and indistinct against the dark shingles.
Finally I said, “It was lucky for me. It was the luckiest thing that ever happened to me.”
I didn’t look at him. I didn’t want to see the expression on his face. The night was very quiet. In the distance, on the highway that led to town, a pair of headlights moved slowly and I thought, those people are different from us, those people don’t know we exist.
“I don’t see any fireflies tonight,” I said after a while. “They must be gone for the year.”
“When I was a kid,” Jack said, “when I was bad, you know what Crazy Mary would say to me? She’d ask me if I wanted to go live with my sister. ‘I’ll send you back there,’ she’d say. ‘I didn’t have to bring you with me.’ And I always shaped up right away. The way she said it was like it was the worst thing in the world. Living with my sister. ”
I tried to remember her. All I could come up with was a faceless mannequin, like the ones in the department store window downtown, wearing the few scraps she’d left behind: the blue dress I wore when Kevin came up, a pair of pearl earrings, a scarf. The mannequin’s wig would be blond, because the hair in the hairbrush was blond, and because Jack and I were both blond and Raeburn’s hair had been dark before he went gray. But the face was a void.
I added the guitar to the picture, sitting in a case at her feet. When I lay back again, the warm crook of Jack’s arm was there to catch me.
The next night, Jack asked Kevin about the drugs, point-blank.
“Well,” Kevin said and looked thoughtful. We were sitting on the front porch, watching the stars move above the elm trees and drinking a bottle of rum. Kevin and I were on the old porch swing, and Jack was perched on the railing. I’d stretched my legs across Kevin’s lap. His head was turned toward Jack, but his eyes kept drifting back to me. His expression was perpetually amazed, as if he didn’t quite believe in me.
“Well,” he said again and took a swig from the bottle. “The good stuff’s all locked away in my dad’s office. All the stuff on the shelves, it’s like, laxatives and zit pills and stuff.”
“Allergy drugs and antibiotics,” I said.
“That doesn’t make much sense,” Jack said. “What if some housewife forgets to refill her Valium prescription and your dad’s sitting at home having dinner?”
Kevin shook his head. “There’s another pharmacist who comes in at night. I don’t have anything to do with the scrips, except handing them across the counter sometimes. Seriously, he’d kill me if he caught me messing with the drugs. The government makes him count everything.”
“Well, I wouldn’t want to get you in trouble or anything.” Jack sounded genial enough, but there was an edge underneath the friendliness, like a knife blade wrapped in velvet.