Jack picked up the bottle and glanced carelessly at it. “Better get another bottle, too,” he said as he sat down on the worn couch. “This one’s empty.”
There were three clean glasses and a bottle of vodka in the liquor cabinet. I brought them to the table next to Raeburn’s chair. Jack was sitting with his foot propped up on his knee and his arm spread out along the back of the couch, as cool and comfortable as if this were all entirely normal. And in fact it happened once a month or so: after downing most of a bottle of something high-octane, Raeburn would do the unthinkable and develop an interest in us, said interest usually limited to finding more alcohol and pouring it down our throats. Jack thought these little parties were amusing. I found them harrowing. It was the only time I didn’t like to drink.
I sat down on the couch with my brother and pulled my skirt primly over my knees.
Raeburn filled the glasses to overflowing. His hand was unsteady as he raised his glass into the air. Neither of us moved.
“Come on, come on,” he said impatiently.
Jack reached over, picked up a glass, and handed it to me with exaggerated gentility. He took the last for himself and we raised them. Mine was so full that the liquid sloshed over the rim, sending a cold rivulet of vodka running down my arm toward my elbow.
“Here, drink,” Raeburn said. “Drink to yourselves. The two of you—you insane fucking children—you’re the world’s only hope, God help it.”
The vodka burned my throat and settled like liquid fire in my stomach. The chemical smell of it was thick in the air. I’d never liked vodka.
Raeburn laughed again. The noise grated like a nail being pulled.
“Would you like to hear what your father did this week?” he said. “You never ask. Aren’t normal children interested in their father’s work?”
“Sure,” Jack said. His voice was cheerful. “How was the office, Daddy?”
“Ghastly,” Raeburn said. He was too drunk for irony. “I am surrounded by sycophants. Idiots, sycophants, and toads.”
“Who?” I asked.
“The board. The fucking Executive Board of Academic Appointments. They’ve announced this week that Professor Ben Searles, the Rock Star Scientist himself, may he slowly be irradiated by his own experiments, is going to be considered for tenure this year.” Raeburn poured himself another glass of vodka. “And he’ll get it, too, may his teeth fall out and his limbs wither one by one.”
“I thought Searles was harmless,” Jack said.
“Searles,” Raeburn said clearly, “is a human plague who spends more time on his hair than he does on his research. The boys love him because he wears motorcycle boots to class, the girls love him because he’s got dreamboat eyes, and the board loves him because the girls love him—and it’s so very exciting to have such a high percentage of female students concentrating in the sciences!” He snorted. “He’s a mediocre scientist and a worse teacher, and if he’s granted tenure I’m stuck with the ridiculous fool for the rest of my career.”
I took a tiny sip of my vodka. “Maybe he’ll leave.”
Raeburn’s empty glass fell to the floor. It landed on the thick carpet with a dull thud. As he bent over to pick it up, he said, “What an intelligent idea, Josephine. We’ll make a scholar of you yet.”
“Maybe he’ll drop dead without warning,” Jack said.
“Only if I kill him,” Raeburn said. “Not that it matters. The world’s doomed anyway. Maybe I’ll get lucky and he’ll live through the nuclear firestorm when we blow ourselves up. Just Ben Searles and millions of mutated cockroaches.” He smiled radiantly. “That clever Margaret. Do you know what she did? She’s gone and enrolled in one of his classes. To see the devil firsthand, she says. To campaign against him from the inside. Clever little minx.” His eyes focused on me. “Sometimes, Josephine, I think I ought to bring Margaret here to meet you. You might benefit from knowing her.”
“Oh, by all means, bring her up,” Jack said with a slow, ugly grin. “I’d love to meet her.”
Raeburn leaned forward in his chair, his face a malevolent mixture of loathing and glee. “You, she would eat alive,” he said to Jack. “She would destroy you. She is a pragmatist. She is a logician. She has a mind far superior to any I’ve seen in years.” He poured himself another glass of vodka—the bottle was now half empty—and raised it, presumably in a toast to the incomparable Margaret Revolt. “The last student I had who showed so much promise was your mother. For all the good it did her.”
“Mary was one of your students?” I said.
Jack answered: “Absolutely. Flourished under his care like a hothouse flower, didn’t she, Daddy?”
Raeburn drained half the glass at one gulp. He gave me a pitying look. “She was brilliant. Not as brilliant as she wanted to be—not as brilliant as she thought she was—but brilliant. God, when I was young I had such grand plans. Such grand plans. I was going to change the world. Tear it down and build a new one. Some help she turned out to be. I should have known about the two of you. The moment I saw you lying in your cribs. I looked deep into your eyes, and there she was, looking out at me.”
He raised his glass. Jack’s face was expressionless.
“We have to fight it,” Raeburn said. “Fight the idiots, the Searleses of the world, fight your crazy fucking mother who almost managed to ruin everything—” His words were beginning to slur together. “You must take advantage of this—of the world that I’ve given you. I made it, children. I made it for you.” He stared into his glass.
When his bladder let go, we knew he was passed out for the night. Jack’s hand found mine and we left our father alone then, with the dark stain of urine spreading at his crotch. Jack led me to his room. Lit a cigarette. Took off his shirt.
“I never knew Mary was one of his students,” I said.
“I never told you,” he said.
The first night that Jack and I were alone again, I managed to convince Kevin that it was safe for him to come around. I used the phone in the kitchen. Jack watched from the counter, his beer dangling between his legs. The windows behind him were blank with darkness and it was as if there were no world beyond the two of us in the kitchen. I had to close my eyes against him.
“Forget Jack. I want you to come up. Jack will be fine. Everything will be fine. I want you to come,” I said again, sounding more desperate than I meant to. “I want to see you.”
After a long pause, Kevin said, “I want to see you, too.”
“Come up tonight.” I hung up.
Jack jumped off the counter. “You should have told him to bring drugs. No admission without Percodan.”
I was mixing rum and Cokes in the kitchen when I heard Kevin pull into the driveway. Jack met him at the front door and held it wide open; from the kitchen I could hear snatches of what Kevin said as he apologized for touching me. The phrase, “I would never do anything to, you know, take advantage of your sister,” came through clearly from the other room. A bubble of nervous laughter burst from between my lips. I’d been looking forward to seeing Kevin, to basking in the simple, obvious glow of his adoration. Hearing him plead with my brother for the right to touch me came close to ruining it. In fact, for no good reason that I could think of, it made me angry.
Jack must have said something that made everything okay, because I heard the door close with their laughter on the inside of it. “Josie, look who’s here,” Jack said as they came into the kitchen. It was early September, the first day that really felt like fall, and Kevin wore the same thing he always did: his black denim jacket, army pants, a T-shirt from a rock concert. He looked so vulnerable and harmless, standing there next to Jack with his skinny body and his skinny arms and his hair that fell wherever it wanted to. It was easy to forgive both of them for everything. In fact, as Kevin planted a chaste kiss on my cheek and Jack said, “My sister makes the best drinks,” there was a moment when I was completely happy, completely satisfied, surrounded by people who were there because they loved me. Then I saw Jack watching me with Kevin, a vaguely amused expression on his face, and I was embarrassed and angry again.
Jack played it well that night. He was his charming self, but beneath his friendliness he was just standoffish enough to make Kevin uncomfortable. I don’t know if Kevin even realized why he felt uncomfortable.
But there we were, playing three-handed gin rummy an hour or so later, when Kevin said, “I was thinking about what you said, Jack.”
“What did I say?” Jack said around the cigarette in his mouth. He didn’t look up from his cards.
“About my dad,” Kevin said. “About the pharmacy.”
“Yeah?” Jack said, as if he’d forgotten the subject entirely. “What were you thinking about that?” He picked a card out of his hand, stared at it for a moment, and then put it back in a different place.
“I was thinking maybe I could see what I could do,” Kevin said. He looked back and forth between the two of us with big, earnest eyes. “Maybe I could pinch a pill or two off the top of the filled scrips. Before they go out. Nobody ever counts them once they have them.”
“If you want to.” Jack sounded as if the whole subject bored him immeasurably. “I wouldn’t want to cause you any trouble.”
There was a slight emphasis on
trouble:
slight, yes, but very definitely there. Kevin answered, “I’m not afraid of a little trouble.”
“Never said you were,” Jack said.
I put my cards on the table. “Gin.”
Jack dropped his own hand and grinned broadly. “Martini. Kevin, my friend, would you like a martini?”
The subtext was gone. Kevin relaxed and said, “Indeed I would,” which sounded so much like something Jack would say that I did a double take.
“My sister makes the best drinks,” Jack said again.
By the end of the next week, Kevin was coming up every night, sneaking out of the house after his parents went to bed and staying until two or three o’clock. As far as Kevin was concerned, everything was fine.
But I was worried about my brother. Kevin had brought him a few Valium and a handful of Tylenol with codeine, and Jack and I had taken them and—I suppose—enjoyed them; the Tylenol made me vaguely nauseated but I never said anything about it. Jack seemed bored. Having ostensibly gotten what he wanted, he had less and less to say to Kevin, and soon he was sitting through his visits in silence, watching us. After a few hours he would drift upstairs without so much as a see-you-later. I couldn’t get out of my head the image of Jack sitting alone on his bed, propped up against the wall, smoking a cigarette while Kevin and I shared our fumbling kisses.
Things weren’t much better when it was Jack and me alone. He didn’t want to let me out of his sight and he didn’t want to talk. We walked, we played cards, we did calculus, all in a thick silence. Nothing I said or did, or didn’t say or didn’t do, broke through it. But every night, soon after I’d gone to bed, Jack would come to my bedroom and lie next to me, throwing his arm across me as he’d done since we were children. Sometimes his need, his anger, whatever it was, came off him in waves and I knew we would be awake for hours. Sometimes he just seemed to want me next to him, and on those nights we lay silently until one or the other of us fell asleep. It was a funny thing about my bed. When I lay in it alone, it seemed too big; with Jack there, it seemed too small.
By contrast, being with Kevin was a relief, blissfully uncomplicated, though Jack was watching over us like a sparrow hawk, listening for our movements from the next room, or just outside. If Kevin noticed, he didn’t seem to care. Once or twice we took his father’s car, drove to some deserted spot, and spent an hour kissing frantically. I came home those nights with sore lips and damp underwear, feeling rumpled and sticky. Jack was always waiting: staring at me, through me, as if he could somehow see where I’d been and what I’d been doing.
I never did meet Kevin’s parents. He didn’t mention them again. Maybe he’d decided I wasn’t that kind of girl; ironic, considering how staunchly I kept my promise to Jack. Kevin got nothing from me. The line I drew was so hard and fast that I wanted Jack to challenge me on the subject so that I could explain to him how faithful I’d been, how steadfast and loyal. But he never asked. In fact, he never said anything at all about Kevin, until one Saturday afternoon when Kevin rang the doorbell and Jack refused to open the door.
“Why are you being like this?” I said. I wanted to scream it, but Kevin was on the other side of the door, ringing the bell over and over again.
“Why are you being such a love-struck little girl?” Jack said. “I didn’t think I had the kind of sister that would fall over backward for the first guy who stuck his”—Jack’s lip curled—
“tongue
in her mouth.”
“Don’t start.” My teeth were clenched.
“Tell him to go home. Tell him you don’t want to see him anymore.”
“I won’t.”
“You want me to tell him?”
“This was your idea!” I said. I was almost crying with rage. “This was
all
your idea!”
“It was my idea to milk Monkey-boy for some cheap drugs.” Jack’s voice was cold. “It was not my idea to sit upstairs by myself all night while he fucks my little sister on the family couch.”
I could hear Kevin calling, “Josie? Jack? You guys home?”
Jack stared at me and I started to shake.
Suddenly Jack smiled. “Just a sec, Kevin!” he called merrily through the door. “Having some trouble with the lock, here.”
“No problem.” Kevin sounded relieved.
Jack stepped away from the door, close to me. I tried to move back. There was a wall in my way.
“You do this to me every night,” he said quietly. “Every single goddamned night. I’ll let him in. But this is the last time.”
“Fine.” I was furious.
He pushed me to the wall, standing against me so that I couldn’t move away, and took my head in his hands. Each of his fingers was a hot hard bolt pressing into my skull. He pulled me toward him so that our foreheads were touching, so that all I could see was his face.
“Did he tell you he loves you?” His voice was acid with contempt. I could smell whiskey on his breath. “Did you
believe
him? ”