The Other Half

by Jess Whitecroft

  “Well, nice to see you, too, son,” he says. “And merry fucking Christmas.”

  “How did you find me? Did you put a GPS tracker on my truck again?” He couldn’t have. I searched every damn wheel arch and hubcap.

  “I heard from your brother that you were in New Hampshire.”

  “Bullshit. Corey told you I was here? He would never. How’d you get the information out of him? Go full on Abu Ghraib on his ass?”

  “No.”

  Goddamn it, talk about The Nightmare Before Christmas. The skunk stripe at the front of his hair has widened another inch, and his skin – cured like ham by years of Lucky Strikes – has taken on a new leathery appearance, but you only have to look in his sharp little black eyes that he’s still the same Jack Ohanian. Still working one angle or another. He hardly ever attended school if he could help it, but he’s no dummy, no matter how many times I’ve called him a moron. Jack never stops thinking, not for a second, and the main thrust of his beady-eyed thoughts is “How does this affect me?”

  “Well, you look tan,” I say. “Which I guess answers my first question about whether you’ve been staying out of prison or not. What’s the grift this time, Daddy dearest?”

  He looks offended. “Why should there be a grift?”

  “Because it’s you. Either tell me what you want from me or fuck off.”

  “Is that any way to talk to your old man?”

  “Seeing as I’m the closest thing a human being can get to being raised by wolves without there being any actual wolves involved, yes.”

  “Okay,” he says. “I realize I was not the greatest parent, but I’m getting to a difficult age, son. I’m like, what do I have to show for nearly half a century on this planet?”

  “Hepatitis?”

  “No. You. You and your brother. And all of the other kids I might have out there.”

  “Yeah. Really selling the doting father thing there, Pop.”

  He sighs. “Jody, I’ve changed.”

  “Uh uh. And because you’ve changed you want me to welcome you back with open arms, let you stay in my hotel room and invite you for Christmas dinner?”

  Jack smiles as pretty as he still can. He’s missing another premolar. “What do you say, kid?”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No. If you follow me back into the hotel I’ll tell them that you’re a kleptomaniac junkie with a penchant for arson and a tendency to shit on the soft furnishings when you’re nodded out. And that you almost definitely have lice.”

  “You little bastard,” he says, as I turn to go inside. “You know you’re probably not even mine, right?”

  “I only wish. Now go.” There was never any doubt as to my paternity, unlike poor Corey, who popped out with a mop of recessive red hair that led to question marks from the get-go. And I’ve got a few questions for him right now.

  Jack will come back, I know. He always does, but I watch him walk away, past the tiny Art Deco diner on the corner of the street where I had supper yesterday. Cute little place. Miniature Christmas trees on every table. That gives me an idea.

  But that’ll have to wait for a moment. I go back inside and call my treacherous ass of a brother. It’s only when the phone is actually ringing that it occurs to me that Corey might not have sold me out at all, but by then it’s too late.

  “Jesus, Jody,” he says. “Do you know what time it is in Oregon right now?”

  “Don’t know, don’t care. Do you want to tell me how Dad knew I was in New Hampshire?”

  He sighs.

  “Cor! What the fuck, man?”

  “I’m sorry, okay?”

  “No. Not cool. Why would you do that?”

  “Because he’s different,” says Corey, and it’s official. My little brother is a goddamn dumbass.

  “Right,” I say. “Like the frigging deciduous forest of new leaves he’s turned over in the past?”

  “I’m serious, Jody,” he says. “He was here for three weeks and he didn’t steal anything, make inappropriate advances to my neighbors or lead a bunch of mobbed up Russians to the house. I think he’s even off the sauce.”

  “Yeah, sure. Like that other time when we thought he’d quit drinking but he’d actually just switched it out for heroin.” That was a wild Thanksgiving, and also the other reason why Dad doesn’t do the whole turkey day thing. It might not be so much a racial thing as simply the fact that nobody ever invited him after he gave a whole new meaning to ‘cold turkey’.

  “Bro, listen,” says Corey. “Skye got a promotion at work, right? She now has the keys to the kingdom, and by the kingdom I mean the pharmacy cabinet. Our old man was under the same roof as the keys to a veterinarian’s drug cabinet.”

  “Oh my God,” I said. “Was there ketamine in there?”

  “Obviously.”

  “He fucking loves ketamine.”

  “I know, right? I had the exact same thought. I told Skye to lock the keys in the car or beg a co-worker to take them home, because I knew how this was gonna go. Pharmacy gets robbed, Dad disappears down a k-hole—”

  “—and resurfaces two weeks later, somewhere in Wisconsin, naked, gibbering and unable to count his own legs. Yep. That’s our Jack.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Jody,” Corey says. “That didn’t happen. He didn’t steal the keys. He didn’t even try to rob the pharmacy and he didn’t take anything stronger than an Advil the whole time he was here. We actually talked. We even made dinner together and he gave me Grandma’s recipe for that Armenian apricot stuffing, with the chestnuts. And it was delicious. He’s…I don’t know…he’s like a new man.”

  “So what are you thinking?” I say, knowing there’s only one thing left that could still scare Jack straight. “Brain tumor?”

  “Possibly. I mean, who fucking knows with him? Every single day is a miracle when you’ve done the things he does to his body on a regular basis. Whatever it is, it’s terminal. Dude’s making his peace with us before he makes his peace with God.”

  *

  I’m nervous.

  Me. I’ve taken a large purple plastic dick in my ass for an audience of who knows how many, and I’m nervous when I lay eyes on my date.

  He’s wearing a crisp clean white shirt that makes the brown of his skin look even richer, and when I walk in he’s running a finger around the rim of a big glass, half full of pinkish wine. When he meets my eyes across the room I see him visibly relax, like he was expecting to be stood up, and then he gets up from the chair to greet me. My heart seems to stretch and fill, because this is definitely a date. Somehow a change of setting and a clean shirt has flipped the script completely. This feels romantic.

  What do I do? A handshake? A hug? I don’t have time to think it through, because he greets me with a soft, winey kiss on the side of my mouth and ushers me to my seat. I want to say, “Fuck dinner. Just take me to bed right now,” but that’s not how this works. This is how normal people behave, people who never had to watch Jack Ohanian vomit in the sweet potatoes at Thanksgiving.

  “The Godfather,” I say, fumbling for the lines I’ve memorized, before I give away that I have no clue how to behave. “Green. Socks.”

  Chris frowns as he fills my wine glass. “Jody, what are you talking about?”

  “Favorite movie, favorite color, perfect Christmas gift.”

  He purses his lips to hide his grin again. “Socks? Really? Who likes socks?”

  “People who hate having cold feet,” I say. “What about you?”

  “What?”

  “Movie, color, Christmas gift. Go.”

  Chris shakes his head. “This is not how you do small talk,” he says, but then I see his gaze change direction and for a second I freeze, because wouldn’t that just be goddamn typical? Someone lovely treats me like a human being and then Jack swings by to ruin it all.

  But it’s not him. It’s that woman from breakfast, the one with the kid. The boy clings to her skirt in that awkward, sull
en way kids do when you tell them they’re going to have to speak to a stranger. Someone at reception must have seen me and blabbed.

  “Sorry to disturb you again,” says the mom. “But did you send up the Christmas tree?”

  “Oh. That. It’s just a little thing…” But I’m busted. Chris’s mouth falls open.

  “Can I give you something for it?” she says.

  “Please. No. Don’t think anything of it. It just came to me this morning and I figured I’d just see if they had one spare at the diner down the street…” They were table decorations. There was a good chance they were only going to get tossed out, so I looked in and batted my eyelashes.

  “Say thank you for the tree, Aiden.”

  Aiden mumbles the words and hides back behind his mother’s legs. I know how he feels. My own face has got to be bright red and Chris is looking at me like I just cured cancer.

  “You bought that little boy a Christmas tree?” he says, with a slight tremor in his voice.

  “It was a table decoration from the diner down the street,” I say. “Cost me five bucks. And stop looking at me like that.”

  “I can’t help it. That was the sweetest thing…”

  “It wasn’t. I told you – my favorite movie is The Godfather. Give it fifteen or twenty years and I’m gonna be calling on that boy to put a severed horse head in someone’s bed. You don’t get something for nothing in my world.” I snag a copy of the menu, determined to change the subject, even though he’s still looking at me like I just farted a giant rainbow clean across the restaurant. If he keeps on doing it I think I’m going to cry. “So. Do you know what you want to eat?”

  He orders salmon with a puff pastry crust and I get the chicken, stuffed with artichoke and provolone and wrapped up in bacon. We trade bites like an old married couple and again I find myself thinking that Zoolander must have been touching on gasoline-fight levels of dumb to fuck things up the way he did. When Chris pats his full stomach and suggests we maybe share a dessert I can’t help thinking that’s the influence of the ex hanging over us – that dainty-ass model who probably barely smelled a spoonful of tiramisu and then pushed the plate across for Chris to finish – but I bite my tongue. I’ve had enough of Legolas’s shit already and I don’t care for him hanging over us.

  “Okay,” I say, as I dig in for another bite. “You still haven’t told me your favorite movie. And you’re not allowed to say Casablanca or Citizen Kane, because those are movies that everyone has to say they love because they’re just that great.”

  Chris arches his eyebrows at me. “And The Godfather isn’t?”

  “No. I told you. The Godfather speaks to me on a personal level. I’ve lost count of the times I got a pair of dead fish in the mail.”

  He shakes his head. “I don’t know. I have so many favorites. I can never choose. Can’t we just talk about something simple? Like…like what your parents do.”

  “I told you. One makes unnecessary turquoise shit and the other’s a grifter. Yours, on the other hand…”

  “You met them.”

  “Only superficially.” Also I’m pretty sure they thought I was a waiter.

  He sets down his spoon and invites me to take the last bite of dessert. “Mom teaches Women’s Studies,” he says. “And Dad teaches Psych.”

  “Both teachers?”

  “Academia is more incestuous than Mount Olympus,” he says. “Especially at the higher levels, and they all met at Columbia. Mom was from Chicago on a scholarship and at the time Becky was a student activist for minority scholarship programs. That’s how they became friends.”

  “So your mom and dad met through Becky?”

  “Yep,” he says. “I might not even exist if she hadn’t introduced them. Or maybe I would anyway. I don’t know. Aunt Becky actually told Dad never to even think about dating any of her friends, because she was worried it would get weird and uncomfortable in the event of a break-up. Over three decades of marriage and a set of twins later and she was proved right.”

  I remember the first time I saw him, deep in conversation with his sister. I didn’t get the best look at her, but I remember thinking they didn’t look like brother and sister. She was much darker, and even in heels she looked like she was almost a full foot shorter than him. She’d been talking about twin ESP or something, and how she’d sensed something hinky between Chris and Zoolander, even though she didn’t believe in anything so ‘flaky’.

  “What’s it like, being a twin?” I ask. “Do you ever have that twin sense when one of you is sad or afraid?”

  He sits back. “Jo does. Even now she swears she prophesied the time my appendix got infected, but no – I’ve never felt anything like that myself. I guess sometimes I feel a little…incomplete, if that makes any sense at all.”

  “Seriously?”

  Chris exhales, pushing his lips forward into that pout that says he’s fishing for the right words. “Perhaps,” he says. “That makes it sound a lot more dramatic than it is, but I can’t seem to help it. When you’ve been treated as half of a pair your whole life then you tend to grow that way, I think. She was always my other half growing up. We balanced each other, like yin and yang. But now it’s just…I don’t know.”

  I pour out the last of the wine. “It’s what? Tell me.”

  He sighs. “Adult stuff,” he says. “Marriage. Babies. All the things that separate childhood best friends. In my case my childhood best friend happened to be my twin, which maybe makes it a little more painful. The first time I saw her with her daughter in her arms I hardly recognized her.” He takes a sip of his drink, and his eyes glisten with that grape-sheen that makes me think of tears. “All that…love. It was just glowing out of her, so that she looked like she’d been transfigured into someone totally new. And she was, I guess, because now she was someone’s mother. I should have been perfectly, purely happy for her right then, but the loneliness I felt blindsided me. Isn’t that terrible? That even for a fraction of a second I was jealous of a baby?”

  “No,” I say, wondering how he can even live, judging himself so harshly all the time. “That’s normal. Trust me, if you’d have had younger siblings you’d have dealt with that shit all the time. It might not be the most noble of human emotions but it’s totally normal.”

  “What about you?” he says. “Did you have to compete for attention a lot?”

  I laugh. Understatement. “We had to compete for just about everything. It was like a sort of preschool Thunderdome, although it was fun, when I was very little. Everyone else’s parents always seemed to be telling them what to do and shit, and mine never did. They never nagged me to brush my teeth or go to bed and let me drink soda for breakfast and have candy for dinner. Neglect can feel like paradise when you’re eight years old. There’s no math homework and you get to watch R-rated movies, even if your parents punch each other to the point where the neighbors call the police…” I stop, because he looks appalled.

  “Okay,” I confess, because it’s Christmas and it’s the only way I’m going to get Jack out of my head right now. “It was bad. For the first few years I can remember he wasn’t around much, because he was in and out of prison. That’s literally the only reason my parents only had the two kids together, because if he’d been around to knock Mom up there would have been more. ‘Babies give you hope,’ she used to say, which is all very cute for an Instagram post or whatever, but I feel like if you’re that fucking dedicated to pushing them out then maybe you should walk the talk and take care of the ones you actually have, you know?”

  “Absolutely,” says Chris.

  “Anyway, she was pregnant again, and it was coming up for Christmas. And she was so excited, because she was determined this one would be a girl. ‘You wait,’ she kept saying. ‘You boys. You have the run of the place and you piss all over the toilet seat, but things are gonna be different once I have my girl.’ Dad had stayed out of prison for a whole six months and me and Corey were maybe six and five at the time and everything
seemed to be going okay, for us. And then the night before Christmas Eve she lost the baby.”

  “Oh God.”

  “Yeah, it was rough. I mean, she was devastated. I remember the way she walked across the kitchen floor to the phone. Like she was made of glass, but looking back I know it was already too late, because you can’t bleed that much down your legs and still keep a pregnancy. The EMT’s kept asking me where my Dad was and I said he was taking our list to Santa. Because that’s what he’d told me where he was going, before he disappeared on his pre-Christmas bender. He was going to the North Pole to tell Santa what me and my brother wanted for Christmas. In reality he was drinking his head off in a bar on the other side of Pittsburgh, and somehow the hospital managed to get a hold of him, which was a fucking Christmas miracle, because nobody does disappearing acts like my old man. I could move to Mars and he’d find me, but him? If he wants to vanish he’s gone like Jimmy Hoffa. It’s crazy.”

  I take a sip of water and keep talking. It’s pouring out of me now and I don’t seem to be able to stop. “He rolls into the hospital reeking of booze and crying his eyes out, because nothing makes an emotionally incontinent narcissist happier than some reason to bust out the grand drama. He didn’t even want another kid, but as soon as he found out she’d miscarried he pretty much went full sackcloth and ashes. Tears. Screaming. ‘How will we live? How will we ever survive this?’”

  Chris reaches across the table and touches my hand. “Jesus, Jody.”

  “I’m okay,” I say, and I am, because I’ve just killed any last remaining flickers of guilt I had about turning my own father away at Christmas. “The same night we got robbed.”

  “What?”

  “Yep. Piling shit on top of more shit. Someone broke into the house, trashed the place and stole all our Christmas gifts. Made all the local newspapers, because nobody could believe anyone could have that much bad luck at Christmas. And they were right, as it turned out. For years I looked back at that last Christmas in Pittsburgh as one where I saw the better side of human nature, because people were so nice, Chris. So good. We got clothes and toys given to us. People brought us hot dinners. We had near strangers tucking Mom up on the couch with a heating pad, and when we left Pittsburgh in the spring I was fucking heartbroken, because I thought it was the nicest place in the world.” I finish my wine. Time for the punchline.