Sons of the 613

by Michael Rubens

  I’m not sure why, but somehow that statement doesn’t help calm Lisa down. She starts bawling harder.

  “I don’t wanna go to the ho-ho-hospital!” she sobs.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” says Josh, clumsily trying to dial his phone. I can already envision being stuck in the emergency room for the rest of the night while they deal with actual emergencies. Plus, someone probably reported what happened at the bar, and there Josh would be, showing up at the hospital, all bruised and matching the description of the idiot who started the fight.

  “Wait!” I say. “Just hold on!”

  “Where are you going?” says Josh.

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I sprint across the hall to the bathroom, open the medicine cabinet, find one of my dad’s pen flashlights, the kind with an advertisement on it for some sort of medication. Back across the hall.

  “Lisa, let me see your throat.”

  She does. I shine the light in. Her throat is covered with white spots.

  “See? It’s strep. We’ll get her penicillin tomorrow and she’ll be fine. Let’s go to bed.”

  “What are you talking about? I’m calling an ambulance!”

  “You’re driving me insane! Look, stay here, don’t call an ambulance!”

  Now I run down the hall, down the stairs, to my parents’ bathroom. On the way there I spot more party wreckage, including Mr. Olsen and two random people passed out on the L-shaped sofa. I don’t stop to check on them. In a drawer in my parents’ bathroom I find a rapid strep test, which my dad keeps on hand because Lisa gets it so often.

  When I straighten up I spy myself in the mirror and pause for an instant, fascinated. I have a deep cut that splits my right eyebrow, which looks like it’s going to heal into a scar like the one Josh has. The area under that eye is starting to purple into a black eye to match the one on the other side. Each nostril is decorated with that dark red crust you get when you have a bloody nose, so I guess I must have had one. I don’t have time to wash the cut, but it’s starting to bleed again, and as I leave the bathroom I snag a washcloth to press against it.

  I run back to the stairs, get halfway up, pause, go back down to the sofa to give Mr. Olsen and the other two a hard shake. Only Mr. Olsen responds with anything resembling consciousness.

  “Whuh?” he says, opening his eyes and sort of focusing on me.

  “Mr. Olsen, it’s time to go home.”

  “Whah?”

  “Time to go. Isn’t your wife waiting for you?”

  “She’s outta town.” He closes his eyes again. I shake him again.

  “Mr. Olsen, you have to leave.”

  “Leave?”

  “GET THE HELL OUT OF OUR HOUSE!”

  “Jeez, kid.”

  “And wake these two other idiots up and get them out, too. Now. NOW!! GET UP!!” I yell, kicking at his shins for good measure.

  I can hear him mumbling and muttering behind me as I sprint up the stairs to Lisa’s room.

  Josh is sitting next to her on the bed, stroking her forehead. He still looks panicked. I doubt he was this scared when I was sick.

  “I’m calling an ambulance,” he says again.

  “Hold on. Lisa, open your mouth.”

  I’ve watched my dad do this half a dozen times, and try to imitate his deft motion with the throat swab. Then I put it in the test tube and wait and dab it on the little strip and maybe ten seconds go by before the two parallel lines appear.

  “There. Positive. It’s strep. Good night.”

  “She’s never had that before.”

  “Josh, Lisa gets strep, like, every two goddamn weeks, but you just don’t pay enough attention to know it. She’s a carrier of group A streptococcus.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  How is it that after every absolutely bizarre thing that has happened this week, that one statement makes me angrier than anything?

  “I might be a total pussy, Josh, but I do know what I’m talking about,” I say to him, very quietly. “And you know it.”

  I can hear Mr. Olsen and the people from downstairs talking drunkenly as they make their way to the front door. One of them is speaking stridently now, arguing with the others. I can’t tell what he’s saying, but he sounds remarkably like my—

  Holy shit.

  “Who are you, and what are you doing here?” I can hear him clearly now, very clearly.

  Josh looks up.

  “Oh my God,” says a very familiar female voice. “Oh my God. Herb, look at this place! I am going to kill Josh!”

  “Oh, shit,” say Josh and I together.

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  JOSH GETS BEAT UP

  My mom punches Josh, the final punch of two weeks of punches. Right in his already-bruised and bloody face.

  A girl punch, I guess he’d say, the wind-up all awkward and the fist in the wrong position, but I swear that punch hurts him more than anything that happened at the bar. It’s like a magic wand, the contact instantly converting him back to being a child. He puts his hand up to the spot and his eyes go teary, the first time I’ve ever seen him close to crying.

  My mom is certainly crying. Scary crying. Hysterical furious shrieking out-of-control incoherent sentences crying. I’ve never seen her like this. After she hits him, she screams, “I can’t stand you! I want you out of this house, and I never want to see you again!”

  It’s worse than the punch. I can see it. At first I think Josh will just shrug it off like he has shrugged off everything my parents have ever said, but this destroys him.

  Everyone gets beat up, Patrick said. This is Josh getting beat up.

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  THE RETURN

  The house is trashed. The lawn is ruined. There are drunken strangers in the foyer. Your clothes are shredded and your face is bruised and bleeding. Your little sister, whom you were supposed to be taking care of, has French braids, is wearing fingernail polish, lipstick, and eye shadow, and has strep throat. Your little brother, whom you were also supposed to be taking care of, has two black eyes, a screwed-up ear piercing, and a claw mark on his face, and is bleeding steadily from a split eyebrow. What do you do? If you’re Josh, you stride out to the entranceway and demand, “Mom, Dad, what the hell are you guys doing here?”

  I heard it all from Lisa’s room, where I was hiding.

  “What’s going on?” said Lisa.

  “Mom and Dad are back,” I said. “Shhh.”

  I could hear my mom and dad yelling at Josh and could track their progress through the house, marked by an exclamation of outrage at each new discovery: the charred countertop; the trashed condition of the living room; the shelf of snuff bottles Terri had destroyed (“My snuff bottles!” I heard my mom wail).

  While my mom was screaming at Josh, I heard the heavier sound of my dad passing in the hallway outside Lisa’s room, on his way to my room. Oh, God, I thought, I hope Patrick and Terri aren’t—

  “Who the hell are you?” my dad roared. “What the hell is this?”

  A few seconds later Lisa’s door opened. I shot out into the hallway past my dad before he could grab me.

  “Hey, Dad,” I said as I receded down the hallway, washcloth against my face. “That’s Patrick and Terri in my room. They’re okay people. Also, I just administered a rapid strep test to Lisa and it came back positive.”

  This was all prepunch. I ended up colliding into my mom as she rounded the corner to the hallway. “And what happened to you?” she said, and roughly pulled the cloth away. She was white-hot raging at that point, but when she saw my face is when she really lost it.

  “What did you do to him?!” she shrieked at Josh, and the scary crying started. “Nothing,” I kept saying, “he didn’t do anything,” but I would have needed a bullhorn for her to hear me, and that’s when she hauled off and let him have it.

  Now she’s shrieking: “Herb. Herb! Have you seen Izzie?!!”

  “Mom, I’m okay,”
I keep repeating. Josh is now sitting on the floor, head in hands, crying. Josh is crying, his body racked with sobs. Our dad is talking at the same time as our mom, saying that there are strange people in Izzie’s room, Lisa has a fever, and Christ, look at Izzie’s face, Jesus, what happened to you, and what the hell is this goddamn dog doing here?! He kicks at Joey, who is yapping at everyone.

  Which is when Eric Weinberg makes his grand entrance: shirtless, red faced, teetering out of the TV room to join our merry group. One by one we fall silent, gaping at the new arrival. Even Joey the dog stops yapping.

  “Hi,” Eric says to us, wobbling on his feet, “what’s going on?”

  Then he throws up everywhere.

  We all take a moment to grasp the impressive volume of material that he just deposited on the walls and floor.

  “Jesus,” says my dad, “can’t this kid keep anything down?”

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  AFTERMATH

  It’s remarkable how loud the world is when you’re sitting in a room with your father, neither of you speaking for a long time. I can hear the air molecules themselves, knocking around against each other.

  We’re in his den. It’s Saturday afternoon, the day after all the fun. Why are they home a day early with no warning?

  “I was concerned about a patient.”

  Of course.

  Patrick and Terri departed midmorning in his beater Camry. Josh, whose face is all lumpy and purple, has been cleaning the house all day under the unsympathetic supervision of my mother. Lisa is resting, already on the penicillin that my dad picked up from the pharmacy. He briefly switched duties with my mom at midday so she could deliver a very hung-over Eric back to his house. As far as his parents knew, he was just sleeping over.

  “Please don’t tell my mom,” Eric begged as they were leaving.

  “Eric,” said my mom, “do you think I’m a goddamned retard?”

  When my mom got back, my dad took me into his den and asked me to sit down. He was very quiet and formal when he did it, and I imagined it’s how he talks to his patients. “Isaac, can you come in here for a moment? I’d like to speak with you.”

  “Isaac,” he said after we’d both settled, “I’d like you to tell me what happened over these past two weeks.”

  I thought for a while, then said, “Actually, I’d prefer not to talk about it.”

  Right after Eric threw up, my dad went into triage mode. I could see it happen: He flipped a switch, sent whatever personal feelings he had on a minivacation, and became Dr. Kaplan in the trauma ward. It was completely cool, actually. Boom: “Judy, take Eric to the bathroom and clean him up.” Boom: “Josh, get off your ass, get paper towels and the mop, and take care of the vomit.” Josh, still crying, complied. Incredible. Boom: “You, come here.” He got down on a knee and examined my face, turning my head from side to side.

  “The window!” wailed my mom from the bathroom. My dad looked accusingly at Josh, who had just returned with a roll of paper towels.

  “No, that one’s on me,” I said. “I broke the window.”

  “We are going to need to talk,” said my dad.

  He sent Josh and me downstairs to their bathroom while he checked on Lisa.

  “Strep?” I said when he came in.

  “Yes.”

  I raised an eyebrow at Josh.

  “You were right,” said Josh. “Isaac was right, Dad.”

  Because Lisa is his daughter, my dad keeps strep tests on hand. Because Josh is his son, he also has a supply of stitches and anesthetic. My dad ended up giving me three stitches in my eyebrow. He gave Josh six—two on his forehead and four over his right cheekbone. He wasn’t particularly gentle with Josh as he scrubbed his face and cleaned out the wounds.

  My dad was silent as he worked, expressionless, still in doctor mode. He’d been shaking with anger before, and looked exhausted and jet-lagged, and must have been overwhelmed by all the chaos that greeted him on arrival. But I couldn’t see any of that. All I could see was pure focus. And I thought, my dad can’t ride a motorcycle or throw a punch or shoot a gun, but he could take the bullet out of you, and he could do it while the house was on fire around him. I liked him a lot right then.

  Afterward there was some contention as our mom and dad huddled and discussed what should happen next, what to do with Lisa, what to do with Eric, and whether to boot out Patrick and Terri.

  This conversation was interrupted by a brief visit from our friends Officers Thomke and Federson, responding an hour late to a noise complaint (Thomke to my dad: “Boy, I feel like we’ve been here a lot this week! Well, good night!” leaving my dad with an expression somewhere between stunned and resigned).

  When the fuzz left, my parents restarted their discussion/argument, even more heatedly. This time I interjected.

  “Listen: Here’s what’s going to happen. Leave Terri and Patrick in my room, because I told them they could use it. I’ll sleep on the sofa. Eric sleeps on the downstairs sofa. We can deal with everything and clean up in the morning.”

  And you know what? They actually listened to me.

  So now here we are in his den, my dad trying to make sense of the past two weeks.

  “What do you mean, you prefer not to talk about it?” he asks.

  “I’d just rather not talk about it.”

  “Isaac, I’m sorry, but that’s unacceptable. I’d like to know what happened, and what happened between you and Josh.”

  I don’t answer.

  “Isaac, did he threaten you?”

  I snort. I can’t help it. It just slips out. Josh has threatened me so many times it’s like background noise.

  “What? What does that mean? Has he told you not to talk? Are you afraid of him?”

  I think about that. Am I afraid of him? Not anymore. I’m not sure what else he could really do to me.

  “Isaac?” says my dad.

  “No. I just don’t feel like talking about it.”

  “I guess we can just wait until you do,” says my dad.

  It takes some effort not to smile. It’s what he used to say when I was a child and didn’t want to cooperate: We’ll just wait until you do. No yelling, no grabbing me and forcing me to do something. He would just out-patience me until I caved. But I’m not a child anymore. It makes me feel proud and sad all at once, and like I want to give my father a consolation hug, because he doesn’t know that era is gone. Instead we both lapse back into our current silence. We’ve been sitting like this for several minutes now.

  He sighs. “Isaac . . .” he says. He’s given up, the first time that has ever happened. “Will you at least explain to me why you won’t tell me?”

  “Because,” I say, “it’s between me and Josh. It’s between me and my brother.”

  He doesn’t say anything, but he nods. He doesn’t like the explanation, but he doesn’t press me any further.

  “Okay,” he says, and gets up, the process labored, like he’s exhausted. He rubs his face. “I’m really sorry, Isaac. This is my fault. I shouldn’t have left you at home with Josh. You were right.”

  “It’s okay.”

  “Sounds like it was quite a time.”

  My hand goes up to the stitches on my eyebrow. I reconsider what I said in the car to Josh last night, about it all being bullshit.

  “Worst two weeks of my life,” I say. “And the best.”

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  THE LAST NAUGHTINESS

  MERIT BADGE: SLAYING THE MINOTAUR

  Friday morning. One day left until my bar mitzvah. I’m on my bike, but I’m not heading to school. I’m skipping again, a fugitive for the final time.

  I’ve spent the week making up homework and tests. I’ve also been studying my haphtarah on my own and going for solitary runs in the morning. I rescued the tent from the creek and dried it out, and I’ve been sleeping in it, even though Patrick and Terri have moved on and my room is available. My mom wrinkled her nose but didn’t say much about it.

  I’ve
barely seen Josh. He met with a judge this week, an accelerated hearing so that he could hurry up and join the Marines. He pled guilty to a fifth-degree misdemeanor assault and received a stay of adjudication and was placed on administrative probation, which basically meant he had to stay out of trouble or they’d toss him in the can. There was also a one-thousand-dollar fine that the judge waived, in light of the fact that Josh was heading off to serve his country.

  During one of my morning runs I got an idea and went to Nystrom’s house and rang the doorbell. When he finally answered, glaring at me suspiciously from behind the screen door, I could barely hear him over the racket the dogs were making, bunched up on the side of the house where the fenced-in area extended almost to the front.

  “Is this the Brown residence?” I asked.

  “Who?” he said.

  “I’m sorry, I guess I made a mistake.”

  The dogs were still there on the side of the house when I jogged away.

  I lock my bike to a street sign in front of the apartment building. No one answers the buzzer after the first few stabs, so I lean on it until Lesley’s voice finally crackles from the speaker, her tone irritated: “Hello? Who is this?”

  “It’s me. Isaac.”

  She buzzes me in without another word. She opens her apartment door before I even raise my hand to knock, and she stands just inside the foot-wide gap and regards me, her eyes sleepy.

  “I need your help,” I say.

  An hour later. I’m hiding in the brush that overlooks Nystrom’s backyard. All four dogs are there, lazing about in the morning sunlight.

  “Can you still hear me?” says Lesley quietly. She’s speaking to me through the wireless earpiece of her cell phone to the wireless earpiece of mine, the new one my parents bought me to replace the one Josh chucked into the creek.

  “I can hear you.”