This Is Where I Leave You

by Jonathan Tropper

  house at one of the furniture outlets gathered in a cluster at the top of Route 9 and lifted free weights with his buddies in his front yard. He was rumored to have pulled a switchblade on Mr. Portis, our aging phys ed teacher, who had subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown; to have punched out the bouncer at the Dark Horse when they wouldn’t serve him a beer; to have beat the shit out of his own father in the eighth grade.

  So even if I could have gotten to my feet at that point to fi ght him, he’d have only knocked me down again, so I just curled up into the fetal position while the room spun around me and psychedelic colors swam across the insides of my eyelids, and Rusco put his boot on my head and said, “You want to watch where you’re going, shithead.”

  And then he was gone, and Alice was hovering over me, helping me up, she and Jeremy taking me upstairs to Jeremy’s parents’ bedroom,

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  where they lay me down on a paisley bedspread. “Are you okay?” she kept saying, while I tried my best not to cry. I was enjoying her concern and her proximity, her hair intimately brushing my face as she leaned over me, but I hadn’t exactly kicked ass out there, and I would be damned if I was going to compound that by crying in front of her.

  “He’s such an asshole,” Alice said.

  I rolled away from her and closed my eyes. I think I might have dozed off because when I woke up she was gone, and a couple of seniors were making out in Jeremy’s parents’ bathroom, their quiet moans re­

  verberating off the tiles.

  I was limping home when Paul pulled up beside me in Dad’s Cadil­

  lac. He’d been granted unlimited use of the car from the moment he was awarded his baseball scholarship, which was why, instead of being at the party, he’d been off somewhere getting laid in the backseat. “Hey!” he said. “What happened?”

  “Nothing.”

  “I heard you got your ass kicked.”

  “It wasn’t my ass.”

  I looked over at Paul and, to my surprise, saw that he was simmer­

  ing with rage. “Get in,” he said.

  “It’s past my curfew.”

  “Fuck curfew. Come with me.”

  “Where?”

  Paul hit the wheel and looked straight ahead. “Just get in the car, will you?”

  The Cadillac smelled of perfume and sex, and my balls throbbed with every bump and curve. “Fucking asshole,” Paul muttered as he steered across Centre Street. “Let’s see how he likes it when I stand on his head.”

  I was scared and still in considerable pain, but I felt safe next to Paul and touched that he was so angry that someone had hurt me. We had 180

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  drifted apart in high school, but we were still brothers, and here he was, interrupting his own evening, which surely had involved some degree of female nudity, to stand up for his little brother.

  “Quit crying,” he said softly. “You can’t let him see you like that.”

  It was a cloudless night and the neighborhood was bathed in the blue light of a low moon. Paul sped through the empty streets, and I fantasized that we were headed to the diner by the interstate, two broth­

  ers out for a late dinner to tell each other about their respective nights. We weren’t those kinds of brothers anymore, but I often wished we were. A few minutes later, we pulled up in front of a dilapidated Victo­

  rian with a sagging porch. Rusco was out on the front lawn, perched on his weight bench, drinking a beer. The two guys he’d been with at the party were sitting on his front steps, each with a beer in hand. I watched as Rusco registered my presence in the passenger seat, watched him take in Paul’s tall athletic frame as he strode angrily through the glow of the Cadillac’s headlights and up the driveway, and, for one delicious mo­

  ment, saw the fear that spread across his face as he realized what was happening.

  “Hey, man,” he said, getting to his feet. “You’re on private property. Get the fuck off —”

  Paul’s fist hit his open mouth with a loud crack, and whatever eu­

  phoria I’d been feeling disappeared in an instant. Rusco went down hard as his two friends jumped up off the stairs, not sure what to make of Paul, who was now standing over Rusco and shouting, “Get up and fi ght, you little pussy!”

  I jumped out of the car and ran up the sidewalk to where Rusco lay on his back, dazed. Blood spilled from his mouth, and my stomach turned when I saw that his two front teeth were gone. “Forget it, Paul,” I pleaded, suddenly terrified. “Let’s just go.”

  “Come here, Judd,” he called to me. I came up and stood beside him

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  as Rusco rolled over and tried to sit up. His chin looked like it had been dipped in red paint, and his eyes were rolling unfocused in their sockets. When he got to his knees, Paul kicked him in the stomach and he went down again. A light went on in an upstairs bedroom, and from in the house, I heard the sounds of barking.

  “We have to get out of here, Paul.”

  “Kick him in the balls,” Paul ordered me. His eyes were blazing, the cords on his neck standing out angrily against his skin.

  “It’s okay,” I said. “We have to go.”

  The front porch light came on. I grabbed Paul’s arm and started pulling him toward the car. “Come on!” I pleaded. From the ground, Rusco lashed out with his leg, ineff ectively hitting Paul’s ankle. Paul grabbed the leg and lifted it, spreading Rusco’s thighs.

  “Kick him in the nuts and then we’ll go,” he said. The blood gathering on Rusco’s chin started to run up his cheeks as Paul lifted his leg higher. When he opened his mouth to spit out some more blood, it looked like the very tip of his tongue was missing too. “I don’t want to!” I shouted.

  And then, behind us, the front door opened and a fat woman in green sweatpants and a large bra appeared, clutching the collar of an enraged rottweiler, who strained ferociously against her grip. She had the same jutting forehead as her son, the same small, humorless eyes.

  “What the hell is going on here?”

  “We’re leaving,” I said, my voice cracking as Paul and I backed away.

  “Tony, what happened? Oh my God! Is he okay?”

  The rottweiler snarled and barked at us and I could see his spit fl y­

  ing in the yellow light of the porch as he fought to escape Mrs. Rusco’s grip. We were almost at the curb when she said, “Get ’em, Max,” and let go of the collar. The rottweiler fl ew off the stairs, and we turned and ran 182

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  as fast as we could. I could hear his claws tearing at the concrete walk, his low growl vibrating deep within my bowels. Paul overtook me on the sidewalk and jumped through the open window into the passenger seat. I jumped onto the hood and then up onto the roof, feeling the alumi­

  num bend under my weight. I turned just in time to see the dog leap through the window after Paul. The car shook under me as the dog snarled and growled, and Paul’s screams changed from terror to agony. I screamed for help at the top of my lungs, screamed until my voice cracked and then refused to come. It would take three days before it returned, three days spent sitting in the hospital while they operated on Paul’s shoulder and performed skin grafts onto his ruined arm. I screamed and cried and pissed my pants, helplessly stomping on the roof as Paul screamed and wept.

  It was Rusco who ultimately got the dog out of the car. He came staggering down the walk, his chin and mouth caked with blood, and yanked open the door, yelling, “Down, Max!” as he went. By now the dog was in too much of a frenzy to heed his master, so Rusco pulled him out by his hind legs and tried to hold him back. The dog lurched out of his grip and tried to run back at the car, barking furiously, but Rusco stood in his way and yelled at him. The rottweiler danced around him, barking and snarling, and at first I thought it was blood dangling from its mouth, but then I realized it was
a wet strip of Paul’s red T-shirt. “Get out of here!” Rusco shouted. “He’s going to get past me!”

  “Hold him!” I yelled hysterically from the roof. Beneath me, the car was distressingly still.

  “Just get in on the other side!”

  I don’t remember coming down off the car or opening the door. I remember Paul’s head jammed under the steering wheel, his body spread across the bench at odd angles, the blood pooling up in the cracks be­

  tween the vinyl seat cushions, the suffocating stench of blood and shit.

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  He didn’t make a sound when I moved his head out from under the wheel so that I could sit down, but he groaned when I slammed the door, so I knew he was alive. So eager had Paul been to beat the shit out of Rusco, he hadn’t even bothered to turn off the engine, so I was able to raise both windows immediately. A few seconds later, the rottweiler hit the side of the car with a thump, his teeth gnashing against the glass. I stared numbly past him at Rusco, who looked back at me expression­

  less, his face painted with blood like a savage, while the dog howled and threw himself repeatedly against the car. At some point I threw the car in gear and drove slowly away, not wanting to shake Paul. Th rough the

  rearview mirror, I watched the rottweiler chase us for a little bit, then stop in the middle of the street to bark furiously at us. I should have thrown the car into reverse and run him over, but I didn’t, I just kept driving, and the ignored impulse became one more thing that would haunt me in the days and years to follow. If only I had backed over the dog. If only I had jumped off the roof of the car to help Paul. If only I had refused to get in the car with Paul to begin with. At some point I managed to get my bearings and drive us to the emergency room, but I have no recollection of that. I vaguely recall a nurse sticking a needle in me because Paul had lost a lot of blood, and then my parents showed up and they stuck needles in them too. Th e

  police briefly impounded the Cadillac for evidence, which is why at some point I woke up in a panic in the back of the police car that was taking me home. My parents would be spending the night in the hospi­

  tal. The cop driving me was an old guy whose face I couldn’t quite make out from the backseat. He told me I’d saved my brother’s life. It would soon become clear that Paul didn’t see it that way. The silent consensus, evident in Paul’s glare, my father’s pained expression, and my mother’s lack of intervention, was that the wrong brother had been mauled. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the night we broke, and in the 184

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  years to follow, the jagged pieces of us would continue to drift further and further apart, small vital bits getting lost here and there, until there was no hope of ever putting us back together. Animal Control put down Max two weeks later, after a hearing my father attended armed with grisly pictures of Paul’s injuries. Suits and countersuits were filed, criminal charges leveled and dismissed. A few weeks later I finally kissed Alice Taylor in a darkened movie theater, and then surprised us both by crying like a baby. Saturday

  Chapter 29

  5:06 a.m.

  Iwake up strangely energized, my stomach growling. Upstairs, the overstocked fridge offers me its bounty of sympathy food. I throw some cheese slices onto a soft bagel and then head up to the second floor. I haven’t been up here since I got back. The bedroom doors are all closed, so there’s really not much to see. I tiptoe up the attic stairs, which creak like a haunted house, and out the access window to the roof, climbing up the slate until I’m sitting at the highest point of the gable. When I was a kid I used to climb up here to look down at the block and gather my thoughts in private. Paul would climb up here with Boner to smoke weed and look at porn, and Wendy would come up to get a tan while her nails dried. I don’t know if Phillip ever fi gured out the roof. By the time he was old enough, we were all out of the house. Knob’s End is on a high elevation, so you can see a lot from up here. You can see into backyards for blocks, swimming pools, swing sets, bar­

  becues, discarded toys. You can see across the rooftops to where the early morning joggers are running on the track behind the baseball dia­

  mond in the county park over on Fenimore. You can watch the sun come up, coloring the sky white, then pink, then blue. You can see your older sister, barefoot in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, walking hurriedly up the block from the direction of the Callens’, tying her long, mussed hair back as she goes, and wonder what she might be 188

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  doing coming from there at this hour. And then, just minutes after she’s let herself in below, you can observe Linda Callen leaving your child­

  hood home to quietly make her way down the block back to her house. It would probably help to see Linda’s expression, but her back is to you, so you can only guess at it. You can ponder these two women, who miss each other by a matter of minutes, walking exactly opposite routes as quietly as the dew now dropping in a mist on the grass and on your face, and you can hazard any number of guesses as to what business they might be tending to in the soft focus of these hushed morning hours when the day is taking its first tentative breaths. You can sit up here, feeling above it all while knowing you’re not, coming to the lonely con­

  clusion that the only thing you can ever really know about anyone is that you don’t know anything about them at all.

  6:30 a.m.

  I step out of the shower into pitch darkness. By now this has become routine. Wrapped in my towel, I walk across the basement to the circuit breaker. But this time, when I fl ip the switch, there is a crackle of elec­

  tricity, a flash of blue light, and I am blown out of my towel and back­

  ward across the room, where I land flat on my back, poised on the precipice of unconsciousness. My body tingles with electricity, and I can feel every molecule in me, thrumming in harmony. I close my eyes and . . .

  . . . I am three years old and riding my red plastic motorcycle in the park. It’s cold out, I’m wearing my navy blue ski hat, and my nose is run­

  ning copiously into my scarf. The plastic wheels of the motorcycle clat­

  ter loudly against the cracked asphalt as I push off with my feet to propel myself around an Olympic-sized sandbox. I don’t know if I’m going

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  clockwise or counterclockwise. I’m three years old; I don’t know from clocks. Suddenly, a kid appears in my path, tall and fat, two lines of snot running equilaterally down from his nose to the corners of his mouth. He holds a gray milk crate over his head like the Ten Commandments being brought down from Sinai. “The Hulk!” he screams at me. I don’t know what he means. I’m years away from Marvel comics, and even once I discover them, The Incredible Hulk will never make sense to me. Is he a good guy or a bad guy? You’re never really sure, and moral am­

  bivalence has no place in childhood. I’m three years old, and I have never heard of The Incredible Hulk, but this kid clearly relates to him inti­

  mately. And maybe he’s pretending the milk crate is a car, or a house, or a large boulder, or an archenemy, I don’t know. Whatever it’s supposed to be, it hurts like hell when it hits my face. And then I’m off the motor­

  cycle, lying on my side, the grit of the cold asphalt biting into my cheek. My nose and mouth are bleeding, and I’m coughing and spitting and crying, gagging on my own blood.

  And then I’m borne up into the air by powerful arms, lifted high above the fat kid and my plastic motorcycle and the earth, really, my face pressed into my savior’s large shoulder, which is somehow hard and soft at the same time. I bleed into the fuzz of his peacoat as he rubs my back and says, “It’s okay, bubbie. You’re okay. Everything’s fi ne.” And then he stands me up on a bench and pulls out a handkerchief to softly wipe away my blood. “That little bastard really nailed you,” he says, gen­

  tly picking me up agai
n. I don’t know what a little bastard is, I don’t know who the Hulk is, I don’t remember what exactly happened, but my father is holding me safely above the fray, and I’m burrowed hard into his powerful chest, and I’m aware of the fat kid somewhere down below, but I know the little bastard can’t reach me up here. 190

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  6:32 a.m.

  I come to with my mother’s worried face hovering over me. “Judd,” she says softly. “Just stay there for a moment.” There are deep shadows under her eyes, and at this angle, the gray roots of her hair frame the upper half of her face. She looks tired and old, and I feel a surge of tenderness to­

  ward her. I’m still vibrating.

  “He called me bubbie,” I say.

  “What, dear?”

  “When I was little. Dad used to call me bubbie.”

  Mom looks at me and smiles. “I remember,” she says, rubbing my chest.

  “You’re crying,” I say.

  “So are you.”

  And now I can feel the abundant wetness on my face, and she comes in and out of focus as I blink through fresh tears. “I miss him,” I say, and something in me breaks.

  And then Mom lets out an anguished cry and drops her head to sob into my chest while I cry into the brittle tangle of her hair, and we stay like that for a good long while.

  Chapter 30

  8:06 a.m.

  This being Saturday, the laws of shiva are suspended, all outward signs of mourning put aside in honor of the Sabbath. Boner stops by to give us the news. He is dressed in a dark suit with a black shirt and looks ready to go out clubbing.

  “You are still in mourning, of course,” he says. “But there will be no visitors today, no outward observance of shiva.”

  “So, it’s like a day off,” I say.

  “Not quite,” he says. He looks at my mother, who nods, and then looks back at us. “This morning, you’ll all come to temple to say Kaddish at morning services.”

  “Kaddish?”

  “The prayer for the soul of the departed.”

  “Why can’t we say it here?” Paul says.