The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  As the credits rolled, the boys stared at the screen, agog. Well, we all did. And then, as the lights in the cabin came back on, the questions started.

  “That’s not going to happen to us, is it?” William was outraged, and being very loud about it.

  “Oh, I don’t think so,” Jack said in an almost frustratingly mild tone of voice. “After all, that happened in the Andes. We won’t be flying over South America. So whatever might happen to us, it can’t exactly be that.”

  I may have been frustrated with Jack’s tone, but the boys immediately calmed down. That’s Jack all over. I was ready to sue the airline, while he was taking the whole thing in intellectual stride. If Jack had been the one to give the boys reason for brushing their teeth, it wouldn’t have been my elaborate fear-based approach. Rather, he’d have simply said, “Because I said so, right?” and they’d have said, “OK.”

  “But if it did happen,” William persisted, “would we get eaten?”

  “Tell you what,” Jack said. “We can continue this discussion if you like, but only if you can keep your voices down to a whisper.” He cast a glance around us. “Because I can’t imagine everyone else appreciates this topic quite as much as you do.”

  “Fine,” William whispered. “Would we get eaten?”

  “Well, that all depends, doesn’t it,” Jack said.

  “On what?” Harry asked.

  “On what else is available,” Jack said.

  I couldn’t help it. As my menfolk looked around the cabin, sizing up the other passengers, I did too.

  “No,” Jack concluded. “You’re the smallest ones here, so you’d be safe until the very end.”

  “What about Mummy?” William wanted to know.

  Jack eyed me. Then: “Have you lost weight?”

  I had actually. In preparation for the trip, I’d been watching what I ate. Sometimes being hungry made me a bitch, but I was hoping it would be worth it once I hit the beach in the new bikini I had packed away.

  “Maybe just a bit,” I admitted.

  “You look fantastic.” Jack smiled. “But then, you looked fantastic before too.” He turned back to the boys. “No, I think Mummy’s safe. Honestly, in our family, I’m the only one in danger. I’m the only one a group of people could make a decent meal out of.”

  I expected the boys to be upset at hearing this, but Jack said the words with such equanimity, they were more curious than anything else.

  “But wouldn’t that bother you?” William asked.

  “Hardly.” Jack laughed. “I am dead in this scenario, right? So why in the world would it bother me? I give you my express permission right now: if it ever becomes necessary, you can eat me. In fact, I insist.”

  “Jack!” That was me of course.

  “What?” he said. “I’m only trying to keep you all from feeling any guilt afterward.”

  • • •

  Having survived the flight, with a little help from a cannibalism discussion, it turned out that JFK was not as close to coastal Connecticut as it might’ve been most helpful for it to be. Of course, we’d known this in advance. But flying to a closer airport would’ve necessitated a nondirect flight with a layover in somewhere like Atlanta, which would have kind of defeated the purpose.

  “When are we going to get there?” William whinged.

  “This is taking for-e-ver,” Harry supplied, holding up his end of the whinging bargain.

  I can’t say I blamed them for feeling fractious. I was feeling that way too.

  It didn’t help that the AC in the leased car was on the fritz. It didn’t help that Jack was having trouble “driving on the wrong side of the road,” as he put it. And it really didn’t help when we got stuck in a godawful mess of stopped traffic.

  Then the boys really started complaining, so of course, I put my foot down.

  “You know what I remind myself,” I said, “when I’m stuck in traffic and start feeling upset about it?”

  “What?” Looking in the vanity mirror, I could see the sullen expression on William’s face.

  “I tell myself that, chances are, whoever’s at the front of the traffic jam is having a far worse time of it than I am, that what is a mere inconvenience for me is likely a real tragedy for someone else, and I just hope they’ll be OK.”

  I can’t say that my pronouncement magically transformed the boys into paragons of patience, but they did let up a bit, and for that I was grateful. That’s the thing about kids: if you let yourself get carried away, you can come up with a whole laundry list of things you’d like for them in this world. But the truth of the matter is, if I could get them to just occasionally think of someone other than themselves, I’d consider the war mostly won.

  Speaking of lists…

  “While we’re stuck here,” I said, “why don’t we start making a list of things we’d like from the shops? You know, once we get to the house, we’ll need to find a market so we have something for dinner tonight and breakfast in the morning.”

  So that’s what we did, made up a list containing the things we liked most (bread and jam, which I suspected we would find, and Ricicles cereal, with its reassuring picture of astronaut Captain Rik on the box, which I suspected we would not) while entertaining ourselves by adding things we’d never want to eat in a million years—the boys’ fancies were utterly captured when Jack suggested vultures’ legs—and before we knew it traffic was moving again.

  • • •

  Some might think coastal Connecticut to be provincial, but what’s wrong with a little bit of quaint?

  As multilane congested highway gave way to tree-lined two-lane parkway, and that in turn gave way to increasingly less traveled roads, the smell of salt water coming through the rolled-down windows, I thought we could do a lot worse than quaint.

  Since Jack was doing the piloting of the car, in addition to keeping the boys entertained, it had been my job to function as navigator, which is one of those things that sounds far more fun in theory than in practice. But as we pulled into the dirt road of what I was already thinking of as our street, all aggravation fell away.

  “Is this one ours?” William asked eagerly as we passed an incredibly long fence, over the top of which we could glimpse what could only be described as a mansion.

  “Nope,” I said serenely.

  “What about that one?” Harry asked of the next mansion.

  “Nope,” I said, still serene.

  And so it went on until we came to the next to the last house and drove through the gap in yet another tall fence. And there it was: our house.

  “It’s a bit small.” William’s tone was skeptical.

  “It’s larger than our house at home,” I snapped.

  OK, so maybe I wasn’t completely relaxed yet. But I’d get there.

  “It only looks on the small side,” I went on more gently, “because it’s sandwiched between two monster-sized houses. But really, it’s a good size, surely big enough for just the four of us.”

  And it was.

  Unlike the surrounding houses, which were all some shade of natural-stained wood with white trim, ours was a dark forest green with cream trim. The others looked like they could have been banged up rather recently, while ours looked as though it had been standing on that spot, withstanding hurricanes, for decades upon decades.

  Retrieving the key from the place the owners said we’d find it, we pulled open the outer door, with its heavy wooden frame and screen barely held together, and let ourselves in.

  Of course the real reason Jack had picked the Roone house was because of its basement. Apparently, at one point the elderly owners we were renting from had had a son who was a jazzman, and they’d soundproofed the basement because not everyone in the neighborhood appreciated hearing him play his sax at his preferred jam session time, which was three a.m.

  Another reason we’d picked the Roone house? They’d given us a fabulous deal on it, some sentiment over Jack b
eing a musician like their son had been. As well as we did financially, we’d normally not be able to afford a house for the whole summer, but we hadn’t really done any traveling since the boys were born and what with the fabulous price the Roones had given us…

  Just inside the back door was a small mudroom and, beyond that, an ancient kitchen looking almost as small. The flooring was narrow wooden slats throughout, and there was a dusting of sand over all of it, with greater piles gathered in the corners.

  “You’d think they’d have cleaned the place before we came,” I said, eyeing a straw broom in the corner.

  “I’m sure they did,” Jack said. “I think the beach just does that.”

  “Does what?”

  “Finds its way into everything.”

  On the wood-board wall in the narrow dark hallway connecting the back of the lower level to the front, I could barely glimpse a small painting. The gilt frame was dusty, and as I peered closer, I saw it was an oil painting of a little girl.

  “It looks like a Renoir,” I said.

  “I highly doubt that,” Jack snorted.

  “Mummy! Can we go swimming? Can we go swimming?”

  The boys had raced ahead of us to the front of the house. We found them in a living area, a small dining table off to one side, the living area itself all overstuffed cushions and wicker, with double-hung windows surrounding the half-hexagon shape. There was a door to the side, I presumed leading onto the porch, and beyond all those windows was the beach and the water.

  “Can we go swimming? Can we go swimming?”

  “Of course not,” I said. “We need to broom out this place, make it livable. We have to find our rooms and unpack our things. Above all, when we’re finished with all that, we need to find the local market. You do want to eat tonight, don’t you?”

  Usually the idea of food took precedence over everything. Growing boys, as I’d come to learn, need almost constant nourishment, like grazing horses or cattle.

  And yet William and Harry just groaned.

  “But that will all take for-e-ver,” said William.

  “And e-ver,” Harry added helpfully.

  “Don’t give your mum a hard time,” Jack said, placing a hand behind each boy’s neck and steering them around. “Let’s go find our rooms.”

  I followed them up the winding stairs—more narrow darkness, more wood—to the second story. Up there, for the first time I realized that none of the floors were level. That, combined with the narrow passageways and the smell of dampness that hung in the air even with the windows closed, gave the whole the feeling of being on a ship.

  Upstairs, there were two small bedrooms, one on each side of the house, and a larger one, clearly the master bedroom, at the back. I counted one tiny bathroom, and it occurred to me that I hadn’t seen another downstairs. Were we really going to subsist with just one bathroom? All four of us?

  “I want this room!” I heard Harry shout.

  Jack and I found him in one of the side bedrooms, bouncing on an overly springy mattress.

  William hung back against the wall, looking at his feet. “I think I want this one,” he said.

  “OK,” Harry said, cheerfully enough. “Then I’ll take the other one.” He raced past all of us, around the back landing and past the master bedroom to the second small bedroom on the other side.

  William pushed off the wall to go follow his brother, and Jack and I followed William.

  “I think I want this one instead,” William said, back to talking to his feet again.

  “OK,” Harry said, still agreeable. “Then I’ll take the other one.”

  “Come to think of it…” William started to say.

  “Why don’t you pick the one you want first,” Harry suggested, “and then I’ll just take the other?”

  “Or,” William suggested to his feet, and yet sounding more hopeful, “you could pick first…and then I could sleep there too?”

  Back home, the boys were accustomed to sharing a room. Both Jack and I had been convinced that they’d each be so happy here with their own spaces, their own independence. What I hadn’t taken into account was the fact that the prospect of turning double digits—William would be ten in July—weighed heavily on William. A part of him wanted to grow up, be mature, be the big brother, knew he should want to spend more time on his own. But another part, currently a larger part, was having trouble with the notion of sleeping without his brother. What can I say? Some kids had teddy bears or pacifiers. William had Harry.

  “Or,” Harry countersuggested, his eyes lighting up, “we can switch off, swapping rooms whenever we like, making it all one big adventure. And,” he added, “we can pop in and visit one another whenever we like without waking anyone else.”

  “But of course we’d wake them,” William objected half-heartedly. It was only half-hearted because, in spite of his fears of independence, I could see that the novelty of Harry’s scheme appealed to him, plus the part that involved regular visits. “We’d be tramping by their bedroom all the time.”

  “No we wouldn’t,” Harry insisted. “Didn’t anyone else see this?”

  He got off the bed and went to a door on the right. In the other bedroom there’d been a door mirroring this one on the left. I had assumed them to be closets, but as Harry flung this one open, I saw they were connecting doors. And the space between the connections? It was a single long room running the front of the house, the only furniture in it a daybed. Opposite that daybed? An entire wall of old-fashioned windows, many of which had been left ajar, causing lacy panel curtains to billow into the room. And the view from that daybed? The sand and the water, only that.

  Where the hell was my suitcase?

  I barely registered their voices—William: “This could work”; Harry: “Wait. Where’s she going?”—as I raced back down the stairs and out to the car, hauled out my suitcase, rummaged until I found what I wanted. Then, figuring the high back fence provided all the privacy I needed, I hurried out of my travel clothes and into my bateau bikini and sarong. When I’d bought the items, bateau and sarong, I’d fancied myself quite international.

  Now I raced back through the house and out the front door, the sound of my menfolk hurrying behind me, stubbing my toe on a grill I hadn’t noticed on the porch. But that didn’t stop me. I didn’t stop until I’d crossed the sand, the edges close to the water sharp with shells, and plunged into the water, surfacing to tilt my head up to the sun. In that moment, I wasn’t a travel agent, I wasn’t a wife, I wasn’t a mother. I was just me.

  “What’s she doing?” I dimly heard William’s voice.

  “I thought she said we had to go to the market first,” came Harry.

  “Never mind that now,” Jack said. “I think Mummy just found her bliss.”

  I’d fallen asleep on the sand and woke to a mosquito biting me, smoke in the air, and the smell of something delicious on the breeze. As I hauled myself toward the porch, in the gathering twilight I glimpsed more than just the three bodies I expected to find there. Apparently the boys had made friends while I slept, and those friends came equipped with parents.

  Despite my awkwardness at making friends initially in grade school, there’s something different for kids outside of school. Unlike adults, who feel the need to go through what almost amounts to an interview stage, as though vetting someone for a position, children can make friends almost instantly, anytime, anywhere. My mother used to think that it was just me, being an only child, the way I’d go up to another kid while waiting for the elevator at a department store and say, “Hey, wanna play?” I think she secretly suspected I was some kind of lonely freak, and for a long time, hearing her tell those stories, I suspected it too. But then I had my own kids and started seeing the boys do the same thing. And even though they’d been a bit hesitant about taking this trip—“But we won’t know anyone!”; “We’re leaving all our friends behind!”—they’d already achieved that while I was sleeping. Like I sai
d, anytime, anywhere.

  “Ah! She’s awake!” Jack said, in the midst of the act of flipping a burger, which is one thing I’d never seen my husband do.

  Normally, I pride myself on my manners—if nothing else, you can’t be successful in business without them—but I was still too groggy to exercise mine.

  “What’s all this?” I said, yawning.

  “I am barbecuing,” Jack said proudly, flipping another burger. “While you were sleeping, the boys and I found the market.” He dropped his voice, whispering behind his spatula. “Just so you know, they do not have Captain Rik around here, but I’m hoping Tony the Tiger will win them over in time.” And back to normal speaking voice: “Then we unpacked everything and they had a swim. They even had time to make some new friends.”

  “Aren’t you lot exhausted?” I said. I was exhausted just hearing about it. “You haven’t slept in forever.”

  “Not really.” Jack shrugged. “I must’ve gotten my second wind. Anyway, when we were done swimming, I could smell the most marvelous smells coming from all the houses around us—did you know people around here barbecue all the time in the summer?—but frankly, I couldn’t figure out how this thing works…”

  His second wind? My husband sounded like he was on speed!

  “…and that’s when Biff offered to show me.”

  That’s when one of the two adults sitting on my porch rose, offering me his hand for a shake. The man attached to the hand looked about our age, only more expensive somehow, and even more expensive looking yet was the woman next to him, who he introduced as his wife. I believed she said her name was Marsha.

  “Your grill’s a bit primitive compared to mine,” Biff said, “but I was able to help Jack figure it out.”

  “Is that charcoal you’re using?” I asked, unable to help myself from adding, “Isn’t that supposed to be unhealthy?”

  “Well, yeah, but you can’t get cancer on the beach.” Jack shrugged. “That’s what Biff said.”