The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  “Well, it’s what your uncle wanted for dinner,” I said.

  Jack raised an eyebrow at me, and then he laughed.

  “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it?” I said, laughing too as I looked around the table with its marked absence of Denny.

  Then I picked up my own knife and fork, cut into the chicken, took a bite. William was right. Definitely oozy.

  • • •

  I was nearly done with the cleanup from dinner when I heard footsteps approaching the kitchen doorway.

  “Do you think we might have something to eat?” Matt asked tentatively.

  “We did brush our teeth first,” Walter added.

  “Help yourselves to whatever you like,” I said, thinking: How ridiculous! They shouldn’t feel they had to ask me, not for food that their own boss had paid for.

  “Oh, no,” Walter said. “We couldn’t possibly do that.”

  “It’s your kitchen,” Matt said. “It wouldn’t be our place.”

  “But you were OK with putting the groceries away earlier,” I pointed out.

  “Oh, but that’s completely different,” Matt said.

  “We couldn’t just leave things out to spoil,” Walter said. “That wouldn’t be right.”

  “But it’s your kitchen,” Matt said again. “We can’t just start making things whenever we feel like it.”

  I couldn’t really see the distinction they were making, but at last I shrugged. Rather than continuing a circular argument, it was easier to get out more chicken, stuff it with cheese, and fire up the grill.

  The chickens were almost done—and still no Denny in sight—when I remembered: Shit! The driver!

  I kept forgetting about Jeeves.

  • • •

  With both hands full, I made the rolling-down-the-window motion again as best I could. Once the window was open, I handed the plate of chicken through, along with a cold can of Budweiser.

  “Here you go,” I said. “Dinner.”

  “Oh, thanks, ma’am.” Jeeves smiled widely. “I was just starting to get a bit peckish.”

  “Well, I’m glad my timing’s good. Enjoy.”

  I started to walk away and then stopped. True, the beach house was already filled near to overflowing. True, there were already seven people sharing one tiny bathroom. But what difference would one more make?

  I turned back, gestured at the window again.

  “I’m not quite done yet, ma’am. Would you like me to leave the plate and bottle outside the back door when I’m finished?”

  “Actually, I was wondering: wouldn’t you prefer to come inside the house?”

  “Oh no, ma’am, I couldn’t do that.”

  “Of course you could. It would be more comfortable for you.” I wondered where there was left for him to sleep. Not the basement—Jack worked there late at night or whenever the whim took him. And while I hated the idea of giving over the dayroom, it’s not like I’d feel inclined to use it now, not with Denny next door. Perhaps the dining area? “Wherever you sleep in there, it has to be better than sleeping in the car.”

  “It’s really thoughtful of you, ma’am, but no, I can’t accept. I prefer to stay with the car. I like to be available with it as soon as Boss needs to go somewhere.”

  “But he hasn’t gone anywhere all day. He hasn’t gone anywhere in about eighteen hours by my reckoning.”

  “Ah, but eventually he will want to go somewhere again. And when he does, I’ll be ready.”

  He smiled while he said all this, but there was some steel in that smile, and I could tell he wouldn’t be budged.

  “Very well then.”

  I started to walk away once more and stopped once more.

  This was insanity.

  “Still not done yet, ma’am. But if you’d like, I can hurry.”

  “That’s not it,” I said almost peevishly. “This is insanity.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I’m not following you here. What’s insanity?”

  “This.” I gestured at the limo. “You. You must hate your job. You’re sitting out here, waiting on his whim—don’t you hate this?”

  Now he not only smiled, he laughed full out, practically in my face. It was like a laugh in a comic strip, so barkingly loud it could have knocked me off my feet.

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” he said, controlling himself, “that must’ve come across as incredibly rude. But hate my job? I love my job! For starters, I get to drive, which is something I love. I’ve driven Boss in nearly every country in the world and on every continent. Did you know he once did a benefit concert on Antarctica? There were some scientists working on some sort of ecological stuff. Boss heard they were going stir crazy, and when there was a break in the schedule, he figured we’d all head down there, see if we could entertain them a bit while they were saving the planet. True, he did it indoors, but it was still Antarctica. I got to drive him in some sort of snow vehicle there. And someday? If more regular-type people get to go into space? I’ll get to drive him on the Moon, or Mars even. Probably get to drive some sort of space vehicle.”

  The Moon? Mars? Had Jeeves been getting stoned out here?

  “Oh, and did I tell you he pays me a fantastic salary? Fantastic salary—the boys too. And he’s set up a pension fund for all of us. When we retire at age fifty, we’ll be set for life. So yeah, maybe right now, sitting outside a quiet house on a quiet street, things are a bit dull. But things’ll pick up again. They always do. Oh, and did I mention all the birds that throw themselves at me just because I drive him? Why, one time there was this girl who—”

  “I get it, Jeeves, Denny’s a saint.” I waved a hand. “You can bring the plate and bottle through to the kitchen when you’re done. We leave the doors unlocked, it’s that safe around here. Oh, and there’s also a bathroom upstairs you can use for bathing and what have you, since Boss hasn’t said how long he’s staying.”

  • • •

  Still no Denny.

  If the whole point of Denny’s visit was to finally spend some time with Jack, I couldn’t see where that was happening. Jack had been asleep while Denny was awake, then Jack had gone sailing, and now that Jack was here, Denny was asleep. If things kept up like this, no matter how long Denny stayed—I still did wonder what “a bit” might mean—they’d never get any further with one another.

  Jack did sit with me for a while in the living area, and we made the usual small talk about the boys and anything else that came into our heads. He really was being very sweet, and smiling often, but I could tell his mind wasn’t really in it. So when he began to look antsy, surreptitiously casting glances at the door to the basement, I let him off the hook.

  “Go on, then,” I said. “Get back to your song.”

  “Are you sure you don’t mind? Because if you do, I could just—”

  “It’s fine,” I said. “I’ll just sit up for a while.”

  With a grateful smile and a quick kiss on the forehead, he was gone.

  William and Harry had found some old board games in a closet and pulled one out. When they read that it required two or more players, they thought more would be merrier and had invited the other boys, Matt and Walter, to join them. I’d tried to demur on behalf of the bodyguards, but they insisted they would find it enjoyable.

  Now, as I sat in a wicker chair, looking out at the water, I heard their voices coming from the dining area.

  “I’m not sure that’s right,” Matt said.

  “I agree!” William said indignantly.

  “Even though I was just in jail,” Harry said, “shouldn’t I still get two hundred dollars? After all, after being in prison, won’t I need proper funds to start a new life?”

  “Hang on,” Walter said. “The rules are around here somewhere…”

  I smiled to myself. The boys may have been bickering, but I could tell they were having fun, all four of them.

  When I first had William and Harry, I was a fairly you
ng mum. Sometimes I would chafe at it. Why was it no longer so easy to just get up and go whenever I wanted? Why, I sometimes thought, if I’m being honest, couldn’t I simply go? Then I met another mother at the park, an older mum, who explained that as far as she was concerned, our children were simply on loan to us from the universe; that no matter how challenging we might find certain stages in their development, blink and those stages will have passed, never to return. There would come a time when my life would be my own again. And who knows? Maybe then I’d wish things back the way they had been before.

  “And,” she’d added, “was it really so great before?”

  I thought about the years before the boys and, more specifically, the years before Jack—all that time at school, trying to fit in; all the years in the dating wilderness. There were definitely good things about before, but when I thought about it, I saw that even with the bad, there were so many better things after.

  I’m not saying that conversation turned me into a perfect paragon of patient motherhood, but it did change the way I viewed things, at least whenever I thought to remind myself. Sometimes, it seemed now, the only requirement for my own happiness was that my own boys should be so.

  So I just sat there for a long time, listening to their play, feeling content.

  At one point, I heard the back door click open, and I figured it was Jeeves returning his dinner things. I knew I should go to the kitchen and do the washing up, but I was feeling too lazy. And when I heard the door click open again a short time later, I simply concluded it must be Jeeves leaving.

  But then, as I stared out the front window, in my peripheral vision I saw a shadowy figure come around from the side of the house before beginning to move faster. It took me a while to realize what I was seeing.

  With the waves glistening in the background, under the moonlit sky, my brother-in-law was running on the deserted beach, alone.

  Since they’d stayed up so late the previous night with their board game, William and Harry were late coming down the next morning, and when their friends came round to see where they were, I went upstairs to rouse them.

  Having done that, I proceeded through to the dayroom, figuring to have a look from my favorite window—it really was the best view in the house—while the boys brushed their teeth. As soon as I stepped into the room, though, I saw that I wasn’t going to get to enjoy the view by myself.

  Denny was already there. He was perched on the edge of the daybed, his posture ramrod straight, his naked feet crossed at the ankles. He was wearing sailor pants, low and loose on the hip, and the most pristinely white T-shirt I’d ever seen in my life, although, as requested, it somehow managed to look used.

  Later, Matt and Walter would explain to me that after purchasing Denny’s clothes but prior to bringing them to the house, they’d brought his dozen white T-shirts to a Laundromat, where they’d run them through the washer and dryer several times. Still later, I would wonder why they couldn’t feel so liberal about availing themselves of the laundry facilities at the house.

  “Good morning, Mona,” Denny said, not taking his eyes from whatever he was looking at. “I’ll bet you look fetching today.”

  “Er, thanks. Have you been sitting there long?”

  “A few hours. Since the sun came up.”

  “What are you doing?” I asked, my own eyes focused on him rather than the view. Without dark glasses or makeup, and in the full light of day, for the first time in years I could fully see his face: the tracery of age; the lines carved around his eyes and mouth so deep, signatures of a life lived more fully than anyone else, the laughter always louder. Despite that his body, looking somehow vulnerable in his all-white clothing, could easily still pass for that of a teenage boy, for the first time Denny’s face actually looked forty-two.

  “Working,” he said calmly. “Thinking.”

  “I see.”

  But I didn’t. Not really.

  “Will breakfast be ready soon? Only I haven’t eaten in over twenty-four hours. Sometimes I go on fasts to clear my mind, but I prefer those fasts to be deliberate.”

  “If you were so hungry, why didn’t you just go get yourself something to eat?”

  “Oh, I couldn’t do that. And intrude on your kitchen?”

  It was similar to what Matt and Walter had said. I was beginning to suspect that’s where they got it from.

  I was already clear across the boys’ bedroom when I heard his voice call after me:

  “I think those eggs would be good this morning.”

  • • •

  The way we’d spent the first day?

  That was pretty much the pattern we settled into over the next two weeks: Me making everyone breakfast; William and Harry going off; Jack disappearing with Biff or one of the other men; me preparing all the other meals whenever anyone got hungry, because Denny and his entourage were all too polite to cook in my kitchen; Jack and Denny spending almost no time in one another’s company. At night, we didn’t accept invitations out because Denny didn’t want others to know he was there—it would have felt rude to leave him behind—and we didn’t have others over for the same reason. After dark, when everyone else was otherwise occupied, Denny would slip out for his quiet runs in the night.

  The only big difference from the first day was that Denny and his boys, no longer suffering from jet lag, were awake in the afternoon, and all three of them spent most of their time in the living area, talking loudly into their large mobile phones. Except for the hours I spent on the beach, I felt as though my time and my life were no longer my own, but I couldn’t spend all my time on the beach. And whenever I wanted to just go read in the dayroom, it seemed that Denny was always there in his white clothes, staring out the window, working and thinking.

  There was one moment that was different from all the others.

  One day, when Jack was off somewhere, Denny asked me if he might use the basement.

  “You said there’s a soundproofed music room down there that Jack uses, yes?” he said.

  “Well, I don’t think it’s quite up to the standards you’re used to…”

  “I’m sure it’ll be fine,” he said, “so long as Jack doesn’t need it himself right now.”

  He disappeared for a moment upstairs and then came running lightly straight back down with an acoustic guitar.

  “Ready!” he said, sounding like William and Harry before embarking on a trip they wanted to take.

  I switched on the light and led him down the rickety basement stairs.

  “As you can see,” I said, “it’s pretty primitive…”

  “It’s fine,” he said, only barely glancing at his surroundings as he sat down in a chair, placing his guitar on his knee.

  I continued to stand there, and after a moment, he looked up, flashed me a wide smile. “Really, Mona, it’s perfect. Thank you.”

  There was dismissal in those words. He had work to do and he was ready for me to be gone.

  As I turned away, I saw him reach for a pad and pen that Jack had left out. I paused, wondering if this might bother Jack later, his things being disturbed. And now I began to regret letting Denny down there at all. But I had already let him in. It would be foolish now to try to take it back.

  I started up the stairs, made it all the way to the top, turned the knob on the door, pushed the door open…

  And then without walking through it, I pulled the door shut again so the click was audible, and, as silently as possible, I sat down on the stairs.

  For the longest time, there was silence. I have to admit, after a few minutes, I started to get bored. Was this what creativity sounded like? Perhaps Denny wasn’t as ready as he thought he was?

  Then I heard the plink of a few notes, followed by a chord or two. Then came some humming, at which point I experienced an echoing hum inside myself. Even without any words at all, that humming was distinctive.

  More silence. This time, I wasn’t bored at all. Rather, I
waited in anticipation for more sound. I knew it must be coming. In the wait, I pictured Denny doing what I’d seen Jack do on the rare occasions when I’d caught glimpses of him composing a song; Jack never really let me inside his creative process. The few times I’d seen him, Jack would stop every so often and make notes, changing a lyric to fit the tune or changing the tune to fit the lyric.

  I knew from reading the mags that, usually, Denny wrote all the words and Lex wrote all the music. They didn’t do this in any particular order. Rather, whenever inspiration struck one of them, that one would do whatever he wanted before tossing it over to the other guy to do his share, finding inspiration from inspiration. But sometimes, over the years, one or the other would do both; Lex more rarely, because Lex wasn’t exactly strong on words, his interviews monosyllabic, punctuated by grunts. And in the beginning, when Denny did try to compose music, Lex would laugh at his efforts. Sometimes, the critics did too, even a few fans. But over time, Denny got better. No one was laughing anymore.

  That—Denny creating a whole song on his own—that’s what I was listening to.

  And then, there it was, that voice: I hadn’t heard that voice, not singing live like that, in eighteen years. I hadn’t even heard it on tape very much, since Jack never played Denny’s band’s music and all our friends knew better than to. So the only times I heard his recorded voice were if I was absolutely alone in the car and a song came on the radio or, sometimes, in a department store if there was a knockoff version—true abominations, those. As for the last time I’d heard Denny sing live, it was when I was fifteen, at a concert I’d gone to with Stella and Bria.

  But I couldn’t think about that right now, didn’t want to, because as I sat there, Denny was struggling over the phrasing of a line of lyrics. He’d get to the end—the last word was “it”—and each time he’d try it a different way. It seemed impossible to imagine, that there could be so many variations on “it,” but there were. At last, he settled on the version that most conveyed wistful longing, turning a two-letter word into a multisyllable one, dragging the short “i” initially and then going up a few notes and hitting the full “it” hard. He sang the word the exact same way three times, and then he began at the beginning of the song, playing it straight through for the first time.