The Other Brother

by Lauren Baratz-Logsted

  Jack’s own story involved an older woman.

  “Babysitter?” I asked.

  “Hardly! The only reason she was with me was because I told her I knew someone well who it turned out she was very interested in. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but,” he shrugged, “you could say it left a bad taste in my mouth. I couldn’t escape the feeling that the one she wanted to be with was him, not me. I can tell you one thing: I never did that again.” It wouldn’t be until later, after I learned who Jack’s brother was, that I’d put it together: that the man the older woman had really wanted to be with was Denny Springer, and Jack knew it. “So, how about you?”

  I was tempted to tell him the truth. After all, it did make quite a story, didn’t it? And wouldn’t we both laugh about the fact that my first-time story involved someone who had the same last name as Jack? Almost like we were destined to be together. But, then, I knew that Jack wasn’t a fan of The Greatest Rock-and-Roll Band In The World and its lead singer. So maybe, instead of being something for us to laugh over, bond over, it would put him off me.

  In the end, I lied. I told him about my second time instead.

  It seemed like such a small, inconsequential lie at the time.

  And, in the years since, I’ve never been sorry I told it.

  • • •

  There were only two people in the world who knew about that night in Cardiff, only two people who knew that Denny and I had once slept together.

  And now, after eighteen years, we were finally discussing it, the secret that we two shared.

  I’d always been grateful to Denny, in the years since my wedding day, that he’d never once let slip, either by word or deed, what had happened. It had been quite the balancing act on my part, and his, never more so than it had been this summer, when we’d been thrown into such close proximity for such a protracted period of time. But now, at long last, there was at least the opportunity to acknowledge that it had, in fact, happened.

  “So,” Denny said wonderingly, “William is mine?”

  “Of course he’s not, you prat!” God, what was wrong with this man? “Can’t you do simple maths?”

  “Well, that’s a relief.” He ignored my insult, both of them. “I mean, he’s a great lad, but if he had been mine, that would have been quite the sticky wicket, no?”

  It was all I could do not to roll my eyes. Like that was the biggest problem here, not that I’d once slept with my husband’s brother.

  There’s just one problem.

  It didn’t happen like that.

  Oh, everything about Cardiff was true—as well as what I did or didn’t tell Stella, Bria, and, most importantly, Jack—but the aftermath? The discussion? The moment of acknowledgment? None of that ever came.

  Because when I said to Denny, “I’m talking about me,” and then I waited for the recognition in his eyes, it simply never came. There was merely a vacant look, followed by, “What are you talking about, Mona?”

  A tidal wave of sadness washed over me then, a wave so tall that it engulfed me and I could scarcely breathe. For eighteen years I’d kept the secret, the one I shared with Denny—the one I’d thought I shared with Denny—and now it was just me.

  “She was actually nineteen,” Denny said when I failed to speak.

  “What?” It was like trying to swim out of a fog.

  “That girl, Tiffany Whosit.”

  “Glynn,” I corrected reflexively. “And what are you saying?”

  “What I started, what I tried, to tell you before. After the story broke, my attorneys looked into it, in case there might be a lawsuit coming our way. Turned out, the girl had lied when she told the reporter she was only fifteen. Her mother’s older too.”

  “But it says—”

  “I know what the article says, but it’s true, Mona. My attorneys even have the birth certificate to prove it. I’m sure in a later issue of that…thing you have, there would have been a correction—they’d have to do that—although no doubt it would be in the back, where almost no one would notice it. Not that it would do much good. Once something like that is out there, people tend to remember the original accusation, not what follows.”

  There was some resentment in his tone, but not as much as one might expect.

  “But the age,” I said. “Why would someone lie about such a thing?”

  “Why does anyone ever lie about anything?” And now he sounded weary. “Sometimes people lie for what they think are good reasons. Sometimes their reasons are bad. And sometimes, people just lie.”

  I supposed that was true.

  “Look, I can see that you’re upset,” he said when, again, I failed to speak. “You’re thoroughly disgusted with me, so I’ll just go. But, if it’s all the same to you, perhaps I should wait a few days? Only, I wouldn’t want the boys to interpret my rushing off right after your return as meaning that I’d only stayed with them out of some sense of duty, that I hadn’t enjoyed my time with them, when really I had.”

  I swallowed hard, nodded.

  “You’re still upset,” he observed.

  “It’s just,” I started. “It’s just…”

  “It’s just what, Mona?”

  I couldn’t tell him. Not now. So, instead I went with:

  “It’s just that this summer was supposed to be about you and Jack finally getting to know one another.”

  And then he did a strange thing. He placed his fingers gently under my chin, a touch so faint I could barely feel it.

  “Ah, that’s sweet, Mona,” he said. “But don’t you know yet? You can’t ‘get to know’ other people. It’s just not possible.”

  “Of course it is,” I insisted.

  “Anyway,” Denny said, “I’d think you’d need both parties to be on board to achieve something like that.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, look at Brother Jack. He’s hardly been receptive, has he? Oh, sure, he’s been pleasant enough, and we’ve had a few nice moments together, but for the most part, I don’t think he’s much bothered if I’m here or not. And if he’d had his choice? He’d have voted for not.”

  “How can you say that?” I said. “Maybe it was true at the beginning. I can’t deny that Jack was a bit chilly at first. But can you blame him? You’d barely paid him any mind for twenty years! But what about after you started playing together in the basement? The jam sessions, the excursions on Biff’s boat, the trips into the city?”

  “That was just him trying to please you, because it was what you so obviously wanted. I suppose we were both trying to please you.”

  “No, it’s been more than that,” I insisted. “It’s been good you’ve had this time together. Jack’s grateful. I’m sure of it.”

  “And I’m grateful too. It has been good. Thank you, Mona, for all of it.”

  I’d ask Jack about it later, whether he was glad or not that Denny had come, but I was sure he was. I was sure that I was right.

  I saw then another truth I hadn’t seen before. I hadn’t done it for Jack—I’d done it for myself. Because as much as I’d said I wanted Jack and Denny to get to know each other—and I had—really, I’d wanted to know Denny. In my stunned state, I confessed something to the effect.

  “That’s a bit hard, though, don’t you think?” Denny said with a wry smile. “I’m what I am and what people think I am, and sometimes neither and sometimes both. But isn’t that true of everyone? Aren’t you and Jack unknowable too? I’m just more unknowable than most.”

  He must have seen something of what I was feeling on my face because he said, “Aw, don’t look so sad, Mona. Tell you what: how about if I tell you something about myself, something no one else knows?”

  I nodded.

  “OK, then. Did I ever tell you about the day I left home? No, of course I didn’t. I was eighteen.”

  I did know that part.

  “I told them I was moving to the big city with Lex. Edith, of course, j
ust about had a cow. ‘But you can’t do that! You’re supposed to go to university, Dennis! Oxford! What about Oxford?’”

  I had to laugh. His impersonation of Edith in full-on hysteria mode was spot on.

  “‘How can you give this all up?’ she said. ‘How can I not?’ I said. ‘I’ve got to take a chance on myself or I’ll never know.’”

  That part was never in the mags.

  “‘Just let him go,’ Burt said.”

  His Burt was good too.

  “‘But he’s supposed to be a maths professor!’ Edith shrieked. ‘And he’ll be back as soon as he’s hungry,’ Burt told her. And then, while they proceeded to fight, Jack, thirteen at the time, pulled me aside and hissed, ‘They’re always fighting over you. Why don’t you just leave now?’ So I did.” He paused. “And I didn’t go back until I was number one in the whole fucking world.”

  He smiled as he spoke the last, but there was a brittle edge to that smile.

  I was aghast, for more reasons than one.

  “But you can’t blame them for that! Lots of people say they’re going to be musicians, that they’re going to be famous. And yet so few ever succeed. You can’t blame them for looking at you at eighteen and not somehow seeing that one day you’d be”—I gestured impatiently at him with my hand—“this. No one could have foreseen that.”

  “Oh, but I do blame them. You know, you never quite get over that: the feeling that the people who should love you best just don’t believe you’ve got what it takes to achieve your dreams.”

  I thought about that.

  “So how about you?” he said.

  “How about me what?”

  “I’ve shared something about me that no one else knows. Would you care to tell me something about you?”

  But there was only one thing about me that no else knew, and I wasn’t about to tell him that.

  “No? I didn’t think so. But don’t you see? Yes, I told you a story, but it’s just one. So now you know a tiny thing, an unglimpsed corner of my universe, but it’s just one moment. Every day for forty-two years I’ve amassed moments, and you can’t possibly know what it’s like to be me—you can’t know me—unless you’ve lived those moments in my skin. Like I said, everyone is unknowable, Mona. I’m just more loudly unknowable.”

  Then Denny said he was heading back to the house to try again with Jack, see if Jack wanted some company while he worked, and he asked if I wanted to come too. But I shook my head.

  “Hi!” I called after his departing figure.

  “What?” he said, turning.

  “I said, ‘Hi.’”

  I’d wanted to say that to him eighteen years ago. For eighteen years, I’d waited, wanting desperately to be seen.

  “Oh. Right.” He was deeply puzzled by me. Well, who could blame him? “Hi, Mona.”

  And then he walked on.

  When he was gone, I thought about the few small things I did know: that Denny’s life was defined by who he was, while Jack’s was defined by who he was not.

  And me? What was I defined by?

  A moment only I knew about or remembered.

  When’s the right time to tell a man, “I’ve slept with your brother”? Was there a moment I could have confessed such a thing to Jack? On our wedding day? On our wedding night? Perhaps once the shock had worn off? Now? Would now be a good time?

  When’s the right time to tell a man you once slept with his brother?

  There’s only one right answer to that question:

  It’s never.

  • • •

  In the end, Denny stayed on for another week. During that time, he was the perfect guest. He played Monopoly each night with the boys—he was always the Hat; he hung out with Jack whenever opportunity arose, or when Jack would let him; he stayed away from the dayroom whenever there was even a hint I might want to use it. Here and everywhere, Denny tried at all times to be all things to all people. It must be exhausting, I thought, being him.

  It occurred to me that when Denny first came, I’d expected outrageous behavior from him, and, even though nothing he’d done had been particularly outrageous—more inconvenient, really—I’d reacted at the time as though it had been. I suppose I’d been working out my own history. Now I found myself feeling more patient with him, more inclined to react with light rather than heat. And, realizing that I never wanted Jack to know what had happened before we met, for the first time it occurred to me to feel relieved that Denny didn’t remember me. Now, it could finally be a moment in my life that was just about me. For so long, I’d wanted to be seen by others. Well, I hadn’t gotten that. But I’d gotten something else. Finally, I could see myself.

  Mostly, I just watched—watched all the men in my life—and thought. I wondered: just how well did I know any of them?

  I’d see Jack smiling or laughing at something Denny had said, but when I looked close, I’d see a tightness there I hadn’t noted before. And I realized it had always been there. I’d just never seen it.

  If Denny’s greatest fear was being less, perhaps my husband’s greatest fear was not being enough.

  I thought about what Denny had said about other people being unknowable and how all these years I’d thought the distance between the two brothers had been because of Jack’s hurt over Denny leaving when, in reality, it had been Denny who’d been hurt by Jack telling him to go.

  I wondered: just how well did I know my own husband?

  After all, I’d been harboring a pretty big secret for the entire time I’d known Jack, one I would take to the grave. What secrets might Jack be harboring that I would never know?

  I thought about what Denny had said, about us only ever being able to glimpse small moments of other people’s lives and how we could never see the whole picture, and I saw that he was right.

  But then I thought: Maybe it’s not the knowing, because we’ll never get to that. Maybe it’s the trying.

  What did I really know about Jack Springer?

  That he was a good husband. That he was a great father.

  In the end, it was enough.

  • • •

  On Denny’s last day, I watched Jack and Denny hug goodbye before Denny climbed into the back of the limo, a hand out the window waving as the vehicle whisked him away from our lives to the plane that would fly him back to his.

  Who knows? I thought, as I stood there waving, my husband on one side, my boys on the other. Maybe, at some point, Denny would invite Jack to come on tour with him or at least to play in the show, and maybe Jack would even say yes. And then Jack would know, at least for a moment, what it’s like to be near the center of all that.

  As for us, we’d stay on for the rest of the summer, as planned, and it would be good, so good—we really were so good together!

  But it would never be the same.

  I wish to thank the following people:

  Jaime Levine, for wanting to work with me and then being amazing about everything

  Everyone at Diversion Books, for being so good to me and my book

  Jon Clinch, for being an amazing writing friend and early reader on this book

  The members of the Friday Night Writers Group who helped with this one: Lauren Catherine, Bob Gulian, Andrea Schicke Hirsch, and Greg Logsted

  Greg Logsted, because: you

  Jackie Logsted, because: you

  Readers everywhere

  LAUREN BARATZ-LOGSTED is the author of over thirty books for adults, teens, and children. Her books have been published in fifteen countries. Lauren’s always been fascinated by Mick Jagger, but the closest she’s ever come to him is the nosebleed section at a concert.

  Visit her at www.laurenbaratzlogsted.com

  or follow her @LaurenBaratzL on Twitter.

 

 

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