Little & Lion

by Brandy Colbert

  “What about you?” I ask. “Anyone special?”

  “Nah.”

  I take a deep breath before I say what I say because I know he could be touchy about it. “Do you still talk to anyone?”

  He blinks at me. “Like, a therapist? That’s kind of part of the deal. Dr. Tarrasch and I are real tight.”

  “No, I mean… DeeDee says she doesn’t really see you around anymore. You don’t hang out with them?”

  I know for a fact he’s not hanging out with our friends. She told me last week that she hadn’t seen my brother outside of school since I invited her over for dinner during winter break.

  “People ask too many questions,” Lionel says, looking down at the closed book in front of him.

  “But they’re your friends.” I step into the room now. “They care. DeeDee asks about you all the time—”

  “Well, Little, they stopped caring so much after you left.” He is not unkind, just matter-of-fact. “So maybe they’re your friends now.”

  I open and close my mouth without speaking, but Lionel doesn’t want a response. He’s removing the envelope from the book, creasing down the page where he left off. “See you at dinner,” he says without looking up, and before, I would have pushed him, urged him to talk about it.

  But we’re not back to where we were. Not yet.

  And that was my cue to leave, so I step back into the hallway and shut the door.

  Mom and Saul are down in the kitchen, tending to the food for Shabbat dinner. Saul always closed up his woodshop early on Fridays to come home and make the challah, and that hasn’t changed. I find him pulling the ball of dough from a bowl that he set aside so it could rise.

  “Hey, kiddo,” he says, smiling as I walk over to the island.

  Mom looks up from her post at the stove, protected by a black apron that sports bunches of dancing grapes. “Hi there, sweet pea.”

  “Can I help with the bread?”

  “We’ve got everything under control,” Mom says, bending down to peer into the oven window. “This is our first Shabbat dinner with you back, Suz. We want you to relax.”

  “I’m not a guest.” I say it so fervently that they stop looking my way to glance at each other. “I mean, I want to help, if I can. It’s been a while… since I’ve been here for this.”

  “Of course,” Saul says quickly, stepping aside to make room for me at the island. He will clean up before dinner, but right now he still smells like varnish and freshly cut wood from the shop, and that really does make this feel like old times. “Here, I’m just getting ready to separate this thing, and then we can start braiding.”

  I feel Mom watching me as I wash my hands and walk over to stand beside him. I see her looking at Saul as she talks about me with her eyes. Then she’s by the island, looking at me and talking with her mouth.

  “Suzette, I understand if you’re still angry with me… with us,” she says. “You know we never wanted to send you away, but—Lionel’s illness took us all by surprise, and we could see how much it was eating at you, and I felt, at the time, that I needed to step in and do something about that. Ease your load.”

  “And ease your load, too?” I ask quietly, staring at the floor. I’ve never said as much to her, but I’ve always wondered.

  We’ve talked about this before, but emotions were running so high last summer that I mostly pretended to listen when she talked about why I needed to go away. Now I can hear the sincerity and regret in her voice.

  “Oh, Suzette. Oh, baby.” She sounds so sad, and when I look up, she’s blinking like she might cry. “You’ve never been a burden, on me or Saul.”

  “Never,” Saul adds, putting an arm around me.

  “We never want you to think that. But we didn’t know how to handle everything when this was all so new, when Lionel was still trying to figure out his routine. We didn’t want you to start resenting your brother for something that isn’t his fault, and we didn’t handle that well, either.”

  They sent extravagant care packages and called all the time. I never once doubted that they loved me. But I didn’t realize how much I needed to hear this—that I wasn’t a burden—until I do. A lump rises in my throat. The sort that signals tears of relief, tears that release me from thinking there was ever a scenario in which my parents truly didn’t want me around. I look down at the island to blink them away.

  “We messed up,” Mom says. “We thought not having to watch Lionel adjust to his treatment would be healthier for you. Allow you to concentrate more on your own life. But we should’ve talked to you more, kept you in the loop. And I’m sorry.”

  “We’re both sorry,” Saul says. “You’re a good kid. You’ve always been honest, and you deserve the same from us.”

  “I don’t know what to say.” It’s not every day your parents apologize to you for fucking up… even if that part about me always being honest isn’t totally true.

  “Just say you’ll try to enjoy your summer as much as you can.” Mom kisses my cheek.

  “I think I can do that,” I say with a smile.

  Mom goes back to the stove. Saul pulls apart the dough in front of us and places a piece next to me on the butcher-block surface. I roll it into a long rope between my palms, set it aside, and wait for the next one. He looks over and grins at my quick work.

  A few hours later we’re all assembled around the table in nicer clothes, and Lionel and Saul are wearing their kippot. Mom and I light the candles and say the blessing together. My Hebrew is a little rusty, but the cadence of the words is so ingrained in me that it comes back after the first couple of lines.

  We don’t always do the blessing of the children, mostly because Lionel has complained that we’re getting too old for it. But tonight, Mom and Saul ignore his grumblings and place their hands atop each of our heads as they recite the separate prayers for boys and girls. Saul whispers something to Lionel that I can’t hear after his blessing, and when it’s my turn, he says, “I love you and missed you very much.”

  After the kiddush, Mom turns and wraps her arms tightly around me. “Good Shabbos, baby.”

  I didn’t tell many people in Avalon that I’m Jewish. I wasn’t the only Jewish person there, not by far, but people have too many questions when you’re black and Jewish. My situation isn’t really that hard to comprehend: Mom and Saul got together, we were slowly introduced to Saul’s lifelong traditions, and Mom and I decided to convert when I was eleven. But it’s too much for some people to handle, like you must offer up an extra-special reason for converting to Judaism if you have a certain type of brown skin. Not to mention the girls in my dorm weren’t the most tolerant bunch, as I quickly learned. So I never joined the weekly van rides to the temple or the Shabbat dinners hosted by the Jewish student association, even though its presence was one of the reasons Mom and Saul chose Dinsmore in the first place.

  Lionel has never been that into religion and does just enough to keep Saul happy. He thought it was funny how excited I was for my bat mitzvah, and rolled his eyes when I admitted I didn’t mind the Hebrew lessons we took as kids. We’re Reform Jews, and the Nussbaum-Mitchell household is more cultural than religious these days, but we still celebrate several of the holidays and eat Shabbat dinner each week, no exceptions, and I found myself missing every part of it while I was away.

  “Good Shabbos,” I say, and I hug Saul and Lion hugs Mom and Saul hugs my mother, and then it’s Lion and me. His hug is tight but a little stiff, and I wonder if he’s still annoyed from earlier. I called DeeDee to ask if there was something she wasn’t telling me, but she didn’t pick up; she texted later, reminding me that she was up in Los Olivos for the day with her dad.

  “How does it feel being back, sweet pea?” Mom asks, passing the platter of roast chicken my way.

  I slept through dinner last night, and now it’s strange being with my family on a Friday evening instead of eating pizza in the dorm or bribing an upperclassman to drive us into town. I want to exaggerate, tell my mothe
r this is the first time I’ve felt like myself since I was here for winter break, but that’s not true. I felt like myself whenever I was with Iris.

  “Good, except I can’t shake the time change. It feels so late already.”

  Saul takes the challah that Lionel offers and breaks off a piece of the bread we made together. “Well, it seems like you managed to avoid picking up that hideous New England accent. My brother went away to Boston College when I was a kid and came back sounding like a Kennedy.”

  “Yeah, but they said I have a California accent. I didn’t even think we had accents out here.” I carefully scoop a hasselback potato onto my plate. The food was actually pretty good at Dinsmore, but we didn’t have dinners like this. You can tell the difference when someone is cooking simply because it’s a job and when the meal is lovingly prepared by people who missed having you around. “They think everything about L.A. is vapid.”

  “That’s so lazy.” Lionel finally speaks. “People who say that are the same ones who come out here and go to those shithead tourist spots and then complain that the city has no culture.”

  “Don’t say shithead,” Mom admonishes, but she smiles when she says it. “And I heard the same things from the girls at Wellesley, ages ago. They made L.A. sound soulless.”

  “Thank God you didn’t listen to them,” Saul says, winking when my mother looks over. She hides shyly behind her wineglass. They still have little moments like this, and it’s embarrassing and kind of cute and gross all at once. Sometimes I wonder if I’ll ever find anybody I like as much as my mother likes Saul. Not just love, but like. “And thank God you’re back,” he continues, looking at me. “I missed my museum buddy. Want to hit up LACMA next week?”

  “Absolutely.” I look over at Lionel, who’s shoving roast chicken into his mouth. “Hey, what are you doing tomorrow night?”

  “What I’m doing for the next three months of my life—hot date with David Foster Wallace,” he says between mouthfuls. “Why?”

  “DeeDee’s having a party for me. A welcome-back thing. What do you think?”

  He finishes chewing. Shrugs. “Maybe. Kind of feel like laying low this weekend.”

  “But I just got back,” I say. Perhaps knowing I should let it go but not wanting to. “It’s going to be everyone you already know: Dee, Emil, Tommy, Catie—well, I guess Catie isn’t exactly a selling point, but still. It won’t be the same without you.”

  “I’ll think about it, Little,” he says, but his eyes tell me to drop it.

  My mother starts talking then, and we spend the rest of dinner discussing what they’ve all been up to. She brings up the screenplay she’s working on and, like she does every so often, says she still can’t believe people pay her to make up stories, even though screenwriting has been her full-time job for a couple of years now. Saul tells us about the recent string of overbearing, eccentric clients at his woodshop. I glance at Lionel a couple of times, but he’s zoned out. At the end of the meal, Saul says my return has granted Lionel and me a get-out-of-kitchen-duty pass for the evening.

  “Hey,” I say to my brother as we take our dishes to the sink. “I haven’t been out to the tree house yet. Want to go up and hang for a while?”

  It’s our spot, a parent-free escape where we used to do homework and listen to music and talk about things we didn’t want Mom and Saul to overhear. We’re too old for it now, probably, but if Lionel doesn’t want to hang out with our friends, the least I can do is get him to hang out with me.

  Except I can’t.

  He scrapes and rinses his plate, shaking his head. “I’m pretty tired, but I’ll see you tomorrow, okay? Maybe we can bike over to the reservoir.”

  “Yeah, okay,” I say, working hard to make sure he can’t hear the hurt in my voice. Because before, it would’ve been We’ll bike over to the reservoir without the preface of maybe. I start to ask him what’s wrong, if he’s feeling okay or if I’ve done something to piss him off. Our parents are still in the dining room, out of earshot and pouring the last of the sweet wine. But he brushes past me before I can get the words out and I wonder if anyone else has noticed.

  That my brother looks like the old Lionel and sounds like him, too, but some part of him is missing.

  four.

  Emil is early the next evening and I’m late getting ready, so he’s sitting with my parents when I get down to the living room.

  “Sorry,” I say, walking over quickly to rescue him.

  But that’s when I notice nobody looks at all put out that I’m running ten minutes behind. Of course Emil’s been a friend of the family since forever, but the scene before me displays a level of comfort I wasn’t expecting. He’s sitting in the leather armchair across from Mom and Saul, chatting away like they’re old friends. Emil is leaning forward, his hands animated as he tells them a story. Mom and Saul are totally engrossed, expectant smiles on their faces as they wait for him to get to the punch line.

  He turns around, and I don’t miss the way his eyes widen as they land on me. He stands. “Hey, no problem. I was just telling your parents about this guy down by the lake today.”

  “Yeah?” I say, waiting for him to go on because everyone in the room looks so amused and I want to be amused, too.

  “So, he was—” He stops. “Honestly, it’s kind of a long story if you don’t already know about him.”

  “Oh.” I look at Mom and Saul, who obviously know all about this random man who appeared at Echo Park Lake within the past nine months.

  “But I can tell you on the way to DeeDee’s,” Emil says with an easy smile.

  Mom and Saul walk us to the door, and I wonder if they think this is a date. It’s more of a date than Iris and I ever had, but I don’t know what Emil is thinking. Or what I want it to be.

  “Curfew?” I say to Mom before I walk through the doorway.

  She looks over at Saul and it’s clear they haven’t had to worry about this since I left. From what I can tell, Lionel doesn’t seem to get out much anymore, if at all. I checked in with him tonight after dinner, just to make sure he hadn’t changed his mind about DeeDee’s. He hadn’t.

  “Well, you’re almost seventeen,” my mother says. “I think twelve thirty seems reasonable for the summer, doesn’t it?”

  “Totally reasonable.” I begin inching out the door before they can change their minds. My underclassman dorm curfew at Dinsmore was loads more conservative. “We’ll just be at Dee’s.”

  Out on the street, Emil unlocks the passenger door of his Jeep and holds it open for me. I hesitate, then look at him and say thank you. His attentiveness surprises me, but I like it. Lionel says holding the door open is more about not being an asshole than being chivalrous.

  Emil gets in and starts the Jeep, and without looking at me, he says, “You look nice, Suzette.”

  I glance down at my outfit, a sapphire-blue romper with thin straps and tiny red roses dotting the fabric. I was wearing my pajamas the last time I saw him, so I guess I cleaned up well. “Thanks,” I say again, feeling my face warm.

  He looks nice, too, in a pair of army-green shorts, an oxford shirt with the sleeves rolled up, and navy boat shoes. I study his profile.

  “So, when did you get your, um…?” I gesture to my ears even though he’s not looking over, which seems really stupid when I think about it.

  “These?” He lifts a hand from the steering wheel to lightly tap his right ear. “You can say hearing aids, Suzette. They’re not bad words.”

  “Sorry.” I clear my throat and try again. “When did you get your hearing aids?”

  “A few months ago,” he says, navigating toward Sunset Boulevard.

  The top of the Jeep is off and the night breeze skims over my shoulders, rustling through the thick knot of dreadlocks gathered at the back of my neck.

  “I started getting these dizzy spells, and then I would have to stay in bed for, like, days,” Emil says. “My doctor thought it was just an extreme case of vertigo, but I have this thing called M
énière’s disease.”

  “I guess I’m not familiar.” Which makes me feel even dumber, that he’s been dealing with this thing all year and I’ve never heard of it.

  “Neither was I. It’s an inner-ear disorder. There are different degrees of it, and not everyone loses some of their hearing, but…”

  “I’m sorry, Emil.” I’ve never thought about what it would be like to lose my hearing. Maybe he hadn’t, either.

  “Ménière’s is… mostly manageable.” He slows for a red light behind a beat-up old VW bus. “The aids aren’t as bad as I thought they’d be. They’re waterproof. And they help me hear better, which is the point, I guess.”

  He grins and I grin back and we ride quietly for a while, bumping along the asphalt in his graphite-colored Jeep. We take surface streets the whole way to Laurel Canyon, passing endless rows of strip malls and bars with flashing neon signs and fast-food places all crammed together at the busy intersections of Hollywood.

  “What’s going on with everyone now? Anything new?” I ask, realizing that I’ve been twisting my hands together so tightly the bones are starting to hurt.

  I saw everyone over winter break, but that was back in January, and the only person I’ve talked to with any frequency is DeeDee. The party is for me, but like the last time I was home, I’m nervous that things will be too different. That I won’t fit in, that everyone will have moved on and not made room for me. Especially since it seems like they already did that to my brother.

  “Just the usual,” Emil says, turning right on a red light. “The group hasn’t really changed much since you left. Except there’s more alcohol now.”

  I sit back as he navigates the twisty canyon roads with ease. Emil didn’t even have his license when I left, and now he’s basically a pro driving through one of the trickier parts of L.A.