Sleep

by Nino Ricci

  It was possible they had been targeted right from the moment they’d stepped off the ferry, that someone had waited for just such a chance. He knew Julia would never recover if something had happened to him, would be ruined, they both would.

  “Marcus!”

  Then he saw it, a narrow path through the dense growth and, faintly, what looked like footprints. Already he was doing the calculations in his head, how much money they could raise in a hurry, who they would go to.

  Something moved in the thicket of shadow ahead of him.

  Marcus was crouched in a clump of ferns like an animal evading capture. A million emotions collided in David.

  “For the love of Christ, Marcus! Didn’t you hear us calling you? What are you doing here?”

  He seemed afraid to get up.

  “What were you thinking? Answer me! Why were you hiding?”

  He was shouting now, had pulled the boy up by his arm and dragged him out to the open.

  “Don’t ever try something stupid like that again!”

  Julia was running toward them.

  “What are you doing? You’re hurting him!”

  “He was just hiding there, for fuck’s sake! We’re going out of our heads and he’s just hiding there!”

  “Let go of him, you’re hurting him! Did you ask him why he was hiding? Did you do that?”

  All he could see was his anger, like a burning wall he had to pass through.

  “Ask him what, for Christ’s sake? I could see for myself he’d done it on purpose! We’re shouting like idiots and he’s hiding there the whole time like it’s some kind of game!”

  “But why would he do that? Why?”

  “You tell me! Because I don’t have a fucking clue!”

  “That’s right, you don’t have a clue! Whose fault is that? Whose fault?”

  The day was ruined after that; the entire trip was. The family had atomized along familiar lines, a clean break. David didn’t even bother trying to find out what Julia might have managed to glean from the boy about the incident. He didn’t want to know, didn’t want the excuses, the lies. Didn’t want to have to think how differently things might have gone if he had simply taken the boy in his arms.

  “Davie, you with us? We better move on that house tour if you want to have time for the visit.”

  He realizes he has blanked out. Microsleeps, Becker calls these episodes, a sudden drop in his brainwaves from alpha to theta for seconds or microseconds, long enough to lose a conversational thread or crash a car.

  “I think I’m going to give the restaurant a miss.”

  “Not the restaurant. I meant Dad. Ma, did you tell him at least?”

  “It’s not for me to tell him. It’s for him to know.”

  “Come on, Ma. I wouldn’t have remembered myself if you hadn’t reminded me.”

  “Don’t lie for your brother’s sake. Every year you’ve gone with me.”

  David’s brain hurts. More than anything, he wants the day to be over.

  “Could somebody please tell me what the fuck we’re talking about?”

  “You see?” his mother says.

  “It’s no big deal, Davie. We were planning to stop by the cemetery, that’s all. To pay our respects. It’s twenty years today.”

  Twenty years. The number staggers him. Sometimes he still feels the man at his back as if it were yesterday.

  Twenty years from now, maybe this is what David will be to his own son, just this darkness, this tumour.

  “Can we get going, at least? Who knows what the traffic will be getting Marcus home.”

  He must have had his reasons. Some impulse he couldn’t shake. Or maybe he had turned to see his parents walking hand in hand and it had hurt him in a way he couldn’t have named, the danger and the hope of it.

  Danny puts a hand on his shoulder.

  “Just a quick tour of the house, then we’ll go. Who knows when we’ll get you out here again.”

  The house goes on forever, with more square footage than their whole city block had back in their old west-end neighbourhood. In the basement there is a second kitchen, a second family room, a wine cellar; an entertainment centre with a cinema-sized projection screen. The floor, of polished concrete, is lined with radiant heat.

  “All geothermal,” Danny says. “Thought I’d do my bit for the environment. They had to drill halfway to China to put the pipes in but it practically puts us off the grid.”

  “I guess you’ll be set when it ends, then.”

  “What’s that exactly, Davie? When what ends?”

  “Civilization as we know it.”

  Danny doesn’t miss a beat.

  “I figure that ended a long time ago, brother. Strictly the law of the jungle out there. You should know more than anyone.”

  David might almost be pleased by all of this if it didn’t feel like something set against him. Right from childhood his relationship with Danny has always felt like a zero-sum game, just a certain portion allotted to them that they must forever fight to get their share of. Even when Danny got picked on in school there was always a part of David that was relieved, as if whatever Danny got, he himself was spared.

  Danny takes him outside and leads him to what looks like the facade of an entirely separate residence, jutting out in a big bay from the side of the house with its own double-doored entrance and trellised courtyard. The courtyard feels utterly private and self-contained, with no sightline to the front entrance or the back patio.

  “You could live here and never know there was a whole other house attached,” Danny says. “That was the idea.”

  From his bated air David senses they have come to the real object of the tour. Inside, the facade’s bay has been mirrored to form a big diamond-shaped space, with a kitchen to one side and a sitting and dining area angled around it. It takes David a few seconds to figure out what is so eerie about the place: it is like a miniature of the house their father built when he moved the family out here, specially designed to fit its odd-shaped ravine lot.

  “All right,” he says. “I’ll bite. Is this where you put the au pair? The mistress?”

  “Come on, David. It’s for Mom.”

  “You’ve got to be kidding! She’d have to be dead before she moved out here.”

  Danny shifts. “I guess she didn’t say anything, then.”

  “What, do you think she’s going to move up here to look after your kids? She loves it downtown! I don’t know if you actually got her to agree to this, but if she did she’s just stringing you along.”

  “She’s already sold the place, Davie. It closes in a couple of months.”

  David feels the hum start at the back of his neck.

  “I get it now. It’s about the restaurant, isn’t it? You figured you’d get the condo money out of her so Nelda can have her little amusement.”

  “You don’t know what you’re talking about, David.”

  He turns to see that their mother has come in behind them.

  “Don’t I?” Just wanting to lash out now, to do damage. “What did your condo fetch? A million? One five?”

  “Don’t start this, David. You won’t like where it ends.”

  “At the truth? Is that what you mean? You both made it sound like you couldn’t rub two cents together when Dad died but now look at you, with your restaurant and your monster house. I didn’t see it then, how you closed me out.”

  “Closed you out?” his mother says. “You didn’t ask about the money back then, did you? You didn’t want to know. You had your scholarship or whatever, that was all that mattered. You had your condo. Why do you think I sold the house up here, really? Do you think I cared about going to museums or the theatre? Do you think I cared about shopping?”

  “Ma,” Danny says. “Just stop. We don’t want to do this.”

  “Tell me, David. Why do you think?”

  He has made his scene after all. And so will get what he deserves.

  “Because we needed the money, David, that’s
why. We needed the money. Who paid for your condo, did you ever think of that? Did you think it was free, just because your father built it? You knew all the problems he’d had with that building, all the buybacks we’d had to do, but you didn’t ask. You didn’t want to know.”

  She has done it again. Now this is the version of things he will have to live with, that will become the truth.

  “It’s like you’ve been holding this over me just so you could throw it in my face! Why didn’t you just say something back then, for Christ’s sake? I would have signed the thing over in a heartbeat for all I fucking cared!”

  “You think I wouldn’t have asked? It was only for Danny’s sake that I didn’t. He fought for you then, if you’re looking for the truth.”

  Danny won’t look at him.

  “That was years, ago, Ma. Why hash it out now? We just did what Dad wanted. We just did what was right.”

  He didn’t want to know. All these years he has gone along thinking that he was the one who had always had the upper hand.

  History has shown that whenever twins stand in line for succession, one of them has to die.

  “As far as I’m concerned, Davie,” Danny says, “this conversation never happened. Let’s not let it wreck the whole day.”

  They leave the kids behind with Nelda and drive to the cemetery in Danny’s SUV. The vehicle reeks of luxury, leather seats, drop-down video, in-dash GPS. David sits in back, the first time he can remember being in the back seat of a car since he was a teen.

  “You still driving that fancy import?” Danny says.

  The fancy import that he had had to return to the dealer when the lease expired because he couldn’t afford the buyout.

  “Strictly subcompact these days. Thinking about the environment.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  David feels sleep coming on as soon as the car is in motion. It was how he used to put Marcus to sleep when he had colic, driving the valley parkway for hours at a stretch. Something about the movement and white noise, people said, the containment of the car, like being back in the womb. Maybe it is the same for David, the same sense of regression.

  He slips a hand into his pocket and feels by shape for a tab of ten-mig immediate-release.

  Danny’s eye goes to the rear-view.

  “You okay back there?”

  “Just wondering when the movie starts.”

  “Don’t joke. Half the time Nelda and Ma sit in the back when we go out so they can catch up on their soaps or whatever. Makes me feel like the frigging chauffeur.”

  They ride past houses built like Palladian villas and Disney castles, one after another, with huge fountains out front or mile-long driveways with enough interlocking brick to pave the Appian Way. Like Rome before the fall, when everything got sloppy and big, the roadways out of the city lined with the monuments of all the middlemen who’d got rich bilking the provinces. Back when their father moved them out here, this whole zone was still farmland—that was probably what drew him here, the prospect of looking out from his back garden to open country like some aging Cincinnatus. By the time he died, the cornfields beyond their ravine had already given way to the road and sewer works of another development.

  This is always the first image of his father that comes to David, of him tending his garden, though it wasn’t something he himself ever showed an interest in. That was Danny’s job, to show an interest. David’s was to resist at all costs, to pile up grievances. Over stupid things, he sees now, things that hardly mattered, and yet at the time it felt like his whole being depended on this unreasoned defiance. At one point he even started imagining to himself that his father was some sort of imposter who had wormed his way among them, taking his cue from the story his mother used to tell of how they met, when she was working for an uncle’s construction company and he came looking for a job.

  “I had to fake everything for him, all his papers. He didn’t have so much as a library card.”

  David used to do furtive searches of his father’s bedroom drawers, his closet, his desk, looking for he didn’t know what. Some clue, some proof he didn’t belong to them. There were occasional handwritten letters from Italy but he could never decipher them; there were photographs, mostly of job sites but also older ones of people he didn’t know, their surfaces cracked, their edges oddly serrated. It took David years of looking at maps before he found one that showed the town his father’s passport listed as his birthplace, up in the lake district. Later he would figure out it wasn’t far from Salò, the town where the Germans had set up Mussolini’s puppet republic after the Italians deposed him. For years, right into adulthood, the idea persisted in David’s mind that his father had had some connection to it, on the basis of nothing, really, given that his father would have been all of seventeen by the war’s end.

  The irony now is that David can hardly remember more than a handful of real confrontations between the two of them. The worst had been when he had broken into one of his father’s work sites with some of his friends and crashed a forklift into a foundation wall, ending up riding home in the back of a police car. His father hadn’t said a word, had simply pulled off his belt when the police were gone and lit into him, the whole time David thinking, Now everyone will see what he is. And yet the truth was that this kind of violence was rare in him. That was the summer of David’s trip to Italy with his mother, which might have been a twisted compensation for the beating, though it felt more like his father simply giving up on him. In the fall, Danny started joining in on their father’s hunting trips, as if the implicit partitioning of him and Danny between their parents had finally been formalized. David can still remember the blackness that used to go through him when Danny returned from those trips, the feeling he had missed out on some rite of passage, something that might have given a shape to the violence in him.

  “You can just see the top of it from here, Davie, the one in fieldstone.”

  David has blanked out again. They are on the bypass that skirts the old town centre, which is just visible beyond an expanse of golf course and new housing.

  “Used to be an old mill, if you can believe it. We’re trying to get it back to what it was. Maybe you could swing around with Mom next weekend to have a look. Jamie was saying Marcus asked if he could come up again.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll have to see. I might have something planned.”

  They go past their old neighbourhood, a stretch of modest split-levels and bungalows that from the highway looks almost bucolic now, the sterile, unbroken lawns of the old days having given way to actual landscaping and full-grown trees. Beyond it, though, instead of the open vistas, there are only more houses, and then the strip malls and fast-food drive-throughs, the stadium-sized reception halls, the big-box plazas. A place without a centre, David thinks, but then it comes to him that Danny’s mill is the centre, where all of this, all this progress, got its start. Back in its day it was probably as much of an eyesore as this sprawl is, spoiling the river and the view.

  “Looks different out here now, doesn’t it?” Danny says. “I know you guys in the city look down on us but you won’t get a better espresso than here, never mind the chain stuff downtown.”

  Even the cemetery looks nothing like David remembers it, hemmed in by highway now and the entrance marked by a big arching gateway. Several mausoleums in polished stone rise up near the entrance like condo buildings for the dead, with glassed-in fronts that look into double-storeyed lobbies complete with seating areas and potted plants. Beyond them is a row of family-sized crypts, each with its elaborate statuary and rusticated flourishes. At least their father had had the grace to die before this sort of excess had become the norm, his own grave in an older section where the same arched slabs stretch row after row like the cookie-cutter gravestones of war cemeteries.

  Their father’s stone, in rose-coloured marble, bears a porcelain cameo of him from a few years before he died. It is a shock to David how young he looks in it, how striking, rugged and lean like
a leading man from the 1950s. The headstone is a double one, their mother’s name already etched out eerily next to their father’s and beneath it her birthdate followed by a dash, as if the span of her life since his death has been merely a malingering.

  Danny has dropped the back gate of the SUV and pulled out four shot glasses and a bottle of Courvoisier from a plastic bin. He pours a generous splash of the brandy into each of the glasses.

  “What is this?” David says.

  “Has it been that long? Come on, Davie, we always do this, every anniversary. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.”

  “He doesn’t remember because he’s never been here,” his mother says.

  “That’s not true, Ma. He always used to come.”

  Danny passes the glasses around. He pours the extra one one over their father’s grave, like a priest anointing a penitent.

  “To Dad,” he says, raising his own glass and knocking it back.

  From out of the bin he pulls a box of Montecristos.

  “Davie, drink up, you look like you’re going to bust a gut. Don’t you remember how every weekend he used to have his cognac and his stogie? No matter what was happening, he had to have his little island of me time. The cigarettes were a habit but the cigar was something else. It was an occasion. Something holy.”

  None of this jives with what David remembers of their weekends. What David remembers is the air of threat hanging over the house that there would be some new incident, some provocation.

  Danny holds out a cigar.

  “Keep it as a souvenir if you don’t want to smoke it. It’s twenty years now, Davie. At some point you have to make your peace.”

  Even his mother has lit up. The smell pulls at David, though he can’t make out where it is leading him. With cigarette smoke it is different: twenty years on and the least whiff of it is still enough to call up his father as surely as if he were standing before him.

  “If he wanted to make his peace,” his mother says, “he’d have done it by now. He never cared about family, not really. If he did, he’d still have one.”

  Danny goes white. “Ma, you’re not being fair.”