Halfway Home

by Paul Monette

  Then I scrambled out of the bed, and he said, "You don't have to get up."

  "Oh, is that so? You mean I can lie here all day and eat bonbons and play with my winkie?" I faced him naked with a hand on my out-slung hip, cocky as a Donatello bronze. His eyes swept me up and down, brimming with delight, rendering all my spots invisible. "Please—I have to see if they've killed each other."

  I pulled on a pair of sweat pants, nothing underneath, deliciously aware of him watching every move. It was like a striptease in reverse, slipping on a tight white T-shirt, then a lumberjack's wool shirt over it, giddy with eros. As we moved to leave we glanced against each other, and grabbed another kiss, his hand running down my spine and cupping my butt. Then we were out the door in the stair hall, and instantly I felt the slightest drawing away, as Gray struggled manfully with the specter of Discretion.

  But now I only wanted to make it easy. I darted down the stairs, laughing, so we wouldn't make our entrance like a couple of love-drunk satyrs.

  Brian and Daniel sat at the kitchen table, plowing through stacks of french toast. It was a tribute to our intimacy that they barely nodded good morning, so intertwined had we become in the dailiness of things. Even so, as I groped for the coffee, I felt an eerie shiver that they should be sitting so peaceably, as if nothing were out of control. Just an echo, probably. I'd sat through too many mornings after, the stink of stale Seagram's like an aura around my bleary old man, my body throbbing from the previous night's assault.

  Then Gray walked in, and this time Daniel looked up with a bright smile of welcome. "Hi," he said cheerfully, managing to convey his pleasure that Gray had stayed the night. I handed Gray a mug of coffee.

  "Susan went out," said my brother, flustered, not even sure himself why he sounded so apologetic. "To call her sister."

  "Hey, I could've given her a ride," retorted Gray, and Brian murmured that was okay, she felt like taking a walk. I pictured Susan trotting down the coast road to the Chevron, whose phone booth had become a sort of annex and index of the jumble of our lives. I imagined her desperation, stumbling along in the wrong shoes, wondering over and over how she'd ended up so lost and far from home.

  "Look," said Brian, "this isn't right, us eating your food like this. I just want you to know I'm keeping track."

  He was talking to Gray, who protested briskly, and I looked at Daniel. He stared at his plate guiltily, then laid down his fork, as if resolved to starve from here on in. The wave of rage I felt just then for Brian—Not in front of the kid, for Chrissakes—only showed how powerless I was. Like my mother wringing her hands and whining Not his head.

  Then Gray drained his mug, never one to linger, and was heading for the door. I bolted after, sloshing coffee over my wrist as I slipped outside, flinging the rest of it onto the camellias by the steps so I could keep up. "Call Miss Mona," I instructed, half running beside him. It was drizzling and blustery, but a lull in the larger storm. "Make sure she tells Kathleen the wife won't budge. Now what am I gonna do? I thought they could have a nice little session of family therapy, just the three of them—"

  My mind was racing faster than my voice, already breathless. And as if that wasn't enough, I felt this crazy desolation because Gray was about to leave. Honestly, when was it ever going to be enough, so I didn't think it was all about to vanish, every time he got into that truck?

  Then he was pulling me under the eaves of the garage, holding me by the shoulders, steadying me with his eyes. I come from people who always looked away. In the whole of central Connecticut, no one ever looked you in the eye—or me they didn't anyway. "Just be with your brother," he said. "Mona and I will brainstorm. And Miss Balanchine? Remember what they taught us at the Kirov. Less choreography is more." He drew me close and buried his face in my hair, breathing me in, not seeming to care who might be watching.

  "When are you coming back?"

  "Tonight," he said, as if he couldn't have been more certain, and even better, as if the answer would be the same tomorrow.

  So I let him go—slouching seductively under the eaves, Donatello again, instead of that needy creep of abandonment. As I turned back to the house, I let the idea play in my head that I had it for real this time, a man who would know me to the bone. For the space of a held breath I seemed to float over the wet grass, the mist in my face like the worst cliche, dew on the fucking roses. Happy—was this what happy was? Because if it was, I had most definitely never felt it before.

  And it only took me the fifty feet between the garage and the kitchen door to learn the most obvious thing in the world, the canker in the rose: I could not bear to lose it now. My chest seized with a pain that wasn't physical but worse, such that my heart attack two weeks ago seemed like a sissy bout of hypochondria. Even AIDS. Dying was nothing to losing. I felt like the last person on earth to learn it, as if I'd been absent the day they taught it in nursery school.

  I tramped into the kitchen, shaking the wet like a dog, wondering if I could stand how sad at the bottom happy was. My brother sat at the table where we'd left him. Daniel was gone. I had a selfish urge to rush right through and up to my room, so I could hoard and savor the lifetime of cheap emotions suddenly restored to me. Brian stared at his empty plate, lost like me in one of my blanks. He'd rather be alone anyway, I thought, clamping my mind against Gray's advice, Just he with him. I took a tentative step toward the dining room, and the movement seemed to jar him from his trance.

  "She wants to leave me," he said, more to the plate than to me. "She'll take Daniel to her sister's. Minneapolis." He smiled wanly at the final word, as if geography were the only thing he could put his finger on in all of this.

  "Just till you get resettled," I said, so firm it almost sounded like an order.

  "No, she's had it. She wants me out of her life."

  "But—" I wanted to whimper with exasperation. "That's why you have to talk to somebody. You can't make decisions like this."

  Finally he looked at me. He seemed fascinated by my insistence, but also untouchable, alone out there on the pitcher's mound. "You don't understand," he replied, not unkindly. "I don't blame her. It disgusts her, what I did. Thou shalt not steal." The last bit spoken completely straight, Charlton Heston on the Mount.

  "Uh-huh. How about thou shalt not lose thy house in Connecticut. Or thy Volvo station wagon. Or thy slot in the Junior League. Isn't that what she's really pissed about?"

  His face went rigid as I tossed off my commandments. "She's very religious," he retorted tightly. "Whatever you think of her."

  "Sorry." Last thing he needed was my shit. On the other hand, exactly how did one be with one's brother? "I think what I really want is for our parents to go get help. Little late, huh?" He didn't answer, but didn't look affronted anymore, so I slipped in another jab. "You just going to let her go?"

  He chortled a one-note laugh, devoid of humor. "She'll prob'ly be better off," he declared bitterly. "She's even ashamed to call a priest. I don't know what we got left." His voice was harsh, but all at once he seemed to have trouble swallowing. "Except Daniel."

  This time when he turned to me, his exhausted eyes were dazed with panic, an animal frozen in the lights of a speeding truck. He raised his arms toward me, fingers clutching the air, as if he wanted me to lift him bodily out of the chair. Then, with a groan that sounded just like mine an hour ago, he cracked and the tears came. Halting sobs, his face a sudden twist of agony.

  I found myself holding him, no conscious memory of getting there. I stood beside his chair, cradling his head against my stomach, his massive arms clinging about my waist. Jesus Mary and Joseph. The world could not have been more upside down than it was right then. I was scared and thrilled at the same time, without a clue what was needed, therefore mute. But after half a minute, the more he buried his face against my shirt, I felt like a kind of rock, if only by default. Stillness was everything. I would stand there all day if necessary, till all his pain had spilled.

  "He's—my—" But he couldn
't form the words through the sputtering gasps that racked him. He tried to pull away, disgusted to be so out of control, but I held him fast. My hands were full of his thick red hair, bearing him like fire, but fire that no longer scorched and charred. So close for once in our lives that I couldn't tell where he left off and I began. As long as I was here, though, he wouldn't go out that door in the dream, pitching into the void. And with one finger of perfect detachment, I hoped that Daniel could hear all this.

  "I don't—want to hurt him like—"

  Like the old man hurt me, I silently finished the thought. He was pleading the court for mercy, just at the very moment when I finally stopped being a judge.

  Then the squall was over, sudden as it came. His arms relaxed their grip around me, and I felt a throb of regret that now he would draw back, like a man pulling out. When it didn't happen, when he let his head stay resting against my belly, breathing deep as he pulled himself together, I thought I would burst with loving him. I would have done anything—taken a bullet, gone to jail in his place—to keep him from losing another thing.

  I hadn't forgotten his own Jekyll-and-Hyde. All of that still waited to be wrestled and cursed and exorcised. But here was my brother turning to me. In the quick of our fumbling clasp, something wrong that went to the core of the planet—a fissure that leaked molten rock and brimstone—knitted at last and healed. I was taking care of Brian.

  "I can't even think anymore," he said, his voice husky and drained.

  I looked down at his warrior's mane, crowned since birth with laurels. "Don't think, just feel."

  He nodded against my belly, then stood up—graceful even in that, unfolding like a diver. His eyes weren't very red or puffy, considering. He looked relieved. "Tommy," he said, "we need to talk about something." Yes, yes. Anything. "The lawyer wants to bring the agents here." Agents? Was he selling his story already? "They'll take a deposition, for the hundredth fuckin' time. And then we'll try to work out this witness protection thing."

  "The FBI," I said, catching up at last, then looking around the kitchen with vague alarm, as if I'd left some nuclear secrets lying about.

  "They think it's safer here than the federal building. Or the lawyer's."

  I nodded. Sure, whatever worked. But wait, could we go back a little first? I wasn't ready to change the subject yet. Indeed, I'd barely begun to see what the subject was.

  "So I'll set that up for tomorrow or Saturday," he said, swiftly clearing the dishes, more businesslike with every passing moment. The flood of raw feeling already began to seem a mirage. "With any luck, we should be outta your hair by the middle of next week."

  "Look, I'm not in any rush—"

  "And don't worry about Mom. Before they froze me I set up a trust that'll pay for the nurse. Won't be long anyway."

  "You could stay here."

  He was looking past me out the window at the rain, and I thought he was thinking it over. Then he said softly, "Here she is now," and I realized he hadn't heard me at all. Where had the other Brian gone, the wounded one who needed me? When the door opened behind me and Susan came in, I saw in my brother's face a spasm of tenderness and relief, as if he'd been worried the whole time she was gone. "So how's Michelle?"

  "It's fine with her," said my sister-in-law. "She's got plenty of room." So matter-of-fact, they might have been discussing baby-sitting arrangements, and not the disintegration of their marriage. As I turned, Susan was furling the aunts' umbrella and hooking it on the coatrack. Then she slipped off the voluminous black slicker, hanging it on the next free hook. Husband and wife exchanged a shy glance of the central Connecticut sort, not quite eye to eye. Yet in that very misconnection was the longing to take it all back. The love between them was so obvious, to me at least, who'd become something of an overnight authority.

  "Did you tell him?" she asked, meaning Daniel.

  "No, I... not yet." He shrugged, no excuses. But she didn't seem perturbed to hear it, only nodding once, as if she understood completely. I wasn't sure why they were speaking so freely in front of me. Maybe they felt they'd reached a point where they didn't deserve their privacy anymore. Maybe they were just too tired.

  Me, I wanted to scream. How could they let this get so out of hand? All they had left was each other. Who the hell else would want them?

  "I'll go find him," said my brother gently.

  "I'll go with you," she replied.

  Now they were sweet and polite, when it was time to go break the kid's heart. They moved together into the dining room, and I heard them shuffling up the stairs, talking low. Why was I so furious? It wasn't just desire to protect my nephew from the fallout. More than anything it was the cavalier unconcern with which they were throwing their lives away. And Gray and I would have to fight for every precious month together, digging out foxholes in winter ground. I couldn't help the sour taste of injustice rising in my gorge. Narcissistic and petulant, that's what they were. They'd had it too good too long.

  I stepped into the dining room, fists clenched with outrage, only now aware that the rain had redoubled again. It was dark as dusk already. Somehow I couldn't think—didn't know how to—that Brian and Susan might really find each other unbearable. Fueled as I was with the triumph of love, I couldn't imagine the dead-end wall they'd come to, or why they couldn't find the will to vault it.

  Let them go, I commanded myself, determined to stay in my own joy. I called up a picture of Gray as I moved through the arch to the parlor. His flinty weathered strength, a profile stark as a sea captain's, and yet possessed of so much lightness, years of pent-up laughter spilling out of him, drunk with contentment. Drunk on me.

  I was breathing easier now. I looked down idly, and there on the table was the finished puzzle of David, every piece in place, dick included. It seemed ludicrous that I ever wasted a second fretting about its propriety. The hero stood colossal, his white gaze unblemished by my bourgeois fit of respectability. For what came into play now, quickening my sight, was the filter of the night just past, the flesh of the marble before me burnished with the heat of our embracing.

  Here was our icon, Gray's and mine, the warrior stripped for passion, nothing withheld. To the rest of the house it was only a statue, hardly likely to haunt the dreams of a seven-year-old. You needed to be where I was, in the throes of flesh and hungry again already, to see where the carnal met the exalted, perfect as David's massive hand cradling the stone.

  I raised my eyes to the window, blinking from so much seeing. The ocean wind blew the rain against the glass, rippling the world outside like the wall of an aquarium. The terrace chairs were upside down, hunkered against the umbrella table. And just at the edge of the lawn was—what? A rock that moved. I took a step closer. The black shape swayed and stuck up its snout. A seal! I uttered a small cry of delight, then instantly felt dashed that I couldn't show it to Daniel. I thought of running to get him, but remembered they were upstairs briefing him, finishing off his childhood.

  No, the seal was just for me today. The wild improbability of the moment—how had it ever climbed this high?—was one with the fine upheaval of my heart. The animal plonked through the grass, tossing its head as if it were bobbing a beach ball on its nose. I think I even heard it bark. As it sashayed in among the century cactus, making for the beach stairs, I let it go gladly, not needing to show it to anyone. I caught a last glimpse of its black shine, liquid as patent leather. Eighty steps down to the beach on flippers—a daunting feat, like me and my eighty steps up on a bad day. I trusted the beast had found the journey worth it.

  I backtracked to the sofa and burrowed in under the afghan, thinking to watch the rain for further apparitions, then falling asleep as fast as Foo in front of the soaps. I vaguely heard some clumping down the stairs and the back door slam, my brother's voice calling, but none of it had a thing to do with me. When they were done disintegrating their family, then maybe we'd all sit down to lunch, and they'd come to their senses. I still harbored a stubborn conviction that love would
win out in the end, against all odds. Against all evidence.

  When I felt the tug at my shoulder waking me up, I flashed back to West Hill Road, my brother giving a sharp nudge to get me up for school. I opened my eyes with a scowl, assuming it was Brian, his touch as rough as ever. But no, it was Susan, her ashen face only inches away. "We can't find Daniel," she declared, equal parts hysteria and despair. I sat up and swept the afghan off me, trying to shake the sleep. "Do you know where he is?"

  This time I heard the accusation, cutting through the panic with a razor edge. But worse than all that was the pleading, as if I had the boy bound and gagged in the attic and she was begging for mercy. I stood up abruptly, backing her off. I could smell the dank of her hair from her running outside in the rain. "I haven't seen him since breakfast," I said, as gently as I could.

  She huddled into her folded arms, her face tight with pain. "We'll find him—" I started to say, reaching a hand to touch her elbow, and she shrilled at me with scathing venom, "Why don't you have a phone?"

  Displacement. I'd been there a thousand times with AIDS, screaming in line at the bank. I took her arm firmly. "Where's Brian?"

  A sob caught in her throat, as she flung out the other hand toward the bluff. She strangled something out, which sounded like "He's dead."

  I didn't wait around to ask which one she meant. As I ran out through the kitchen and grabbed the slicker, hauling it on as I bolted outside, I prided myself for staying cool. Because I believed without question that nothing was terribly wrong. The boy was safe and poking about somewhere, enjoying the rain. This was all just a mother's overreaction.

  Yet the rain was driving down in sheets as I tramped across the side lawn, wishing I'd brought the umbrella for a shield. He couldn't actually be out in a storm like this—the first small voice of worry hissing in my ear. Already my pants were clinging wet to my legs below the tent of the slicker. I crossed the terrace, buffeted so intensely I thought the wind would blow me over. Please—let him be somewhere inside. Even the stiff swords of the century cactus were bending like reeds. My hair and face were drenched, my shoes squishing, but at last I reached the top of the beach stairs.