The Family Hightower

by Brian Francis Slattery

  “Yes,” Muriel says. “But you look as beautiful as always.”

  Jackie smiles, big and broad. “Where’s Uncle Stefan?”

  Stefan’s been gone for seven years; he dies at eighty-five in 1988, of a heart attack, in the kitchen of that same house in Tremont, which he stays in long after most of the people he knows have moved out to Parma. But they all come back for his funeral, just like his brother thought they would. Muriel doesn’t remember the service very well, but the memory of the party afterward is as sharp as ever. The drinking. The jokes. The stories. As close to Mykhaylo’s funeral, a proper Tremont send-off, as any of them will ever go to. It feels more like a birthday party and she wonders why more funerals aren’t like this, or like this anymore, because they should be. Jackie’s there, too, laughing along with everyone else, though because nobody has the heart to make her go to the funeral, or to tell her what the gathering’s for, she’s never clear on just where Stefan went. Stefan leaves everything he has to her, and it’s more than the rest of the family expected. He must have gone out of his way to save this much, Henry tells Muriel and Sylvie. He hasn’t taken a dime from this family in years. Lets them share in the collective guilt that they didn’t do as much for their own sister. Stefan’s will has instructions to sell everything and then manage the funds to best pay Jackie’s way, get her the care and therapies she needs. Tell your uncle thank you, Henry says, after he’s made the arrangements. Thank you, Uncle Stefan, Jackie says. See you soon! It’s 1995, and she still doesn’t know he’s gone for good.

  “He couldn’t make it today, sweetie,” Muriel says.

  “Well, tell him I say hello and miss him.”

  “Yes, of course.”

  They talk about nothing. They play cards, the same games they played when they were kids. Jackie claps her hands every time she wins. When Muriel has to go, Jackie tells her how good it is to see her, and Muriel realizes that nobody’s said that to her in a long time. So she visits again the next month, and the next. When Petey’s trial is over, she switches to visiting every two weeks, then every week, on Tuesday in the late afternoon, a pattern that lasts for decades, until one day Muriel can’t leave the house anymore. Not long after that, Jackie goes deaf.

  But we’re still in August 1995, before Petey’s trial starts. Henry wakes up in New York City next to Holly, calls Muriel, now that they’re talking again, and finds out that Petey’s turned himself in and is coming home. It feels like a sign, but he’s not too sure, so he stays a few more days that turn into a few weeks. He’s still there when there’s another knock on Rufus’s gate in Livingstone, Zambia. I’m coming, I’m coming, Rufus says, and wheels himself to the door. He knows who it is already. Sylvie doesn’t say anything when she sees him. She keeps smiling, because it’s so good to be with her brother again, but Rufus can tell she’s holding back tears; she knows he hasn’t been in a wheelchair long, and the bandages over his left eye are fresh. Rufus pushes himself forward and she bends down and hugs him, hard. He reaches up and hugs her back. They stay like that for a long time, because it’s been years, way too many years, and they need to begin something that never ended.

  “Is Peter here?” Sylvie says, into Rufus’s shoulder.

  “Yes. He’s still here.”

  “Tell me you’re going to be okay. Both of you.”

  “We’ll be fine, Sylvie. Just fine.”

  He tells her the story later. The break-in, the fight. A few days in the hospital. But one of the Wolf’s boys is now at the bottom of the Zambezi, and the gun that killed him is tucked away safe somewhere in the house.

  “And Peter?”

  That’s when Rufus lies. He tells Sylvie he does all the killing, that a friend gets the body out to the river, never asks any questions. That Peter’s been saved, and now the animals of their past, the whole sad history of the Hightower family and all the hurt it’s done, are in a cage; maybe Henry, Rufus, Sylvie, Muriel, and Jackie are all in there with them, and maybe they’ll be eaten alive, but at least they’re together. And there are the kids, Alex and Peter, Andrew and Julia, on the outside, free. Sylvie blinks twice when Rufus feeds his fiction to her, and she’s quiet for too long. She’s not buying it, Rufus thinks. She knows Peter’s doomed, that he’s in there with us now. But she doesn’t say anything.

  She has a fake passport with her mother’s name in it—it makes it easy for her to remember on the spot and call her own—and one of her suitcases is full of cash. That’s it, all that’s left of the Hightower fortune, but it’s more than they need. Rufus counts the money, takes a big pile of it out, and then tells the landlord he’d like to buy the place he lives in. The landlord doesn’t care where he got the cash. Then Rufus has Sylvie push him around town to introduce her to the people he knows, to make sure they know her. She doesn’t go out much after that, though, and for a while, when his friends catch Rufus out—at the market, at the club—they ask him who the lady is. Where did you find her? they say. She’s an old friend, he says. Uses her false name. His friends all assume the two of them are lovers. They make up a backstory about them being childhood sweethearts before something separated them, a crime, a falling-out. Then they both lived their lives separated by thousands of miles—ten thousand, maybe—though they never forgot about each other. In time the crime was forgotten, or pinned on someone else, or they turned out to be innocent. Whoever was keeping them apart died. And now here they are, picking up where they left off, thirty, forty years ago. Rufus and Sylvie hear the story they’ve made up after a while and don’t do anything to make people think it’s wrong. It’s a good cover, and some parts of it are even true. Henry still sends Rufus money and Rufus still takes it. He never tells Henry that Sylvie is there with him, but he suspects Henry knows anyway. In the backyard of their house, Sylvie starts another garden, much smaller than what she had, and she doesn’t tend it as much, because it’s too easy to think about how temporary it is, though it turns out they have more years in Livingstone than they think.

  For Peter, it’s like starting over, again. He knows so much now; too much. Everything. There’s no going back to Granada. He’s pretty sure that the few things he owned aren’t there anymore, and neither is his job. If anyone noticed that his place was broken into, then the police are involved, and he doesn’t want to talk to the police. And then there’s his name. He doesn’t want to tell people what it is, doesn’t want to sign anything. He looks at his passport and cringes. It’s a name that’ll trigger a million warnings. It’ll dog him for the rest of his life; he’ll always have to answer for it, for the things his cousin did, the things his family has done. He’ll always have to let the animal loose, and he doesn’t want to do that. At all.

  It’s October 1995. A dry night with no mosquitoes. The streetlamp outside, beyond the wall, is buzzing.

  “Dad?” Peter says. “What was my grandfather’s last name again? Before he changed it?”

  “Garko,” Rufus says.

  “And no one in the family used it since?”

  “No one but your great-uncle Stefan, of course.”

  “Right,” Peter says. Gives Rufus a minute to guess where he’s going with this, but Rufus just lets the silence happen.

  “I’m thinking of changing my name to that,” Peter says.

  Rufus nods.

  “I think you should,” he says. Nods again and shrugs. “At last you’ll have your grandfather’s name.”

  They both smile, both too tired to laugh.

  “That means you’re thinking of leaving soon,” Rufus says.

  “Yeah. In a couple days.”

  “You coming back anytime soon?”

  “Are you going to be here?” Peter says.

  Rufus looks toward the kitchen, where Sylvie’s humming to herself, putting cut flowers in water. He pats the arm of his chair.

  “I don’t think I’m going anywhere anymore,” he says. Then looks at Pete
r. “Keep in touch this time, okay?”

  Peter buys new clothes, new shoes. Gets a haircut. Takes a taxi to the Zambia-Zimbabwe border, walks over the old railway bridge that spans the gorge of Victoria Falls. He doesn’t have anything but a little backpack with a few changes of clothes, an envelope of bills Sylvie gave him before he left. Next to him is a man carrying a bundle twice as big as he is on his back. Where are you from? the man asks. Morocco, Peter says. But my family’s American. The man gives a little chuckle. You have all the power right now, in America, he says, then shoots Peter a look that tells him not to get used to it.

  In Zimbabwe, Peter takes the train from Victoria Falls to Bulawayo, and from Bulawayo to Harare. He finds an apartment, calls his old contacts at the wire services, sweet-talks a local paper into giving him a first assignment as a journalist. Gets his first byline with his new name. They realize fast how good he is and start giving him more, enough that Peter can eat and hold down an apartment in a part of Harare where white people don’t live, but he doesn’t mind. He’s there to cover Zimbabwe’s slide into chaos, the land grabs, the violence, the hyperinflation. People taking shopping carts full of bills to the grocery store to buy a couple vegetables. Reuters makes him a correspondent. The worse Zimbabwe gets, the better he does, and it starts to get bad. When opposition politicians and journalists start getting beaten and killed, he has a long talk with his editor. You should get out of there, the editor says. Will you keep giving me work if I leave? Peter says. Sure. The kind of places you seem to live? Sure.

  He’s everywhere after that: Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Indonesia. But it gets easier and easier to keep his promise to his father to stay in touch. They end up with a long string of emails, long enough that Peter gets a separate address just for mail from his dad. Peter tells Rufus about his best assignments when they’re over. Rufus tells Peter about small political fights in Livingstone, about how crazy things seem to be getting in Zimbabwe. It’s so sad, he says. I’m glad you left when you did. Everyone is leaving now, everyone who can. We get new people every day. He tells Peter jokes, too, stories from when he was a kid. Stories about his mother. Once we took a walk in the mountains and got lost. We might have died out there if your mother hadn’t convinced a goatherd we found that we really were lost, and not just off in the hills to do drugs. All the things he didn’t get around to telling him before. Your mother was the sweetest, fieriest person I ever met. I wish I had known how to stay with her. For your sake. The emails get more and more personal over the months, but Peter doesn’t quite see through it. He thinks his dad is making up for lost time. Then one day he gets an email, written from Rufus’s account, from Sylvie. Peter: You should come see your father. He’s very, very sick.

  By the time Peter gets there, Rufus is close to dying.

  “I bet it’s cancer,” Rufus says.

  “You don’t know?” Peter says.

  “What’s the point of knowing?” Rufus says. “I was never going to do anything about it anyway.”

  He’s half drunk; for the pain, Sylvie says, and it doesn’t seem to be an excuse. But he’s lucid, or at least as lucid for Rufus. He holds Peter’s hand and looks as happy as Peter’s ever seen him.

  “It’s so good to see you,” Rufus says. “I’m so glad we’ve been talking again.” Gives him a big smile. “You’re the best thing I’ve ever done, Peter. The best thing that ever happened to me. The best parts of me. The best.”

  It’s too much for Peter to deal with at once, and he doesn’t know what to say; the obvious answer doesn’t occur to him, but will later.

  “You should go,” Sylvie says. “I’m glad that you got to see him, but you should go.”

  “Don’t you need help?” Peter says.

  “No,” Sylvie says. “I’ve done this kind of thing before.”

  “I want to stay.”

  “Maybe for a few more days,” Sylvie says. “But after that, Peter, he won’t know who you are. And then everything gets much, much worse. Do you understand?”

  “Yes. That’s why I want to stay.”

  “Peter—”

  “I don’t want to be protected anymore, Sylvie. I want to be here for it.” He sharpens his voice a little. “Do you understand?”

  That’s when Sylvie chuckles a little, and Peter feels as though he’s passed a test.

  “Okay,” she says. “Okay.” Two months later, they bury him in Zambia’s sandy soil. It’s a short, small service at the Church of Christ with Peter, Sylvie, and a few of Rufus’s friends from town, who after the service tell the kind of jokes Rufus would have liked. And when they get back to the house, Sylvie hands Rufus a thick envelope.

  “No. No more money,” Peter says.

  “It’s all Rufus’s, Peter,” Sylvie says. “It’s what he would have wanted to give you.”

  “But what about you?”

  “You think I don’t have a plan?”

  He takes the envelope, turns it over in his hands.

  “I’ll come and take care of you when you need it,” he says. But she just shakes her head.

  “No you won’t. Because I’m not going to tell you when I need it. How can I? I’m supposed to be dead already.”

  He says his goodbyes then, but comes back eight months later to try to surprise her, to make sure she’s all right. She’s not there. Someone else lives in the house and doesn’t know who lived there before him. He walks around town, finds some of Rufus’s friends. They say they have no idea where she is, and he can’t tell whether they’re lying or not. She’s gone. He’ll never see her again.

  He stays in touch with Henry and Muriel, visits them a few times when his work allows it. He goes to Henry’s funeral, to Muriel’s. He sees Alex and Petey, Andrew and Julia, at all of them. At Henry’s, they talk about nothing. At Muriel’s, Peter takes Alex and Petey aside and tells them almost the whole story; he puts Rufus’s lies at the end, like his father would have wanted him to.

  Six months later he’s covering a story about oil companies in Venezuela when he meets Silvana. She’s a few years out of college and working as a photographer; she also helps her mother run a fabric store in Caracas. They meet because she has a few photographs—and connections—that he wants, and she’s looking to sell more pictures to international news agencies, but after a few weeks of working together it’s clear that there’s more going on than professional camaraderie. I’m seeing someone right now, she tells him, so nothing can happen. He chuckles to himself. Of course.

  He leaves Caracas after he files his story. Three weeks later she emails him to tell him that she’s broken up with her boyfriend. He was not serious enough for me. After that they text each other at least once a day. I miss you all the time, she says, which is crazy because I am not a sentimental person at all. Four months later Peter takes the first vacation he has had in years to fly to Caracas to see her. He texts her from the airport. What will your mother think? She texts him back. I’ve already told her everything about you. Just don’t be different with her than you are with me and everything will be fine. He smiles.

  After two more trips, they’re engaged. Just one thing, she writes him. I don’t want children, ever. And Peter sighs, thinks to himself, good. Maybe now it can all die with me.

  They’re married by the time Jackie dies, and he takes her to the funeral. When Silvana is out of earshot, Alex and Petey descend on him, and they ask one another the big question, since all three of them have been carrying it around for a years now: Have you ever told anyone? They ask because it seems less and less important to keep it secret. Their lives seem so far away from what happened in the summer of 1995. But then they’re not so sure that’s true, because they read the paper and watch the news. They see how things are going over in Eastern Europe, in Europe, in America—all over—and can’t shake the feeling that they’ve seen something, some truth about the future, about what’s coming, and th
ey don’t have to know what it is to know how dangerous it could be.

  Have you ever told anyone?

  It’s not an idle question. Peter never changes his legal name, just his professional one, so now and again someone makes the connection, a colleague, a new friend, a boss. Hey, you have the same name as that thug in Cleveland who was wrapped up in that crazy mob thing. And Peter tells the tiniest bit of the truth. This is going to sound crazy, he says, but that’s my cousin. The expression on the other person’s face is always the same. Yeah, Peter says, long story. We never kept in touch with that side of the family. After that, whatever he says is a lie. Then Petey dies in a drunk driving accident, and Alex and Peter see each other at his funeral, for what both of them are pretty sure is the last time.

  “You going to tell anyone now?” she says.

  He thinks about it all over again, because he’s a journalist and it’s a big story, and he has everything he needs to tell it. Between what he knows and the police reports, he could put it together like the police never could. He could solve the case, a dozen cases, more than a dozen, all at once. If he wrote it all up, it could be a career-making book, a real masterpiece of investigative reporting and memoir, a story about capitalism, the rise of organized crime and the fall of a family, all at once. The kind of thing other journalists would read and shake their heads afterward with envy. Story of a lifetime, they might say. It’s so tempting because it seems so obvious how well it could do. The money he could make. And almost everyone in it, he thinks, is already dead. Who’s it going to hurt? But then he turns that last question over in his mind. He looks at Alex, at Silvana on the other side of the room, playing a hand game with an eight-year-old he doesn’t recognize. Thinks about the room filled with blood, the feel of that rifle in his hand. All the dead, the murdered, the dismembered, the disappeared. All those people eaten alive by the animals that made one great sweep across three continents and a century that passed in the blink of an eye. The beasts are still out there, still getting closer, and they’re crazy with hunger. There are people in their way, and he doesn’t know who. He can’t even see them. So he never says a word.