And now my heart fell to think that the holy mystery of who my brother was might be made flesh, ordinary flesh, by the notion that he was simply a certain kind of man.
To think that he had walked out that summer day, crying, weeping, naked, and grieving, not for the mortal world, but for himself alone.
I felt Tom lean down in the darkness to kiss the top of my head, and in doing so, he put his hand to my arm, my elbow. “Now, I’m not saying I know anything about this guy who was here tonight,” he said. “All I’m saying is, we should let Gabe be. He’s been poked and prodded and shocked and, worse yet, talked at till he’s blue in the face, out there in that place.” The awful name now forever expelled from our conversation with his turn of phrase. “I got sick of it myself, and I was only visiting, the way they wanted to reduce everything to a couple of easy words about sex.” He paused, as if to consider. “I don’t know,” he whispered. “Maybe it’s me. Maybe I see things too simply.” He eased himself down, into the comfort and the darkness of our bed. “Who can know the heart of a man?” he whispered, and pulled the thin sheet up, over my shoulders and his, as was his habit before we went to sleep. “Especially a man like your brother.”
Later, Tom spoke out of the darkness. It was the middle of the night. He had gotten up for some reason—had the phone rung?—and now he was back in the room. Leaning over, his breath warm. He was whispering. Or crying. I came awake to realize he was crying. “It’s Tommy,” he was saying. Our Tommy.
Tommy’s drowned, he said. I could barely make out the words. He hadn’t put on the light. His head was heavy now against my shoulder. Drowned or driving, he was saying, drunk driving, I heard, and I heard myself say, “Oh God.” I got out of the bed, aware, in the darkness, of the heavy weight of him on the mattress. He was crying, speaking, They were bringing him home, he told me. Through the night. Bringing the body home, and I put my hands over my ears at the phrase. I would not hear it. I found myself in the living room where the dull streetlight came through the crisscross curtains in grays and whites. I had forgotten to draw the blinds last night, with that Matt Cain character here in the living room, and now there was a nightmarish tinge to the couch and the coffee table and the lamps, the family pictures on the walls, the sound of my own entreaties, which I might have been speaking out loud, wasn’t at all speaking out loud, Make this a dream, O God, too terrible, too cruel.
But it was the very cruelty of it that made me know it was real. Brutal and cruel, the way of all flesh. But to lose a child was the worst of it all. I fell to my knees. There was the smell of dust on the bare floor. I could hear Gabe coming down the stairs, sleepy and afraid. Good Lord, what’s wrong. I had my head to my knees, and from somewhere in the darkness I could hear the girls’ careening voices, asking, asking, but putting off with their questions the answer they feared to hear. Some general devastation. Don’t put on the light, I begged my brother as he came down the stairs. Tommy is dead. My child. They are bringing his body home through the night.
Good God, good God, he said.
There was wailing from the other rooms. The body was coming home, I heard someone say, and I put my hands to my ears. It was a terrible word, used this way. How could it be that I had never heard it before, the cruelty of it, the stupidity. Why hadn’t Mr. Fagin, in all his wisdom, banned the term. The body. Stuffed with horsehair. The child warm in my arms. How would I bear it?
Gabe pressed his hands to my ears. This can’t be real, I said. Tell me it’s not real, make it not real. I had him by the sleeve. I pulled at his sleeve. I said it to Gabe, but he was full of sympathy and utter helplessness. Impossible, I heard him whisper. He was crying. Weeping. Impossible, he said. I was alone. No one had turned on a light.
You could ask, I said. My throat ached. Ask.
I woke slowly to the darkness of the bedroom and the steady hum of the summer fan, which Tom had turned up during the night. I felt the ache in my throat that told me I had been crying in my sleep. The house was silent. Tom was snoring softly beside me. It took a few seconds for the dream’s grief to fall away, so real and terrible. I had had such dreams before. My throat still ached with how real it had been.
I wiped my wet cheek with the heel of my hand. It was the middle of a summer night and my husband was asleep beside me. It had been nothing more than a dream of disaster. Overanxious-mother dream of disaster. Fagin’s girl hearing in my dreams the long settled echo of other people’s grief. Plus dinner table talk of Tommy and Jimmy diving in and out of the salt ocean day after day, hung over and carefree.
Still, it was a terrible thing to say “the body.”
Still, I had asked and it had been given. His life restored.
Still, tonight I’d have Tom call the restaurant where both boys worked and tell them to get themselves home for dinner this week. “Your mother is worried,” Tom would say. He would know just how to put it, both joking and sincere: the women must be humored. “Come home and give your mother a chance to look at you.”
I sat up, reached for my glasses, stood. I walked out into the living room, where I saw I had indeed forgotten to close the blinds against the coming morning’s heat. The slatted streetlight was exactly as I had seen it just moments ago. I could smell the summer dust on the bare floors. And each of the family photos on the wall—professional portraits already looking dated, graduation pictures from a time already past—was stamped with the same distorting darkness I had seen in my dream. I paused at the foot of the stairs. The walls of the room were lit with lozenges of streetlight, long rectangles and a thin cross. From the bedroom upstairs I could hear my brother breathing in his dreamless sleep. I climbed slowly. When I reached the top of the stairs, where it was darker, I slid my bare feet cautiously along the floor, some intimation of how I must walk now, in my blindness.
I looked into the boys’ room, which was dimly lit by the streetlight, the two narrow beds neat and undisturbed, the scent of boy about it still, but tempered now with the warm breeze, the odor of the day’s heat against the roof. I looked into the second room, where Gabe slept, the windows opened, a night breeze stirring. Gabe was on his back, under a white sheet, his arm thrown over his eyes as he used to do. He was awake and he whispered into the darkness, “Marie?” as I entered the room.
“Are you all right?” I asked him, and he answered, “Fine. And yourself?” Which made me smile.
I sat on the edge of the bed, felt him move his long legs to accommodate me. “Bad dream,” I said, and recognized as I said it my own foolish certainty that it had not been a dream at all. I had asked and it had been given to me. Time had relented, doubled back on itself, restored what had been lost.
I saw my brother lower his arm, felt his hand move toward mine over the thin sheet. In the darkness, he lifted my own and held it. His palm was warm and broad. I felt the certainty of it, of his grip. I understood that he knew my dream. That he had felt me tugging at his sleeve.
On the nightstand beside the bed, reflecting the dim lamplight outside, there was a plain glass of water. Beside it, the white-capped prescription bottle Tom had brought home.
I asked him again if he would stay. “This is a nice room, isn’t it?” I said. “It’s always been a great place for guests. Momma stayed here a couple of times. When the kids were young.” I could see the way the streetlight caught in his eyes and on his teeth.
“I remember,” he said softly. He said, “That fellow who was here, Matt Cain, asked if I was interested in his place. He’s got a three-family out in Bay Ridge. The top floor’s available. I don’t know the neighborhood very well, but I told him I’d consider it.”
“You’ll be lonely out there,” I said. I said it abruptly, without thinking. “It will be a lonely life.”
I did not remember then that the phrase had been used for Bill Corrigan.
“That’s occurred to me, too,” Gabe said softly. He lifted my hand and dropped it down again. “I don’t know if that can be helped.” And then he added, “It won’
t be like home”—meaning, I knew, everything that once was. And then he laughed a little. “Remember Momma in her last days? Not home, we had to tell her, but Brooklyn.”
I let go of his hand as I stood. “You’ll be at home here,” I told him.
He nodded, and then he once more lifted his wrist to his eyes. I lingered for a moment at the side of his bed. Without fear or forethought, without intention, not at that moment, I lifted the prescription bottle and slipped it into the pocket of my robe.
The staircase was darker than the rooms upstairs had been. I went down the stairs slowly, carefully, one hand on the banister, one on the wall, walking with the caution of my blind old age.
I might have saved my brother’s life that night. I don’t know. I might only have dreamed the loss of my first child.
I went down the stairs carefully in the dark, one hand on the banister, one hand on the wall. What light came from the lampposts outside the living-room window was pooled at the bottom of the stairs. I thought of Pegeen Chehab and her last fall. And then of the distance her parents had traveled to bring her to her brief life, sands of Syria and Mount Lebanon and the slick floor of the pitching ship, and then that brief flame in the parlor floor window.
On the day before she died, Pegeen leaned down to me, her eyes sparkling with her plan. She said, If I see him, I’ll get real close. I’ll pretend to fall, see, and he’ll catch me and say, Is it you again? Someone nice.
She told me, poor sparrow, poor fool, We’ll see what happens then.
ALSO BY ALICE McDERMOTT
After This
Child of My Heart
Charming Billy
At Weddings and Wakes
That Night
A Bigamist’s Daughter
Copyright
Someone
Copyright © 2013 by Alice McDermott.
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