The Recent East

by Thomas Grattan

  “An extra day,” Adela said, and curled against Gert’s shoulder, a shoulder that might turn into more than an interlude. She decided not to answer Taro’s email, to think only about the hours they had to fill, the ride into town to get dinner.

  * * *

  She stood outside the house that had been Udo’s, technically now half hers. Adela had read the emails he’d sent over the years, which unfolded on her screen as one endless apology. More than angry or annoyed, Adela had felt pity for him. Udo was stuck, as she’d felt when they’d first moved here.

  Inside, Peter and some young woman played cards.

  “You were supposed to come back yesterday,” Peter said.

  “I left a message,” Adela answered.

  “Did you get Oma’s messages?” Peter asked.

  Adela held up her dead phone. Peter scowled, then put down a card.

  “This is Ines,” Peter said.

  “The babysitter,” the young woman added.

  “Supposed to come back yesterday,” Peter repeated.

  “It was just a day.”

  Peter slapped down another card.

  “I think he—” Ines said.

  “Michael’s okay,” Peter interrupted.

  “Was worried,” Ines finished.

  Peter stood and began walking upstairs. Adela imagined him forcing Mutti to call over and over, her phone going right to voice mail, Adela so busy being on vacation that it wasn’t until they were on the ferry back that she realized her phone was dead at the bottom of her bag.

  “You thought I wasn’t coming back?” Adela said.

  “Michael’s okay,” Peter answered, from the stairs’ landing.

  “What are you talking about?” Adela asked.

  “About what happened to him.”

  “What happened?” she asked.

  “The assholes from the bar,” he answered.

  “Peter!” she said, thinking of those three belligerent men, her stomach dropping as it had while the ferry from Juist pushed through wind and waves. “Where is Michael?”

  “It was in the paper,” Ines said. “I guess they beat the crap out of him.”

  “I think you can go,” Adela answered.

  The young woman’s eyes opened wide, though she didn’t move. She was waiting to be paid, Adela realized. Adela looked through her wallet, found nothing.

  “I’ll get the money from Frau Haas,” Ines said, and left.

  Adela plugged her phone in, though it was too dead to start up. She looked around the room for the newspaper so she could read the story. She had to pee, but held it.

  “Michael wouldn’t serve them,” Peter said, his voice so loud it echoed. “They waited until he was outside. One of them was named Michael, too.”

  Peter moved into their bedroom; Adela followed. Clothes crowded the floor.

  As she stood in the bedroom they treated as their own, Adela realized that if someone asked where they’d be in a week, she wouldn’t know how to answer.

  “Where is Michael?” Adela asked.

  “Shut up,” Peter said. He kicked clothes covering the floor. When she’d left, their things had been folded in their suitcase.

  “Shut up,” he said again.

  “I didn’t say anything,” she answered.

  Adela picked up her clothes and dropped them into the suitcase. Peter walked to the suitcase and threw them back across the room.

  “Stop it,” Adela said. She grabbed his arms but he yanked himself free.

  The drunks from the bar had assaulted her brother. Peter had imagined her gone. When she asked about Michael again, Peter answered, “Hospital,” and tossed a pair of jeans across the room.

  “They were so drunk they could barely walk,” Peter went on. “One of them almost fell over after he hit Michael. But he got up again, and he—how do you say kick in this language?”

  “How do you know all this?” Adela asked. Peter tossed a sweater, its arms spread as if cheering.

  “I was there,” he answered.

  * * *

  A man spoke to Michael, whose bruised face stayed stuck in a wince. He held a cup of ice chips and could barely open his left eye. Machines beeped in rhythm.

  “That’s the Potato Farmer,” Peter said, followed by, “He’s not really a potato farmer.” Her son hugged the man’s knees. Adela felt like she’d been away for longer than a week.

  “How was Juist?” Michael asked.

  “Give the two of us some time,” Adela answered.

  Peter and the Potato Farmer left. It was raining in Kritzhagen, as it had been in Juist. Every once in a while, it clapped across the window.

  Michael looked a mess. The drunks had come at him hard, with fists and feet. Peter had watched it happen.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Michael said. “I’m on some drugs, you know.”

  Someone wearing a ring of keys walked past. Michael’s hands were bandaged.

  “Why was he there with you?” Adela asked.

  “I keep thinking about Udo,” Michael answered. “In the water and—I don’t know. How it happened. If he wanted it.” One of Michael’s eyes had been beaten closed, his jaw a ridge of distended purple. His swollen lip or the meds he was on, or both, garbled certain consonants.

  “I think he was always waiting,” Michael said.

  “Why was Peter at your bar?” Adela repeated.

  “You’re supposed to ask what Udo was waiting for.”

  “Peter was with you. At the bar, Michael,” Adela said, though she’d been the one who wouldn’t answer her son’s questions about school, Peter’s interest in German a raft for him to hold. As she listened to a nurse squeak down the hall, as Michael touched his nose with a gauze-softened fist, Adela couldn’t believe she’d let them float for so long.

  “I think he was waiting for you to forgive him,” Michael said.

  “Peter’s seven.”

  “Udo always talked about you,” Michael answered.

  “He told me what he saw.”

  Michael’s bruises glistened with ointment. The drunks had hit him, Peter in the car that rattled each time his uncle fell against it. Michael talked in a stream about the community center where Udo had volunteered. How he’d convinced Heinz to hire some of the immigrants he’d trained there, these men so loyal that they’d shown up to his funeral.

  “Michael,” she said, gripping the bed frame.

  “Are you going to hit me, too?” he joked.

  She winced at the thought of it, at jokes he made even now.

  Michael gave her a boneheaded smile. He’d always treated terrible things as amusing. For a time Adela had, too. She couldn’t imagine how she’d explain the delay to Taro, her bartending job, a sort-of boyfriend who changed bike tires, her brother all the while acting as if it were wonderful.

  “I don’t care about Udo,” she said.

  Rain soft-shoed down the window. Her brother’s blanket slipped, his legs bruised and bandaged, too.

  “If I’d called you,” he said, “or texted while you and Gert were in the middle of your fuckfest, and I told you Peter was in the bar’s office watching TV, you would have said no?”

  His unharmed eye stared at her. The bandage on his forehead fought the force of his lifting brow.

  “You would have said no?” Michael asked again. “Would have predicted what would happen, like it was something you read in an asshole book?”

  Adela touched his arm, but he shooed it away. She wouldn’t have cared. Each time Peter tried to show her something true, she went to the bar or took a nap or stayed away with Gert for an extra day. One of Michael’s toenails was missing.

  “But you didn’t,” Adela said. “Ask me.”

  His heart-rate monitor sped up. She waited for a nurse to come in and check on him.

  Michael’s look told her to stop pretending; for a moment she was worried that she didn’t know how to do that. She wanted to blame her brother, to hand him everything she hadn’t done or seen. But he hadn’t
forced her to work at the bar, hadn’t insisted they stay with him. He’d only woken up each day, pleased or confused or relieved that she was still there. Like Peter, he’d asked her questions. Adela hadn’t answered them.

  Michael’s heart flew. A hundred and thirty bpm, Adela guessed.

  “You’re always happiest when you have someone to blame,” he said.

  Adela remembered when she used to worry that he could read her mind.

  “I don’t think,” she said—he breathed, fast and with sound—“that I’d call it happy.”

  In the window behind him, Adela saw a hotel, the wet beach.

  “And now you left Peter with someone you don’t even know,” he said.

  “I know you,” she answered, realizing he meant the man with the nickname.

  Michael shifted and his gown inched upward, showing off his wounded shins. Adela wouldn’t go back to the bar. Wouldn’t stand on it and rank people’s raunchy fiascoes. Her face heated at the fun she’d bled from that place, her dream that someone would claim the neo confession. The look of shame she’d wanted from Michael, who’d been with Udo at the camp decades before, standing behind Udo rather than trying to stop him.

  Adela needed to find Peter. To tell him that school would be in Washington, where his father was. That she’d get a job as a nurse again and be awake in the morning when he got up.

  She walked to the nurses’ station. She asked the woman there if she’d seen a small boy.

  “What’s his name?” the nurse asked.

  “Michael,” she said.

  “My name’s Peter,” Peter answered.

  He stood in the hall, the Potato Farmer next to him.

  Adela walked toward her son and leaned down. She tried to see in his face how these last weeks might have changed him. He looked the same. It was only his hair that had grown. The first thing they’d do in D.C. was get it cut. She took his hand. He looked confused.

  “What have we been doing?” she asked.

  Peter’s look answered: You weren’t even here.

  But then he smiled. He put his hand on her knee and she hoped to remember this as a moment when their course began its correction.

  “I was telling him,” Peter said, pointing to the man who surely had a real name, “what Oma and I did while you were gone.”

  She thanked the Potato Farmer, told Peter they had to go. He walked toward Michael’s room, though the elevator was in the opposite direction. Adela didn’t want to see Michael’s mauled face again, worried she’d forget everything she’d just realized, or pretend to forget it as Michael and Peter did a comedy routine about the drunks who’d broken three of his ribs, sprained his wrist, and left him with a concussion. One of them had your same name! she imagined her son saying, as if it were the most hilarious coincidence.

  But when they got in there, they found the German Lady sitting on the edge of his bed. She’d brought Michael magazines, also pudding. Her hand touched the one space on his arm where there was no bruise. She opened one of the pudding packets, spooned it into his mouth. She wiped his lip, and Michael gave her the closest thing to a smile he could muster. Mutti fed him another spoonful. The overhead light shone across his bandages, on Mutti’s gray hair. Michael’s heartbeat was slow again. Peter stood in the doorway rather than walk inside.

  “It’s okay?” Peter finally asked.

  Mutti looked up, as if brought back from a daydream. Adela saw something young in her face. Mutti when they’d lived in Glens Falls. Mutti at Liesl’s wedding.

  “I think your uncle is tired,” Mutti said.

  Adela had wanted to blame her, blame Michael, which made nothing feel fixed or better.

  “Get some sleep, Michael,” Peter said.

  He raised a gauzy fist.

  “Imagine that’s a thumbs-up,” Michael mumbled.

  Peter lifted a fist, told Michael to imagine, too.

  “We’ll see you tomorrow?” Mutti asked Adela. Each morning she, like Michael, must have woken up unsure if Adela and Peter would still be here.

  “Tomorrow,” Adela answered, knowing it wasn’t true.

  * * *

  Outside, rain was light and cool. Before they got into Michael’s car, Adela stopped, pulled her phone from her pocket, and told Peter she needed a minute.

  When Taro answered, she said, “I don’t know what I’ve been doing.”

  He stayed quiet on the other end.

  “You there?” she asked.

  He answered that he was.

  Peter climbed into the car he’d been in two days before when those awful young men had attacked Michael. She tried not to think of what would have happened had the men come after him a minute earlier, Peter on the street with Michael, her son panicking instead of making perfect choices. The car’s driver’s-side mirror was smashed. Adela imagined Michael thrown against it, the bandage on his forehead covering dozens of cuts and bruises.

  “You there?” Taro asked.

  “We’re both here,” she answered.

  Taro gave a sniff that she hoped was a laugh. Peter rolled down the window, shrugging to ask what was keeping her. Taro asked Adela if she was ready.

  * * *

  “I left something at Oma’s,” Peter said that night, after they’d finished packing.

  An annoyed sigh leaked from Adela before she said, “Fine.”

  But when they got to Mutti’s house, Peter wandered from room to room. He picked up objects from shelves. Opened the kitchen’s junk drawer. Adela was relieved that her mother wasn’t here.

  “What are you looking for?” Adela asked. She felt ready to sleep for days, though in a handful of hours a taxi would come to take them to the train station, train to a plane to a city neither of them had been to.

  “I don’t know,” Peter said, and moved into the dining room.

  Adela lay down on the couch. Closing her eyes, she worried that she’d sleep so hard that they’d miss the cab and have to explain to Mutti in person where they were going, what the plan had been. She and Michael used to make fun of the way their mother turned the w in coward into a v. “Covard,” she said, and fought to keep her eyes open.

  As she lay there, Adela wondered what would happen if the German Lady appeared just then, Peter rushing in and telling his grandmother that they were leaving. Perhaps Mutti would get angry. Maybe she’d retreat as she had when Adela had decided to move to California. As Adela’s eyes grew heavy, as Peter kept opening and closing drawers, she imagined the German Lady in front of her, telling her that leaving was a mistake. Okay, then, Adela might have answered, Mutti crossing and uncrossing her arms. Convince me.

  * * *

  When Michael and Adela were in fifth grade, she’d come down with the flu. Classmates asked where she was, and Michael answered—without thinking—that she’d died. The more he was cajoled, the more serious he got. He stood on the asphalt behind the cafeteria, a basketball bouncing nearby.

  “A freak virus,” he said.

  “Why are you here, then?” someone asked, breath bright with chewing gum.

  “Too much sadness at home.”

  Most classmates saw through his lie. But a few paused, and the what-ifs in their expressions felt powerful. The next day he wore black and wouldn’t talk to anyone. When people called him a liar, Michael closed his eyes. His heart raced at the certainty of getting caught.

  When Adela returned to school, she heard of his stories and confronted him.

  “What a bunch of liars,” Michael said. They stood in the hallway between the two fifth-grade classrooms. Her nose red, her narrowed eyes a hand grabbing his collar.

  “You said I was dead,” she answered.

  Michael told her it was a joke.

  “What kind of joke?” she asked; he couldn’t answer. Part of him had enjoyed the attention of it. Part of him wanted to try on life without her. But mostly he didn’t know what kind of joke it was. Even as he’d gone into detail about the virus squeezing one lung, then the other—he couldn’
t believe what he was saying.

  For days he tried to atone. He stole her favorite Life Savers from the Cumberland Farms and handed her a pencil when hers broke. She wouldn’t talk to him. Michael felt his insides tighten. He had to go to the bathroom constantly, and when he went for the third time in one morning, he overheard Susan Doin—who rarely said anything clever—mumble that maybe Michael had gotten the virus, too.

  A week later, taking the shortcut to school, Adela told him he had toothpaste on his chin.

  “Maybe I want it there,” Michael answered.

  “Maybe you look like an asshole.”

  “Maybe I am an asshole,” he said, and she nodded. Leaves crunched underfoot. A crow cawed across the sky. Michael saw the sky after a week where everything was in his head, where he bumped into familiar furniture and crossed a room, forgetting why. But as his sister returned to him, a piece of her stayed hidden, and he knew something had been chipped, recovery and injury uneasy twins.

  “Uneasy twins,” he said to Mutti when she came to the hospital and told him that Adela and Peter were gone. Adela had sent her a long text from the airport. Peter had left a drawing for her titled, Oma, Oma, Oma, as if she were three people in one.

  “I brought more pudding,” Mutti said, and looked like she would cry.

  She pulled the pudding from her purse. Michael told her it was his favorite.

  * * *

  After Adela left, Michael returned to the memory of his cousin and friend who’d thrown rocks at people who had nothing, who stayed when others left. Michael kept a smattering of Udo’s ashes in a small ceramic box his cousin had given to him.

  Back in Udo’s house, a place that he’d briefly pretended was Adela’s and his, Michael wound back to the last time he’d seen Udo. Udo had shown up at his apartment at three in the morning. His hands and knees dirty, his face red.