Bruiser

57) ABJECT

Tennyson began to act strange around the time he and Katrina broke up, and his behavior became odder and odder each day. It came to a peak the day Brew and I went to Amanda Milner’s sweet sixteen. When we got home that night, he laid into us the second we walked in the door.

“Where were you? What were you doing? Do you know what time it is?”

He sounded like a parent on the rampage, and his eyes were disturbingly wild. Tennyson had always been unnecessarily protective of me, but this was ridiculous. Brew was getting all stressed out and went straight to the bathroom, just to get out of Tennyson’s line of fire.

“What is wrong with you!” I demanded once Brew was gone.

“You shouldn’t be taking him out like this!”

“What is he—a dog on a leash?”

“No, it’s just that…it’s just that you need to be careful.”

I pointed an accusing finger at him. “You’re telling me to be careful? You, who treated yourself to a pain-free lacrosse victory at his expense?”

Just mentioning it deflated him. He looked at me pleadingly—a helpless look that, until recently, was never in my brother’s arsenal of facial expressions. Lately, there’d been a whole lot of weird desperation in his eyes, and in his actions. If I didn’t know better, I’d wonder if Tennyson was on drugs.

“Mom and Dad were fighting while you were gone.”

It surprised me, because they hadn’t had an argument for a while. “Fighting how?”

“Like they used to.” He looked at me for a moment more with that abject expression, but then his face changed. It was as if every muscle in his face switched to a new preset. He took a deep breath and relaxed, his anxiety fading like a dark cloud dissipating. I’d noticed that before, too—how he’d be so anxious and then calm down so quickly. He took another deep breath and released it.

“It’s okay now,” he said. “It’s okay—but you shouldn’t keep Brew out so long. He’s not used to parties and all those people.”

“Now you sound like his uncle,” I told him. I just meant it as a tiny little poison-tipped barb, but somehow it hit deep. He couldn’t even answer me. He just turned and retreated to his room.

I could have gone after him and worked on him, ferreting out exactly what was going on, but I was too disgusted with Tennyson to pursue it. Instead I checked in on Mom and Dad. If they had been fighting, then there was some fresh hell we’d all have to deal with.

I found them both sitting up in bed, just inches away from each other, calmly reading.

“Was it a nice party, honey?” Mom asked once she saw me standing there. I saw no evidence of emotional battle scars on either of them: They hadn’t retreated to neutral corners of the house; neither one was pacing, or brooding, or scarfing down comfort food.

“It was fine,” I said; and without the patience to beat around the bush, I asked, “What were you guys arguing about?”

They looked at each other a bit perplexed by the question. For a moment I thought Tennyson must have been lying until Dad said, “Well, whatever it was, it must not have been too important.”

Mom concurred, and they both returned to their books.

I told them good night and retreated to my own room, feeling content with their answers, with the evening, with myself. I didn’t even harbor any ill feelings toward my brother, which was a definite indication that something was off—not just around me but inside me as well. Still, I chose to ignore it, subconsciously citing all those wonderful sayings that justify denial:

What you don’t know can’t hurt you.

Let sleeping dogs lie.

Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.

I keep telling myself that if I had questioned things sooner—if I had grasped the extent to which Brew had become intertwined in our lives—I would have behaved differently. I would have done the right thing. But who am I kidding? How can you do the right thing when you can’t figure out what that thing is? When all you have before you are choices in various shades of wrong?

58) INTERLOPER

Tennyson and I always made fun of people who blindly followed the crowd. Lemmings, we called them—poor, unfortunate creatures who, at the slightest sign of rain, relinquish their self-determination to the mob and join a mad, mindless stampede. Ultimately the stampede leads them off a cliff into the sea, where they all drown. It’s funny if you’re an observer. It’s tragic if you’re a lemming.

I understand lemmings now. I understand that, contrary to popular opinion, it takes only two to form a crowd. Perhaps a brother and a sister. I can’t say I was blindly following Tennyson, but I was so busy noticing what was wrong with him that I failed to see that I was charging toward the same cliff right beside him.

We had an unexpected guest the following evening.

I had the misfortune of being the one to answer the door. Standing there was a small man with lots of hair and a thick but well-groomed beard. I recognized him from various university functions as one of our parents’ colleagues.

“I’d like to speak with your mother,” he said with a slight accent that I couldn’t place. He was determined yet fidgety, his eyes intense and a little wild. All at once I realized who this was. This was the man Mom was seeing. Mr. Monday Night.

I felt a wave of panic rise in me, brimming into anger; but the feeling drained quickly. This was my house, I was in control of the doorway, and this interloper was not getting in.

“You’d better get out of here,” I told him, coldly staring him down, “before my father sees you.”

And then from behind me, I heard, “I already have.”

My father was standing halfway down the stairs, gripping the railing. He stood there for a long moment, and I saw the same rise and fall of anger that I had felt—although I’m sure his blossomed even more powerfully before it subsided. He came the rest of the way down the stairs, and when he spoke he was like a diplomat, with both power and poise in his voice; but his anger was reined in.

“Well, if it isn’t the proverbial barbarian at the gate,” Dad said. “Are you coming in, Bob, or are you going to stand in the doorway all night?” The man stepped in; and Dad approached him, looked him over, and grunted dismissively. “This is Dr. Thorlock, from the anthropology department. An expert in prehistoric man, and other small-minded things.”

I heard a guffaw behind me and turned to see Tennyson peering down from the top of the stairs; but the moment I saw him, he retreated.

“Are you here to bring us a little drama today, Bob?” Dad asked. “Are you going to challenge me to a duel?”

Thorlock seemed entirely unnerved by Dad’s flipness.

“I just want to talk to Lisa.”

“Brontë,” said Dad, “please go fetch your mother.”

I found Mom in the laundry room, and when I told her that Thorlock was here, she looked shocked; but that faded, too. “Well,” she said with a sigh far too light for the circumstance, “we knew it would come to this. No sense postponing the inevitable.”

“Which inevitable?” I dared to ask.

But all Mom said was “We’ll see.”

Then she strode down into the foyer.

I should have been dizzy with dread but instead was merely filled with car-wreck curiosity. At the time I assumed it was a protective layer of numbness. A shock-shell rather than shell shock. I would have eavesdropped on the three of them if I hadn’t suddenly heard a groan from the guest room. I went in to find Brew holding his gut, rocking back and forth as he sat on the bed. He was here alone tonight. Cody, who now had actually accumulated a friend or two, was at a sleepover.

“Are you okay?” I asked Brew.

“No,” he snapped. “I mean, yes. Just leave me alone, okay?”

He doubled over, moaning in pain through gritted teeth.

“Is it your stomach?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s it,” he blurted. “Stomach. It’s my stomach.”

I felt his forehead. He didn’t have a fever, but he was clammy. I touched his arm—the skin on his forearm had such goose-flesh, I felt like I was reading Braille. “I’ll get you something,” I told him, trying to remember what biological nightmare the school gave us for lunch that day. On the way to the medicine chest, I made a point of looking toward the foyer, where Mom spoke to Thorlock in hushed tones. Dad was now sitting on the stairs, observing. He looked somewhat relaxed as he sat there, and I remember thinking how off that was; but this particular kind of family drama was not anything I’d experienced before, so how was I to judge what behavior was appropriate when your mother’s boyfriend paid a visit? Rather than dwelling on it, I brought Brew some Maalox, which he guzzled straight from the bottle.

“Thank you,” he said with the same guttural voice. “I’m better now. You can go.”

Then he rolled to face the wall, pulling the covers over his head, ending any hope of conversation.

By the time I left the guest room, Thorlock was gone, and my parents were in the kitchen. Dad was scouring the fridge for some low-carb snack, and Mom was thumbing through a cookbook. I felt like I had suddenly time-warped into a different day.

“So… what happened?”

Neither of them answered right away; but when they saw I wasn’t leaving until someone said something, Dad chimed in with “Mom asked him to leave, and so he did.”

“That’s it?” I asked. “He’s gone for good?”

“We’ve set boundaries,” Mom said. “Boundaries and rules.”

“As in ‘Come here again and I’ll get a restraining order’?”

Dad laughed at that, and Mom tossed him a halfhearted scowl. “No,” said Mom. “Not exactly.” Mom turned a page in her cookbook, and I closed the book, practically catching her finger.

“What, then?”

She sighed—again that small kind of sigh that spoke of minor concerns. “Mondays are still Mondays,” she said. “My night out.”

Usually I’m a quick study, but it took a while for the words to relay from my ears to my brain before settling in my solar plexus like a rock. And in the other room, I could hear Brew groaning again. I turned to Dad, who had a slice of Muenster cheese hanging from his mouth.

“And you’re… okay with this?”

Dad’s eye twitched slightly. “No,” he admitted. “But I’ll live with it.” And then he added, “Maybe I’ll take Tuesday nights off.” I snapped my eyes to Mom, certain she would say something like “Over my dead body!” but instead she opened the cookbook again. “Do you think it’s too late to start a roast?”

This was wrong.

The things they said, the things they felt were wrong to the core—but it wasn’t just them. The depth of what I should be feeling was absent from me as well. My emotions had become as shallow as a wading pool. I couldn’t feel anything but a pleasant, airy void, as incongruous as sunshine in a thunderstorm.

I left my parents in their surreal stupor and took a moment to peer in on Brew. Stomachaches I could understand. They had easy solutions that came in bottles and tasted like chalk. Brew wasn’t moaning anymore, but he was breathing heavily and haltingly beneath the covers.

“Can I do something for you?” I asked, feeling helpless but wanting desperately to somehow ease his pain.

“No,” he said weakly. “My head’s better now. Thank you.”

“You said it was your stomach.”

“Did I?”

And then I finally connected several of the many dots littering my head. Brew had acted this way after that lacrosse game—the one where Katrina broke up with Tennyson. I had the sudden sneaking suspicion that Tennyson knew something I didn’t.

59) INCONGRUOUS

I pushed my way into Tennyson’s room without knocking. He was sitting on his bed, a plate of veggies beside him, a textbook in his lap, and his TV playing a bad slasher film.

“Yes?”

He didn’t look surprised that I had burst into his room uninvited; he merely waited for me to say something, like he was expecting me to burst in all along.

“Mom and Dad are acting weird, and something’s bothering Brew.”

“What else is new?” he said. He picked up a carrot and started munching on it. “Is the fur ball gone?”

“Yes, and no,” I told him. “But Thorlock’s beside the point. You know something, don’t you?”

“I know lots of things—your inquiry needs to be more specific.”

“Just answer the question.”

“True/false, or multiple choice?” he asked.

“How about an essay worth ninety percent of your grade.”

He tapped his pen on his textbook. I waited. On screen a woman with bulbous, inorganic breasts was chased by a dwarf wielding an oversize carving knife. I reached over and turned off the TV.

“Feeling ticked off?” Tennyson asked. “Feeling angry?”

“No, not really,” I told him honestly.

“Funny,” he said. “Neither am I.”

“Can you please stop being enigmatic!”

“Yes, and no.”

I closed my eyes and sighed. Round and round we always went, my brother and I, always trying to see who was more clever. I folded my arms, content to be silent until Tennyson said something useful.

“I can’t tell you what I don’t know,” he said. “I can’t comment on what I don’t understand.”

“So tell me something you do understand.”

He thought about it and finally said, “I think I might understand his uncle. I know why he wouldn’t let Brew have friends. And why he did his best to keep Brew housebound.”

“Because he was a sick, sick man!” I reminded my brother. “Yes,” Tennyson agreed. “Sick, and twisted, and cruel. But keeping Brew lonely might have been the one act of kindness he ever did in his entire, miserable life.” Then Tennyson turned on the TV to a bloodcurdling scream from the silicon starlet. “Now if you’ll excuse me, a sizable body count awaits.”

I wanted to be furious at Tennyson’s bewildering insensitivity, but I couldn’t be. I wanted to be neck- deep in frustration over our parents’ psychotically serene behavior, but I couldn’t feel that either. The flood of distress I so desperately wanted to hold on to was mercury in my hands: heavy, dense, yet impossible to hold. So I grabbed Tennyson’s plate from him and hurled it across the room—anything to shatter the numbness.

The plate didn’t even break. It hit the wall and fell onto the bed, dumping carrots, celery, and ranch dressing all over the bedspread.

Tennyson, who should have jumped up and yelled at me, just looked at it and said, “Now look what you’ve done.”

“Push me!” I screamed at him. “Call me an idiot! Tell me I’m a waste of life! Fight with me!” I begged. “Please, Tennyson, fight with me! It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve always done!”

He stood up but made no move to confront me. Instead he looked at me and shook his head, like he did when I didn’t get the punch line of a joke. “Things are good, Brontë,” he said. “Things are great. For all of us. Why do you want to mess with it?”

I tried to answer him, but how can you find words for what you’re not feeling?

“Fine,” he said. “If you want to fight, let’s fight.” Then he reached out his hand and gently nudged my shoulder. “Okay,” he said. “Your turn.”

But instead of nudging him back, I found myself throwing my arms around him, hugging him tightly, suddenly needing the kind of closeness we must have once shared in the womb.

“What’s that for?” he asked.

“I don’t know… I don’t know….” All I knew is that I wanted to cry and I couldn’t, and it made me want to cry all the more.

60) ILLUMINATION

If your heart tells you something but your mind tells you something else, which do you believe? Both are just as apt to lie. In fact, they play at deceit all the time. Mostly they balance each other, giving us that crucial reality check. But what happens on the rare occasions when they conspire together?

Things are good, Brontë.

And Tennyson was right. My heart told me that life was better than ever, and my mind told me not to think too deeply or all might be lost. Between my heart and mind there was a strong argument to eat my mom’s first truly homemade meal in months, then slip beneath my comfortable quilt and dream peacefully till morning.

But we all have a fail-safe, don’t we? When our heart and mind fails us, we have our gut. And my gut told me that if I didn’t question things tonight, I never would. So after dinner I quietly left the kitchen, counted the paces to the guest room, and pushed open the door into darkness.

Brew was under his covers, but I knew he wasn’t asleep. I turned on the light.

“I want to know what’s happening in this house. And God help you, Brew, if you lie to me.”

He rolled over to face me, squinting in the sudden illumination. “Everything will be okay,” he said. “Whatever’s wrong, you’ll feel better by morning.”

But I already knew that. That was the problem. Right now I could feel the turmoil inside me clearing out like smoke through an open window; but as long as I could keep generating it faster than it could escape, I had the upper hand.

“Tell me!” I demanded.

He sat up. “Are you sure you really want to know?”

I nodded, even though I was feeling less sure by the second.

He stood, went over to the door, and closed it. “Why don’t I show you?” Then he slowly began to unbutton his shirt.

You think you want to know the secrets of the universe. You think you want to see the way things all fit together. You believe in your heart of hearts that enlightenment will save the world and set you free. Maybe it will.

But the path to enlightenment is rarely a pleasant one.

When the last button had been undone, Brew parted his shirt to reveal a battered torso that barely looked like flesh at all. Bruise upon bruise upon bruise. Purple and yellow, swollen red, bloodless white. His chest, his shoulders, his back. It looked like he had been thrashed by chains and bashed by bats, and pummeled by countless other blunt objects. This was worse than anything his uncle had ever done. I could see where he had masked the marks on his neck and face with covering makeup much more skillfully applied than the day he came to school with a black eye. This time you couldn’t even notice it. I’m sure there wasn’t an inch of his body that didn’t bear some kind of damage. All of it was fresh; all of it came long after his uncle had died.

“Who did this to you?”

He pointed to one discoloration on his shoulder. “This is your father’s. When he fell on the basketball court.” Then he pointed to another. “This is Tennyson’s from lacrosse.” And then another. “This is yours; I’m not sure from where.”

But I knew.

“Someone opened their car door into me…,” I said numbly.

He nodded and kept on going, pointing to the marks on his body like one might point out constellations in the sky. “This is Joe Crippendorf’s…. This is Hannah Garcia’s…. This is Andy Beaumont’s….” On and on he went, reciting a litany that I thought would never end. He seemed to know where every single injury had come from— maybe not how or when, but he always knew who; and I thought back to something he had said. “I like your friends,” he had told me. Until that moment it had never occurred to me that, for Brewster Rawlins, the cost of friendship was exacted in flesh.

“…This is Amanda Milner’s…. This is Matt Goldman’s….”

I wanted to shed all the tears in the world for him, but I couldn’t. My tears were already taken away from me. My tears were filling his eyes instead of mine— and that’s when I knew how much further this went than flesh and bone. Then he took my hand and pressed it firmly to the center of his chest until I could feel his heart beating against my palm.

“And this…,” he said, “…this is your parents’ divorce.”

I pulled my hand away as if he had thrust it in hot coals. “No! They’re not getting divorced! They worked things out! They’re happy!”

He offered me a slim but satisfied smile, then said with absolute certainty:

“I know.”

61) IMPLOSION

I ran from him.

It was callous of me; it was cowardly; it was worse than the time he ran from me when I was most vulnerable. But, like Brew, I’m human. All I knew was that I had to get to a place far enough away for me to truly know my own feelings and grapple with them. I couldn’t let Brew make peace for me. I had to make peace for myself. With myself. Only after I was out in the street and off of our block did worry, doubt, and anger begin to filter back in. Not enough to overwhelm me, but certainly enough to give some depth of field to my vision.

My feet were on autopilot—I didn’t even know where I was going until I got there.

The pool.

It was getting toward nine o’clock. The pool closed to the public at eight, but the underwater lights came on at dusk and didn’t turn off until sunrise. The gate was locked, but I knew the pool as well as I knew my own home. There were half a dozen ways to get in that didn’t involve the gate; and although I had no bathing suit, I knew the storeroom door was never locked. Neither was the lost-and-found bin, which was always full of suits.

Diving into a pool as smooth as glass and creating the first ripples has always been magic to me. Like taking the first steps into virgin snow. This is what I needed—just me and my own liquid universe. I hit the water, feeling the chill. I set out to do twenty warm-up laps but quickly lost count as my head went into defragment mode, trying to put together the events of the past weeks in some meaningful way.

I wanted my frustration and my anger to align in a single direction—like a beam I could aim at someone, fry them in blame, and be done with it. But who? Not Brew—he didn’t choose his gift. Not Tennyson—he didn’t start this. Not my parents—they were unwitting victims with no idea where their sunny, distorted dispositions had come from.

And then there was me.

Was I to blame for bringing Brew out of his shell and exposing him to all the toxic things the rest of us carry in our souls? And as our family rose out of our own gloom, how could I not have known the cause? Me! The girl who always prided herself on her ability to see to the heart of things—to pull the truth from the tiniest bit of emotional evidence.

There could be only one answer.

I did know.

Maybe not consciously, but somewhere deep down I must have known that Brew was filtering out all those wounds we couldn’t see. I let it happen because I wanted it to happen. I wanted my world to be safe and whole at all costs. I used Brew—just as Tennyson used him, just as Cody used him, just as his uncle had used him. In the end, blame didn’t shine on an individual. It was a floodlight cast on all of us.

And all because we longed for healing and happiness—as if happiness is a state of being. But it’s not. Happiness is a vector. It’s movement. Like my own momentum across the pool, joy can only be defined by the speed at which you’re moving away from pain.

Certainly our family could reach a place of absolute, unchangeable bliss at Brew’s expense; but the moment we arrived, the moment we stopped moving, joy would become as stagnant and hopeless as perpetual despair. Happily ever after? What a curse to have to endure!

Time doesn’t move at the same pace when I’m swimming, so there was no telling how long I swam. More than half an hour, less than two. Maybe. By the time I was done, I had found a sense of balance to all my emotions. I knew there had to be a way to hold on to them even in Brew’s presence. There had to be. Uncle Hoyt had done it. I’d never seen a man so angry, and he held his anger even with Brew around him every day.

As I climbed out of the pool, my inner balance didn’t do much for my outer balance. All those laps had tired my legs and made me just a little bit dizzy. I found myself leaning a bit too far back; I overcompensated, and then my feet slipped off the ladder rungs.

I fell into the pool, but never felt myself hit the water.

Instead, I felt my head hit the concrete edge, knocking me unconscious. And in that instant, everything—happiness, sorrow, peace, and anger— were all snuffed silent in the implosion.