Secrets & Surprises

A Clever-Kids Story

The two clever kids are Jane and Joseph. The names alliterate. Our parents planned that — two cute kids with alliterating names, born two and a half years apart.

The summer that I was five and Joseph was seven and a half he began to tell me the clever-kids stories when we were put to bed. We lived in what had been our grandparents’ house in New Hampshire — a huge barn of a house with high ceilings and rose-splotched wallpaper. My parents moved there when Joseph was four and a half and I was two. He claimed to remember New York City. It was one of the many things I envied him for: he had been born in a hospital as high as a skyscraper; I had been born in a bed in the house in New Hampshire. When my grandfather died, my parents sold their furniture and my father quit his job, and they moved to the woods of New Hampshire, into the house where our family had spent the summer. My grandmother, after my grandfather’s death, moved to the warmer weather in Georgia and was able to live with a cousin whose husband had died a few years before. My grandmother came to New Hampshire in June and stayed until the first of September.

The first clever-kids story I remember was about her: the grandmother was chewing gum, and she blew a bubble so big that you could see things in it, like a mirror. The clever kids looked into the bubble and saw a robber coming in the door, and as the grandmother began to breathe in and retract the bubble they saw the robber getting smaller and smaller, but coming closer. The grandmother didn’t see anything because she was squinting, concentrating on making the bubble disappear. Just as the bubble was about to disappear, the clever kids whirled around and overpowered the robber. They took out their guns and shot him dead.

Nothing about the stories seemed odd to me. That we would have real guns seemed perfectly possible. Anything Joseph said seemed reasonable and likely. He told me that he could fly, and I believed him. Partly it was because when he told me the stories late at night — when he crept into my bed and awed or scared me and then ended the stories in some satisfactory way — he seemed so authoritative that I couldn’t help but believe him. His whispering made the stories more emphatic. The secret ritual of climbing into my bed made them something we shared privately, and things privately shared must be important — and therefore true. When he told me he could fly I didn’t challenge him. I had never heard of Peter Pan, and had never even been to a circus to see the trapeze performers, but I could believe that a person, particularly my brother Joseph, could fly. “Where do you fly?” I whispered. He thought about it. “I fly by the lake,” he said. “I’ve flown on the main beach. One Sunday when it rained and there was nobody around.”

I remembered the day he was talking about. It was a Sunday in springtime and it had rained for three days, but the rain was really pouring down that Sunday. And Joseph put on his black rubber boots and his raincoat and said he was going to the beach. My mother grabbed him by the arm and said he was not. My father told Joseph to go ahead, then turned to my mother and said he admired his son’s spirit. Sebastian was visiting, and she started to argue but backed down when Sebastian asked them please not to fight. In many ways Sebastian was like one of us: he put his hands over his ears if someone said something harsh. Once when he hit his finger with a hammer, I saw him cry. Sebastian had left New York the same year my parents did; my father worked as a carpenter with two other men, and Sebastian kept the books.

My grandmother did not like Sebastian. My father liked him very much, and my mother tolerated him. Joseph and I had mixed emotions: he was always kind to us, but when he was with adults he seemed childish, so we didn’t respect him as we’d respect an adult, but when he played with us he seemed reserved — the way an adult would. When I was seven, when I saw him cry after he hit his thumb, my father took me aside and told me that sometimes Sebastian’s reactions were a little out of whack because in New York he had had a breakdown. He explained to me what a breakdown was. I was fascinated and wanted to tell Joseph, but somehow I knew that he was the storyteller. In fact, I started to tell him, but he interrupted with his own Sebastian story: in the Bible they shot him full of arrows, for being evil, but a beautiful lady pulled out all the arrows, without causing him any pain. “What happened to the holes?” I said. “All the arrows were shot into his face. She pulled them out so carefully that they just left little holes. Whiskers grew out of them.”

As Joseph was fabricating stories that spring, strange things were happening that we didn’t know about. We knew things were going on, but we were involved in collecting seashells from the main beach, playing hide and seek in the woods with Billy LaPierre, whose family had the camp next to ours, and the secret nighttime stories. We knew our mother was irritable and our father silent. We knew that Sebastian didn’t come around very often. We did not know that our mother had had an abortion, and that Sebastian had driven her to Montreal, where she had it performed illegally, and against my father’s wishes. I overheard her, one night, saying to him, “Where would we get the money for another baby? You won’t commit yourself to anything. You could have worked for a prosperous business, but you hooked up with Frankie and Phil Renshaw. I’m already surrounded by babies: Sebastian in tears every time I turn around, you bumming around, your mother coming every summer and expecting me to do everything but wipe her chin.”

I don’t think that my mother loved Sebastian — just that after the abortion, when he felt she and Sebastian had both turned against him, they began to spend more time with each other, discussing it. Then my father became jealous, and my mother laughed at him for thinking anything so stupid, and her taunting made my father bitter, and finally silent. Things were so bad that my grandmother came in June and left before the month was over, pretending that she felt guilty for having left her cousin.

Sebastian and Joseph and I drove her to Boston to get a plane. Everyone knew that it was strange my parents didn’t go. My father said that he had to work, and my mother offered to go along for the ride, looking very ashamed, but my grandmother said no — she wanted some time alone with her two favorite children. As I recall, she hardly talked to us, but she gave us both money. On the way back, Sebastian bought us large vanilla ice cream cones. We sat on the grass beside the ice cream stand, bees swarming around the trash can, Joseph more interested in watching them than in licking his cone. He got ice cream all down his shirt, and when we got home my mother complained about that instead of thanking Sebastian for what he had done. We ran outside as soon as we could and hid our five-dollar bills in an old tackle box and buried the box in the nook of a tree, because Joseph said we should.

At dinner my mother asked if Grandma had given us a treat before she left. It was all she said about her having left. Joseph tried to evade the question.

“Because your father has stopped speaking doesn’t mean that you should stop, Joseph,” she said. She laid down her fork and Sebastain laid his down too.

“I think she gave them both some money,” Sebastian said, looking at me because he knew I’d never have the courage to avoid a direct question.

“Yes,” I said.

My mother smiled. “She said she was going to give you money to buy a treat when she and I had breakfast this morning.”

Sebastian picked up his fork and began to eat his salad.

“Did you put it somewhere safe?” she said.

Joseph looked at me — a warning look.

“What’s the big secret?” my mother said.

“Look,” my father said, “it isn’t necessary to fill us in on little details. We don’t need to know everything. They should just do whatever they feel like doing.”

My mother frowned. “That’s unfair,” she said, “to challenge me in the guise of protecting the children.”

“I was aiming it at you. I love children. I wouldn’t put the children on the spot.”

“Stop it,” she said, “or I’m going to leave the table.”

“Take Sebastian with you. There’s nearly a full moon tonight — good night for a walk.”

“Why don’t you two make up?” Sebastian said.

“Why don’t I get a direct answer from my children before the conversation veers off again?” she said. She turned to me. Everybody knew I was the easiest mark.

“We pretended, we — played pirates, and we buried the ten dollars in a box in the hole of a tree.”

Joseph had not said we were pirates, and I thought I had been very clever.

My mother looked at me. “All right,” she said. “I don’t see why there had to be such a secret.”

That night, in bed, Joseph didn’t tell a story. Instead, we talked about how something had been wrong at dinner. Finally, proud of my invented story, I mentioned the buried money.

“She wasn’t even mad,” I said. “We can get the money tomorrow.”

“She wasn’t mad at you, but she was mad at me because I wouldn’t answer.”

“We can buy candy down at the store all month,” I said.

There was a long silence. Then Joseph said, “The money’s gone.”

I didn’t question it. He whispered, “The money’s gone,” and suddenly I knew that it was, that it was punishment for my having told the secret. Before we fell asleep he relented a little. “It might get put back somehow,” he said. But when we whispered the next night it wasn’t about the money, and we never dug for it or mentioned it again.

For years I forgot about it. I remembered it recently, riding the bus; I looked out the window and saw a squirrel run up a tree very much like the tree where we had buried the box. All at once I felt so sentimental I had to concentrate hard not to cry. I had remembered that there was something that was his and mine, that it was still there, and that I could go and get it. I got off the bus and walked to my room. It was a nice room with walls painted oyster-white, and the bare walls made me think of the rose-covered wallpaper all through the house in New Hampshire, and of what Sebastian had told me years before about the hospital he went to when he had his breakdown — how he would study the plain white walls and know that he had to get out of that place. The hairline cracks in them would appear in his dreams; imagined smudges would make him wake up, in a fit of anxiety. His obsession with the walls was only making him crazier.

In 1969 Joseph died in Vietnam. My mother received official notification, then a letter from a friend of his that was full of praise for his valor, his wonderful sense of humor, his skill with a rifle. It was an odd letter, one that the man probably would not have sent if he had thought it over. There was a paragraph near the end praising Joseph for having changed the man’s taste in music, for Joseph’s having explained what was really important musically. A list of several meaningful songs followed. The letter concluded mournfully, and he signed it “God bless.” I read it over and over, all summer, and at the end, every time, I would hear Red Skelton’s voice saying the “God bless.” The man who had written the letter was obviously heartbroken, yet it just wasn’t the kind of letter to send. He was alive and Joseph was not. He seemed to give equal weight to a sense of humor and rifle skills. What sort of person could he be?

Instead of going to the main beach, I went to the dock and sat at the end of it with my feet in the water and the letter beside me, carefully closed in a book so it wouldn’t get wet.

He had a sense of humor, all right. He had such a fine sense of humor that he laughed when I told him to go to Canada.

Every day I sat on the dock, and when the sun went down I walked back to the house and had dinner.

For eight years my father has not lived in the house. He and my mother are not divorced, but the other day I saw an ad she had circled in the Village Voice about Haitian divorces. On and off, Curtis lives with her. Curtis is Phil Renshaw’s younger brother, who works for Phil now that my father is gone.

One day at the end of the summer when my brother was killed, my mother walked down to the dock. I was smoking grass, as usual — staring out at the water. When she came to the dock I was thinking about how often my friends and I thought ironically, and how irony had been absent from my childhood. The memory of the conversation about how much my father liked children began to come back to me. I was wondering if children miss a lot of ironies, or whether that had been a different world and everything in it really hadn’t been ironic.

My mother sat down. She didn’t say anything about what I was doing. Finally she said, “Your father is totally irrational. He holds it against me. He thinks that God did this to curse us, to even the score for that abortion I had years and years ago.” She took off her sandals and put her feet in the water. It was wet where she sat. She was sitting in a puddle on the dock. “Can you imagine your father being religious?” she said.

“No,” I said. “I can’t imagine him living in Mexico with a twenty-four-year-old girl either.” I did not say that I found it hard to believe that she lived with Curtis Renshaw. He was plain-faced, less willing to work at anything than even my father. And he was vain — he always washed with a special soap. There was a plastic soap dish in the tub with a bar of putty-colored soap in it that was Curtis’ soap.

“Your father loves you,” she said. “He should pay more attention to you. When Joseph died he lost all perspective — he’s forgotten what he’s got.”

I stared at our four feet, spooky and slender in the water.

“He should have sent the money for the plane ticket. He shouldn’t have said he was going to and then not done it.” She brushed the hair out of her eyes. “Is that part of why you’re blue?”

“No,” I said.

“I know,” she said.

Then, being as deliberately cruel as my father had been with his sarcasm and his silence, I said, “He didn’t send the money because she’s going to have a baby and he doesn’t want me around now.”

“Yes,” she sighed. “There’s that, too.”

It didn’t seem to have made her angry at me, though I knew she could hardly stand to be reminded of it.

“She’s twenty-four years old and a Catholic. I hope he keeps her pregnant and that they have hundreds of children for him to support, and no abortions.”

The dock needed some boards replaced; that was why there was the puddle next to me. She wouldn’t repair it, and Curtis wouldn’t repair it, and I wouldn’t. In June I had finally repapered the living room because the wallpaper was at once so faded and so garish. She had always asked my father to do it, and now, years later, I had done it with no prompting, wild for something to do with my hands. I suspect she didn’t care about the wallpaper anymore because she didn’t care any longer about the house. He had left it to her — his parents’ house (my grandmother had died five years before; no longer even any reason to fix it up for her summer visit) — as if to say: You care about material things, here it is. Then he traveled and finally ended up in Mexico City. What would have happened if she had had the other baby? Would anything that simple have kept them married?

“What’s that you’re reading?” she said.

I looked down at the book I held, with the letter closed inside it. The book was Cooking with Wine.

Sebastian comes to my apartment. “It’s nice,” he says. “What? Don’t you like it?” He sits on one of the two Salvation Army chairs. “It’s nice in here,” he says.

He comes here often, and is always ill at ease. He never knows what to say. After a dozen visits, today is the first time he’s passed comment on the apartment. He used to call and invite himself over. After he had called a few times I called him and began inviting him because I knew that was what he wanted. He drinks too much now. He knows I’m going to school and don’t have much money, so he brings his own bottle, and a bottle of white wine for me.

It’s winter now, snowing. I was surprised he came, because you can’t get a cab, and the streets are too bad to drive, so he had to take three buses to get here.

His shoes are on top of the newspaper in front of the door and he’s sitting in the chair with his socks drying on the arm. His feet are so familiar. In the summer, in spite of rough floorboards and rocky beaches, nobody ever wore shoes.

He wants to take me out to lunch, but I don’t want to go out into the snow. He looks a little relieved, and is happy when I bring him a plate of cheese and crackers to have with his Scotch.

“I got a letter from your father,” he says, reaching into the breast pocket of his worn corduroy jacket.

I read it. It’s a lot like the letter he sent to my mother, and the one he sent me. He has a nine-pound son, named Louis. Just like that.

“He wrote your mother, too.” He says it so I know he thinks such letter sending is insane.

I go into the kitchen and get the rest of the brick of cheese. It is a one-room apartment and from where he sits, Sebastian can see me.

“It’s nice of you to put up with me,” he says.

“It was nice of you to bring me a present.”

When he came, he brought with him six photographic postcards from the bookstore in the Square where he works. He knows that I like Walker Evans photographs; I won’t mail any of them.

We sit, eat cheese, and fall silent.

I remember a night when my parents went dancing. It must have been the same year she had the abortion. Sebastian came to baby sit. He came upstairs, barefoot, and we didn’t hear him. He found Joseph in my bed. “What are you two doing in bed together?” he said. He put the light on, and our eyes blinked — we couldn’t help looking funny. That was the first time I knew there was something strange about it. Joseph must have known, because somehow, long before, he had gotten me to understand that I wasn’t to talk about it. When Sebastian spoke, I knew that what he was asking about was something sexual. I thought about sex for the first time, though I didn’t know the word then, or even what sex was.

Today, Sebastian isn’t having much to drink. Usually by this time he’s high, and the visit goes more smoothly.

“I wish I had been your uncle,” he says. “I always liked children.”

“You were like an uncle.”

“Then I wish I had been a rich uncle. Then you really would have liked me.”

“When did we ever care about money?”

“You never had any. Your mother was always complaining because your father had quit his job in the city and they were stuck in the country with no way to do anything, or buy what she wanted.”

The house, in those days, had broken-down furniture, and we sat on pillows on the floors instead of in the old chairs with bulging springs, long before sitting on floor cushions was fashionable. My mother inherited money when Grandma died, and now there is new furniture, and a lot of the old pieces have been mended and refinished by Curtis.

“This is a very nice place,” Sebastian says. “It’s not easy to find a place this clean in the city.”

The year I was nine Joseph and I stopped sharing the huge upstairs room. It was nobody’s idea but my mother’s that I have my own room. I got the small room at the back of the house on the first floor. A bureau was moved in, and a bed, and she hung white curtains and put a straw mat on the floor that she had bought that summer at an auction. I missed Joseph — though long before, he had stopped telling me the stories. He still told stories, but they were full of bravado, stories that were about things that didn’t amaze me; he had hit a home run; he had carried Andrew’s little sister home when she broke her foot diving off the dock. In the stories, he was always the hero. I didn’t want my own room, but I suspected that my mother would have been angry if I had said so. Everybody else I knew had her own room, or shared one with her sister. After I moved into my room my mother would come in, once or twice a month, and sleep in the bed with me instead of with my father. I was a little embarrassed to have my mother in bed with me because I thought sleeping with your mother was childish, but something told me not to say anything about that, either.

I remember when my father left — the summer before Joseph left, to go to Vietnam. I remember that she was angry at first, and then so sad that Sebastian seemed always to be at the house.

“Your mother never really warmed up to me, in spite of the fact that there was nothing I wanted more. But you know that already,” Sebastian says.

I reach out and put my hand around his hand, on the glass. He was always there, so I could go off and sulk and not worry about my mother. He was there the next summer, too, working in the garden, the day we got the news that Joseph had been shot.

It seemed that the winter would never end, and that I would never be able to read all the books I was supposed to read for my courses, when suddenly, at the end of March, there was a day as warm as summer. Nick showed it to me first, having been awakened by the children who had gone outside early to play. The house in which I rented the apartment was across the street from a playground. He shook me gently by the shoulder and pointed out the window, at the bright day. I got up and leaned on my elbow, and looked at it: sunny, beautiful, the trees so still that there must not have been the slightest breeze.

Nick and I had breakfast, and although he was in his first year of law school and worked constantly, didn’t even question that we would leave the apartment. We had coffee, then walked to his car. Our plan was to drive to the North Shore to climb the dunes and walk on the beach. But the plan got changed to going all the way to my mother’s house. It was Friday, and we could spend the weekend. Nick loved the house. More amazing, Nick loved me. He had been living with a girl named Anita when I met him, but a few months before, he had called it off, come to my apartment one day and made it plain that the scene with Anita had been a bad one. He had come, but he wouldn’t look at me for a long time. “You didn’t come cheap,” he said.

We stopped for more coffee, but even that plan changed. Inside the restaurant, with the windows open, coffee was too much a winter drink. We sat on stools at the counter and drank cold chocolate milkshakes.

When we got there, Sebastian’s old white Buick convertible — top down — was in the drive. He was the first to see us, from where he was digging in the side yard. I gave him a hug and Nick shook his hand. “Great minds with a single thought,” he said to me. Whenever he could take a day off, he would leave the city and go to New Hampshire. He was planting a little evergreen. Nick and I went around to the back of the house, where my mother and a woman who had moved into the LaPierre house next door and Curtis were talking. My mother stood and rushed across the lawn, happy to see us. She had on a sundress, and her hair pulled back in a ponytail, and looked young.

It started out as such a happy day that what happened seemed even worse than it might have, because no one expected anything. We had all gone down to the beach (Sebastian was talking to the new woman, who was a widow; I was hoping that she would like him), when Sebastian mentioned Joseph. For months it had been all right to talk about him, so there was no reason why it hit her wrong. I guess that it was such a perfect day that we had all been thinking of him: he thrived in the warm weather, bought tulip bulbs and planted them in the rocky side yard every spring, sailed from the dock that we were now walking past every day that it didn’t rain.

“I might try to fix the boat,” Sebastian said, as much to himself as to any of us. Except that he must not have said the boat, but Joseph’s boat. And it was my brother’s boat. He had bought it, and my mother and I had hardly ever rowed out in it alone.

“Why do you have to mention him?” my mother said, her mouth quivering. “What do you have to talk about Joseph for?”

Then she put her hands over her face and ran, without lowering her hands, like a person running from an explosion.

Sebastian’s face was perfectly white. He looked like he might cry himself. The woman he had been walking with was the only one who stared after my mother. She had been living in the LaPierre house a week or so, and I don’t know if she knew, then, who Joseph was.

“Oh hell,” Nick said, putting his hand on Sebastian’s shoulder. Then, though it was a dumb and obvious thing to say, he said, “She’s just upset.”

Sebastian didn’t move. I went over to him and said, “Hey — it’s okay. I was thinking about him too.” I had been thinking that that night Nick would sleep alone in Joseph’s room.

We continued the walk down the beach. Nick took my arm and we walked a little ahead, and Sebastian and Carolyn Little trailed behind. Nick chattered to me as nervously as he had when he had started to tell me how he loved the woman he lived with, but ended up, instead of telling me anything about his life with Anita, talking about how some noises that cars make can indicate serious trouble. I strained to hear what Sebastian was saying to Carolyn Little, but there was a hollow sound all around us — the whole beach was echoing like a conch shell. It was that constant, almost inaudible noise — background noise — that distracted me. I turned to look at Sebastian. He was holding Carolyn Little’s arm, talking to her, and she was looking at the sand.

I had been thinking about Joseph all day, long before we got to New Hampshire. I had started to think of him when Nick touched my shoulder. Joseph used to do that when I was falling asleep and he still wanted my attention. I could not stay awake long when I went to bed, but once he began his storytelling he would be energized. If I wouldn’t listen to him, he at least wanted me to be awake. “Look at the stars tonight,” he’d say, or he’d show me, in winter, sites for the snow fort we could build in the morning. More than once I fell asleep in the middle of one of his stories, and he nudged me awake.

I don’t know if it took him a long while to die, or if he died suddenly. I don’t know the name of the place he died in, or if it had a name. Although there were many random facts in the letter, the questions I really wanted answered were not answered.

I went back to the house ahead of the others, leaving Sebastian and Nick sitting on the dock after Carolyn Little went home. As I had expected, my mother was there, in the kitchen, drinking coffee. She was hanging her head and I expected her — as she had done in the past — to make me feel worse by apologizing for having made a scene. She did not say anything for a minute, and then she said, “You know what I hope? I hope that when he was over there he spent all his money on dope and laid every whore in Saigon.”

She looked up. It was a challenging look, but she didn’t mean to challenge me. “I didn’t even have the courage to tell him, and you did. I heard you telling him, and I should have told him too—‘Go to Canada.’ ” She said “Canada” with the reverence a minister would use pronouncing the word “heaven.”

“At least I hope he went crazy over there and did whatever the hell he wanted.” This time she just looked at me sadly. We both knew he was not the kind to storm through Vietnam. More likely, he would sit and listen to the radio. When songs by any of the people on the list his friend sent us came on the radio, my day was ruined. All the lyrics took on horrible, ironic meanings.

“And your father’s great grief — all I get are ‘remember when’ letters from Mexico. They weren’t even close. Joseph and I weren’t very close either. You two were.” She looked up again, no real expression on her face, just a person stating facts. “It was mean of me to yell at Sebastian,” she said.

“Don’t stay in here sulking,” I said.

We sat there for a while, and then she pushed the coffee cup away and went out. I imagine she went to the dock. I got up and went to the bookcase and took down the cookbook. The letter from Vietnam was still in it. I already knew it by heart, so I just looked to reassure myself that the letter was where I had put it. It was strange that she had never asked where the letter was. Strange, too, that she cursed when she got a letter from my father (most of the letters, inevitably, maudlin with memories of Joseph) but kept all of them in a basket on her dresser.

When I went outside, Nick and Sebastian were gone, and she was sitting on the dock where I had left them. She was sitting there on the dock just where Joseph and I had sat after our argument about his going to Canada. As we sat there, I was already sure that if he went, he would be killed. In the kitchen, he had argued against going to Canada because it was dishonorable. On the dock, I began to understand the real reason: it wasn’t a matter of principle, but simply that he thought he wouldn’t die; he thought he was indestructible. He really thought that he would always be in control, that he would always be the storyteller. I don’t think I said to him in so many words that I knew he was going to die, or that he actually said he knew he was going to live, but that’s what our conversation was about. He didn’t understand how bad, and how pointless, things were in Vietnam. No matter what I said, his attention didn’t focus on it, and I couldn’t make him understand.

I went out to the dock, where my mother was, and crouched there. A bird flew overhead. There was a nice mossy smell the breeze was blowing in off the water.

“Know where Nick and Sebastian went?” I said.

“Look at his poor boat,” she said.

I looked down. The water was slopping against it, the breeze blowing ripples of water toward shore. The water made a slapping sound: put-put.

“I just can’t snap out of it,” she said.

I leaned over and kissed her cheek. Nick did that most mornings when it was time for me to wake up. Joseph had nudged me awake with his hand, squeezed my shoulder in the dark. It was nicer than any kiss.

• • •

I went to bed early and slept for a little while, then woke up. I put on an old lacy robe that belonged to my mother or grandmother, and went out of the room. The clock in the kitchen said one-thirty. Everyone had gone to bed. Going back to the bedroom, I saw the small lamp on and detoured to the living room. Sebastian hadn’t gone home. He was stretched on the sofa, but not sleeping. There was a bottle and a glass on the table. “Howdy,” he said quietly. My mother was asleep — or at least she was in her room in the dark. Her bedroom opened onto the living room. The door was cracked open a few inches. I waved to Sebastian and went back to my room. I looked at all the books that I couldn’t remember having read, and at the pictures I no longer found attractive: a Picasso poster of a hand holding flowers, a drawing of lobstermen casting their nets, done by a boy who had had a crush on me in high school.

Joseph would have interrupted the silence with a story. I went out of the room and passed by Sebastian in the living room without looking in, and climbed the stairs to the attic.

It smelled the way it always smelled. The two beds were still there. When I moved out, they left that bed in place. Nick was sleeping in the far bed. Without knowing who had slept where, he had chosen Joseph’s bed. Nick had slept upstairs the other time he came to the house, but that time I hadn’t gone upstairs to see where he slept. In fact, I hadn’t been above the first floor in a long time. With the exposed beams and the low, triangle-shaped window, it still looked snug, like some room in a storybook.

“What are you doing here?” Nick whispered.

I went over to his bed. The room seemed to exist in a time warp; I could imagine stepping on one of Joseph’s socks.

“She’ll hear you,” Nick said. He reached out his hand from under the covers. He had been asleep.

I sat there and held his hand. Then I lay on the bed. Finally, I got under the covers.

“We shouldn’t upset her any more today,” he said.

It was a rational, and even a nice thing to say, and I knew that I was wrong to hate him for saying it. He lay still in the bed and I lay beside him. My eyes were getting accustomed to the dark. I was looking around the room and thinking of how Joseph’s shadow tiptoed to me, the pitch of his whispery child’s voice. As I got older, if I told people about my brother, the stories would always be about my brother as a child — I got older, but Joseph was still frozen in childhood.

“What?” Nick said sleepily.

I had moved and thrown my arm over him, inadvertently. I wanted to say: Nick — my whole life just rushed by.

Nick fumbled for my hand and we held hands again. His hand was so warm. I could see in the dark now: his eyes closed, his mouth like the mouth of a Botticelli angel.

“There’s a demon in the corner.” I pointed. (Starlight on two metal coat hooks.)

He mumbled again: “What?”

He was trying to be kind, trying to stay awake. I looked at the coat hooks. They did look like eyes glaring, and I had scared myself a little by calling them demons.

“A demon,” I said again, and something in my voice told Nick he had to rouse himself, that the talk about demons was flippy.

“Okay,” he said, struggling up, half sighing the second “Okay.”

He smoothed my hair from my face and, kindly, kissed my neck, moved his hand up my ribs. It was not what I wanted at all, but I closed my eyes, not knowing now what to say.