Part 19 (1/2)

”It'll get better,” I said.

He surveyed the room with revulsion and shook his head. ”You know, last night I actually thought the red paint on the walls was kind of s.e.xy.”

”If slaughterhouses turn you on.”

”Christ,” he said. ”We've got to sleep here tonight.”

I looked at the floor, which was still streaked with dirt after three rounds with the mop we'd bought that afternoon, and shuddered. The artist-girl had taken the futon with her. She'd taken our fifty dollars, too.

By the time we had taken care of the most obvious mess, it was after midnight. Jack managed to convince the man behind the counter at the corner store to reopen the deli counter and make us some sandwiches, which seemed, in my exhausted state, a miracle on a par with the loaves and the fishes.

On our way back into the building, we pa.s.sed a young, black-haired man with olive skin coming out. We'd seen him earlier that day, on one of our many paper-towel-buying trips. He had stopped in the hall to watch us go by, staring frankly at us out of dark curious eyes. He hadn't spoken to us and we hadn't spoken to him, but now he lifted his chin in a sort of half nod.

Jack, noncommittal, said, ”Hey.” I said nothing.

Upstairs, we spread the sandwiches out on the floor. Jack only made it through half of his before he was up on his feet, pacing.

Finally he put on a clean s.h.i.+rt. ”I'm going out.”

”Where?” I asked, a bit incredulously, through a mouthful of ham and cheese. It wasn't so much that I thought there was nowhere to go, in this huge city; but with so many places to go, where were you supposed to begin?

”For a walk. I'll be right back,” he said and left.

Along with the sandwiches, Jack had bought an incomplete Sunday paper at half price. I spread it out in a thin mat on the grungy floor and covered the mat with the one blanket that we owned. Then I lay down. Our clothes were in plastic shopping bags, piled in the corner. Staring at them, I had a mental image of the artist-girl getting ready for work and tearing through piles of clothing. I had thought it was bohemian eccentricity. I'd been wrong. No closets.

It took me an hour of puttering around the apartment to realize that Jack wasn't going to be right back, a conclusion I accepted with more calm than I would have thought possible a year before. He had only one s.h.i.+rt and not very much money, so I knew he'd be back eventually. There was nothing in the apartment that I hadn't already tried to clean that day, so I folded back the blanket and read the newspaper. In the science section, I found a headline that read, ”Dying star gives s.p.a.ce telescope a chance to s.h.i.+ne.” The article said, ”A recent supernova, discovered at the Palomar Observatory in southern California, is expected to provide scientists with some of the most detailed photographs ever taken of the death of a star.” And, buried deep in the article: ”The supernova is not expected to pose any danger to Earth. 'Earth is in constant danger from interstellar objects and events-like asteroids and supernovas and solar flares-but the chance of a catastrophic event actually occurring during the span of human life on earth is infini-tesimally small,' said one leading scientist. 'In interstellar time, it would be like a blip within a blip.' ”

I turned the page.

By the third hour I was hungry again. I ate the other half of Jack's sandwich, but it didn't help for long. I had Jack's bankroll, so there was really nothing to stop me from walking down to the corner store and buying a loaf of bread or a can of soup. Considering this fully, with all of its various ramifications, took another half-hour or so. Once I even put my sandals on and stood up to leave, but I kicked them off at the door. I didn't have keys, I told myself, which would mean leaving the apartment unlocked, which couldn't be a very good idea. Besides, just because the outside door had been propped open all day didn't mean it would stay that way all night. What if I went to the store and in the meantime somebody came along and closed the door? Better to stay and wait. Jack would be home soon, I told myself. By morning, anyway.

Sometime near dawn, the scratchy wool blanket pushed to the side and the newspaper thoroughly perused, I fell into a sort of half-sleep and dreamed that I was reading the comics in color but all of the colors were wrong and I couldn't figure out what went where. The sounds of the street outside wove in and out of the dream like the artist-girl's Christmas lights in the barred window. Someone was singing, in Greek, on the sidewalk, and the dream s.h.i.+fted. Raeburn was reading Euclid aloud, which he had done a lot that summer when I was six. Then he made toast for me, which, as far as I could remember, was something that he had never done.

September came and went in a hot, disoriented blur. The headlines at the newsstands screamed BAKED APPLE! and HOT HOT HOT! Even now I can only remember flashes of that month, like a slide show, and I can see the images but it's hard for me to believe that I was actually there, acting and being and doing. And time must have pa.s.sed, because one day I reached up to touch my collarbone and discovered that its edge stood out more than I remembered, as if I'd spent that month eroding.

One afternoon, when the humidity was obscene and being in New York was like being in a diseased lung, we spent two hours in the rainforest enclosure at the Central Park Zoo, where the automatic misters made the air dewy and cool. The park, with its wide green lawns and tree-lined avenues, was the only part of the city that didn't make me feel desperate and alone. When we emerged, Jack's s.h.i.+rt was clinging to his shoulders and my hair was curling and damp at the ends. In no particular rush, we made our way slowly across Central Park South, which was choked with people going home from work and movies and sightseeing. Jack took my hand so we wouldn't be separated. I felt distinct from the rest of the world, as though I'd come from another time. I could see and hear and feel every detail with startling clarity: the heat in the air, the cool clamminess of the ersatz rainforest still clinging to our clothes, the way the thick silver chain that Jack wore lay against his throat, the sun going down, the musicians and street performers, the carriage drivers sweating in top hats, telling me that I should make my fella take me for a ride through the park, love. Everything fell into place like cards in a shuffled deck, making perfect and profound sense.

Most of the time, of course, nothing made sense at all. As the heat spell broke but our money continued to melt away, Jack grew petulant and unpredictable. He told me a thousand times and occasionally in tears that our lives weren't the way he'd planned them, but I still found myself watching him too carefully and working too hard to predict his reactions. If I'd stopped to think about it, I would have realized that all of that work was more than a little like living with Raeburn again, except this time I didn't have my brother to catch me when I fell down on the job. But I didn't stop to think about it. Sometimes he said that coming to get me was the best thing he'd ever done and sometimes he said it was the worst. I was never afraid of him the way I was of Raeburn. He was just angry, and I was just in the way.

One night, when our bankroll had shrunk to a couple of crumpled bills at the bottom of a coffee can, Jack brought home a bottle of cheap rotgut whiskey. He drank his straight; I mixed mine with watery lemonade from a plastic jug. After I'd had two drinks and Jack had slugged most of the rest straight from the bottle, he watched as I took a used coffee stirrer and mixed round three in a plastic cup.

”How the h.e.l.l can you drink that?” he asked.

”There's pretty much nothing I can do to it that will make it taste any worse than it does on its own.” I wasn't really complaining, but Jack was drunk, and snide.

”Sorry,” he said. ”Sorry we can't afford Chivas this week, prima donna.”

”Relax. We'll drink Chivas next week.”

”How magnanimous of you, princess.” He took the bottle back from me.

I stared at him. In my plastic cup, the yellow liquid swirled and sloshed. ”You're the one who wanted to come here,” I said.

”Not like I had a whole h.e.l.l of a lot of options, having to drag you around with me, did I? In fact”-his voice grew fake-bright-”I seem to remember that it wasn't until I went and got you that my problems started.”

Sure, shacking up with Becka was the high life, I wanted to say. Instead I said, ”Come on, Jack,” and threw the stirrer out the open window.

Without speaking, he stood up and went to the sink. The apartment was stifling and hot. He turned on the water, leaned over, and splashed handful after handful on the back of his neck. Outside, there were car horns honking and people shouting.

I rose as quietly as I could and went to him. But when I tried to touch his shoulder he wheeled around and slapped my hand away, hard.

”Say it, little sister. f.u.c.king say it.” He was livid. ”I came along and ruined your life, didn't I? You were happy as a little princess with Daddy on the Hill and I waltzed in and now you're living in squalor. And that's all my fault, isn't it?” Water stood out in beads on his skin. He pushed past me and grabbed the whiskey bottle again.

”Prima donna,” he muttered. He tipped the bottle to his lips, found it empty, and hurled it against the wall. It didn't break. ”f.u.c.king prima donna.”

My hands clenched into fists. ”Okay,” I said, ”you ruined my life. But all you ever talk about is how great life was when you were on your own-how easy and fun it all was, how many girls you had-so I guess I ruined your life, too, didn't I? You ruined mine, I ruined yours, and it's all my fault. Except for the fact that it wasn't me that moved in with Becka Capriola, and it wasn't me who got us kicked out.”

”You didn't help.”

”I didn't beat her up, either,” I said, and he hit me.

It was only a slap across the face. It stung but it wasn't even hard enough to unbalance me. Wildly, I thought, is this real? Did that happen? Is this real?

Jack was staring at the hot place on the side of my face. Suddenly he sprang back as if he were the one who'd been slapped. ”Oh, sure. I'm the violent son of a b.i.t.c.h who beats up his poor little sister. Everything that's wrong with the world is my fault.” Veins stood out in cords on his wrists; he didn't seem to see me anymore. His eyes were alive with rage. I realized that Jack was in a different world now. Whatever was wrong with him, I had to get out of his way until it was over, so I ran.

I had never needed to run from my brother before. For two hours I walked aimlessly past streetlights and police cars and panhandlers, past arguing couples and kissing couples. I saw them, registered them as obstacles, and avoided them, but my mind was caught on things like the keys I'd left behind, and why we had only one set, and why I hadn't had my own set made. Towels. Why didn't we have more than one towel? We should have more towels, and sheets, too. Even though we didn't have a bed yet. We would someday, and we'd need sheets. We had separate toothbrushes, but only one pillow. We weren't prepared for this at all. Of course, we hadn't exactly planned anything. Why hadn't we planned anything?

I turned a corner and found myself facing a broad highway. Across it, the lights of New Jersey sparkled in the Hudson River. I'd walked all the way across the island. I stared at the dark water for a long time. Then I turned my back on it and kept walking.

A week later Jack and I were standing under an awning at the corner of Thirty-fifth Street and Park Avenue while soft, heavy drops of rain fell onto the sidewalk. Jack had decided that we were going to be criminals.

He was holding a crisp new fifty-dollar bill against the wall of the nearest building. The fifty, along with the $7.61 in my pocket, was all the money we had in the world. We were in trouble.

”O ye of little faith,” he said and showed me the bill, on which he'd written, ”Happy Birthday Josie!!! from your Loving Aunt Becka,” in a looping feminine script.

”Very funny,” I said. ”This isn't going to work.”

”You have a better idea?” I didn't and we both knew it. He put the bill in his pocket and told me to follow him. ”We've got to keep close, but not look like we're together.”

I did as he said, following him into a well-lit coffee shop down the street. The shop was packed with people on their lunch breaks. Jack went ahead of me and bought a sandwich, which had to be made up behind the counter. I took my time at the refrigerator case next to the register, picking up cartons of yogurt and reading the nutrition information until his sandwich was wrapped and on the counter in front of him. Then I grabbed a carton at random and joined the line, two or three customers behind him.

The girl at the counter was busy and frazzled. Jack used the marked fifty to pay for his sandwich, and then walked out of the store without looking at me, heading toward the river and the park where we'd agreed to meet. I would pay for my purchases with the five I had in my pocket, and then tell the clerk that I'd given her the fifty with the phony birthday message on it. The bill would be in her drawer; she'd have no reason not to believe in my Loving Aunt Becka, so she'd give me change for the fifty and I'd leave more than forty-five dollars ahead.

Jack had come up with the idea. I thought it was absurd. Worse than absurd: it was reckless and doomed to fail, and it reeked of desperation. But that stench had been too strong lately, so Jack's plan had to work. And because I was younger, and a girl, and more innocent-seeming, I had to make it work.

The cas.h.i.+er took the five from my shaking hand and made change without ever really looking at me. I was grateful for that.

”Next,” she said.

I stared into my hand for a second, as Jack had told me to, and then smiled sheepishly and said, ”Excuse me,” thinking, this is insane, this isn't going to work, why am I the one who has to do this?