On the last day of his life, the quiet man was drinking in his neighborhood bar on an ordinary day like all the others. He had slipped out of the clanging world of the street into the dark, quiet room to rest from what had become of his life. But on this day, the sounds of the street followed him, abruptly filling the bar as the big man pushed his way in, shoving himself and his angry words into the quiet man’s temporary and melancholy peace.
Some people say the big man’s hollering caused the quiet man to lose balance. Perhaps he stood, but stumbled, dizzy from too many drinks and too little sleep. Others say he was hit and knocked off his feet by the big man, that he fell and hit his head on the edge of the bar. The big man turned away and left the bar as the quiet man lay on the floor, his blood running into the wood under his head. He died a day later. The police say it was murder.
The big man is my brother, now behind a bulletproof glass in prison. I face him. His teeth have rotted, and his hair is matted, thick, and dark. Like everything about him, it is excessive and unruly. I imagine looking into a mirror and seeing my teeth tipping over and sliding out of my gums, my skin becoming blotchy as I grow taller and thicker. I reach down to pick up the phone and see him carefully watching me, his body tightly attentive. Like a lover.
Once, a lifetime ago, I taught my brother to dance behind the oil heater, small windows outside at ground level near the ceiling, allowing only narrow columns of diagonal light to pierce the dimness of the basement. In the late afternoon, after we had both returned from school; I was in ninth grade, and he was in seventh. We moved together. His short hair brushed my shoulder, and I counted reassuringly as we moved across the red linoleum,
“One and two and three… that’s right. Don’t look down. You’ve got it. Once more. One and….”
I speak. “Hello, Mal.”
He looks down at me. His face is feral, his massive body carelessly wrapped in ill-fitting clothes. He leans towards me, the glass between us, holds my eyes, and begins to speak.
“No, Mommy she didn’t throw her eggs down the garbage disposal. I saw her eat them all up,” said quickly.
“And you better not call my sister a long drink of water or you’ll get a bloody nose just like I gave Joey,” said breathlessly, Joey still at his feet.
“Ya gotta help me, sis. Just this once more, sis. I gotta get out of this muthafuckin place. I gotta get a good fuckin lawyer. I’m gonna go nuts in here. Sis?”
He looks at me imploringly.
“You’re my blood sis. I’m your bro. Remember?”
His voice deepens, and there is an ominous shift in his tone. My eyes are caught in his, and I wish for a reason to turn away, to shift my gaze, but I am rooted before my brother.
I hear Joey’s crying, snuffling into the first baseman’s impassive feet. I hear the music of Nat King Cole singing Nature Boy as we majestically tour the basement, Mal’s face shining with excitement up into mine.
He speaks into the phone.
“Sis. Didja hear me, sis? What the fuck’s going on? Say some fucking thing.”
I stare up into his face. My pulse replaced the sound of his voice in my ears, and I didn’t trust myself enough to open my mouth. Not wanting to hear what words will push themselves through my throat, into the air, and the glass between us.
My hand presses his waist firmly.
“No. This is how you put your hand on a girl. I’ll do it this time and you next.”
I place his hand on my right shoulder, his dirty, bitten nails resting on my emerald green cardigan. I look down at his ankle-high white basketball sneakers and my brown and white saddle shoes as we count the box steps together.
“What’s happening? Didja hear what the fuck I said just now? You high for Christ’s sake?”
I hear Mommy opening the door at the top of the cellar steps, calling down. “Come on, you kids. Daddy’s home. Come on up now.”
We hastily separate, I take the needle off Nat King Cole’s mouth, and together we climb the stairs that take us from one another.
I hold the phone and hear his voice,
“Do you have Prince Albert in a can? You do? Well, let him out then.” Laughing. Throats full of laughter then.
I asked my brother what happened. Thinking about the man who has not been mentioned. The man who is dead.
“Nothing happened. I never even touched him. It was an accident. The man was an old drunk. The cops made it all up. The bar owner is afraid for his insurance. You have to get me a lawyer. You have to front my bail. I got to get out of here. You have to help me. Just this once more. This is the last time. I swear. At least give me some money for cigarettes.”
Still, my brother says nothing about the man who is now dead. I reply in a clipped and flat monotone.
“I can’t help you get out onto the street. Not now. No money. Not this time,”
His face slowly changes from disbelief to hatred, then closes. He screams into the phone, and I watch his lips silently move as my hand replaces the receiver into its cradle. I turn away from the big man calling to me behind the bulletproof glass. I turn away from my brother and move quickly down the long pale green hallway, feeling his eyes on me, moving as quickly as I dare towards the door ahead, away.
Driving through the congested streets, I remember the summers when my brother and I were children together, when we swam alongside one another out to the raft at the public beach, pulling ourselves up on its slippery surface to lay side by side in peaceful contentment. We never talked; we just lay on our backs, looking up at the sky and drifting into our own thoughts, mine a jumble of imagined shapes, listening to the wind riding the water’s surface, knowing he was beside me, feeling safe.
Then one of us abruptly leaped to our feet and announced,
“I’ll race you back,” then slicing into the water just a breath ahead of the other and starting for shore. I never looked to see where Mal was in the water as we swam alongside one another. Just knowing he was beside me was enough.
We exploded out of the water laughing and wrapped ourselves in the carefully laundered beach towels spread on the sand. Walking slowly to our bicycles leaning against the driftwood fence, we began the ride home. In silence, we prepared to re-enter the house, remember to wash the sand off our feet outside, hang up our towels carefully, take a shower in our separate bathrooms to wash off the salt water, return the bath mat to its proper place, and come back downstairs when we were done.
We didn’t look at one another very much in the house, moving through the shadowed hallways like swimming fish, gliding past one another, acutely aware of one another’s presence.
I pull the car over to the shoulder and weep, my brother’s presence cradled in my throat where memory and speech pool.
Five years later, Mal was released from jail, and I went to the gritty bus depot at dawn to meet what had become a foul-smelling six-and-a-half-foot collection of sour rags. Unfolding his massive body from the cramped seat, my brother climbed down the narrow steps. He had enough money for the first day and a half to buy prepackaged ham and cheese sandwiches as the bus rolled across the country. There were no rest stops to shower or even time to wash his big body. He barely slept and was sorry when he did, for his dreams catapulted him into jarring wakefulness. Several of his teeth were missing, his eyes were red from sleeplessness, his voice raw from a continuous stream of cigarettes. Behind him were his wife, his daughter, his youth, and his dreams.
“Mal,” I whispered when he moved towards me. “I’m glad to see you.” “Really, sis?” his tentative response.
The bus unloaded, and a Hoover vacuum carton tied with string was shoved out of the hold onto the sidewalk.
“That’s mine,” my brother said. “That’s my shit.” He picked it up and, with surprising gentleness, placed it into the trunk of my car.
I began to chatter then, awkward and uncertain.
“The car is just over here. I thought we could go and get something to eat first,” sure that his jail money hadn’t allowed him to buy enough food on the long trip across the country. A country he had crossed to be close to his sis.
“Cool,” he murmured, watching me closely.
We drove to a 24-hour diner, where he ordered a double portion of steak and eggs. Lowering his head, he ate steadily and wordlessly, then leaned back, lit a cigarette, and looked straight at me.
“How you doing sis?”
“I’m good, Mal,” uncertain about what parts of my life I could offer him. How much he would understand.
“That’s cool,” he said, leaning back in his chair and looking at me with a bemused stare. “That’s cool.”
He watched me for a while as he smoked his cigarette down, more comfortable than I with long silences.
“Let’s go to a place where I can wash my shit. Everything is funky. I need to have clean threads before I go over to Synanon.”
I rose, relieved that he had decided to enter Synanon’s program, and drove us to the nearest laundromat. Mal carried in the Hoover box and placed it in front of a bank of washing machines.
Untying the string, I opened the box. I began tossing clothes into the machines, white and colored, moving quickly to avoid the stench of unwashed clothes and my unwashed baby brother. At the bottom of the box, my hand brushed a velvet bag.
“That’s my tallit, my brother said. Keep a hold of that for me, sis. I’ve kept it with me all these years and through all this shit.”
Busying myself with finding quarters for the machine, I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see the tears that blurred my vision.
“Of course I will, Mal. Don’t worry. I’ll keep it for you.”
But I didn’t. Somehow it was lost, misplaced in a move, perhaps caught in the back of a drawer or trapped in an old carton. I didn’t keep my promise to my brother.
Within six months, Mal abruptly left Synanon, returning to the familiar streets. After a silence of several weeks, he arrived half drunk, banging on my front door. Unable to turn him away, I swung the door open and preceded him down the narrow hallway into my living room. His glittering eyes swept the pictures on the walls, the objects on the tables, and in the cabinets. He frightened me, and after an aimless and blurry conversation, I stood to indicate our visit was over. Mal stretched out his long legs in front of him, locked his fingers behind his head, and grinned at me.
“I’m not going anywhere, sis. I got evicted today and got no fucking where to go. You’re not gonna turn your bro out on the street, are you sis?”
Heart pounding, I said,
“Mal, you can’t stay here. I live here with Barbara. I can’t make a decision like that without talking to her,” my mind racing to find a way to get him out of my house.
He looked at me sharply,
“You gonna call the police on me too, sis? You gonna put your bro out?”
I remained standing and said, “Come on, Mal. I can’t let you stay here. Here’s some money for a place tonight, and I’ll meet you tomorrow to help you figure out what to do,” reaching for three twenties, hoping it would be enough to assuage him.
He rose heavily and said, “Well, shit. If I can’t crash with my sis, then fuck it.”
He began to weave slowly down the narrow hall, bumping into the walls, as I followed behind his broad, slumped back. His bulk and his breath, redolent of cheap wine, filled the hallway.
Opening the front door, I said,
“Let’s meet for breakfast in the morning, Mal, and we’ll figure something out together. OK?”
“Sure, sis, sure,” he murmured, descending the stairs and staggering up the street.
Relievedly closing the door behind him, I turned quickly and went into the kitchen to pour myself a crystal goblet of expensive wine.
Three months later, Mal called from a small bedroom community south of San Francisco. He spoke quickly, eagerly, slurring his rapid-fire words.
“Hey, sis. This is Mal. I’m in Belmont now with a really fine chick, and we’ve got a little crib and wheels. Things are going good.”
“That’s great, Mal, “I replied, waiting for what would come next.
“I gotta talk to you, sis. Something’s come up, and I want to run it by you.”
He fell silent then, and I let the pause lengthen before I spoke,
“Mal, I want you to understand I can’t and won’t lend or give you any money, so if it’s about money, forget it. I’d like to see you, but I need to be clear in front,” hearing the stiffness in my voice and the awkward schoolmarmish instructions.
“Yeah, sis, I hear you. I hear you. Let’s meet. Can you get down here? There’s a parking lot behind the McDonald’s just off the Belmont exit on the freeway. I’ll be in a 72 gray Impala waiting for you.”
I told him I’d come down to see him, knowing that a parking lot was not a crib, a car was not his new chick, understanding already his story didn’t hang together.
Driving into the large parking lot, I saw him at once, his massive body leaning against an old, rusted car, his eyes sweeping up and back across the concrete, looking for me. Looking for his sis.
I pulled up alongside his car and got out.
“Hi, Mal.”
“Hey, sis,” he began, and I saw at once that he was deliriously high his eyes swimming, face slack, movements jerky.
“Check out this car, sis. It’s my old lady’s. She’s really a beautiful chick. Look here,” he said, pointing to the back seat covered with stuffed animals and torn pillows. “This here’s our decorated car. Huh? Huh? Pretty cool, dont’cha think?”
I realized he and the woman who owned the car were sleeping in it. That the car was their crib.
“Yeah. Pretty cool, Mal,” I replied softly.
His words spilled over then, formless, urgent. He needed money, just a loan, not for long, it was a sure thing, he would get it right back to me, his words running into one another. I was motionless during several repetitions, standing beside my brother, who now lived in the back seat of an old, rusted car. He peered at me when he was done, waiting.
“No, Mal. I can’t give you any money. I have no money to give you.”
I was repelled by this foul-smelling homeless drunk and wanted to get away from all the conflicting responses confusing and frightening me. I lowered myself into my car and said,
“No Mal. Not this time. I’m sorry.”
He stared, bewildered and too high to organize a response as I backed the car up and drove away, watching him grow smaller in my rearview mirror, standing alongside someone else’s car in a parking lot in Belmont, California.
Now, my brother has been clean and sober for one year, and we are celebrating his triumph in a cafe in North Beach. His coffee is cold, and his perpetual Lucky Strike has burned down in the crowded ashtray. He speaks his newly learned language with a sense of wonder.
“It’s all there. If you just read Ecclesiastes and Proverbs, it’s all there. It’s a matter of living an ethical and moral life,” then ducking his massive head and smiling shyly, “Can you believe me talking this shit? I’m the only Hebe in a Catholic joint, ya know. It’s been an amazing year since I left the street. I keep telling them that Jesus was a Jew. A revolutionary rabbi, in fact. Ya know they smoked some weed then, too, but they just didn’t put it in the book. He’d turn over in his grave if he saw they made a religion out of his shit.”
My brother’s hair is neatly trimmed now, and his alert eyes are covered with solemn square glasses that give his leonine head an owlish look. Only his teeth remain as stubby memories of where he has been.
“My buddy in the house has this lady. He’s an alky too, and they rent a room on Sundays to lay out together, and when I met her friend, they said they would rent a room for us too.” he pauses, flushing. “We got together, and she was sober, and I was sober, and well…we hung out together all day.” He exhales a deep breath. “It’s the first time I was ever with a woman sober. Can you dig that? The first time.”
Musingly, almost to himself, nearly forgetting my presence across the table in the cafeteria, he continues.
“Ya know, sometimes I wonder who that cat was running around in my body doing that shit? Can you believe some of the shit I did?”
Then, more quietly, remembering the 12 steps of his apprenticeship,
“I have to compare myself to myself. That’s all. No more comparing myself to everyone who has made more and can do more. Just me with me. Here. Let me getcha some more coffee.”
He rose, strode forcefully back to the cash register, and refilled our cups from the container beside it.
“I have to let this shit go,” he said, returning to the too-small chair and settling upon it. “There’s nothing more for me there in my past. I have to live with myself. I’m forty years old, and it’s about time now. I spoke with Dad last week, and he asked me to call Ma. Shit, I told him that I don’t have a relationship with her. I never did. She loves to tell people how much I hate her. Well, maybe I don’t hate her anymore, but I sure have nothing to say to her now. Do you remember the time before I went to prison when I went to see them in Boston?” He pauses while I nod.
“I stood outside the house in the fucking snow with a bunch of flowers in my hand, and she called the cops. She had taken out a restraining order on me. I don’t know what she thought I was gonna do, chrissakes, but she took out a fucking restraining order. Even the cops were embarrassed when they drove up.”
“Where you been, Mal?” they asked me.
When I told them I had been away for all those years, and they looked and saw the faces of these two old scared people peeping through the window at us, they shrugged and said,
“Well, jeez, come on then, Mal. We’ll drop you off at the bus or a cab or something. Come on, boy.”
My brother and I sat quietly, each lost in our own thoughts. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out some yellowed clippings.
“I want to show you some articles, sis. Look at this shit.”
I lean forward as he offers me the news clipping and picture of the tired and dusty face of an Irish firefighter who has just rescued a small girl seen tucked into the folds of his voluminous rubberized coat. Her eyes are peeping out, and his are steady and calm as he appears to be signaling for help.
“Look at this magoo’s face. That’s what a father is supposed to look like.” he nearly sighs the words. “Look at that kid tucked in there, all snug and safe. Isn’t that shit something?”
Not waiting for an answer, he pushes the picture at me. “I brought this for you to keep, but don’t lose it. Hold onto it, hear? It’s important.”
Settling back into the chair, he reaches for the next clipping.
“I brought this for you to dig. Actually, I don’t know why I did, but I thought you would find it interesting. Look at this shit, sis. A rabbi. Can you dig that? A girl rabbi. Can you imagine me bringing a girl rabbi home to meet the folks?” He exhales a bitter laugh, then sighs, “They would probably find something wrong with her too.”
When my brother had been mostly clean and sober for over a decade, he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He wrote our mother to tell her.
Dear Ma,
I have been diagnosed with cancer and am given about five or six months to live. My left lung collapsed, and I had a malignant tumor removed from my right lymph node under the armpit. I’ve been receiving radiation and chemotherapy, and I’m home now. I have a nice place, even though it’s been a struggle to get it going. Last year, I had a hip replacement in April, and then I had to deal with wheelchairs—crutches—and canes—and finally, I got back to work in August.
I have oxygen at the house and portable tanks so I can go out. An oncology nurse visits me at the house, and the care I’m getting is really good. So is my attitude. I’ve accepted my fate and am not weeping. I’d like you to be with me until I go. I want to go to the grave knowing I had a loyal mother who was at my side.
All my love,
Mal.
P.S. I just remembered that Sandy’s birthday is tomorrow. When you talk to her, wish her a happy one.
It was also the time of my birthday when Mal was released from prison and traveled on a bus for three days to be near his sis. I got him into Synanon and promised I’d hold onto his tallit. Again, his life gnarls around mine. When I understood my baby brother would die within months, I flew across the country to be with him, an immediate choice, fueled by remorse and longing.
Mother prepares me by telling me she has seen him and that Mal doesn’t look like himself. All my life, even when I had no contact with my brother, decades in which he drifted and stumbled across his life, I always saw in his square lantern-jawed face, thick black hair, my own face.
“He is bald now from the chemo and weighs next to nothing,” Mother warns me.
My brother is six foot six inches tall and has lost nearly one hundred pounds during his years of drink, drugs, and now, of cancer.
“He has no teeth,” she finishes, leaning back heavily in her chair. “No teeth at all.”
I drive across town to a three-story house with peeling shingles on a broken, littered street and climb the steep stairs to his attic apartment. After the first knock, he swings the door open. He must have been watching for me. He must have been looking out the window looking for his sis. We greet each other with a careful hug, and he ceremoniously ushers me through the cramped living room to a stained sofa upon which we settle.
“Look, sis, check out this pad. My own full bath and bedroom, full kitchen and living room.”
My eyes take it all in at a glance, the twenty feet, all that was needed to contain the four rooms that make up his home. He asks about my daughters, talks about his own life, and asks me some desultory questions but cannot focus on my response. He is restless even while sitting down. I remember when Mal was punished in elementary school and was not permitted to play during recess because he couldn’t sit still during class. I remember Mal as a young man constantly pacing, unable ever to come to rest. Now he moves, sits up, stands, walks into the kitchen, merely ten feet away, then exhausted, sits down again. His is a restlessness dying down.
I return the next day to find my brother lying on his narrow bed, thin pillows bunched behind his head in an attempt at comfort. There is static on the television. Waiting for cable, he tells me. A cheap clock radio plays classical music beside him, and political magazines are piled beside the bed. A large brown paper bag holds used Kleenex and his steady stream of cigarette ashes. Across everything is the long cord of the oxygen mask, poised, ready for him to place it onto his nose to breathe. A yellow pad filled with scrawls of errands, activities, and medications is on the cluttered floor beside his bed. My name is written with an exclamation point next to it. Sandy! coming today. Sandy! sandwiched between the ordinary, unpunctuated tasks of maintaining a dying life.
My brother has egg salad, a fresh loaf of bread, and a slice of black forest cake painstakingly prepared and arranged. We sit at his kitchen table as he watches me eat, alternately smoking and breathing the oxygen from the portable tank.
After an hour, when I suggested that he seemed tired, Mal sighed in agreement and offered to walk me downstairs. As we emerge into the sun’s glare, I see his once-thick black hair in patchy tufts, his skin has a yellow pallor, and his tee shirt outlines a nearly concave chest. His shoulders are hunched, and his mouth is trapped in a permanent sucking shape.
“I love you, Mal, “unexpected words spilling from my throat.
“I love you too, sis,” he whispers, head averted.
He waved goodbye as I drove off, tears already forming in my throat, my brother behind me, trapped in his exhausted body, in an airless attic room, without a fan, without a breeze, without television, without radio, trapped in an accumulation of mistakes.
As I prepare to leave after what has become our daily visits, Mal asks, “Do you enjoy coming to see me, sis?”
“Of course, I do, Mal. That’s why I came to Boston. To be with you.”
At first, I answer unthinkingly. But only when I understand the urgency of his question, do I respond with more care and more truth.
“Yes, Mal. I am grateful that we have this time together. Remember when you punched out Ritchie Wrightman for calling me a long drink of water? And we raced out to the raft at the Cape?”
Careful only to retrieve the good memories, the ones where Sandy and Mal lived together in a childhood of promise. Sometimes, he tried to take me by surprise.
“When are you going back to California, sis?” he asked.
“I’m not going back, Mal. I’m staying right here with you. I promise.”
“You’re sure? Cause you know I’m really doing OK. I could have a couple more months.”
Both of us know that isn’t possible, so I answer,
“I’m here, Mal. For however long we can be together, I’m here.”
The following week, returning from a hospital visit, Mal was too weak to climb the steep flight of stairs to his bed. Even with his diminished body, I knew I couldn’t bear his weight to get him up to his apartment.
“Ask Ray, Mal whispered, slumped weakly in the passenger seat of my rented car. ‘He’s the big cat downstairs. Ask him.”
At my tentative knock, Ray flings the door open, arms folded across his belly, black hair slicked over his ears, tattoos covering his arms and chest, teeth yellow with nicotine, breath reeking of stale beer.
“Can you help me get my brother upstairs,” I asked, hesitantly.
His cold blue eyes take me in, and then he makes a sound I take to be assent, and we walk together to the car. Ray swings open the car door, booming,
“Yo, Mal. This is your one chance to be a muthafuckin bride. Never thought things would come to that, didja pal?” throwing back his head in a roaring laugh. Then, leaning into the front seat, he scoops my brother up in his enormous arms. Carefully carrying him up the stairs, he delicately lowers Mal onto the hospital bed.
“I’d pronounce you man and something, buddy, but not sure just what.”
Then he laughs again, filling the room with his bulk, his sound, his breath, his vitality. Glancing briefly at me, he throws Mal a high-five and leaves.
I returned to my brother’s apartment several days later for a carefully tendered brunch invitation. Mal was eager and animated, reminding me of his prowess in the kitchen department, telling me how he handled the kitchen thing with every one of his sweeties.
Eggs were skillfully removed from the boiling water with a slotted spoon, and shells cracked expertly to discharge perfectly soft-boiled eggs. Fresh lox was arranged into a fan shape on a cracked blue dish. Purple onion slices were sprinkled beside the lox, and a scoop of chive cheese was placed carefully in the middle of the plate. Oat toast popped from the toaster, and Mal carried the overflowing plate across the room and placed it precisely in front of me. Leaning back, tired now, he lit a cigarette and watched me eat.
“I want you to remember this breakfast forever,” he urges, eyes soft and watchful.
Then, he rose from his chair and looked out onto the parking lot below. Standing silently for a few moments, he went into his bedroom. Emerging a few minutes later, his eyes red-rimmed and demeanor matter of fact, he said,
“So, whaddya think about this Camille Paglia? Some intelligent chick, huh?”
For the next hour, we talked of the radical right, the liberal left, the cast of characters of the news magazines and television shows that have been his only window on a world larger than the cab route and the gin mills. He watched me as we spoke, alert for any trace of condescension or disinterest. After an hour, he murmured that he was tired and hoped I wouldn’t mind if he didn’t walk me downstairs.
I put my arms around him, as we stood at the top of the stairs, my head just reaching his shoulder, remembering when his head reached mine on those long ago afternoons when I taught him how to do the box step to the music of Nat King Cole. After a moment, he patted my shoulder awkwardly, indicating the end of the embrace. I began to weep, unable to release him, and held on tightly until he very gently disengaged from me, looked directly into my face, and said,
“I crashed on the fucking runway before I even took off, sis. I never even got off the fucking runway,” then turned, closing the door between us.
I call my brother to tell him that it’s Friday, and I will light the Sabbath candles and pray for him. He is filled with morphine now, and his voice is thick and blurry.
“That’s good, sis,” he says. “How many candles?”
I realize he thinks it’s Hanukah, or maybe he doesn’t know the difference between Sabbath and Hanukah. “Two,” I reply.
“For you and me, right, sis?”
“Right, Mal. The candles are for you and me.”
The ground is dry and cracked, the air damp, gathering for a storm. It is still as I approach, not a bird or squirrel disturbs the silence. I spread my jacket under my hips and settle against the bark of the stumpy trunk jutting into the air, all that remains of the tree’s once-stately presence.
I close my eyes and wait. The sun moves across the sky, bathing me in warmth and leaving a sense of whiteness and light behind my lids. I doze off, and when I awaken, it is cool, and the sun is low in the sky. A shadow moves across my outstretched legs, and I look up.
“Hello, Mal,” I whisper.
“Hey, sis,” he replies, massive head nodding in acknowledgment.
I fill with questions and wait to see what is to be next. He lowers his body to the ground beside me and folds his hands in his lap. I glance over at him, and he is, again, beautiful. The ravages of his face and life are gone. The flat planes of his jaw and chin, the deep intelligence of his eyes, and the sensual lift to his upper lip before it had become a permanent snarl were, once again, my brother’s face.
I sit looking into the mirror of him, tentatively reaching my hand towards him. He looks down as my hand hovers over his long, tapered fingers, always bitten nails. I had finally stopped tearing at my skin. He never had.
“I’ve missed you since you died,” I venture.
He says nothing, and the silence makes me uncomfortable. I nervously smile at him, but he simply returns a steady gaze.
“I’m sorry I left you behind,” I whisper. “I’m sorry I knew and still left you. I’m sorry. I thought I had to trade my life for yours.”
I look up at him as he rises, towering over me and looking down. Scrambling to my feet, I face him. Abruptly, he puts his leg between mine, twisting my shoulders so that I fall. Lying on my back, I look up at him, his expression unchanged.
“Oh, Mal,” I wail, “are you still that mad at me?”
In response, he pokes me in the ribs with the toe of his shiny oxford-clad foot, and I begin to cry. Crumpled at his feet, I sob in disappointment, until I start to feel his presence above me, still unmoving. Wanting something from me.
Again, I rise to my feet, face him, and stand my ground. “I’m not leaving until you bless me,” I say. “I’m not leaving until you forgive me and give me your blessing.”
His hands reach for my shoulders and, with a sudden twist, turn me away from him, facing into the darkness. I swing around, determined to push him off center, to make him respond.
“Speak to me,” I plead.
His hands reach again for my shoulders, but this time, he gently rests one enormous hand on my left shoulder and raises the other. Suddenly understanding, I placed my hand on his waist and took his raised hand as we began to circle the bony dry field in a slow box step.
“One and two. That’s it, Mal. You’ve got it. Just relax and count to yourself. One and two and…..”
The light through the trees shines its diffuse rays upon us, and the velvety echoes of Nat King Cole sings of the strange and enchanted Nature Boy as my brother and I move together.