It’s this one who swings open the door for him, like a polite hotel doorman, letting in the full glare of day. After the semidarkness it’s ferociously bright, and my brother stands blinking as the image clears to sand and sea, a happy vacation postcard. Then he is falling, faster than the speed of light. This is how my brother enters the past.
I was on planes and in airports for fifteen hours, getting there. I saw the buildings after that, the sea, the stretch of runway; the plane itself was gone. All they got in the end was safe conduct. I didn’t want to identify the body, or see it at all. If you don’t see the body, it’s easier to believe nobody’s dead. But I did want to know whether they shot him before throwing him out, or after. I wanted it to be after, so he could have had that brief moment of escape, of sunlight, of pretended flight. I did not stay up at night, on that trip. I did not want to look at the stars. The body has its own defenses, its way of blocking things out. The government people said I was wonderful, by which they meant not a nuisance. I didn’t collapse or make a spectacle of myself; I spoke with reporters, signed the forms, made the decisions. There was a great deal I didn’t see or think about until much later.
What I thought about then was the space twin, the one who went on an interplanetary journey and returned in a week to find his brother ten years older.
Now I will get older, I thought. And he will not.
Chapter 69
“It doesn’t matter how old they are,” my mother said. “They’re always your children.” She tells me this as something I will need to know, later on.
My father became shorter and thinner, visibly shriveled; he sat for long periods, without doing anything. Unlike himself. This is what my mother told me, over the telephone, long distance. Sons should not die before their fathers. It’s not natural, it’s the wrong order. Because who will carry on?
My parents themselves died in the usual way, of the things elderly people die of, that I myself will die of sooner than I think: my father instantly, my mother a year later, of a slower and more painful disease. “It’s a good thing your father went the way he did,” she said. “He would have hated this.” She didn’t say anything about hating it herself.
The girls came for a week, early on, at the end of summer, when my mother was still in her house in the Soo and we could all pretend this was just another visit. I stayed on after them, digging weeds out of the garden, helping with the dishes because my mother had never got a dishwasher, doing the laundry downstairs in the automatic washer but hanging it out on the line because she thought driers used up too much electricity. Greasing the muffin tins. Impersonating a child.
My mother is tired, but restless. She won’t take naps in the afternoon, insists on walking to the corner store. “I can manage,” she says. She doesn’t want me to cook for her. “You’ll never find anything in this kitchen,” she says, meaning she thinks she’ll never find anything herself if I start messing around in there. I smuggle frozen TV dinners into the refrigerator and con her into eating them by saying they’ll go to waste if she doesn’t. Waste is still a bugaboo for her. I take her to a movie, checking it first for violence, sex and death, and to a Chinese restaurant. In the north, in the old days, the Chinese restaurants were the only ones that could be depended on. The others went in for white bread and gravy mix sandwiches, lukewarm baked beans, pies made from cardboard and glue.
She is on painkillers, then stronger painkillers. She lies down more. “I’m glad I don’t have to have an operation, in a hospital,” she says. “The only time I was ever in a hospital was with you kids. With Stephen they gave me ether. I went out like a light, and when I woke up, there he was.”
A lot of what she says is about Stephen. “Remember those smells he used to make, with that chemistry set of his? That was the day I was having a bridge party! We had to open the doors, and it was the middle of winter.” Or else: “Remember all those comic books he had stowed away under his bed? There were too many to save. I chucked them out, after he went away. I didn’t think there was any use for them. But people collect them, I read about it; now they’d be worth a fortune. We always thought they were just trash.” She tells this like a joke on herself.
When she talks about Stephen, he is never more than twelve years old. After that he got beyond her. I come to realize that she was, or is, in awe of him, slightly afraid of him. She didn’t intend to give birth to such a person.