We didn’t touch. My gut ached from the ceaseless heaving of this absurd grief, and when it decided to finish it did so as quickly and unexpectedly as it began. Pierce was already done. He took a box of kleenex from a pile of several lying on the floor next to his bed and offered it to me. I grabbed a handful and honked into them, then he did the same. The sound was like a rusty safe being opened after years untouched.
“Well,” I said. “Let’s finish the job I started.”
“What’s that?”
“Cleaning the place out. The clothes, the junk. Let’s get rid of it all.” I looked at my watch. It was five in the afternoon. “Before nightfall.”
Pierce’s eyes blinked as if against a bright light. “Okay, sure.” He seemed scrubbed out from his crying jag. I was not, from mine, and was jealous.
We hauled everything we could out of closets. There was nothing of it that I wanted. This was a new feeling to me, wanting nothing, and as we worked I probed it and turned it in my hands, marveling at its novelty. It didn’t make me feel free, only that there was nothing worth having — a sensation, I perceived, of ambiguous worth. The trunk of the Caddy quickly filled, and then the backseat, and then the passenger seat. We uncovered old silk suits, worn once to conferences or dinners; shoes that must have cost hundreds of dollars. We balled up evening gowns and scarves and blouses and jeans, clothes our mother hadn’t worn since she’d lived here and had forgotten along with almost everything else. Briefly I wondered if we ought to offer some of these things to Bobby and Rose and Bitty. But I knew that, though they might later profess to have wanted them, they would mostly be relieved they were gone. I thought about how long it took to truly bury the dead. There are cultures and religions in which they still have access to the living, and I thanked my lucky stars we weren’t in one, because there would be no sleep for us.
We made five trips to the Salvation Army drop box, filling it nearly to capacity. I wondered if I would soon see people walking around the North Side in my parents’ clothing.
That night, I was cleaning my parents’ room in almost total darkness. I had begun when there was still some light, and been too consumed by the task to notice its gradual ebb. Now there was only moonlight to clean the room’s single window by, enough for the job. Too much, even. I felt like it was shining right through me, chilling me from the inside out, like a microwave oven in reverse. Visible from this vantage point was my father’s studio, and I noticed that the lights were on inside it.
Could I have left them on? I remembered turning everything off the night before. “Pierce?” I called out. He was cleaning Rose’s room (later Bitty’s, then a guest room and lately storage) down the hall.
“What?”
“Were you in the studio today?”
A pause. “No.”
I turned back to the window. The lights switched off.
I ran outside and stood in the backyard, listening. A rustle in the bushes? I went to the studio, opened it, and flipped on the lights. Nobody was there. When I turned again to look out into the yard, I noticed the key, hanging where it always had on a nail under the eaves. It was swinging gently there, as if pushed by a wind.
I locked the door before going back inside. In the kitchen, I put the key with the other spare, in the junk drawer. I stood a long time, staring at the keys nested in a tangle of twist-ties. A low-grade hunch was unfolding itself in my head.
Pierce was where I had left him. He was wearing yellow rubber gloves and scrubbing a wall that would need to be painted. I said, “What was in your envelope? The one you got from Dad?”
He shrank from me, clutching his damp rag close. “Why do you want to know?”
“I’m just curious.”
“Some kind of key.”
“What kind?”
“Not like a door key.”
I realized I was speaking loudly, and quieted myself. “Can I see it?”
Pierce seemed very afraid. He led me to his bedroom and fished the envelope from a drawer. Inside was a long, thin, squarish key with a simple notch at the end. I had worked at a bank part-time in high school, so I recognized it right away. “This is to a safety deposit box.”
“Really?” he said, but it was a reflex. He was no more interested than he had been.
“You’re not even curious about it? About what’s in it?”
He looked away at a wall for a second, his arms crossed over his skinny chest. “Probably just the title. To the house, you know.”
“Probably,” I said.
“I gotta lotta work to do, man,” he said, quiet as his shuffling feet against the carpet. We stood there where we had cried, filling the room with our breaths, for another minute before he left.
I remained, holding the key. One key to each son, I thought. Was that what had made me think of it? I wasn’t sure. Suddenly, though, it seemed like less of an accident that Pierce and I were living under the same roof again.
twelve
Friday I got in trouble with Wurster. I hadn’t drawn a thing the night before, and so had nothing to show him, and he called me every foul name I’d ever heard and made me draw house interiors without pause for more than an hour overtime. By then, the gray light and the scent of perspiration had turned the studio into a locker room, and as I walked out into the sun, I could feel its rays greedily drinking the moisture off me like a swarm of sweat bees.
At home, I turned the car over to Pierce, who said he would be away all weekend. We stood in the driveway while he twirled the keys on the end of his finger and darted his eyes from side to side.
“Where are you off to?” I asked innocently.
“Nowhere.”
“Same place you went last week?”
He frowned. “What do you know about that?”
“You said you were with your lover.”
“Did I say that?”
“Yes,” I said. “You did.”
“Hmm.” He frowned. He was still frowning when he got into the car, started it up, and shut the windows tight. As he pulled away I could hear the circus music he liked to play blaring from the stereo.
Pierce had always had a thing for the circus, though to my knowledge he had never been to one. When he was a child, he had a flea circus. He collected the fleas from our dog, who frequently brought them inside during the summer; many times I saw him patiently combing the dog’s fur and corralling each flea into a mason jar. He ordered the circus items from a catalog of eccentrica that he had turned up somewhere: little hoops and brightly painted thimble-sized wooden platforms; a crow’s nest on a long thin dowel. He kept it all locked in a trunk in his bedroom and wouldn’t let anyone see it. Letters came in the mail for him, addressed in shaky, faint handwriting. He would read the letters, rapt, then barricade himself in the bedroom, and I would hear the banging and scraping of the flea circus being unpacked, and then only hours and hours of silence.
One day, a man showed up when nobody was home but me, Pierce and Bitty. He was perhaps six feet ten inches tall, and had to stoop to get from room to room. He had huge ears the size of his palms and thin gray hair. Pierce brought him to his bedroom and shut the door, and through it Bitty and I heard the shadow of a mumbled conversation: first the man’s deep, monotonous voice, then Pierce’s sibilant eight-year-old mutter. They were in there a long time. Then the tall man came out, nodded to Bitty and me where we sat on the hallway floor, and left the house.
Pierce didn’t come out for another half hour. He carried his trunk past us and into the backyard. He went to the garage, came back out with a can of lawnmower fuel and a box of matches, and before I could stop him set everything on fire. We watched it burn. Every few seconds a piece of glass would go with a loud crack. Our parents returned just as the flames began to die down. I was held fully responsible and grounded for a month.