The news blew Esme well back into her chair. Her brother’s voice. She didn’t even know its sound. “Out of the blue?” she said. “He’s awake? What did he say?”
Linda picked up a bird carved out of wood, small as soap, and hopped it along the edge of the table. “The doctors said this could be prelude to waking up. But not to get excited.”
Esme was surprised the doctors would presume interest let alone enthusiasm in relatives who never came, never called, but then maybe to them family was just family; you can’t judge ’em all.
“Wow,” she said, because what else was there? Apparently, a lot. Linda got in close to the bird, as though talking to the bird. In fact she was talking to the bird; it sure as hell beat talking to Esme. She said, “Of all the things. Of all the times I imagined this happening.”
Now the bird was in her palm, eye to eye. “What’s that? You want to know what he said?” She faced the thing at Esme. “Go on, tell her,” and then, “Oh, fine, I’ll tell her. He said, you ready for this? He said Esme. Loud and clear, too. They were amazed. Not like he’d been asleep for a quarter of a century, not like he hadn’t used his lips in as long, but just like he was in the middle of a conversation. A heated one, too. They said he sounded mad.”
Esme had been shaking her head for a while. Her darling brother reliving their fight day after day, the anger still on his lips, with no sense of the years that had passed, him still fourteen years old. It is 1981. Ronald Reagan has just taken the oath. The president says, “We’re going to begin to act, beginning today,” and the next day, her brother’s life stops, and all because she let his friend ejaculate on her chest.
Linda continued to hop the bird across the table and even to chirp on its behalf, the stupid smile back on her face.
“Have you been to see him?” Esme said.
“He’s been screaming for a year, what do you think?”
“What screaming? He screams? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Are you serious?”
Esme had begun to take issue with the bird and to concentrate anger in the bird and to make the bird proxy for all the ways she did not love her brother, daughter, parents, enough, and so, yes, she snatched it from Linda’s hand and hurled it over the balustrade.
Linda stood. She seemed verged on the kind of laugh that sizes you down for life. But no, she just stood. Stood and stretched and said, “Ida and me made pineapple upside-down cake. Let’s eat.”
“Now? I want to talk to you.”
“I’m hungry.” And with that she slapped the table, and the laugh Esme had braced for came out. Her brother speaks for the first time in twenty-four years and her mother wants pineapple upside-down cake? Esme leaned forward and had a good look — at her mother’s face and mostly her eyes. The red tracery of veins fencing her pupils. The Windex shine in each lens. The part where her lids were barely half-open, in contrast to Esme’s mouth, which was hanging way open now that she realized her mother was stoned. Had been stoned this whole time.
Esme knew Linda had smoked in the sixties, was a big old hippie. But she was seventy-one, and how did someone her age even acquire marijuana? The nearest neighbor was a soldier just back from Iraq. Maybe he got high for having killed in a war without cause and maybe because he also tended chickens and harvested their eggs and brought her mother a dozen every week, he brought her a little something else, too.
Linda cleared her throat, and, with the firmness Esme had come to expect from her but which was no comfort now, she said, “I want cake.”
Fine. They went inside. Her dad was at the computer in the living room, under a bearskin nailed to the wall. Not just the bear but the head too, and an old-timey rifle captioned underneath, so it was hard to know which was displayed as the better prize. Her parents had bought the place furnished, but after ten years, if you’re still living with a dead bear on your wall, you’re doing so for a reason. Her dad was distraught; she watched him type. Most people of his generation finger-peck and get right up to the screen, but since he only had one arm and giant googly glasses, his deportment was in a school of its own.
“His friends,” Linda said, and snorted her way to the kitchen. “He gets one night a week. Let’s go, Bill!”
His hand fell on the keyboard like Play-Doh. He looked up at Esme and the look was bleak. She touched his arm, though it did no good. You can’t solace a man whose only friends are text.
Esme said, “Come on, Dad, we’re having cake.”
He pushed back his chair but didn’t get up. His empty sleeve hung over the armrest, and the awful thing was, you barely noticed for how slack the rest of his body was. He stared at the screen like the dead stare at us.
Esme made for the fridge.
Her dad trudged to the table when it was clear Linda would not stop calling his name. Esme sat next to Ida, though she still hadn’t said a word since Don. Her mother knifed the cake, but served only herself, a quarter wedge, huge. Her dad wasn’t hungry. Ida said it tasted gross, while Linda, who had retained her good cheer throughout, opened her mouth — her mouth was full — and said, “Now, Esmeralda, daughter mine, would you like to say something about Thurlow Dan and the Helix? Because I think maybe this little lady should know more of the world than she does.”
That night, Esme fought with her parents. She promised to get it right with Ida; she bought herself more time. And then she left. And now the hospital where Chris was living called three times a day. And the morgue where her parents were called three times a day. They all wanted to know what arrangements to make. If Esme didn’t call back, they would dispose of the bodies and send her the bill. But it wasn’t as though she didn’t know what she wanted. She wanted her parents and Chris to reunite. They had died trying to make that happen; the least she could do was help. She knew she had heard this story before, about parents who died as they drove to be with an adult child who was himself dying. It turned out that when Chris spoke her name, it was the swan song he’d been trying to belt out for twenty-four years. Only in her parents’ unction for a miracle, or perhaps because one was stoned and the other disabled, they pitched off I-64 on the way to the hospital. The road was narrow and ascendant one hairpin at a time, there was no guardrail, and if you went over even halfway up, you would not survive the fall. Every time Esme thought about it, she wondered whether they had any last words, too, hurled from their lips as they said good-bye. And why not? People were crying out for each other all the time.
They were stopped at a diner off the freeway. Ida had to pee. It was two in the morning, but still, this was not the most advisable conduct. Esme’s face was mugged on every TV, on every channel. On the plus side, the coverage gave her a visual on the Helix House, and a sense of what people were saying.
On the downside, what people were saying was bad. For one, the feds had turned the site into a zoo. Tents, kitchen, helicopters, Bradley. Bradleys. Six tanks in a residential suburb. The team had to stump all the roadside trees just to accommodate their girth. She could tell they were M3s, though, because they had room only for five — driver, commander, gunner plus scouts — which meant this was the team’s concession to context or, more likely, the government’s attempt to look modulated but ready.
Ida insisted on cherry pie because she wanted an American experience, they being on the road and mingled with the people. At age nine, she was already sassy with expectation of what dreams the country would make true for her.
“Kinda late to be up!” the waitress said, and overflowed their water glasses.