I'd Give Anything(17)
But when we do talk there, we mean what we say. It’s like an unspoken rule. Or more like an unwritten vow, the kind you sign with Xs of blood. At the burial ground, we tell the truth.
Can a person hate—truly hate, the way people hate Nazis or slavery or war—his own mother?
They had a fight. They always have fights, but I guess maybe this one was especially bad. I don’t know because I wasn’t there to hear it. I usually stick around to argue in Trevor’s defense when he’s too mad (or drunk or stoned, which sometimes happens) to stick up for himself, but mostly just so he knows I’m where I always am, which is on his side.
But I wasn’t there this time.
Tonight’s fight—well, last night’s now, I guess—started months ago, when we were sitting at the dinner table and Mom told Trevor that she had decided that he would live at home during his upcoming first year of college. No “I need to talk to you about something,” no “You’re not going to like hearing this, but.” She didn’t even put her silverware down or clear her damn throat. Just carved up Trevor’s future the same way she cut the meat on her plate: calm, calm, calm, slice, slice, slice. I’ll never forget that voice. So much like a scalpel that you can almost see eerie arctic operating room lights flashing off the blade.
Trevor said, “That’s not happening.”
“You will commute until you demonstrate to my satisfaction that you are responsible enough not to disgrace yourself or—more to the point—your family.”
Before Trevor could jump in and totally demolish his chances of changing her mind, I said, “That’s not fair!”
No one looked at me.
“It’s like you’ve already decided he’ll mess up, Mom! How can you do that? You can’t! You need to give him a chance first!”
Again, not a glance. It was like one of those dreams where you may as well be trapped inside a Mason jar with the lid sealed tight.
“Like you’d ever actually stick to that,” said Trevor, sneering. “So—what now? I’m supposed to beg and promise I’ll behave? Grovel? Is that what you want? Because I know you can’t wait to get rid of me.”
“You will stay here for your freshman year, assuming you don’t flunk out before it’s over, at the end of which I will assess. Consider it a test,” said Mom, and she went back to cutting her steak.
Then, Trevor had stood up, leaned over, and, with one giant sweep of his arm, sent her plate and water glass crashing onto the floor.
My mother had looked down at the rubble of crystal and china on the floor, made a ticking noise with her tongue, and said, “At least it wasn’t the Waterford.”
They’d had five different versions of the fight since then, and last night’s ended with Trevor shouting that he would make her regret it, that whatever disgraceful behavior she’d expected from him at school would be nothing compared to what he’d do right here at home. Then, he ran out of the house, leaving the front door gaping like an open mouth behind him.
My mother said, “Virginia, shut the door; mosquitoes are coming in.”
At about ten o’clock that night, from my bedroom window, I watched a police car glide into our driveway, with my brother in the backseat. I opened my window to listen. Trevor had gone out with his friend Eddie Rourke in Eddie’s pickup truck. When the cop stopped them, Trevor was drunk and there were three stolen stop signs in the bed of Eddie’s truck.
By the time I got down the stairs, Trevor was standing in a splatter of streetlight with his back to the police car, his hands jammed into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes on the ground, and Mom was shaking hands with the officer, a kid who couldn’t have been much older than Trevor. After he left, Mom didn’t say a word, just turned and walked—with precise, unhurried steps—down the driveway, up the stairs to the porch, and into the house. If she has ever even once cut across our lawn, I’ve never seen it. I stood with my heart banging and a sob welling in my chest, watching my brother staring down at the road as if he were trying to burn holes in the asphalt with his eyes.
His shoulders inside his thrift-store plaid shirt. His overgrown hair resting on the collar. The smell of lilacs from the bush in our yard infiltrating the night air. Those three things together filled me with a sudden, sad, wild loneliness, like a wolf howl.
Then, Trevor turned and saw me, and the grin that cut across his face shone in the streetlight.
“Tried to talk the guy into the lights and siren, but he wouldn’t do it,” he said.
For a second, I couldn’t find my voice. Then, I eked out a “too bad” so flat and hoarse it got lost in the singing of the crickets.
When we went inside, I saw that the door to Mom’s study was shut, and I knew she was doing what she’d done before: making a phone call that would scrub her son’s latest screwup right out of existence. I knew that when she came out, she’d find Trevor, and there would be another fight, a terrible one.
Trevor hissed, “Fuck her,” then climbed the stairs to his room and flopped face-first onto his bed.
My brother has been my favorite person ever since I can remember, my first friend, but all I could think about was giant objects hurtling toward each other, screams, twisted metal, the smell of burning brakes and rubber tires, smoke in the air, blood on the road.
It was the trust that broke me: all those law-abiding drivers with their belief in signs and signals and carefulness, their belief in the right-of-way, in a fair and orderly universe. It hit me: how we turn our breakable bodies over to the world for safekeeping every single day. One uprooted stop sign and all those years of growing and going to school, laughing, sledding in winter, turning pages of books, getting haircuts, brushing teeth, learning to swim: over, done, extinguished.