The Last Romantics(36)

“Help me clean this stuff up,” she said to Joe, and they began to collect her school things: the purple zippered pencil case, the red binder, two notebooks, her geometry book, a plastic protractor. The star note was muddied, torn by Joe’s cleat. Carefully Renee refolded the note and slipped it into her back pocket.

And then Renee took her brother’s hand and they walked to the front of the Hunters’ house and to the sidewalk. The brown car was pulled to the curb, its driver’s door open, headlights on, a tiny electronic beep alerting its owner of things gone awry. Joe and Renee walked past the car at a normal pace. They did not hurry, they did not call attention to themselves. They walked three more blocks east, then three more north, then up the hill, through the front door of the gray house. Home.

When they crossed the threshold, Renee finally let go of Joe’s hand.

“Where were you?” I was the first to ask. “We were so worried!” Caroline sat on the couch with wide, frightened eyes.

“We’re fine, everything’s fine,” Renee said. But then she told us to close the blinds, to gather in the kitchen.

Renee told us half the story, as calmly and clearly as she could, but she did not tell us everything. She knew with an insight beyond her thirteen years that we would always remember this night. The lesson she wanted us to retain was one of caution. Of fear, but not terror. Of a lesson learned, a near miss, so that we might avoid what had happened to our sister. Renee bore the brunt of it so that we wouldn’t have to.

This was how Renee saw it. And I was grateful to her, I am grateful to this day. The man in the car is the reason as a young woman I always carried Mace in my purse, the reason I learned self-defense in college, a class taught by an ex-marine who called us “ladies” but taught us how to gouge a man’s eyes and punch out his windpipe. Caroline and I both learned Renee’s lesson well.

And Joe? When no one was looking, he stuffed the cleats into the trash. He took a long shower that night and went to baseball practice as usual the next morning. He’d lost his cleats, he told Coach Marty, probably left on the bus, and Marty shrugged and said, “Okay, Joe,” and found him another pair. For Joe there was no lesson from Renee, only her gratitude. He was her savior. She thanked him later that night and again the next morning. In a way Renee thanked Joe every day for the next sixteen years.

But not once did she worry about what the man in the car had done to Joe. She never wondered what those kicks required of him. What that bloodied face told our brother about himself.

*

“I’ll never leave you,” the man said again to his wife. “I’m staying right here.”

Renee hung up the phone. “They’re ready for her upstairs,” she called to Jaypa.

Jaypa nodded at Renee and then waved her away. “I’ve got this,” he said.

Renee fell back to the nurses’ station and let Jaypa get on with it. Her thoughts had moved past the man in the car, that episode banished from her mind in a self-preserving efficiency she’d perfected years earlier: the ability to replace one strong emotion with another. Now a familiar frustration rose up. The blood, the urgent fear in the man’s voice, the pregnant woman’s screams—all so easily avoided. You want to give birth at home? Try time travel. Try a return to colonial America, where one in ten women died in childbirth. For most emergencies there was no warning, but for this one they’d had forty weeks of warning.

It was the same frustration she felt with Joe. His drinking, the drugs. How does a man genetically predisposed to heart disease justify the regular use of cocaine?

Last week they’d met at a coffee cart outside the hospital. Recently Joe had suffered some chest pains. A moment when he felt his heart buck. That’s how he’d described it to Renee: “Like a horse, like a horse kicked me right here”—he placed his palm in the center of his chest. She’d immediately called a cardiologist friend and arranged for Joe to have a workup.

But the tests came back normal. No cause for concern.

“Just stop, Joe. Just stop using,” Renee said, holding her coffee in two hands, blowing the steam into the frigid autumn air. “It’s a risk.”

“I don’t do it that much,” he replied. He ate a glazed doughnut in three bites, licked the sugar from his fingers. “It’s fun. It helps me stop thinking about work. You know, unwind.”

“I’d like to get you into some kind of treatment.”

He laughed. “Renee. I love you. But come on. You heard your friend. The tests were normal. I just got freaked. That’s all. I have it under control.”

“I wish you would stop hanging out with Ace.”

“Ace? He’s harmless.”

“He’s a drug dealer.”

“That’s a bit of a stretch. He’s got some connections, that’s all. He’s a good person to know.”

“Well, I wish you didn’t know him.” Renee paused and then asked gently, “And, Joe—have you seen Dad again? Or any other hallucinations?”

Joe looked up at the sky and then down at Renee. “It wasn’t a hallucination,” he said.

“Okay, fine. But have you seen him?”

“No, Renee. I haven’t. I’ll let you know next time it happens. Okay?” He gave Renee a tight smile.

Renee took hold of Joe’s elbow and pulled him toward her. “Hold out your arms,” she said. “Please.”