The Last Romantics(53)

I remember writing in my book, Muscle, tooth, solid, sex, skin, languish, stubble, power.

No one picked up Joe’s call. His face drained. “They all know,” he said, his voice thin.

“You can’t be sure.”

“Yes I can. It’s been . . . what? Two hours since I left. That’s enough time. They all know.”

And then Joe’s phone rang with an unidentified number. With a small, hopeful smile, he picked up.

“Hello? Yes, this is Joe Skinner.” I leaned forward to hear the other side of the conversation, but I caught only a deep, ominous babble.

“Uh-huh, okay. . . . Yes. . . . Okay, I will,” Joe said. “Okay. . . . Yes, thank you, Officer.” He hung up. “Well. Kyle reported me to the police. They’re investigating an assault charge. I have to go down to the Seventeenth Precinct and turn myself in.”

“Oh, Joe,” I said. “I’m so sorry. Let me go with you.”

“No. Absolutely not. But can you call Sandrine? I can’t talk to her. Not right now.”

I nodded.

“But don’t call Noni, okay? Don’t tell Caroline or Renee either, not until . . .” Joe paused. “Not until I know what to tell them.”

I nodded again. I waited for Joe to make the first move toward departure, but he just sat in the deli’s flimsy plastic chair, legs crossed at the ankles, back curved, folded into himself as though seeking to protect some tender inner spot. Once I would have said that I knew my brother better than any other person. At the pond we would play gin rummy for hours, barely speaking, and then rise together at the exact moment when the heat became unbearable, run into the water, and then return, dripping and cool, to the game. Now I didn’t know what to say, how to comfort him, or if comfort was what he deserved.

“Fiona,” he said without looking at me, “do you think it’s unfair that we never had a chance to know Dad?”

“I don’t think about it very much,” I answered.

“I wonder if Noni really loved him,” he said. “I don’t think she did.”

“Why do you think that?”

“She never talks about him.”

It was true: Noni rarely talked about Ellis Avery anymore and, when we were younger, only in relation to her regrets.

“Maybe it hurts Noni to talk about him,” I offered. “He was there for her, and then he was gone, so suddenly.”

Joe shook his head. “I don’t think so.”

“Well, it’s not like it makes any difference. Does it? He’s been dead so long. I don’t even remember him.”

“I remember him,” said Joe. “I loved him.”

“That makes sense. You were older.”

“Fiona, sometimes I think I see Dad,” Joe said.

“See him?” I repeated. A memory of that day in the yellow house came back to me. Standing in our parents’ old bedroom. I’d thought it was silly, almost a joke. But Joe had been waiting for our father. Maybe Joe had been waiting his entire life. I remembered what Caroline had told me about the night of the frat party, Joe’s disillusionment with baseball: Dad told him to stop playing.

“Usually it’s when I’m high,” Joe continued. “Really high. Or drunk. When my mind is . . . elsewhere. When it’s relaxed. It’s not a hallucination, it’s not. I’ve been trying to do it without the drugs. To relax enough, like meditation. So I can see him when he’s here.”

“You don’t see him,” I said.

“You’ll see him one day, Fiona. We all will. I told Renee too.”

“You don’t see Dad,” I repeated.

But Joe wasn’t listening to me. He was looking at the floor, appearing to examine the dirt-filled cracks of the linoleum.

“Joe?” I said.

He lifted his head. “What?”

“Should I be worried about you?”

Joe smiled. “Me? No. Don’t worry about me. I’m great. I’m always great.”

*

Joe caught a cab downtown to the police station. I took the subway to my office. That morning I edited a press release about the upcoming UN climate-change conference in Buenos Aires and posted some website copy. I ate lunch at the bagel place down the block. I walked back to the office and saw on the way a man without legs scooting himself along the sidewalk on a dolly, his hands black with the filth of the street. I remember these details exactly. Some days continue to exist year after year, decade after decade, as though they are happening inside you concurrent with the present. A persistent, simultaneous life. One that you consider and wish more than anything that you could change.

I returned to the office, and I picked up the phone. I called Sandrine. I said hello and how was your weekend? And then I began.

“Something happened today, and Joe wanted me to call you.”

“Oh,” said Sandrine. “What?”

I told her what Joe had told me: the bad numbers, the partying, the anger, the punch.

“Where’s Joe? Why isn’t he calling me?”

“He had to go to the police station. Kyle is pressing charges. Assault.”

Sandrine began to breathe shallowly into the phone.

“Sandrine, I’m sure it’ll all be okay,” I said. “They’re like brothers, remember?”