Chapter 26
When I got home, I had good news in my inbox.
Grove had selected me for the summer trial position: six weeks working with international students who were considering boarding school in the fall.
That position could lead to a full academic-year job.
Sister Lucretia told me they’d been waiting for the recommendation from Dean Duplass, but they’d decided my other letter of recommendation was sufficient.
Other letter. It couldn’t have come from anyone other than Curtis. He’d vouched for me.
In practical, objective terms, I felt better. Less worried about money. Less certain that no school would ever hire me again. I had a place in a community. Benj and I both had a place.
But it all felt like someone else’s good news—as if I’d received a phone call from a friend, and I was having a terrible day but I couldn’t let my mood overshadow the friend’s good fortune. Better to congratulate her, and to keep my dour mood to myself. If I ignored it, surely it would go away.
I could actually see myself, as if from a distant position in the corner of the room.
I watched myself going through the motions of making dinner, starting a pot of jasmine rice, opening and closing the freezer, pulling out a fresh head of broccoli.
I watched myself slice vegetables and move from place to place inefficiently, still remembering my old apartment’s layout, forgetting where I’d put the five-spice powder or the sesame oil—all with a vacant expression and sagging shoulders. Is that how I really looked?
“Chicken and broccoli, extra spicy, two minutes!” I called out to Benjamin, in his room.
Is that how I really sounded?
It had to be the hypnosis, making me feel this temporary sense of distancing. I hadn’t emerged completely from the trance Curtis had facilitated. Maybe I was, in fact, one of those people who is all too suggestible. Someone who wasn’t tethered firmly to reality.
“I hope you’re hungry,” I said as I scooped rice. I set out forks and chopsticks, since sometimes Benj liked to use both. Instead of bringing everything over to the living room coffee table, where we all too often ended up, I served the food on the kitchen peninsula.
With perfect timing, he slid onto a bar stool just as I was setting bottles of sriracha and extra soy sauce within arm’s reach.
“Smells good,” he said.
He’d come to dinner wearing a red and navy blue–striped rugby shirt I didn’t recognize.
“Thrift store?” I asked. “I don’t remember that one.”
He didn’t look up. “Dr. Campbell gave it to me. The person who lived in that separate apartment left a bunch of stuff behind. He was going to donate the clothes to Goodwill but he offered me some shirts.”
I made a face. “He just gave away the person’s shirts?”
“They moved out!”
I couldn’t shake it off. The weird part wasn’t just the clothes, it was the fact I didn’t remember Benjamin leaving Curtis’s carrying anything.
“This was today?”
Benjamin laughed, eyes still down on his food. “You were pretty loopy coming out of that hypnosis.”
“I guess I should have let you drive, then.”
“Yeah, I guess you should have.”
I no longer wanted to talk him into trying hypnosis, but I didn’t want to prejudice him against it, either. “It did feel a little strange, but mostly it made me sleepy.” I looked down. “And hungry.” I’d already inhaled half of the food on my plate.
He shook his head. “Still not into it.”
“Okay,” I said. “That’s fair.”
We were halfway through eating when the sound of a funky bass scale started up from below us. The vibrations rattled the glasses in the nearest cupboard. When a magnet fell off the fridge, Benjamin laughed.
“You’ve been stuck in your room a lot, lately,” I said. “I never wanted you to feel like a prisoner this summer. Didn’t you say David offered to teach you guitar?”
“Yeah.”
“But you don’t want to accept because he’s too much of a stoner? Because I know that part already.”
“No, because when I go down there, he usually has a few other guys over, and I don’t like what they’re into.”
“Video games?”
“Nope.”
I waited what felt like a reasonable amount of time. When he still hadn’t volunteered any hints, I said, “I know David smokes a lot of pot. I hope they’re not using other drugs down there.”
Benjamin shrugged. “No. Just watching porn. I don’t like it.
” I couldn’t tell if he was being honest or just telling me—a woman, his mother—what he thought I wanted to hear.
Maybe he could read my skepticism because he added, “Dr. Campbell says that’s good I don’t want to watch porn with them. He says they’re asking for problems.”
“Because they’re watching porn . . . in a group?”
“Watching too much at all. He says most guys watch so much that when they finally have real sex, like on a regular basis, they can’t get it up without acting out what they’ve seen in movies. Like they don’t even feel comfortable with a real body.”
A real body. The phrasing seemed odd, but maybe he was just trying to avoid saying “a real woman” or anything non-inclusive.
“So,” I treaded carefully, “Dr. Campbell is anti-porn.”
“Pretty much. Not because he’s worried that it’s not fair to women or something. It’s because he thinks men get messed up. They live in fantasyland for so long, they get addicted to fake sex. Sometimes they can’t perform.”
He must have noticed my eyebrows lift in response to the last word.
“I was trying not to say ‘fuck,’ Mom.”
“Thank you.” I took a few more bites. “Do you want to hear my opinion, as a woman?”
“Do I have a choice?”
“You do.”
He smirked. “Fine, tell me.”
“I think violence against women has been normalized by pornography. So even if it’s one way for people to learn about sexuality, it comes with a cost.”
The conversation had run its course. But he didn’t look particularly irritated or nervous. He just looked like he knew this wasn’t an extended conversation to have with his mother. We’d tried. We were getting somewhere.
“I’m just glad,” I said, “that you’re comfortable talking about sex with Dr. Campbell. It must be hard not to have men around to talk to about these things.”
Benjamin’s plate was nearly empty and he was shoveling fast.
“Change of subject,” I said. “Grove sent me a contract for the summer. I’m going to sign, but they’re already hinting this is a first step toward a fall job, and I want to know in advance.
If you wouldn’t consider going to school there, it’s a no-go for me.
” I start listing pros and cons, telling him about Grove’s state-of-the-art science lab and multiple foreign language options, including Japanese.
“Eighty-five percent girls for now, even though they’re recruiting boys heavily.
Maybe the girl-to-boy ratio is a good thing? ”
He cracked a smile. “Must be easier to get a prom date there.”
“Okay,” I said, feeling a bubble rise in my chest. “So, you’re not entirely against it. Not that I have the job yet. But that’s good to know.”
A cool breeze was blowing in from the open window.
The stir-fry was tastier than anything I’d made all week, probably because I made an effort, using fresh broccoli instead of frozen.
We were having the most normal conversation we’d had in weeks.
The strange, dislocated feeling I’d sensed was dissipating, perhaps no more complex than hunger.
Benjamin went to the fridge and brought back two flavored waters without asking, as well as some paper napkins.
“Thanks,” I said, setting down my fork. “I want to talk about one topic we haven’t really settled, and I know it may be coming up in your therapy.”
Benjamin stiffened, but I kept going.
“It’s about my brother. I know it must be hard for you to understand why I throw out his letters and don’t want you to communicate with him.
But you need to know. Ewan did bad things that landed him where he is now.
He’s not a good person. But even more important, he won’t ever be a good person. I’m sorry for not explaining that.”
Still, nothing. Benjamin had never been good at offering or accepting apologies.
“If he’d played his cards right,” I said, “he could have been out of jail when I was still a teenager. He could have started over. We could have finished growing up, together. But he’s done even worse things in prison.
Fights with other prisoners. Attacks on guards.
He assaulted a dentist so violently the poor man was left with brain damage.
Can you imagine that? Attacking a stranger who is only trying to help you? ”
Benjamin ignored the question, eyes focused on his food.
He looked angry. Some of it was about Ewan, without a doubt, but I wondered if he felt resentful about other things we hadn’t yet discussed. “Are you mad that I’m not letting you go out for a special day with Dr. Campbell, up to Wisconsin?”
He lifted his head, brow furrowed. “What the fuck?”
“He didn’t mention it to you?”
From his smoldering expression, I could tell that he hadn’t.
“You can’t keep me home every goddamn minute,” he said. “When I get a car, I’ll go wherever I want. And I won’t need a stupid therapist to take me. I can do what I want. I can visit anyone I want.”
From below came another bass riff. Less charming this time.
“Visiting Ewan would be a bad decision. You can’t do it now—not at your age—and I don’t think you should do it later, either. Once he gets to know you better, he’ll find ways to manipulate you. When you wrote him back—”
“Once. Just once.”
“Thank you.” I slapped my palm against the countertop, harder than I’d meant to. “At least you’re finally admitting it!”
“I told him we moved, and I mentioned a few things about school. That’s it.”
“But that encouraged him, don’t you see that? Protecting you from him is something I take very seriously. So when you wrote back to him, I felt . . . well, I guess betrayed is the word—”
“Betrayed?” Benjamin dropped his fork onto his plate with a clatter, sending grains of rice flying. “You felt betrayed? You invaded my privacy!”
Quietly I said, “Okay.” I took a deep breath. “Okay. We both need to calm down.” I’d been holding up my hands, palms out, directing him to relax. I lowered them and waited, watching to see if he was calming down, too. “Benj, I was just a little worried—”
“You weren’t ‘a little’ worried.” He shaped the scare quotes with his fingers. Then he reached down for the edge of his plate, looking up to double-check I was still watching, and flipped it violently across the peninsula, missing me by inches.
I shrieked as the plate shattered on the kitchen floor.
He shouted, “You think I’m a murderer!”
I jumped off the stool. Flecks of food and sauce had sprayed onto my feet and lower legs. Broken ceramic everywhere.
He jumped up, too, but he was on the opposite side of the peninsula, clean and spared. His face was beet red, a thick cord of purple pulsing at his neck. “How am I supposed to live with someone who thinks I killed Izzy? Or Sidney?”
I stepped backward, palms up again. “I don’t think you killed them.”
“Or made them kill themselves! You’re sick! You hate me! You shouldn’t be my mother!”
My voice trembled. “Calm down, Benjamin.”
“You just sent me away. To talk to a shrink.”
I kept my voice low. “But you like him.”
“Better than you.”
“Benjamin, I love you—”
“Oh yeah? Like the way you still love your brother? The way you were willing to just cut him off and throw him away?”
I whispered, “Because he isn’t a good person. He isn’t safe.”
“Well maybe I’m not good or safe.”
“You’re just parroting me now. This isn’t a conversation.”
“I didn’t want to have a conversation. I don’t forgive you. Not for thinking I’m a terrible person. Not for going through my stuff. Not for cutting me off from family. Not for making my life even worse than it already was.”
He balled up his fists, closed his eyes, and screamed at the top of his lungs. The bass coming from below us stopped.
“Shhhhh . . .” I start to say, but it only set him off again.
“Don’t fucking shush me!”
Someone could call the police. They could pick Benjamin up.
They could use this as proof that he was violent.
He’d be a suspect all over again. All because we lived in an apartment with a downstairs neighbor and thin walls.
We weren’t allowed bad days. We weren’t allowed secrets. We weren’t allowed mistakes.
I took another step back. He took a step forward. “I’m not a baby!”
I moved closer to the front door, tripping sideways over a big plastic jug of laundry detergent we kept against the wall. The doorknob jammed into my hip. I groaned, then cupped a hand over my mouth and thrust the other hand out, trying to keep Benjamin at a safe distance.
Things had been getting better, so I’d thought.
But now I was leaning back with the memory of Ewan’s fingers around my throat, lifting me off the ground.
My own brother, choking me. Which wasn’t even a major shock at the time.
It was just something Ewan did. Something I’d had no choice but to tolerate, because I had no one else.
If anyone came knocking now, I’d need to explain. The shouts were from a movie. I flattened my back against the door, both hands up, ready to protect myself, while my brain turned cartwheels, trying to imagine how I’d protect him if the police came.
I held my breath until Benjamin stalked off to his bedroom. Even after the door shut, I was still holding it.