I said, “No, thanks, you can go. It’s fine. I’ll call my mother.”
Nothing was fine, and my mother had been dead for five years. I just wanted them out of there.
That it was my idea for the guys to get meat to grill would be tough for anyone to live with—and stay sane.
After the police left, I spent a long time trying to calm Miles, who was crying his head off, even though he couldn’t understand what had happened. I was so busy with him I didn’t have time to go to the bathroom. Mothers of small children learn to postpone or ignore their most basic needs.
Miles and I lay down on my bed. Miles drifted off to sleep, and I slipped off into the bathroom, keeping the door open so I could hear if he woke up.
I saw a piece of white printer paper taped with Band-Aids to the bathroom mirror. The Band-Aids were at odd angles and the whole thing looked psycho, like the way serial killers decorate their lairs on TV crime shows.
It was Davis’s handwriting, except that Davis’s handwriting was normally, like everything about him, orderly and neat. This was the way Davis might have written if he’d taken bad drugs. Hasty. Careless. Angry. Scrawled. I had to read it several times, not only because it was hard to decipher but also because I was still in shock.
The note said: I’m sick of all the lying.
On the sink was a photograph of me and Chris standing and talking in our backyard. Laughing. Davis had torn the photo down the middle, and a jagged rip separated me and my half brother.
I knew that it was a suicide note or that someone might see it that way. I burned it in the bathroom sink. I didn’t want anyone thinking that Davis had killed himself. On a practical level, we had insurance to consider. It would affect how Miles and I lived from then on. Miles didn’t need to know. Davis’s mom didn’t need to know. I didn’t want or need anyone to know.
I must have blacked out for a moment. The next thing I knew, I was sitting on the bathroom floor. I must have hit my head on the edge of the sink.
As I pressed a washcloth against my forehead to stop the bleeding, I heard Miles crying in the bedroom. When he saw me, with blood trickling down my face, he began to scream.
I thought: You’re right to cry, my darling boy. You’re right to be afraid.
Your mother is a monster.
19
Stephanie
I knew what Davis meant. I knew what he meant by “lying.”
Chris and I had been in love ever since that day he walked into my mother’s house. There was never a moment when we didn’t know we were doing something wrong, just as there was never a moment when we thought that our love affair wasn’t going to happen or when we believed it was going to end. We would swear off each other; we’d promise ourselves that we’d stop. Then Chris would call or drop by, and it would start again.
When I went to college, Chris left Madison and rented an apartment near my dorm. Because he was a carpenter, and good at it, he could pretty much find work anywhere. After I got out of class, I’d go to his place and wait for him to come home. We’d spend the late afternoon and early evening on his bed, just a mattress on the floor of his cold room, as the New England winter sun went down early and the light turned charcoal, then blue. We were so happy being together, naked skin against naked skin. We were each other’s drug and each other’s dealer.
People who wonder why we couldn’t stay away from each other and behave like decent human beings—why we couldn’t get over it and move on—all I can say is that they never had something like that happen to them. It lasted—on and off—for years. Things got crazy. There were a couple of months when just looking at my mom and dad’s wedding photograph would get me hot. How sick is that? Is there a twelve-step group for this? There is probably a group for survivors of everything that has happened in my life. Not that I would have gone.
Chris and I would agree: This isn’t right. This isn’t healthy. We’re hurting people, hurting ourselves. We’d end it again, for as long as we could hold out.
It was during a period when we were actually keeping our promise that I met Davis. The ultimate nice guy, as long as you didn’t cross him about a paint color or where the couch goes. How solid and sane and large-hearted he was! He cared about the planet, the future. He wanted a family, a house. He was so earnest, so sincere. He seemed to live in a bright, shiny world where people did the right things and didn’t have sex with their half brothers.
I could even imagine—almost imagine—that Davis would be forgiving if I ever told him the truth about Chris. Assuming our affair was over. But I didn’t tell Davis. And it wasn’t over.
It would have seemed suspicious for him not to meet my brother. And he knew the story—some of the story—of how Mom and I learned that Dad had another family.
I decided their first meeting should be in a public place, which is what you’re advised to do when there might be some kind of scene or conflict. I don’t know why I thought there would be. The conflict was all in my head.
We went out to dinner at an old-fashioned Italian red-sauce restaurant in Brooklyn that Davis liked because it was authentic. Unchanged since Christopher Columbus.
Chris had a girlfriend, tall and blond like all the women he dated at the time. I think her name was Chelsea. Those girls couldn’t have looked less like me. Maybe my brother was trying to show me that he’d gotten over me. But he was always so distant and cool with those girls; I was never fooled. I knew how he acted when he was turned on. When he cared. I wasn’t even slightly jealous, though he wanted me to be.
Davis was not the kind of person who would imagine someone, his wife, a woman he thought he knew and loved, having sex with her half brother. And that evening, nothing happened that would have made anyone suspicious. Chris and I had gotten good at being undetectable.
Still, he and Davis got into a stupid argument about—of all things!—Frank Lloyd Wright. Davis was going on and on about what a genius Wright was.
Chris said, “Sure, he was a genius. But a real genius would have cared if his clients’ roof leaked. And Wright told them to put a pail under the leak or move the furniture.”
I agreed with Chris on that one. I was imagining what it might be like to live in a gorgeous, leaky house. But it would have been unwise to take my brother’s side.
How easily that could have been a friendly conversation, a bonding thing. They both knew about Frank Lloyd Wright; they both had strong opinions. They knew about architecture and construction, though from different angles.
I looked around for the waiter. More wine! Where the hell was our pasta?
Finally, Chris said, “What if we agree to disagree?”
“Fabulous!” I shot a grateful look at my brother.
Later, at home, Davis said, “If he wasn’t your brother, I’d say the guy was a moron.”
“He is my brother,” I said. “So you’d better watch what you say.” We laughed, and I thought: I’ve dodged a bullet. For now.
One night, when Davis was in Texas visiting the site of a museum that his office was competing to design, Chris came over, uninvited. I swear I didn’t call him, so it was like some sixth sense, some intuition that let him know I was alone.
He walked in the door. We looked at each other. He hugged me hello. The hug turned into a kiss. And once again, it was on.
My affair with Chris stopped when Davis and I got pregnant with Miles, and Chris and I relapsed only once (and not for long) after Miles was born. I didn’t want my precious son raised by an incestuous adulterer. Me.