One night, as I’m leaving, a correctional officer corners me in the elevator. He is standing too close to me. His breath on my neck. I hold the papers to my chest.
Why do you teach these losers, he says, when they are so fucking stupid?
They’re not, I tell him. They write brilliant.
I go through their mail sometimes, he says, and laugh at their stupidity.
They’re brilliant, I say.
And anyway, he says, What’s someone like you doing with people like them?
BROTHERS
There are two boys in my life. The older boy, Shawn, is very serious, his eyebrows thick and expressive like a tract of cables running straight to his heart. The younger boy, Blake, likes to perch on top of cushions, or steps, or countertops, with his knees to his chest. He’s always kicking something, needing something, digging at something. Scabbed and ready. I don’t know who these two boys are, not yet, only that we pose in pictures together from time to time, and that, somehow, in some places, I love them.
There are two boys in my apartment. That’s what my mother tells me, anyway, when we have to pack up for the weekends and stay with my Auntie T. When we leave, my father locks up the room with my Breyer horses spread across the carpet, my mother’s lipstick-smacked tissues piled up in a garbage can—a door locked in front of any lingering silhouette of a woman or child. My father plays catch with the boys on the weekends, buffed leather to ball, a square of sun behind the building. I wonder, still, how he explained our locked room. If it supposedly served any purpose.
There are three children on a beach. The two boys, now teens, and me. I’m chubby-legged, wearing a flopping sunhat, shoveling my feet into the sand. My mother is reclined in a chair, darkening beneath the sun like a soft, worn saddle. My father is speaking to the boys, the boys in their neon swimsuits, white smears of lotion circling their shoulders, their backs. They all look at me, sitting on my stupid towel. Their faces are exquisitely serious. Waves crash over in fangs. The two boys remember this day, this moment, more than I do. They remember every second of it.
A boiler room. An extra closet. A secret Narnia. A reclusive roommate. A door to nowhere. Just a door, long stuck. Another liquor cabinet. Storage for cleaning supplies. A grown-up room. A room of hidden pets.
My father was an excellent liar. His lies were like laminated sheets of paper—the facts were the facts—shining, reflective, unable to be torn even when a corner peeled.
I don’t actually remember their neon swimsuits. Of course I don’t. What I remember is a photograph taken on the beach that day. Two boys squinting into a camera, me in the middle—look at them, together!—none of our faces are ready. The two boys, now teens, looking at me on the edge of my towel. Round, Asian child, a face nothing like theirs, kneading hopelessly into colder sand.
You see her? said my father. That girl?
Yes, say the boys.
She’s not just that woman’s daughter, he says. She’s your sister.
There are two boys in need of a home. Hurricane Andrew chewed up their land, spat it out in splinters. My mother, father, and I drive down to Coconut Grove, where we bring the two boys canned foods and bags of chips. A woman pearled with sweat opens the door to an apartment. It’s dark inside, damp; there’s no power for miles. The woman looks at me more carefully than anyone has ever looked at me—his other child—Hello, she says. The two boys at her side, guarding her like soldiers.
Are you old? I ask her. My words have no malice, no motive. I am just a kid, carrying cans in my arms as if they are baby dolls.
One of the boys says Mom, and I can barely breathe.
This mother is nothing like my mother. This mother is not my father’s. How many mothers can exist in the same world? And do they all live in locked, dark rooms?
There are two teenage boys visiting from South Africa, where they now live. My mother, father, and I now live in the big white house with the indoor pool. My brothers stay in the guesthouse with black-and-white Berber carpet, a lofted bedroom area, a drum set. The older boy keeps to himself, folded inside the pages of Hawthorne, Faulkner. The younger one has just dyed his hair electric blue, and he body slams me into the mattress each time I try to sneak into their house. I love it when he does this—when he raises my body above his head and throws me down into the springs. I try and try again to bother them, to get the slams, these stunning moments of rage. Somehow, even then, I already know we all need this.
If you asked me, I would have told you I was an only child. If you asked again, I would have said I have two brothers, somewhere. Where somewhere? Africa. Why? To be away from me. And their mother? I hate their mother.
My older brother doesn’t speak, I tell my friends at school. He’s a real asshole. At the time, I think my brother hoards all his thoughts and words and opinions for later, for the people he thinks deserve them more than I do. I never remember seeing him smile. Everything about him was in his eyebrows. One day, while visiting, he finds a box in our garage full of his high school photographs, love notes, yearbooks. He reads the scraps aloud on our living room floor, laughing, grafting together different pieces of paper, different memories. It’s the first time it occurs to me that my brother has a life outside the few days a year in which I see him. He has jokes. He’s been in love. I don’t even know him. I feel at once both enamored and deceived.
I never hated their mother with any purpose—I never even knew her. I hated her because there were two mothers and only one father.
If you asked the two boys, they might tell you they had a sister, somewhere. Where somewhere? Boca Raton. Why? Because she got a life better than ours. And her mother? Well, they hated her, too.
Imagine that locked room in the weekend apartment, imagine a father around less and less, a man moved from one home to another—my mother’s lipstick on his collars, her scent everywhere—my father’s new habits, a new ring, his new life. Would you blame them?
After she dies, I will wonder about the two boys’ mother. I will study the African seed pods she collected, floating in a glass shadow frame on my older brother’s wall. I will consider the dimensions of her urn on the mantelpiece, next to my father’s urn. I will touch the art she collected over the years, each paint stroke, the frames, and wonder at the value she placed on each one, the ways in which they may have moved her. She was an artist. She made two beautiful men. Once, she loved my father. Sometimes it feels like too big a wonder.
I keep things from my brothers. I don’t tell them about the baseball bats or the women and men who’ve appeared in our house in puffs of smoke; I don’t tell them about the pantry incident; I don’t tell them about the burning stink or the stuff or the way our father turns off in the middle of speaking sometimes, his face bloodshot, his eyes gone. Instead, I ask the younger brother to teach me how to play the drums. In the guesthouse, he lets John Coltrane spool around a cassette until the button clicks, and then we play him again, again, as he shows me how to wrap my fingers around drumsticks, how to keep time, snap the hi-hat, stuff the bass drum with a snail-rolled towel. We beat the snare until it silvers, until we can’t hear anything outside the sound that it makes, until it needs a new skin.
If there are real men, I haven’t met them yet. Not when my father moves to New York, not when my mother falls. So when my brothers and father come home for Christmas, when my brother hands me those Sour Patch candies, you must understand why I said nothing. I’m still trying to explain.