“No way,” he said as I finished. I shushed him, and he lowered his voice. Our walls, we both knew, were thin. “What a chump. He was yelling at her?”
I nodded. “I mean, not in a violent way. More in a pouty, spoiled brat kind of way.”
He looked down at the last remnants of bread butts in his hand. “No surprise there. He’s a total baby. And the next time I trip over one of those Ensures on the side porch someone’s going down. Down.”
This made me smile, reminding me of how much I really liked my brother. Despite our differences, we did have a history. No one understood where I was coming from the way he did.
“Hey Chris?” I asked him as he pulled a carton of milk from the fridge and poured himself a glass.
“Yeah?”
I sat down on the edge of the table, running my hand over the surface. I could feel little pieces of sugar, or salt, fine but distinct beneath my fingers. “What made you decide to love Jennifer Anne?”
He turned around and looked at me, then swallowed with a glunking noise my mother always screamed at him about when we were kids, saying it made him sound like he was drinking rocks. “Decide to love?”
“You know what I mean.”
He shook his head. “Nope. No idea.”
“What made you,” I expanded, “feel like it was a worthwhile risk?”
“It isn’t a financial investment, Remy,” he said, sticking the milk back in the fridge. “There’s no math to it.”
“That’s not what I mean.”
“What do you mean?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Forget it.”
He put his glass in the sink, then ran water over it. “Do you mean what made me love her?”
I wasn’t sure I could take further discussion of that question. “No. I mean, when you thought about whether or not you wanted to open yourself up, you know, to the chance that you could get really hurt, somehow, if you moved forward with her, what did you think? To yourself?”
He cocked an eyebrow at me. “Are you drunk?”
“No,” I snapped. “God. It’s a simple question.”
“Yeah, right. So simple I still don’t even know what you’re asking.” He flipped off the light over the sink, then wiped his hands on a dishtowel. “You want to know how I debated about whether or not to fall in love with her? Is that even close?”
“Forget it,” I said, pushing off the table. “I don’t even know what I’m trying to find out. I’ll see you in the morning.” I started toward the foyer, and as I got closer, I could see my keys laid out neatly on the table by the stairs, waiting for me. I slid them into my back pocket.
I was on the second step when Chris appeared in the kitchen doorway. “Remy.”
“Yeah?”
“If what you’re asking is how I debated whether or not to love her the answer is I didn’t. Not at all. It just happened. I didn’t ever question it; by the time I realized what was happening, it was already done.”
I stood there on the stairs, looking down at him. “I don’t get it,” I said.
“What part?”
“Any of it.”
He shrugged and flipped off the last kitchen light, then started up the stairs, brushing past me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “Someday, you will.”
He disappeared down the hall, and a minute later I heard him shut his door, his voice low as he made his required good-night-again-this-time-by-phone call to Jennifer Anne. I washed my face, brushed my teeth, and was on my way to bed when I stopped by the half-open door of the lizard room.
Most of the cages were dark. The lights for the lizards were kept on timers, which clicked them on and off at just the right cycles to make the lizards believe, I supposed, that they were still sunning themselves on desert rocks instead of sitting in a cage in a converted linen closet. But at the far end of the room, on a middle shelf, one light was on.
It was a glass cage, and the floor of it was covered in sand. There were sticks crisscrossing it, and at the top of one stick were two lizards. As I came closer, I saw that they were entwined—not in a mating, nature-takes-its-course kind of way, but almost tenderly, if that was even possible, like they were holding each other. They both had their eyes closed, and I could see the pattern of their ribs, revealed and hidden with each breath they took.
I kneeled down in front of the cage, pressing my index finger against the glass. The lizard on the top opened his eyes and looked at me, unflinching, his pupil widening slightly as he focused on my finger.