PAULIE’S SISTER, CLAUDIA, who cloaked her significant height in tailored beige pants and bland gold accessories, had found him the place just around the corner from hers. Her husband didn’t think—well, how could he put this—that it would be best if they all lived together. The other tenants nodded at her on her daily visits, as she balanced bags of groceries on her hips and adjusted the leather bag that was permanently cutting into her left shoulder. Paulie was enthused to see her every time: he liked to clap his hands to his face, then to hers. She had to remind him to save the hugs for after she had brought the various bags and packages inside, and he’d recall that, yes, one time he had been so glad to see her that he’d accidentally sent a watermelon bouncing down the stairs. (He’d thought it looked lovely, he had told her, at home in flight, like the blimps that used to hover over the freeway when he and their father went on long drives just for the sake of the radio and the wind.)
Despite being exhausted from long hours in a corporate public relations job she had hid in for years, despite sometimes requesting that Paulie speak a little more softly, Claudia made sure her brother knew he was loved, knew he was seen. She listened to his new songs repeatedly and told him the parts she liked best, she took his dirty laundry from the sloping piles on his bedroom floor and brought him hand soaps that smelled, as per his preference, spectacularly of pomegranate. On the weekends, they took the subway—Paulie loved the hurtle, the bright orange seats, the light in the tunnel present long before the train itself was visible. It was everything she could do to keep him from striking up conversations with all the people clearly taking refuge in the urban privacy of the C or D train, but watching him ascend joyfully towards the skyscrapers of Manhattan was worth it. They went to the Bronx Zoo, where Paulie observed that the giraffes must have been made by someone talented but distracted. He delighted in the New Museum, the exhibits one could touch, and rushed to the flashing interactive electronics, the video art, the generous plush headphones. They lay in Central Park, exhausted, where he confessed to her that to him, horse poop smelled friendly, somehow. “Think about it. Is there any other poop that says hello like that?”
Sometimes they talked about their parents. Paulie said things to Claudia that stuck to her, and when she arrived home to her new husband, she lacked the ability to explain what had affected her so and why she couldn’t turn over to him to listen to the story of his day.
“You know, Claude,” said Paulie. “I think that probably Mom and Dad are holding each other under an apple tree, and the roots are all twisted in their bones, and they have these long conversations about us that travel up into the trunk and branches. And that tree makes the best apples anyone has ever had, and people come from miles to taste them. But we don’t get to know exactly where it is or to take a nap under the leaves. Know why? ’Cause we grew up eating those apples.” He could sound like some slightly warped and delirious Hallmark card, a nursery tale fed ayahuasca, but his insistence on determining a why, on explaining away sorrow, made her feel she was some inferior model of human, resourceless, easily jammed.
Paulie rarely seemed unhappy when she left, and liked to make little jokes about the luxuries of the bachelor lifestyle—“Don’t worry about me, sis. Guys like me prefer it alone!”—but still she imagined him all the time, trying his best to navigate physical space, remembering to feed himself and flush the toilet, and she grew hamstrung with the thought of an obligation unfulfilled. She spent $2,400 a month on an aide who came once a day and helped Paulie with chores and escorted him on walks. When he called her at the office to talk about his dreams, Claudia put her work on hold, swiveled her chair away from the desk, and pressed her forehead to the window. She tried to associate him, in lasting ways, with energy, with optimism, with things clean and good. She tried to match every compliment he offered with one of her own. She kept a memo in her phone of all the strange or benevolent things he’d said that had touched her in a particular way and reviewed it on days particularly stressful, those when he called five times to report on the path of an ant or to cry about a smell. She put his music on her headphones at the gym as she increased the tension on the treadmill and opted to look past her reflection, through the windows, where New York changed incrementally, a Korean bodega emptying of its merchandise, a For Sale sign, leaves drifting down as slowly as sleep.