The last day, we stand on an airport tarmac waiting for the flight that will carry us home. Back to the Saturdays of my grandparents’ arrival, back to my father sitting late into the night at the kitchen table, drinking, or the scrape of his car tires sending gravel spinning off into the dark. I remember a new heaviness in my body, but maybe that’s the work of time and my looking back. On the tarmac, the island sunlight ricochets off the parked bodies of silver planes, so bright it stings my eyes.
My brother stands in front of me. He is still thin, still not quite out of the danger woods of our birth, and the crew cut my mother made him get for the trip has only emphasized the shape of his skull, leaving his eyes round and wondering. While we wait, he curls his palms under his chin like paws and juts his lower teeth out. His eyes big, his head small, he makes a perfect chipmunk. My sisters and I laugh. Already he is the entertainer, the one who, sick for so long as a child, now wants only to make others laugh. Next he tells a joke. The setup has seven Chinese brothers in it. For the punch line, one fries in the electric chair.
“What’s that?” I ask. I am a proud child and I hate having to ask, but something in the phrase “electric chair” demands that it be known.
“He got the death penalty,” my brother says.
By the time I understand his words, I am against the death penalty. Death is what I am afraid of. Death is what my sister was lost to; death is what the grown-ups fear for my brother; death is what I have nightmares of. Through my mother’s books and my father’s stories, I have begun to think of the Constitution as a document of hope. The law I love can impose death? Never mind the reasons in law books. This is where it starts: with horror. From this moment on, I will always be against the death penalty.
*
For my mother’s graduation, my father has a white tent erected in the long sprawl of our backyard. That night darkness envelops the tent, and there’s a moment when the band stops playing, the crowd he has invited hushes, and a waiter in a vest emerges from the dark carrying a cake, its top aflame. The waiter sets it on the table with a flourish. My mother’s eyes are wet and shiny in the candlelight as she bends, beckoning to us children. Together, we blow out the candles, and what the cake says is suddenly clear: L & M-L. My father, tall and burnished in a tuxedo, squeezes my mother’s hand. They will become law partners.
The building they find to rent is at the center of our town, along the railroad tracks, across from the old train station. On the other side of the station is the big Catholic church. A few steps down the block from their new office is the movie theater and a newsstand that sells bubblegum, Archie comics, and books of logic games. Around the corner is the one apartment building, where the only magnolia tree blossoms lush every spring. My father takes the third floor for his criminal and malpractice cases. On the second floor, my mother becomes a family lawyer.
I am raised in the law the way other children are raised in religion. When my siblings and I gather around the table for family dinners, we don’t bow our heads to say grace. Instead we raise them high and try to catch the words that fly between my parents. The divorce fights she’s handling, the battered women she advocates for in those early years when she still takes low-paying work. The medical malpractice cases that pay nothing if he loses, but big—one-third of the verdict—if he wins. A gambler’s payday, and one that rewards curiosity. “I like the law because I get to learn a little bit of everything,” my father tells me. I recognize something of myself in his words—and something of the way I love the objects on his windowsill.
As a child I learn to write on long legal pads pilfered from my parents’ office. I lie on my stomach on the nubby carpet and try to fill the pads’ lined pages with my writing. I have invented a character I name Cassie, who lives on the same island we visit every summer and goes to the movies in the same theater. The difference is that Cassie loves a boy, Bobby, and so is unlike me.
I am ten and then eleven and then twelve, and though my friends all talk about boys, I don’t have crushes. I think love is foolish and distracting and I alternately pity and scorn my friends when they talk about it. I don’t like pop music, because all the songs are about love, and I think most of the preteen magazines at the comic store downstairs are silly, because all they talk about is crushes. It’s not just that I feel too tall, too awkward, and too dark, with my frizzy hair in a town of straight blond hair, to think a boy could like me. It’s something deeper than that, though I can’t say what. How I feel about it is like the answer I give when, a few months after Christmas, my mother asks me what happened to a new stuffed animal. “Shh,” I say, and point to a corner of my room. “It’s sleeping.” When she asks me again a few days later—“Hasn’t it woken up by now?”—the answer must come from a place inside me that understands more about my brother than I’ll let on. “It’s in a coma,” I say.