“Why don’t you ever visit Grandpa?” my brother Andy asks me. We’re sixteen, standing in the hall outside our bedrooms. My younger sister Nicola and I have moved out of the bedroom we shared in the back of the house. Now she’s in the hallway space my baby sister, Elize, was in, and I’ve taken what used to be my parents’ room at the top of the wooden staircase. I’ve gotten rid of my bed—a mattress on the floor seems closer to the dream I have of a New York City loft apartment—and put the stereo on the floor, too. Two big green Papasan chairs for curling up and reading, incense I buy in thick packets even though the smell gives me headaches. On one wall I have a mural going of images I’ve cut from magazines: the splayed limbs of a pinup girl, heavy black text, roses. With a can of black paint I brush whole poems on the other walls. Marianne Moore: your thorns are the best part of you. E. E. Cummings: pity this busy monster, manunkind, not. Richard Eberhart’s “Rumination”—death has done this, and he will do this to me, and blow his breath to fire my clay when I am still—I paint on the ceiling over my bed so it’s the last thing I see at night and the first thing I see in the morning. I like roses and images of guns and guitars. I like the Steve Miller Band and Johnny Cougar tapes from the days before he became John Mellencamp and I don’t much care about television or movies. I make friends who go to the Rocky Horror show and once I go onstage and pluck a cherry Life Saver out of a guy’s mouth because it seems like what teenagers like me, in our fishnet stockings and Doc Martens, are supposed to do. Inside, I’m so shy I have trouble speaking sometimes, so shy I feel like someone has sewn tiny fishing weights around my lips, piercing the skin in two neat little rows, and moving my mouth is slow and heavy and painful. Across the hall, my brother’s room is wallpapered in movie posters, the same bright style since he was eight. Every month he tacks up new ones, not removing the old, so that in places the posters bow out from the walls, six and seven and eight years of movies beneath them. He’ll keep doing this until after he’s in college, and by then the room will actually seem smaller, a couple of inches trimmed off on each side by the weight of all the posters.
Now we stand opposite each other in the hallway, he outside his door, I outside mine. He’s still the entertainer, still as skinny as when he was a kid. His hair curls out in puffs from beneath his ball cap. The jean jacket he wears is covered almost entirely in souvenir patches from trips to Disney, whales from Nantucket, a breastplate patch from my father’s uncle’s time in the Army. That man became a famous boxer after he came home, and at least once when my brother meets a ballplayer who’s his idol the player will recognize the name on my brother’s patch and grin, and he and my brother will start talking about the boxer’s glory days. Who knows how those in a family find their roles, whether a role is assigned or chosen, whether it’s a function of the way that even siblings—even twins—grow up in different families? Have different pasts. But while I am flinging myself around to escape the past, my brother is papering himself in it. He will grow up to be the family’s keeper, the one who remembers birthdays and anniversaries and organizes the Christmas card list every year, the one who’ll spend hours organizing family photos I can’t look at into albums he has printed into photo books.
“Why don’t you ever visit him?” he asks again. That’s where he’s going. I study his face for a minute, expecting to see accusation. Or curiosity. But in his brown eyes—a brown inherited from my mother and my grandfather, the brown that links them in the family—there’s neither, only the rote expectation that he will ask this question of me, the one whose role in the family is separation. The one who, confused and swirling and angry, already wants to get away. Are we already who we will always be?
For an instant, maybe there’s a different possibility. A chance. A world in which I tell him everything now and yes there would be fireworks but after the fireworks we would all talk about it. My parents would learn what I’m carrying. My brother would learn what has turned us into strangers, and why I seem so angry at the same family he holds so close.
I look at his face a long moment. Then I turn and click my bedroom door closed behind me.
Fifteen
Louisiana, 1984–1985
The Louisiana mental health clinic intake worker’s notes—notes that will later be entered into the court record—describe the nineteen-year-old, brown-haired man before him as depressed, submissive, “overly compliant.” Ricky Langley is eager to please, the caseworker writes, but he seems to sense that Ricky may not know how. Behind the thick glasses Ricky wears, his brown eyes stay too steady, constant in a way that suggests a fundamental disconnect with life, a fundamental hopelessness. He doesn’t get excited and he doesn’t get mad, he just is. The caseworker gives him a mimeographed sheet listing problems Ricky could be experiencing and asks him to circle which ones he is, right now, experiencing. He circles: nervousness, depression, guilt, unhappiness, worthlessness, restlessness, my thoughts. He does not circle: education, anger, friends, self-control, fears, children. He begins to circle stress but stops. The pen leaves an arc on the page. He begins to circle sexual problems, then stops and crosses that arc out—but then he is rebuked by his mind, by the better part of his knowing, and makes the acknowledging circle. The page becomes evidence of the struggle. The circle around want to hurt someone he draws so tightly that it nearly touches all the letters, so tightly it strangles the idea even as it admits it, as if it wants to be its own undoing.
A year has passed since that tipsy, star-filled night he wanted help. Now he’s been ordered into it. No, he checks on the intake form, he is not a veteran. No, he has no income. He gets no aid. How long has it been since he worked? Two years. Sometimes, he tells the caseworker, he steals down to the bank of the Calcasieu River to sleep. The trees’ boughs shelter him; the creek bubbles and his mind calms there. When he wakes he hunts and fishes to feed himself and pursues what he calls his hobby: “archeological digs.” He looks closely then at the silt of the bank, searching for an arrowhead or a shard of glass, some scrap of the past. The past pulls at him. It can feel more real than the ephemeral present, just as Oscar once did. His head hurts, he tells the caseworker, “all the time.” Only the river settles it, or going into the graveyard to sleep. The dead are peaceful the way the river is.
Drinking settles it, too. Yes, he checks, he often drinks or gets high to deal with stress. But no, not before going out or social situations. He can leave the question about parties blank. No, he hasn’t lost time at work or school because of drugs or drink, because he doesn’t have work or school. His drinking doesn’t cause conflicts with friends, because he doesn’t have friends. How many times does he have to say it? He prefers being alone. What about siblings? the form asks. “To tell you the truth, I ain’t close to nobody.”
I often drink or get high by myself. That, he checks.
“Who raised you, Ricky?” the caseworker asks. Ricky has just written on the forms that he lives alone. The caseworker was the one to correct it: He lives with Bessie and Alcide and Jamie, the four of them in one tight trailer. Medical bills cost Bessie and Alcide the land they built on and the house they built on it, too. I picture the caseworker as a young woman, just out of school in Baton Rouge, her hair pulled back in a ponytail and a photograph of her boyfriend in a plastic silver frame on the desk. She wants to go outside for a smoke; it’s past time. She wants her boyfriend to take her out to dinner this Friday night and she wants a job anywhere but here.
He doesn’t answer.
She sighs. “Ricky, who raised you?”
“Luann and Lyle.”