Extraordinary

“Yes.”

Sally got up on her crutches. I put my hand under her armpit—it was warm—and steadied her. “Okay?” I said.

She stared down at the carpet. Or her slippers, I couldn’t tell which. “Yep,” she said, breathing in on the word the way people sometimes speak in the country, the way her grandmother spoke.

Out the window, I could see the flickering red lights of a plane slowly descending into the city. “I didn’t think planes landed this late,” I said, but Sally was already in the bathroom.

After a while, I found myself thinking about my older brother, Jake, how he had gotten off to such a promising start: a good student, a teacher’s favourite, a hit with girls, captain of the track and field team—even had his picture in the newspaper one spring day under the caption, jake gillings champion prospect! There he was in his whites with a trophy gleaming in the late afternoon sun.

Champion prospect indeed. I had so admired him! Watching him on the football field—his hands on his hips, watching the players move and shift just before the snap, reading the play—or making his way down the school corridor with a cluster of A-list friends, their jackets open, ties loosened, I felt as though I was observing a more successful model of myself. Better-looking (he looked like Kris Kristofferson), a better soccer player, better at backgammon, better at water skiing, better at Ping-Pong, even a better dancer at parties. Just better, better, better. And believe it or not, I basked in it. It gave me a charge, as they used to say, to be connected to him, to have people say, “Oh, that’s Jake’s little brother.”

But something happened to him in university. It was as though someone switched off the lights in the house and they never came back on: an unfinished degree, boarding houses, failed projects, disappointing travels, uneasy girlfriends, Eastern religions, a string of psychiatrists (who invariably, after three or four months’ treatment, turned into “assholes”). I saw him once in a restaurant. He was screaming at a waitress. I hadn’t known he was there until suddenly there was a commotion, smashing plates, an overturned table, an ashen manager hurrying across the floor. Where did it come from, this fury? This capacity to abandon himself to such a public display of childlike rage? A grown-up throwing a tantrum. Had some long-haired, cowboy boot–wearing sixties psychiatrist counselled him to “get in touch with his anger”? And poor Jake had got it wrong?

Why had he turned on me, who adored him? Why had he fucked my German girlfriend in my bed and made sure I heard about it? Why does he still, according to my cousin, rant at the drop of a hat about our long-dead parents, how they ruined his life? Can the dead ruin our lives? Can their talons be that long? Don’t we win by dint of just being here?

And why had he turned on himself like that? This peculiar resignation to not being happy till he was fifty? Tonight, as I’m writing this, I wonder about him: He’s out there in the city somewhere. But doing what? Thinking what? He must be, I don’t know, sixty-three, sixty-four.

Are you happy yet, Jake? Are you?

One moment we had been such brothers, dancing side by side to the Zombies’ “She’s Not There” with a pair of sisters at a summer dance. And now this? What happened? Jake and Kyle. Chloe and I. What the fuck happened?

Something else: I noticed that night in the restaurant that he was dressed identically to me—black corduroys, brown leather jacket, crew-neck sweater and white running shoes. So odd: two aging schoolboys who hadn’t spoken in years wearing the same clothes. That means something, I know—but what?

Sally emerged from the bathroom and settled back down in her chair. “What were you thinking about?” she said.

“Jake and Kyle. Kyle and Jake.”

She moved her crutches to the side. “You know what I want? After I’m gone, I want you to have a little party for me. Not right away. Nothing maudlin. But a birthday party. A party with lots of wine and candles. Martinis, too.”

“Sure.”

“I want to be in cheerful company and not be alone.”

“Okay, then.”

“And there’s something else.”

“Yes?”

“There’s a silver canister in my bedroom. On the dresser.”

“Yes, I’ve seen it.”

“Do you know what’s in it?”

“No.”

“Those are Kyle’s ashes. I was supposed to do something or other with them, but I couldn’t stand any of the ideas. I couldn’t stand, to be honest, to be so finally parted from him.”

“What would you like me to do?”

“When you leave here, tonight, tomorrow, whenever, I want you to take the ashes with you. I can’t stand the idea of people poking through my affairs, opening the lid, going, ‘What’s this?,’ maybe flushing it down the toilet or packing it up in a cardboard box and sending it to Chloe in California.”

Four

Skinny, sharp-chinned Chloe. A dead ringer for Arthur Rimbaud. Dagger tattoo on her arm. Sally’s dark eyes. A lanky girl drifting along the sidewalk on a Sunday morning.

I said, “Tell me a little bit about Chloe. How old is she now?”

“Twenty-six.”

“And she’s in California?”

“She calls it Cali. You know Chloe—she can’t leave the English language alone.”

“And doing well?”

“So I gather.”

“You sound uncertain.”

“She’s grown rather secretive. With me, anyway.”

“Is she single?”

“She has a friend. That’s all she’ll tell me.”

“Who is it?”

“That’s what I asked.”

“And?”

“She tells me, in the nicest way, that it’s none of my beeswax.”

“Beeswax. Her expression?”

“Who else?” Sally fell silent for a moment. “They move on, don’t they? It’s sort of shocking. You always think it must be something you did. Or did too much of.”

“I’m not following.”

“Well, put it this way.” Sally moved her crutch to a more stable upright position. “She was such an easygoing kid, the kind of teenager who hums while she’s doing her homework. Tapping her pencil and humming and watching TV all at the same time. Then one day she came home early from high school, drank half a bottle of Marek’s vodka, called her English teacher and told him she was dropping out, that she was tired of being a suck and an asshole. Her words. ‘A suck and an asshole.’

“Then she put on her pyjamas, got into bed, threw up so violently that she popped a vein in her throat. The sight of blood on the sheets totally unhinged her. She called an ambulance, which carted her off to the hospital on a gurney. Apparently she waved at one of the neighbours on the way out.

“They didn’t pump her stomach or anything. They just gave her a stern talking-to and sent her home that evening. I waited a day or so and then, when she was back on her feet, I said, ‘What the hell were you thinking, drinking like that? Phoning Mr. Reed.’ And she kept saying, over and over, ‘I’m so sad. I’m so sad.’

“And I said, ‘What are you sad about?’

“She said, ‘I can’t say. I don’t know. I’m just sad.’