“I’m going upstairs,” I said.
“Wait,” my father said. His voice was booming and big. Deep.
I stopped in midstride.
“Before you go up there,” my mother said, “we need to tell you something.”
I walked to the table. It was only a few steps, but I remember a distinct feeling like I was walking up to a hangman’s noose or a guillotine. Marching to my own execution.
I sat.
“What?” I said.
My mother spoke first.
“Your brother is home.”
“What?” There was no delay, not even a fraction of a second. It just burst out of me. “How? How is he home? How can he be?” It sounded like I was arguing, but the more I talked, the more I was getting excited. In the back of my mind I was beginning to wonder why they weren’t treating this like a good thing. “He wasn’t supposed to be able to come home for . . .” Then I hit a big question. Not the biggest. The biggest hadn’t made it through the jumble of my thoughts yet. But big. “Wait,” I said. “Did you know about this?”
My mother looked down at the table in shame.
“And you didn’t tell me?” I shouted, raising my voice in a way I never did to my mother.
Well, from that moment forward I could never again claim that I’d never yelled at her. Everything was changing in that moment.
“It was just a few days,” she said. “We were trying to figure out the best way to tell you.”
I sat a minute with my mouth hanging open. I had all these things I wanted to say, and might well have said. How it really isn’t so hard. How she maybe could have used the words she’d used a minute ago. “Your brother is home.” See? Easy.
I didn’t say any of those things. Because, before I could, the biggest question came up through my thoughts.
I asked it. I couldn’t not ask it.
“Did he get injured?”
A pause. One I didn’t like. It wasn’t what I would call long, but it was long enough to contain some news I didn’t want to hear.
“He . . . ,” my mother began, “. . . hurt his foot.”
My father lost it and started yelling at her.
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Ellie, how can you say a thing like that? Why do you talk in euphemisms? Just tell the boy the truth. He doesn’t have a ‘hurt foot.’” He said those last two words in a high, mocking voice, showing us both what he thought a foolish woman sounded like. “Half of it is blown off.”
My ears tingled while I sat and digested that, and listened to them fight.
“Now see here, I won’t have you telling me how to raise my son! I raised those two boys into fine young men, and where were you? Working every minute!”
It struck me that almost every important development of my life had sounded something like this. That I had absorbed almost every piece of family news over this blaring backdrop of rage.
“If they were both fine young men, he wouldn’t have done what he did.”
“Don’t you dare, Bart! Don’t you dare say a thing like that to me! You have no idea what he went through over there!”
“Well, you don’t either.”
“But you’re the one making judgments based on what you don’t know.”
The volume of their voices was starting to hurt my eardrums.
In my head, in the privacy of my imagination, I took a brilliant stand. Literally and figuratively. I stood, towering over them, and told them to stop. Now and forever. Just stop fighting. I told them it was killing me. At a moment like this, when I should be upstairs welcoming my brother home, it was a crime to be expected to sit here and listen to all this screaming. I told them it had been this way as long as I could remember, and I couldn’t take much more. I asked them if they knew how much it took out of me.
In the real world, I stood. Just like I had in my fantasy land.
Then I walked out of the room.
Because in the real world I couldn’t even have shouted them down. They never would have disconnected from their fighting long enough to give me their attention.
Besides. I had more important things to do.
I walked up the stairs, still hearing them shouting.
“It was irresponsible!” My father.
“I won’t let you speak that way about him! He’s my son!” My mother.
Their voices got quieter as I walked upstairs. Not because they lowered their volume. Because I was walking away.
“Your son? Not our son?”
“Well, isn’t it always moments like this when you foist them off on me?”
I stepped up onto the landing and looked in the direction of Roy’s bedroom door. It was closed. It had never been closed while he was gone. Not one time.
I walked to it, a dizzy feeling in my head. Like I was dreaming. Was it possible that all this was only a dream?
I steeled myself and knocked.
“Who is it?” I heard. A weak, mushy sort of voice through the door.
“It’s me, Lucas.”
“Oh. Okay. Come in.”
I opened the door.
The first thing I saw was the foot. It was bandaged, of course. So I wasn’t literally seeing the foot. But I was getting a good look at where it ended.
My brother was under the covers, but his foot was outside them, and propped up on a pillow. I guess even the weight of blankets would have been unbearable on that wound.
It wasn’t really half the foot gone, like my dad had said. More like a third of it. More like from the ball of the foot, I was guessing, where the big toe joints into it at the base. From there forward, nothing. Air. It reminded me of Libby Weller’s brother Darren, and how nothing can be more shocking than just about anything. No amount of wounding of a human body part could be worse than the utter absence of it.
He noticed me noticing.
“Hey buddy,” he said, his voice fuzzy.
“Land mine?” I asked. That’s
