But then the sniffling began, and he realized that his sister wasn’t laughing. He dropped his pad in his lap, helpless to help her, miserable to see how thoroughly he’d cracked her shell. Her sadness, maybe because she so rarely showed it, demolished him. “Caw-da,” he said, his tongue moving like a speared fish. She didn’t look up for a long minute, not until she wiped the last tears away. Rarely did she give anyone the privilege of seeing her cry, and now she looked embarrassed, flushed red beyond her breakdown and angry for having succumbed to it.
“You’re such an asshole,” she said, her voice still shaky but unwilling to yield. “Why are you doing this to us? I know this isn’t about us, but fuck you, Benji, this is about us too. It’s about Mom and Dad. It’s about me. You were going to leave me alone. With them. What were you thinking?”
Benji hung his head and answered as best he could, “E oth oo soopid hings. Ow.”
Claudia gave him an exasperated look: she didn’t speak Bitten Tongue.
We both do stupid things, he wrote.
Claudia looked doubtful.
We pick each other up. It’s what we do.
“I’ve never done anything this stupid,” she said.
His pen was poised to write Nick! Forget writing Hello?! Baby! The name of her ex-boyfriend would have been enough of a reprimand, but he put his pen down and sighed.
She looked from her brother’s eyes into her own hands, as if their emptiness might comfort her in ways he could not.
“How could you do it?” He couldn’t count the number of times she’d come back to that question. And still he had no answer for it. “I spend every second I’m not here worrying about you. Wondering if you’re ever going to be okay. How any of us can ever trust you again. And I spend every second here wanting to strangle you. I do, Benji. I’m sick about it, and I hate you for it.” She ruminated over her cup of coffee, sipped at it as though it imparted bitter wisdom. “You didn’t end up on that bridge alone. I know that. I helped you get there. Or I didn’t stop you from getting there. I wasn’t enough to stop you, which amounts to the same thing.”
It had nothing to do w/u, Benji wrote.
“I wasn’t opening a discussion.” Claudia shifted in her seat, wiped her eyes one last time. Everything about her now said business. “I didn’t help you then, but I’m helping you now,” she said, reaching into her trendy bag and producing a colorful trifold brochure with two smiling octogenarians on the front, their heads touching tenderly under a flowering tree. “Treadwell Acres.” She tossed it on his lap.
Benji gave it the once-over, flipped to a new page in his pad, and drew a big?.
“Dr. Malek gave it to me,” she explained. “It’s one of the best rehab facilities around. They have a fantastic mental health unit.” She mustered a hopeful but hollow smile, as if presenting a child with a secondhand toy she meant to pass off as new. Benji responded with a dubious look and began bouncing his pen along the thin and pulpy page. I can stay w/u. He placed a dot under each word as if leading Claudia through a sing-along.
“You can’t stay with me.” Claudia broke the news a bit too cheerfully, Benji thought. “I’m sorry, Benj, but you can’t. I start teaching next week and haven’t read half the books on my syllabus. I’m behind on the Selkirk place. I don’t have time to babysit.”
Benji didn’t like to sulk, but he wasn’t above it either. I don’t need a babysitter!
“Your doctor disagrees. So does your social worker. So does your therapist. So do I.”
Treadwell Acres?! I’m not 80, he scribbled, then drew a series of mad lines under and through each word until the message looked thoroughly redacted.
Claudia opened the brochure to show him another picture, this of a freckled young woman staring out a sunny window with a stock photography glaze of hope in her eyes. “Look. Not everyone is eighty.”
It failed to make him feel better. I’ll find someplace, he wrote, flashing his notepad with a petulant shrug.
“Where?” Claudia asked. “Where will you find?”
To be fair to Claudia, most of Benji’s friends were poorly equipped to play Florence Nightingale. They spent their days hiking from one audition to the next and their nights telemarketing or tending bar or offering certified (but not necessarily chaste) massage, which left little time for developing a bedside manner. His nursiest friend, a straitlaced chorus boy currently making his way across Washington state as a flying monkey in the traveling company of Wicked, could no sooner swoop down and tend to him than his former roommate, who’d sublet Benji’s room to a couple of cater waiters with dreams of becoming Alvin Ailey dancers, could offer him his old bed.
Rhonda & Jim, he wrote defiantly, desperate to prove his sister wrong and satisfied that he’d found two of the most decent, responsible, bulletproof people either of them knew.
“Rhonda?” Claudia’s eyes widened in disbelief. “Who has thyroid cancer?”
He caught a brief, stinging glimpse of his own narcissism — what kind of friend forgets a friend’s thyroid cancer? — but his mind refused to pause. He suggested Thom and Guyang and several strategically unnamed “good friends” he claimed Claudia didn’t know, but she shot each of them down with marksman’s skill. Thom lived in a sixth-floor walk-up. Guyang already had a baby. And friends she’d never heard of? How good could they possibly be?
“There’s nothing wrong with Treadwell,” said Claudia, resolute.
Benji uttered as emphatic a “No!” as his throbbing tongue would allow. It was a howl more than a word and spurred his roommate to raise the volume on his TV to an unneighborly pitch. “I wava say ear,” Benji cried in pain, his Sharpie shaking as he translated, I’d rather stay here!
“I’m sure you would. But here isn’t an option.” Claudia pulled a sleek silver thermos from her bag and, her still-red eyes finding him over a capful of steaming coffee, continued in a harsher tone. “Not that you get a vote. You surrendered that right the minute you decided to play Billy Joe McAllister. You turned your ballot over to me.”
I’ll stay with Mom.
“Mom is nearly eighty, Benji, and already has enough patients,” Claudia answered. “Her hands are full.”
U think Mom will let me end up in a nursing home?
“It’s not a nursing home. For God’s sake.”
He tossed the brochure back at her. Looks like one.
What, he wondered, if I tell the truth? It was impossible to know whether an alteration to the story of his fall would spare him the torture of his sister’s good intentions. But what had once felt like a pardonable omission of a key detail now, in the fiery light of Claudia’s grief (not to mention the shadowy threat of waking in a rehabilitation facility for the aging), felt like a hoax. A hoax he was about to be punished for.
“You realize sharing a house with Mom means sharing a house with Dad?” Claudia asked.
True, he hadn’t thought of that. How could he possibly share a house with Henry? How, when nobody knew how to push Benji’s buttons better than his father, who many years ago, like an architect charged with building a young boy from the ground up, had helped install them? Henry called actors “mountebanks” and maddeningly, purposefully, added the word “the” to every title on his son’s filmography—The Prodigy, The Hamster for Hannah. And though age and illness had considerably dulled Henry’s sharpest edges, his belittling commentary continued to play in Benji’s mind, as a radio plays on even after the power’s been cut. It was Henry who Benji now heard. A cruel and cacophonous litany that rose above Claudia’s sorrow and chastening, above the blare of the clumsy roof patcher’s TV. True, he would come clean to avoid his father.