But then the bad thing did happen, and form a snapshot of a different kind.
I remember having nothing in mind but scaring Ethan silly with a cannonball landing, right next to where he paddled around in circles, wondering where I had gone. Grinning, I shouted Geronimo and leaped off the rocks twenty feet above him, striking the water with the kind of concussive force that made the impact feel less like a splash and more like an explosion. The bubbles rose all around me, like a fleet of spaceships taking flight. I hit the soft ooze at the bottom and pushed off, grinning, happy, in what I now recognize as the last uncomplicated moment of my youth.
I broke surface just behind Ethan, with a fine view of the back of his head. Jean was screaming. I didn’t know right away that this meant anything was wrong, as shrieking girls are just part of the fun of horseplay in water. But when I tracked the sound to Jean, who was paddling around in the water twenty strokes beyond Ethan, nothing in her face testified to play; she was pale, and wide-eyed, her lips peeled back as far as they would go in a grimace of horrified denial.
My first thought was that I’d just scared her more than I’d intended to scare Ethan. My second, more serious, was that some kind of animal had bitten her underwater and that I’d catch hell from Mom for not being sufficiently watchful.
Then she screamed, “It’s Ethan!”
The back of Ethan’s head looked the same as it had always looked. It looked like the back of any little kid’s head, jug ears and all. I figured it couldn’t be too bad, since he was still treading water just fine, but Jean was still screaming, so I grabbed his shoulder and pulled him toward me.
The only warning I had that I would not be seeing a human face where his should have been was a sudden shift of the bone where my palm touched his shoulder. It felt like the bulge of a rat scurrying around underneath a throw rug. It flattened and became something other than a shoulder just before Ethan completed his turn and blinked at me through the one eye that remained recognizable, an eye that had somehow migrated socket and all further down his cheek, and now blinked at me from the vicinity of his lips. That eye begged me for explanation. Then the skin on both sides of that eye rose up and swallowed it whole beneath a curtain of bubbling flesh.
I was away at University when word arrived that Ethan had taken a turn for the worse and that I needed to hurry home right away.
That was a hell of a way to put it. The phrase “taking a turn for the worse” implies that the state before it could be somehow counted as better. With Ethan, all developments were bad; some were worse than others, but every day brought a fresh nadir, a brand new visit to countries more terrible.
This was cram week, so it took me the better part of a morning negotiating with various academic offices before I could get a hardship leave that would allow me to postpone finals without flunking out or taking incompletes. I made sandwiches before I left, borrowed a junker from a friend in the dorm, and made it home in just over twenty hours, feeling like a failure as a brother whenever I had to stop to stretch my legs or fill up the gas tank or even take a shit. On the way back I got regular updates by cell phone. Ethan was awake and coherent now; he was asking for me. Then he was insane and ripping holes in the walls. Then he was flat on his back and gasping for air, unable to take in enough to feel anything but slow strangulation. Then he was expected to be dead within the hour. Then he was dead. Then he was alive again (or rather still, the half hour he’d spent mistaken as corpse now explained away as an understandable mistake, given that he’d been something nobody could bear to think of as alive).
Twenty hours, and then I pulled off the highway and into the cookie-cutter template the old neighborhood had become, rows and rows and rows of ugly houses without enough space between them to pass sunlight except as isolated stripes. As always after a long absence, I hated the families in all those houses, for what they’d done to the special place where I’d grown up. My folks might have still had a couple of dozen acres left over from the days when land was cheap, and they’d kept the original homestead inside it as pristine as possible behind stone walls crawling with ivy, but even as I pulled past the automatic gate, what I found past it no longer felt like a homey refuge on the edge of a forest, but rather the last threatened keep protecting itself from invaders who had ruined a once enchanted country.
It was a much smaller estate than it had been, once upon a time. Mother had been selling off our acreage, both to pay taxes and to support us when all her energies went to Ethan and no other form of income was possible.
I left the pavement of the hated outside, pulled onto the gravel of the family’s circular drive, and after another minute or so came to a stop behind a small fleet of parked cars clustered at the base of the wraparound porch. Jean, who’d been up all night providing intermittent companionship via cell phone, slammed the screen door and came running to meet me, her waist-length scarlet hair bouncing behind her like a banner. She was hugging me tight even before I was all the way out of the car.
Her voice broke as our cheeks touched and her tears mingled with mine. “Oh, Lawrence. It’s been so long.”
I knew she wasn’t talking about the months since my last visit home, but rather of these last days since Ethan started to fail. We’d lost our father to emphysema a couple of years back, and had learned back then what Jean and the rest of the family had been re-learning now; that deathbed vigils have a way of trapping time in amber, turning each passing tick of the clock into another slice of eternity.
I didn’t have to ask how bad it had been. Life with our afflicted brother had always been bad, but my sister’s beautiful green eyes looked like the last night, alone, had aged her twenty years. “I should have taken a plane.”
Had I been anybody else, Jean might have said, damn straight you should have taken a plane. But Jean had been with me the one and only time I’d been a passenger on a commercial aircraft, and knew that flying with me was a nightmare. I didn’t take well to enclosed places. “It wouldn’t have made a difference. Most of the time he wouldn’t have known you were here. You’re here for the end, that’s what matters.”
The screen door slammed again, and Mom appeared. She was tall, slender, an older version of Jean who had aged in the way most beautiful women hope to age, becoming more golden where others just become more lined. Unlike Jean, who had come at a run, Mom came at a measured walk: calm, regal, as measured in every movement as only a woman who had discovered her own iron strength could be. She wore her own long hair, as scarlet as Jean’s without a touch of dye, in a tight wrap behind her head, more for convenience than any aged dignity. Her tight-lipped, tired smile was as warm to me as any embrace. “It’s good to see you, Lawrence. You made good time. I was afraid that you’d have to stop in a motel for a few hours. Do you need to sleep before you see him?”
“No, I think I had about twenty cups of coffee on the road. I’m about to jump out of my skin. You’re looking good, Mom.”
“Nice of you to say. But I know I look like hell.”
This was both true and untrue. Physically, Mom had never come close to looking like what women mean when they say they look like hell. More than once, doing her grocery run in town, she’d been mistaken for Jean’s older sister instead of her mother; more than once, she’d received come-ons from young men who would have been mortified to find out just how old she was; more than once, she had admitted to being lonely enough to want to take them up on their offers, if only for a night of anonymous release. It hadn’t been loyalty to the memory of my father, or fear of our disapproval, that stopped her. It was the tormented presence in the upstairs room, the sense that allowing herself to take pleasure in anything outside the family, while he still lived, amounted to failing him.