As for the other part, the price taking care of a doomed boy enacts on the mother who loves him—well, in that sense, you could say that my mother looked like the hell she’d been through. She wore every moment of the last ten years on her face, and anybody with an ounce of sensitivity could see it. But again, on her, it didn’t mean what women usually mean when they say they look like hell. Hell hadn’t aged her. Hell had just brought out what she was. Hell became her.
She put her hands on my shoulders. “Whatever you say, I won’t have you driving yourself to exhaustion. You can bring your bag inside later. You’ll pay your respects to your brother, and then you’ll come downstairs for a hot breakfast, and then you’ll go up to your room and catch some of that sleep you’ve been missing. I won’t take any argument on this. Is that clear?”
I nodded, and then hugged her. “It’s good to be home.”
I could see how close she came to contradicting me, to saying that she knew damned sure it wasn’t—as it hadn’t been; being home wouldn’t be good as long as Ethan remained what he was—but she allowed the lie to stand, as she hugged me back and told me, as she told me out loud only in times of great celebration or sorrow, that she loved me.
There was no point in expending tears now, not with the sight of Ethan still ahead of me, and so I gave her one last squeeze and let her and Jean lead me into the house, where I nodded hello at the gathered forms of my cousins and uncles and aunts, all gathered out of grim sense of family duty for these last hours of the long vigil my mother had endured, almost without rest, for so many years. Then I went to the stairs, putting my hand on the polished banister that Ethan had once used to slide down with giggles, and holding on to it as I ascended toward the attic floor with the locked and soundproofed door that had never been able to cage the sound of splintering bones.
On the day Ethan changed, Jean had run home to get Mom and Dad while I stayed with him, watching him shift from one terrible shape to another, enduring the sounds his insides made as they fractured and reformed into new configurations. I shooed flies away from the lungs that had burst from his chest, glistening with blood and foaming with fugitive breath. I lied to him about everything going to be okay when his spine contracted like a salted slug and bent him over backwards, with the back of his head melting into the bare skin of his buttocks. I vomited with revulsion, for the first of what turned out to be many times in our relationship, when all his connective tissue dissolved and he became a mound of disembodied organs, pulsing on the rocks where a boy had been, with nothing but a boiling puddle of blood between them to identify them as parts of the same tormented body and not as separate butchered pieces of meat.
I had thought that nothing in my life could ever be as horrible as that half hour, and had gone away for a little while when Jean returned with our parents and a plastic tub to carry our brother in. I surrendered myself to shock and catatonia as the three of them helped me collect Ethan’s pieces, as we squared him away in an upstairs bathtub, and as we called the family physician, Dr. Zuvicek.
My ability to form new memories went away for a while. I know what happened intellectually. I suppose you can even say I remember it, in the way one remembers a favorite movie. But in another way it never really happened to me. It never recorded. I can’t really call forth anything else until much later that day, until Dr. Zuvicek trudged down from upstairs to enter a living room still festooned with multi-colored balloons and HAPPY BIRTHDAY banners.
Zuvicek’s status as our family doctor bore a double meaning, since he was related to us via some arcane spiderweb of genealogy that had always escaped me and frankly always would. I knew little else about him except that he specialized in treating members of our family, and in fact traveled throughout our region to pay house calls on those who had settled in the six closest states. He was broad-shouldered and thick-armed and wore a sculpted red beard with silvery flares at the pointed tips. Today he had pieces of bloody Ethan tissue on his sideburns and glistening patches of worse things on his conservative black suit. He looked colorless, which for him was like being another person, since Zuvicek had always been one of the ruddiest men I’d ever known.
As he entered the living room, he put his big black bag on the coffee table and faced my sister and myself with a look of almost infinite pity.
Jean, who was still young enough to seek hope even in hopeless situations, said, “Is he going to be okay?”
He rubbed at his dark eyes with one gloved hand. He always wore black gloves, even indoors: something to do with a skin condition that made his fingers sensitive. “No.”
“Is he gonna die?”
“Yes,” Zuvicek said, with a sharpness that surprised me. “But that’s true of you and me as well. It might happen tonight and it might happen fifty years from now. Your brother, I think he’ll still be with us for another few years yet.”
I heard in his voice the admission that this would not be good news for us. “But what’s wrong with him, exactly?”
We heard footsteps on the stairs, and Zuvicek said, “Your father will wish to speak to you on this, I think.”
Unlike my mother, who would remain youthful even after years of fighting for her damaged son, my father looked like he had aged four decades in as many hours. Ethan’s plight had ripped a hole in his life, one that had already leeched the color from his skin and the spark from his eyes. In the short time he had left, before daily existence in the same house as my damaged brother put him in his grave, he’d age still more, developing a stoop, a lingering wheeze, and a patina of exhaustion that turned every breath he took into a fresh burden he only shouldered out of habit. But on that day, as he came down the stairs, there was still some of the man he’d been left on his bones, and as he lowered himself into the overstuffed armchair that had always been his alone, it seemed less the attitude of a man without strength to stand than that of a father who now had to address his two undamaged children from across a common table.
Father massaged his temples with forefinger and thumb. “I am sorry. In any other family, you would have been able to live your entire lives without seeing this.”
“Seeing what?”
“This… curse,” he said, spitting the word as if he would have liked to wrap both his hands against the disease, and strangle the life from it, if he could. Then he heard himself, seemed to realize that anger at the fates would only frighten us, and softened. “This disorder. It is known to our family, from the old country, but it is very, very rare. Most of us have lived entire lifetimes without ever hearing of a case, except in old stories. A distant cousin you have likely never met had a child with the condition, about twenty years ago. Your grandmother, may she rest in peace, once told me it had happened to a grand-uncle of hers, when she was a girl even younger than Ethan is now; and a hundred years before that it happened to some other poor child, whose name and exact relationship to us have been lost to history. Records only go back so far, but it has always been the hidden devil inside us, the one that slept for generations.”
I had been learning genetics in my science classes. “You’re talking about a recessive trait.”
My father looked blank for a moment, as if I’d just tossed a few words of quantum physics into the conversation.
Zuvicek answered for him. “You are a smart boy. Yes. That is exactly what your father is talking about.”
“And… it only happens to our family? To no one else?”