“Can’t you just give the photo back?” Marlinchen said.
“No,” Aidan told her. “It’s not here anymore.”
“You’re provoking him.”
“He took something that was mine,” Aidan said. His voice was changing, and for a moment she heard a man’s timbre, his future voice.
“If you just give it back, things will be all right,” she had said.
Marlinchen had better grades than Aidan. She helped him with his schoolwork. But now he was looking at her like he knew something she couldn’t grasp.
“No, it won’t,” he said. “It’s not about the picture.”
When the beatings started, Marlinchen and her younger brothers dealt with it by pretending that it wasn’t happening. It wasn’t that hard. Most of the hostilities were staged away from their eyes. When they heard something through the walls, Colm would turn up the volume on the TV set. Liam would put on the headphones of his Walkman and read. Marlinchen took Donal outside, to walk by the lake. Aidan himself never spoke of it in front of them, and he disguised the bruises from both them and his teachers.
The younger boys were changing; Marlinchen saw it. They began pulling away from Aidan, as if afraid that the lightning that struck him regularly might strike one of them as well. Colm, who had once followed Aidan like a shadow, became rude and oppositional to him. At dinner he pointedly sat as far as possible from Aidan, echoing his father’s opinions and ideas. Liam grew quiet and nervous, retreating into the stories he’d begun to write.
One day, in late spring, they were all outside, enjoying the first good weather. Colm was tossing a baseball around with Donal. Marlinchen was sitting at the outside table, finishing a book she needed to write a school report on. Aidan was working on Marlinchen’s bike, the lovely metallic-orange one she’d just gotten and was still growing into. They’d taken the handlebars off and put them back on reversed, and Aidan was worried about the brake tension.
Colm made a long throw to Donal, who was standing near the deck stairs with his fielder’s glove. The throw went wild and hit the porch railing about four feet from Aidan, who put a hand up to field it a second too late. The baseball ricocheted off the wooden railing into the kitchen window. Glass shattered.
They were all statues for a moment. They knew Dad was upstairs, and he would have heard.
“Shit,” Aidan said, getting up off his knees and walking toward the window. They all clustered around it, in time to see Dad enter the kitchen, observe the broken glass on the floor and the baseball that had rolled to a stop by the refrigerator.
“Who did this?” he said, when he’d emerged onto the deck, his eyes taking them all in. There was silence for a moment, then Colm said, “Aidan did.”
“What?” Marlinchen protested. “Colm.”
“Aidan did,” he insisted, nervy defiance on his face. Aidan, like her, was staring uncomprehending at Colm, who was looking only at their father.
Dad spoke to Aidan. “Get upstairs,” he said. He didn’t ask if what Colm said was true. Marlinchen knew that he wouldn’t, not now and not upstairs.
“Colm,” she said when Aidan was gone, “what did you do that for? It wasn’t Aidan’s fault.”
“How do you know?” Colm said mulishly. “You were reading. You didn’t see.” Then he went inside the house, retrieving his baseball.
Marlinchen watched him go, and as she did, she realized that there was a poison spreading through her family. What Colm did once, he would try again, because it had worked. Marlinchen was afraid of how things would change from there. But what happened next was far from what she’d expected.
It was perhaps a month later that their father called Marlinchen and Aidan into his study. “I’ve been in touch with your aunt Brigitte, your mother’s sister,” he said to both of them. “She’s generously offered to let Aidan live with her.”
Why? Marlinchen wanted to ask. They didn’t even know Aunt Brigitte. She had never visited Minnesota, and the family had never traveled to her home in Illinois.
Instead, she said, “For how long?” Summer was here; that must be what her father had in mind, a summer away.
“We’ll see,” her father said. He tapped a narrow folder on his desk with a Northwest Airlines logo. “You leave as soon as school’s out,” he told Aidan, who swallowed hard and left.
“Dad,” Marlinchen said softly, but she didn’t know what else to say.
“Help him pack, would you?” her father said. “Boys are hopeless at that sort of thing. And, honey”- he turned back from booting up the computer-“tell your brothers, will you?”
Upstairs, Aidan required no help in packing, and he seemed to have already adjusted to the idea that had so shocked Marlinchen.
“Don’t worry,” he said quietly, pulling out his suitcase. “I’ll be fine.”
“But we’ve never even met Aunt Brigitte,” Marlinchen protested.
“Yes, we did,” Aidan said. “We were down there once, at her place in Illinois.”
Marlinchen gave him a quizzical look. “I don’t remember that,” she said. “Besides, Dad doesn’t even like her.”
“Then she’s probably all right,” Aidan said bitterly.
“It’s just for the summer, I bet.”
“Don’t worry about it. I don’t care where I live,” Aidan said.
“But-”
“Just drop it, okay?” Aidan said sharply. “And get your cat out of my suitcase.”
Marlinchen saw Snowball happily digging her claws into the clothes Aidan had laid in the open case. She got up from Liam’s bed. “Snowball isn’t my cat; she belongs to all of us,” she said.
“No, she doesn’t,” Aidan said. “Snowball is your pet, and you’re Dad’s pet. Why don’t you just leave me the fuck alone?”
Aidan had never thrown it in her face before, her special status with their father. Tears welled in Marlinchen’s eyes.
“Linch,” Aidan said, relenting, but she fled, into the hallway, into her own room.
On the day of Aidan’s early-morning flight, Marlinchen got up at 5 A.M. to make him pancakes. Her reflection in the blackness outside the kitchen window looked like the pinched face of an old woman whose hair had failed to go gray. Aidan ate only a third of what she’d made him.
She got up again at seven to make a second breakfast for the boys. Dad wasn’t home yet. Liam cried at the breakfast table, and Donal followed suit. Colm’s face was set and hard.
Marlinchen called Aidan a few times on the phone, until one day her father left the phone bill on her bed, with the Illinois calls outlined in yellow. She knew he didn’t want money for the calls, and a cold feeling coalesced in her stomach. She started making the calls from pay phones, when she could, but opportunities were few and far between. Aidan told her he was all right, and that Aunt Brigitte was nice. After that there was little to say.
When school started, Hugh didn’t bring Aidan home. Marlinchen started several times to ask her father why not, but the words froze in her throat. When Aunt Brigitte died in a car accident, and Aidan was sent farther south to live with an old friend of their father’s, Marlinchen heard nothing about it until it was over and done with. When she finally found out, she understood that Aidan was never coming home. Their father was never going to change his mind.
I have to do something. I have to talk to him. I can’t let Aidan live down there with someone we’ve never even met.
But she didn’t say anything, not right away. If Marlinchen was afraid for Aidan, she was just as worried about her father. He’d been under pressure for so long, financial and otherwise. His back had flared up, and he was moodier than ever. Once, he’d said he’d had something important to tell her, and led her down to the magnolia tree to say it.