CHAPTER 16
Growing up, I had never considered my brother Aaron to be a bad person.
A pain in the ass, sure. Often. And with an undeniable streak of cruelty. The first time I noticed that streak—the first time his meanness struck me as something characteristic about my brother, distinct from the usual schoolyard cruelties—was when I was nine years old and Aaron was a week shy of his twelfth birthday. We had been in the park adjacent to the school on a slow Saturday morning, me pitching softballs (pitching was my only athletic skill) and Aaron taking practice swings. Neither of us was likely to make the MLB draft, but I was drawing my own measure of smug satisfaction from Aaron’s inability to hit my slider.
Also enjoying Aaron’s swing-throughs was Billy-Ann Blake, ten years old, who lived three streets east of us and who was amusing herself by heckling from the otherwise empty bleachers. Billy-Ann was a tall, gawky girl whose parents let her run around in pink denim overalls. That morning, the summer sun hammering down from a silvery-blue sky, she repeated what must have been every scatological epithet she had ever overheard at the town’s Little League tournaments, which was quite a catalog. Aaron was frustrated and embarrassed, and with every taunt from Billy-Ann his complexion turned a deeper shade of red. Finally he threw down the bat (“Sore loser!” Billy-Ann shrieked) and walked off the field, tossing a terse see you later in my direction.
I gathered up glove, bat, and ball and made my own way home. Aaron showed up around lunchtime, sweaty and sullen and uncommunicative.
Not long after lunch, Billy-Ann Blake’s mom knocked at the front door. Mama Laura took her into the living room, and after a brief talk Aaron and I were called to join them. It seemed that Billy-Ann, after taunting Aaron, had been walking through one of the park’s paved trails when she was pushed from behind, fell face-first into the asphalt, and suffered a spectacularly bloody broken nose. She was at the hospital with her father now, and although she hadn’t seen who pushed her, she was certain it was Aaron Fisk.
Mama Laura asked Aaron whether this was true. Aaron gave her a somber, troubled look. “No,” he said flatly. “I mean, Billy-Ann was watching us play ball, but we came right home from the park. Somebody else must have pushed her.”
Mama Laura had spent the morning in the kitchen assembling her contribution to tomorrow’s church bake sale and she had not paid attention to our whereabouts. She returned Aaron’s stare without reaction. Then she turned to me. “Adam, is that so?”
I didn’t hesitate. I knew what was expected of me. “Yeah,” I said. “We came right back.”
Billy-Ann’s mom went away unsatisfied, and Mama Laura may have had her suspicions, but no more was said on the subject in the Fisk household. Because Aaron was gold. Firstborn son, pride of the family, star of the debating team … shitty on the baseball diamond, maybe, but a first pick for soccer and a rising star of the school’s swim team. Sure, Aaron had been angry, and yeah, he had probably shoved Billy-Ann hard enough to break her nose. But stuff like that happened. It didn’t make him a bad person, did it?
And lying to protect him: that was just family loyalty. Even if Mama Laura started looking at Aaron a little differently from then on. Even if she spared some of those same glances for me.
Jenny Symanski spent plenty of time at our house in those days, but she never seemed to buy into our idolization of Aaron. Which was good. As far as I was concerned, the best thing about Jenny was that she liked me more than she liked my brother. Which is why, years later, even after I joined Tau, even after Jenny and I broke up, I was astonished when she married him. It was flattering to think she had settled for Aaron because she couldn’t have me, but it was also possible that some kind of mutual attraction had smoldered away unacknowledged until they were in a position to act on it. And, well, why not? By that time Aaron was a college graduate, involved in the family business, and already catching the eye of the local Republican party elders; I was the standoffish art-boy geek who had traded his family for some kind of pretentious, dope-smoking social club.
Geddy stayed in touch with Aaron and Jenny more consistently than I did, and it was Geddy who had flagged the first signs of Aaron’s abuse. He had hinted at it back when I was in Vancouver, but it wasn’t until months later that he raised the subject in another phone call.
“He slaps her,” Geddy had said. “Punches her sometimes. Maybe worse things.”
“Really? You’ve seen this?”
“When I was staying with them. I mean, I didn’t see it happen. But some nights I could hear the yelling. And in the morning she might have a bruise. Or she might be walking a little carefully, like something hurt. So I knew. And she knew I knew. She tried to talk about it sometimes.”
Jenny had never been a complainer, but neither had she suffered fools gladly. I asked Geddy why she didn’t go to the police.
“She’s worried Aaron could pull strings and get a complaint shut down. And then it would be even worse for her. But she’s thinking about it.”
One thing I had learned from watching my tranchemates disentangle themselves from their tethers was that these things don’t get better all by themselves. “There are shelters,” I said. “There are people who can help her with legal problems. Geddy, if she wants to talk to me, I’m sure I can set up a secure line. Aaron wouldn’t have to know about it.”
“Okay,” Geddy said. “I’ll tell her that.”
But I didn’t hear from her. And a year later, Geddy said the trouble had been resolved.
“Resolved how? They’re still married, aren’t they?”
“That was part of the deal. Jenny decided she needed evidence, right? So she set up her tablet in the bedroom with the camera recording video. Night after night, until she had all the evidence she needed. Yelling, slapping, grabbing, hair-pulling—Aaron’s a hair-puller, did you know that? Including threats. What he’d do to her if she tried to tell anyone and how he’d bankrupt her if she left him. Because he’s afraid of a public scandal.”
And here was another aspect of Jenny’s personality I had failed to discern: this calculated stoicism, the ability to endure something terrible until she had devised a tool to end it. Twenty-five minutes of video recording, Geddy said, which she had wisely copied and stored in multiple locations. I pictured a thumb drive in a safety-deposit box in some DC bank, an insurance policy by any other name.
But still, she hadn’t divorced him.
“That’s part of the deal. She keeps the video to herself and goes on pretending they’re happily married. In return they lead totally separate lives, separate bedrooms, separate vacations, he pays her a monthly stipend and guarantees payments on her car, things like that. She hardly has to see him, except at public events.”
“Not as good as a clean separation.”
“It’s what she wants, Adam. She feels like it gives her some power over him. She’s saving all the money he gives her, in case he tries something. But he sees other women. What he calls discreet short-term relationships. Which Jenny says means high-priced hookers and bar pickups, basically.”
And that was how things had stood until a couple of months ago, when Jenny herself had called me. She used Geddy’s phone (he was in DC with his band), which meant she distrusted her own phone, which meant the situation with Aaron must have heated up again.
At first I didn’t recognize her voice. Jenny had been a social smoker almost as long as I had known her, but her years with Aaron had ramped it up into a full-blown pack-a-day habit, and her voice was a charcoal drawing of the voice I remembered. It had lost its tentativeness, too. “A while back you told Geddy you’d be willing to help me. Is that right?”
I felt blindsided. “Of course. But I’m not sure—I mean—”
“I know Geddy told you about Aaron and me. So I don’t have to rehash all that business, do I?”