At that time, I believed he was still the brother of my childhood. I believed he could save me from some of the world’s harms, given the right circumstances, as he had one summer saved me from the black and weedy water under our capsized canoe. We had dated each other’s best friend; we had lied for each other to our stern, unyielding parents; we had accompanied each other in a silent vigil at our father’s wake and funeral. Those days, white with distance, still bound us.
After his divorce Brent and I invited him over two or three times a week for supper. But he was a mess: he missed his wife, missed his house; he was drinking too much. He was a pleasant drunk, though, and we used to wait it out together, chatting in the living room until he was sober enough to drive home. Sometimes we reminisced about our childhood, our mother and father, our sister, Beth. Often we complained about our mother, who was getting cranky with age, or told each other little dramatic stories about people at work. He and Brent talked work, too, and sports. With Jenny, my brother played games: Go to the Head of the Class when she was ten, and Monopoly when she was eleven, and computer games when she was thirteen. When she was fourteen, they’d just talk. It was on one of these occasions, when Jenny was fifteen and a half, that my brother, long drunk and feeling generous, gave my daughter a taste of what a man’s hand could find on a woman’s body if it had a mind to.
She told her father first, moments after we got home. We’d been to a movie, one we’d chosen for a famous sex scene, which was shot low and which dissolved into black and white at the end. Our marriage had fallen dormant of late, a sleepy partnership that needed the shoring up we were happy to give it.
Every light in the house was on, and the radio, and the dishwasher, and the television, and the stereo — a clash of light and sound that was so wrong my heart was tearing up my chest before we got the door open.
“Who was here?” I asked her, looking around, thinking burglar, rapist, one of those boys from her school. She shrank against the wall, her pixie features lost and shriveled, and asked to speak to her father.
Wrestling, I heard her say as I eavesdropped, shaking, on the other side of the door. He said he could teach me wrestling.
Brent tore out of the house and went raging over to my brother’s apartment, and by the time I got there it was done: the police had arrived and my brother — his face dirty with tears and blood — was wincing under the officers’ questions. Brent was sulking by the door, his knuckles rubbed raw. It was my brother who had called the police, to save himself from harm.
She didn’t tell me first because she thought I wouldn’t believe her. It’s true that I didn’t speak right away, that I hesitated too long, that my first thought was not for her. My temples throbbed with the difficulty of believing them both, my head was crammed with two truths trying to fit into a space that would take only one. When finally I attempted to comfort my daughter, she found my arms unconvincing, my voice a small and suspect thing.
Brent believed her, believed such a thing of my brother, believed without a moment’s thought, an instinct that — in the torment of therapists and victim advocates and assistant prosecutors that blotted our life for so many months afterward — made him the good parent, the one who could believe in evil on the turn of a dime.
We waited nearly a year for the trial, and in that time my family — I mean my first family, the one that included my brother — disintegrated as subtly as the afterimage of a fireworks. Everything we ever were as a family, everything we had ever shared — every morsel of food, every dog and hamster, every yes and no and sorry — was gone, replaced by the knowledge of what we might be capable of, what sin lay waiting in our souls.
My other family, Brent and Jenny, underwent an even subtler dissolution: we moved through the same house, ate at the same table, occasionally even laughed together or made each other proud. But I dragged around like a phantom limb the part of me that believed my brother, and in some unnameable way I knew my husband and daughter had stopped speaking to me.
The trial came, an unseemly ritual that held at its core my daughter’s high, halting voice and my brother’s tense denials. Strange men asked the questions I had not asked, for until the trial I’d had no wish for clarity. I listened to every word, and what I was listening for were the details — exactly where he had put his hands, the farthest reach of his fingers — so I would know how far I had to hate him, and how much room was left on the other side.
He had done this, but not that. They used real words, ugly words — vagina and nipple and pubic hair — words that dripped like a dirty rain from the domed roof. Brent sat next to me, his jaw set like a watchdog’s, his fingers braided together, avoiding mine. My brother was found guilty of unlawful sexual contact and we all went home.
I got up, leaving my brother smoking on the park bench, suddenly bent on blending our secret into the cheerful clumps of midday shoppers picking their way over the cobblestones. He followed me and I let him. We eased into and out of the handsome little stores, and my brother watched as I picked up and handled every necklace and knickknack that pleased my eye. My brother’s ugly shadow made me so greedy for pretty things; I wanted everything I saw, an embarrassment I carried around that day with the pastel bags I wouldn’t let my brother hold for me.
It was a perfect New England fall day, sunny and cool, the city blazing all around us. If we had merely spoken on the phone, or perhaps met on the dark porch of our mother’s house, or even if I had visited him once in prison — but our meeting was public in every way, and it was too late now not to claim him. That we were meeting, that I still hoped to find in his face the brother of my childhood were things I would have to account for.
The earrings cost forty dollars, money I know my brother couldn’t spare, living with our mother and out of work. We spotted them at the same moment and reached for them, touching hands. He started to draw away, but I held his hand, and then picked up the other, as if they were two halves of a rock I’d found on the beach; I examined the tobacco stains, the starry cracks over the knuckles, the tattered fingernails, the healed-over cuts. Weighing what they might have done. I saw my brother’s hands as a thing apart from him, and again I found myself believing they were what they seemed to be: the hands of my brother, not unlike mine in shape — narrow, innocent. I let him go.
Fashioned out of some sort of blue shell, the earrings had a graceful, bell-like shape and a thin lattice of gold around the bottom curve. Displayed alone on a tray of black velvet, they were heartbreakingly beautiful. And because they were beautiful I wanted them badly. I let my brother buy them for me; I understood that he was not buying them to make up for the cost of my meeting him but because he too was taken with their beauty and he too — on that crisp fall day amid scores of ordinary people and bright storefronts and soulful dogs tied temporarily to lampposts — was seized, unexpectedly, by hope.
“Remember that big shell we found one time at Silver’s Beach?” my brother said to me.