“Can you be any more blind and not have empty sockets in your head?”
“Not blind, oh no. Corrupt. Corrupt as Nero, and just as Roman.”
“You have to wonder how they live with themselves.”
“It’s a wonder they don’t feel like fakes. I’d feel like a fake.”
“You are a fake. Nothing real about you, honey.”
“Fuck off, Bob.”
“How can they eat? Doesn’t it make them sick? It makes me sick. I don’t think I can eat any more.”
“Darling, the lobster is coming. Don’t tell me…”
“Well maybe I could eat a little. But I won’t enjoy it.”
“Ruined. The whole day is ruined. I agree completely. Corruption has spoiled this day. Corruption is spoiling our country.”
“Something should be done about it.”
“Oh, something will be done about it. It’s not so long till November.”
“I meant tonight.
“I’m formulating a suit, but not tonight.”
“I for one will have to be a lot drunker before I do anything about it.”
“That can be arranged,” Jemma’s father said, handing a beer to Mr. Nottingham just as she and Rachel came up from the table. “Hey, sneaky girls,” he said. “Want some corn?”
“We had some,” Jemma said, and they ran off to hide under other tables and eat other people’s corn and shrimp. Underneath a Roman table they ate a whole lobster together, Jemma doing much of the dismembering because Rachel was squeamish, but Rachel devouring most of the rubbery tail meat. They went searching for Calvin because they wanted to pinch him with one of the big red claws. He was on the pier with a mixed group of boys, in the process of seeing how many magic snakes they could ignite at the same time. They had eighty of them set up in a circle of two layers. Jemma forgot to pinch him, too excited to remember when she heard about the plan. Four boys lit snakes at compass points on the circle, while Calvin leaned over and lit a few in the center. In a moment they were smoking and uncoiling, each individually at first but then they seemed to grow together, until it was one giant snake, a beast that was a deeper piece of darkness sucking up the torchlight and the flare of stray rockets. As it approached and exceeded child height they began to flee from it, all but Calvin, who was calling to it, pretending it was some demon he was summoning out of a deep black hell. “Come!” he was shouting at it. “Come and take them, my precious! Come and take them all!” Mr. Cropp came up with a fire extinguisher, blasting ash into the air to blow in a mass down the pier and into the Spartan table.
The big fight almost began then. Mr. Cropp and a Spartan dad exchanged a few drunken shoves until their wives — both of whom outmassed their husbands — pulled them apart. Rachel had wandered away, and suddenly the whole party seemed to go still for Jemma, even though everyone was still talking and laughing and running. All she could see was her brother, and all she could hear was her brother. He winked at her, and said, “Do you want to see something?”
“Sure,” she said.
“Sometimes I can make anyone do anything I want.”
“I know,” she said, because when she closed her eyes she saw him knocking the rocket aside, and she really believed he could do anything.
“Everyone else wants me to go, too. Even though they don’t know what it is. They’ve been waiting and waiting, and wanting it and wanting it.”
“I know,” she said, and he laughed.
“No you don’t.” Then he turned and hurled a piece of corn at their mother, and ran off into the darkness beyond the reach of the torches. Their mother had just lit the sparklers in her crown and raised up the arms she’d kept so carefully green with repeated applications of makeup throughout the day, to call down the big fireworks. It knocked her upside the head just as she cried out, “Let there be liberty!” and the first rocket shot up, a red-white-and-blue peony.
After that the hot corn began to fly in earnest, along with raw and cooked crabs that spun like frisbees as they sailed through the air. Jemma got nicked with a passing claw as she stood on the beach, not sure if she should watch the fight or the fireworks. Those who were drunk enough thwacked or stabbed at their neighbors with corn, or struck them with lobsters as if with a purse, or punched, or kicked, like Jemma’s father, mindful, even almost too drunk to walk, of his surgeons hands. Of the children only the teenagers participated, fighting with each other but not entirely seriously, and Tiffany Cropp, who in a confused ecstasy of rage, and in the dark between explosions, bit her own father on the calf.
Jemma and Rachel and a dozen other children on the beach were herded knee-high into the river by Elena and a few other older kids, out of the way of the food. Then they turned their faces to the sky and back to the earth again, watching the fight and the fireworks. Severna Forest was rightly said to have the best fireworks display east of DC. It went on while the fight intensified, red-white-and-blue peonies; silver swans; white stars that burst three times in succession to show a blue circle in their heart; red flares that burst green at their apogee and settled in shapes like trees into the water; a red, green, purple, and orange set, spheres of four different sizes that hung in the sky like a giant bowl of fruit for what seemed to Jemma to be forever — every explosion made Jemma’s stomach leap, her attention so consumed by what she saw that she did not hear herself exclaim with the people on the shore at every new explosion. For Jemma it was wonder piled on wonder, until the last, which seemed to explode just over her head, so she had to lean so far back she thought her hair would touch the water, a procession of flares in every color Jemma had ever seen, that exploded one by one, each one bigger and brighter than the last, each one touching her with a wave of force she felt break against her face, each one echoing in her eye and her head until she felt sure she must be suspended high in the sky. “Goodbye!” her brother shouted at her. She had waded close to the pier, and looking up she saw him there, framed against the explosions with his arms lifted up to the sky, as if he was summoning them out of the clouds, or hurling them out from his breast. “They are sending me!” he said. “Goodbye, I’m going!” In a panic, she clawed her way up a pylon and held on to his ankle, ready to be dragged after him into the sky. He shook his foot but she wouldn’t let go, and after the finale he was still just his ordinary self with his arms up. He sat down heavily next to her. On the beach people were still fighting and cursing, and Sheriff Travis turned on the lights on his patrol car, and started shouting on his bullhorn for people to calm down.
“Did you go?” Jemma asked her brother.
“What do you think?” he said.
67
I do not like your brothers, Pickie Beecher says. It is very early in the morning, and he sits on the edge of the roof, kicking his feet idly in the air and sipping at a packet of blood. I like every brother. Every brother lives in my heart, but these two… I do not like them.
Never mind them.
Angels hate me.
You are an orphan of creation.
Brother-killers, all of you. Even now brothers are dying, and what are you doing about it?
I am the recording angel.
Another and another and another. Death after death, and didn’t my mother undo death?
Not for everyone. But do not fear my brothers. The accuser has nothing to say to you, and the destroyer will not touch you. A different way has been prepared for you.
Death, he says.
Not death, I say. But life. Someone has died for the sake of everyone else’s happiness. Even yours.
Will I get to be with my brother again?