“I never asked for any of it.”
“But you got it all, don’t you? And every time somebody dies, you get a little more.”
“I’ll wring your goddamned neck if you don’t shut up.”
“Jake, Jake, Jake.” Joshua wheezed a laugh. “You looked in a mirror lately? We’re not kids anymore.”
“I don’t have to put up with your shit. I put up with plenty of it when we were kids, but you’re right. Those days are over. And you can add one more person to my list of dead people.” Jacob started for the door, then whirled and jabbed out with his finger. “You.”
Joshua rose, the poker in his hand. “Where the hell do you think you’re going?”
Jacob kept walking, entered the foyer with its high ceiling and haunted walls. The front door was locked. The shiny, key-operated deadbolt was new, its bright glint out of place in that dim room.
“You’re home, Jacob,” Joshua said, tapping the poker on the floor as if it were a cane. “Get used to it.”
Jacob yanked on the door. One of his parents’ favorite punishments was to lock naughty children in their rooms, and many of the doors in the house could be locked from either side. “I’ll bust a window if I have to. Or your head.”
“Such anger. I thought the doctors taught you to deal with it. But it’s handy to claim you don’t remember what happened.”
“What do you want?”
“What have I always wanted? To be you, hotshot. I had the bad luck of sliding into the world after you did. And you beat me to everything else, too.”
“Look, I didn’t want Dad’s blessing, I didn’t want the inheritance, and I sure as hell didn’t want any Wells birthright. I fought against that with every breath, same as you.”
“Until just before he died. Funny how that happened. How you got in good when it counted.”
Jacob pressed his hands over his ears. If only he could shut off that taunting, accusing voice. Or maybe squeeze hard enough for the memories to squirt from his brain like pus from a festering boil. He hadn’t gone to Warren Wells’ deathbed and begged for forgiveness, had he? But he couldn’t shake the image of that pale wrinkled hand reaching to pat his head, and those watery blue eyes staring in pride and victory.
Joshua approached, the poker raised before him like a fencer’s foil, his lips curled in triumph. Jacob had nowhere to run. Even if the door were open, there was no place in the world to escape the past. He stared into the face that looked like a savage mirror, a reminder of all those dark secrets and sick, hidden things.
Joshua stood close enough for Jacob to smell the stale cigarette tar on his lips. “Take it easy, brother. You’re acting like you’re here against your will. As if you haven’t thought of this house every single day of your adult life.”
Joshua put a hand on Jacob’s shoulder. The hand was as cold as a lizard tucked under a creek rock. “Come on. Let me show you to your room.”
Jacob let himself be led across the foyer to the polished stairs with their worn runners. They paused as if both were admiring the splintered baluster, an awesome relic that had resisted repair. Then Joshua nudged him up the stairs. Each riser took Jacob closer to the past, though memory seemed to elude him. Instead of clear and prolonged reels, he saw the events of their childhood in flashes of blurred and fractured images.
Step. On the floor, the sun shining through the window, making a yellow river between them, Joshua bringing a wooden train caboose down hard on Jacob’s knee.
Step. Jacob’s fingers caught in the corner of the crib, his screams filling the world, Joshua grinning while yanking the covers away.
Step. In the dark behind the curtain, holding his breath, something terrible scratching at the door.
Step. Mother entering their room, smiling, bearing a silver tray with China teapot and mugs.
Step. Father smirking around his pipe, holding out a dollar bill and seeing which of his sons could leap the highest and be the first to snatch it.
Step. The window broken, the jagged glass smeared with the dark blood of the bird that had flown into its own reflection.
Step. In the night, Joshua giggling from his bed across the room. A separate giggle echoing from the closet. Jacob with his head under the suffocating safety of the pillow.
Step. Mother at the head of the stairs, her legs trembling, eyes gone wild toward the ceiling.
Step. Jacob’s comic book collection scattered across the floor, the crotches of the cartoon women neatly clipped out.
Step. An arm reaching up from beneath the bed, fingers pale in the moonlight.
Step. Father locking the closet door, threatening to leave the boys in there until they turned to skeletons if they didn’t learn to behave.
Step. A fleeting stench of sulfur, then a small flame crawling up the sheets.
Step. Joshua making him promise to never tell, cross his heart and hope to die.
Step. The doctor bending over, smelling of sweet decay, his round face bright with kindness.
Step. Mother with the silver tray, this time bearing pills and a glass of water.
Step. A scattering of coins on the walnut dresser. Joshua with three whole dollars because he was Father’s favorite.
Step. Rummaging through Joshua’s laundry, trying on his brother’s favorite red shirt. It fit perfectly, better than any of Jacob’s own clothes.
Step. Jacob with his head under the pillow. The closet door creaking open.
Step. The doctor telling him it was just a dream, and dreams could be scary, couldn’t they? But, see, there’s nothing here now.
Step. Mother at the head of the stairs.
Step. Father at the head of the stairs.
Step. A crashing sound, bone softer than wood, meat with little give.
Step. Promise not to tell ever.
Step. Jacob at the head of the stairs.
He blinked and looked around. The dust was like a fine silver-gray carpet, the threads shimmering and almost ethereal in the dying daylight. The hall was paneled with cherry. The closed doors stood like solid slabs of unforgiving darkness. Cracks as crooked as the legs of spiders stretched across the ceiling.
The last door on the right led to the room he and Joshua had shared as young children. Despite the expansiveness of the house, Mother had insisted the boys be together as much as possible. Their parents’ bedroom was two doors down, the neighboring room serving first as a nursery, then as a guest room after the boys had been weaned from the crib. It wasn’t until Jacob and Joshua were twelve that they each were allowed their own rooms. But when Jacob thought of the house, he didn’t think of “his” room. He thought of “their” room. To him, the room on the corner with the view of the barn and the field beside the river was where he had grown up.
That’s where his feet carried him now. The floorboards creaked with damp age, though he still unconsciously avoided the weak spot that had first alerted his parents to his sleepwalking. How many times had he walked this strip of faded carpet? Probably more times than he remembered.
“Attaboy,” Joshua said. “Don’t fight it no more.”
Jacob must have entered a brief fugue state, because the next thing he knew, he was standing between the twin bunks that stood against opposite walls. Jacob’s childhood bed now seemed too impossibly small to have held all those terrors and shivers. The closet door at the foot of the bed was ajar and he studied the harsh angle of blackness for any signs of movement.
Joshua sat on his own bed and made an awkward attempt to stretch out. “Brings back a lot of memories, don’t it?”
“Not really,” he lied. “My childhood is just sort of one long blur. Why would I want to remember it?”
Joshua sat up with a hard groan of bedsprings. “Because I want you to, dear brother. Those were best days of my life, and I’d like to have them back.”
Jacob shook off the malaise that had engulfed him. “Is that why you hate me? Because I finally had some happiness? Because I succeeded while you ended up in a slave-wage job in Tennessee? Because I had a loving wife and kids while you were shacking up with some trailer-trash slut? Because I left all this behind and you had to live in it day after day because it’s all you ever had? Is that why you hate me?”