Ask Him Why (4 page)

Then she was there, closing the classroom door behind her.

She never once met my eyes.

“I hate to be the one to have to tell you,” she said.

I want to report that I had a reaction to those words, but the truth is that I was fresh out of reactions. I was at the bottom of the reaction well, with no more options beneath me.

“But you just have to, though,” I said, “because when you know something is that bad, it’s torture to have to wait.”

She raised her eyes to my face and smiled sadly, but I couldn’t help noting that her gaze landed more or less on my nose.

“I understand,” she said.

But then she didn’t say anything for a torturous length of time. I think at the time I might truly have believed she was trying to torture me. Now I look back and see that it was hard for her, too.

“Could you please . . .”

“Somebody who fought in the war with your brother is saying some things anonymously. Somebody got in touch with the reporter. With a lot of people, I guess. Anyone who’ll listen. He says your brother didn’t just fail to show up for duty one night. He’s saying Joseph talked several other soldiers out of going. So he thinks Joseph should be charged with mutiny.”

I’m not sure if there was a silence while the word “mutiny” rang in my head, or if I simply missed something else she was saying. I tried to think what I knew about the word. It made me picture men on a ship dueling with their captain, swords drawn, but I knew I would have to find out what it meant in real modern life.

“They had to go out on a raid four men short,” she added. “And two men in their unit were killed.”

I found a new level at the bottom of the reaction well.

“How does he know they wouldn’t have been anyway?”

“That’s a good question,” she said. “An important question. I guess we don’t know, and maybe we never really will. But he’s saying that when a unit loses men it’s hard on morale, and it throws off the whole way they’ve been trained to operate. So he’s making a strong case for the two things being related. But he can’t prove it all by himself. It’s something the army will have to investigate. They’ll decide if one was a direct result of the other. And outside the army, well . . . people are going to have to decide for themselves, I guess.”

“Oh,” I said. “Okay. Well. People will see that it could have happened anyway, right? I mean, they’ll look at both sides.” I waited for her to assure me. She must not have known how desperately I needed that worldview confirmed. “People will be fair, right?”

More silence.

Then she said, “Some will. I’m sorry to have to have been the one to tell you. Also I hate to tell you it’s time to go in and sit down now, but you know it is.”

“No,” I said. “I’m going home.”

“You need to go to the office and get permission.”

“No,” I said again. “I’m just going.”

“If you’re not feeling well—”

“I’m not.”

“You have to go to the nurse first.”

“No. I’m just leaving.”

And I did. I walked down the hall without looking back. Down two flights of stairs and out into a cold and bright morning that felt unfairly unchanged. I was outraged at how unaffected the world seemed to be, and with seemingly no sense of apology, either.

I knew no one would stop me, and no one did. I knew I would never be taken to task later for the desertion, and I was right.

At the very bottom of human experience comes a set of certain privileges, a special zone where the rules apply to everyone else except you. It was good of the world to build itself that way, and include that tiny consolation prize for those who have nothing else to recommend their lives in that moment.

The trick, I’ve found as the years go by, is not to get addicted to that feeling. It would be easy enough to do. It can be used like a Get Out of Jail Free card, because the universe has just skewered us right through our core and put us over the coals to roast, so it’s unthinkable for anyone to expect anything from us in that moment.

Anything that lifts responsibility for our actions is addictive, I’ve found.

So really, looking back, I’d have to say that was not the hard moment. The tough bit is always later, when you’re held responsible for yourself again, and your life is expected to go on.

Chapter Four: Aubrey

I’ll say one thing in favor of the other thirteen-year-old boys I went to school with. It may be the only positive thing I have. They didn’t read the morning paper. So I went through first period and half of second not knowing anything was wrong.

Then my science teacher’s phone rang. Not his personal phone. Not his cell. The one on the wall. The one that links the office to the various classrooms.

He stepped away from the board, answered it. A second or two later, he looked straight at me.

Does it go without saying that this is never a good sign?

He nodded, but not to me. Which seemed weird. Who nods into a phone? Then he hung up, and looked right at me again.

“Aubrey,” he said. “You’re wanted in the office.”

A murmur of low noise from the other kids. A reaction to the trouble I must be in. There’s a special noise kids make, like the word “ooh,” but with more inflection. More attitude. It sounds like taunting. Only in recent years have I decided they might just have been letting off tension. You know. From that moment when they didn’t know for sure the trouble wasn’t theirs.

“What’d
I
do?” I yelled out.

It was reflexive. Instinctual.

I’d been in trouble so recently, but the principal had let me off the hook. Was she allowed to put me right back on?

“Nothing,” he said. “It’s not like that. Your mom’s coming to pick you up. She needs to take you out of school early.”

I must have risen to my feet. Or partway there, anyway. Because I was surprised when my thighs hit the bottom of the desk. I guess I wasn’t clear on what my body was doing.

“Why?”

“She didn’t say. Just go down there and find out, okay?”

On the way to the office, I busied myself thinking up reasons why my mom might take me out of school in the middle of the day. Which, of course, she never had before.

Dad had had a heart attack. One of our distant relatives had died. Ruth was sick, though I’m not sure what that would have to do with me finishing out the school day. They’d found out about something I’d done, and now I was in trouble. There had been a bomb threat or a gun at school, but why would she be the first to know?

Farther down, in the part of my gut that’s better left alone, I think I knew it probably had something to do with Joseph. Everything did in those days.

“What do you
mean
you don’t know where my daughter is?”

My mom was in the office, at the counter, yelling at the staff. I was in the corner, on the farthest possible bench. Trying to disappear.

Those who haven’t been in school for years may have forgotten the piercing and utter humiliation of almost anything your mother does there. Even if it’s marginally acceptable by adult standards. I haven’t been in school for years. University and graduate school not counting. And yet I remember.

I couldn’t hear the answer, because the only one yelling was my mom.

“So you’re saying you misplaced her.”

Inaudible answer.

“Well, isn’t it your job to know?”

Inaudible answer.

“This is completely unacceptable.”

Then she stormed out of the office and into the hall. I swear I thought she’d forgotten all about me.

A few seconds later, she stuck her head back in.

“Aubrey!” she barked.

And yet I was the one who followed like a dog.

We drove for three or four blocks in absolute silence.

Then I said, “Are you
ever
going to tell me what’s going on?”

“There was an article in the paper.”

“So? There are articles in the paper every day.”

“Not about our family, there aren’t.”

“What did it say about us?” I noticed I didn’t sound scared. Not at all. Which is interesting. Because I was.

“It was about your brother. And it was very critical.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“Why doesn’t it?”

“Why do I get to leave school just because someone criticized Joseph?”

“You’ll see when we get home. There are newspeople. Reporters.”

“At the house?”

“Yes, Aubrey. Where else?”

“Then isn’t that the last place we want to be?”

She sighed. Obviously quite taxed to have to talk to me. To be fair to her, she was having a horrible day. To be fair to me, so was I.

“Our house is private property. They can’t step over our property line. Your dad made that very clear. So that’s safer. We didn’t want those vultures surrounding you or Ruth on the way home from school.”

“Dad’s home?”

“He
was
.”

“Why was he not at the office?”

“Oh good heavens, Aubrey, must you ask so many questions? At least stick to the ones you can’t figure out on your own. Please. Obviously he was home because of this—”

I was waiting anxiously to hear what “this” entailed. But I never got to find out. I mean, only later. When I got to find out the hard way.

“
There’s
your sister!” she practically shouted.

I looked where our mom was pointing and saw Ruth walking along the sidewalk, her back to us. Looking dark and mad. Yeah, I know. I couldn’t see her face. But it radiated from her body language. It hung over her like a cloud. Like that messy kid from the cartoons whose dirt surrounds him in the air every place he goes.

Mom pulled the car over to the curb and powered down the passenger window, bumping my elbow away. It had been leaning on the glass.

“Ruth! Where on earth are you going?

“Home,” Ruth said. Without stopping. Without turning around.

“Get in! Now!”

Ruth stopped. Sighed deeply. I could see her shoulders lift up with the sigh, then collapse.

She got into the front, right beside me. Forcing me over closer to Mom on the bench seat of our big Mercedes. I wished she’d gotten in the back. Not that I had anything against my sister. But that’s a lot of people in a small space.

Ruth slammed the door much too hard.

“I have no idea how you knew I wanted you home,” our mom said, “but fine.”

A few silent blocks. Then we pulled around the corner and our house came into view.

There was a news van parked out front. The kind with the satellite receiver on top and the name of the station painted on the side. It was the local NBC affiliate. Don’t ask me why that stuck in my mind. Another three or four cars sat near the curb, all unfamiliar. Nobody ever parked on the street in our neighborhood. We had garages. Big garages. Our parents would have been humiliated to have a garage too small for their multiple vehicles.

About half a dozen people milled around on the sidewalk in front of our gate. One man had a big video camera on his shoulder. A woman in a jewel-tone violet suit held a microphone.

I was stunned by what felt like a lot of news traffic. Three or four days later, I would look back at that day and view it as so close to silence and peace that I would feel nostalgia for the moment.

All six people surrounded us as my mom turned into the driveway. They stood much too close, considering the car was still moving. The man with the camera filmed us pulling in. I couldn’t understand why anyone would want video footage of us arriving home. The others hovered close to our windows as she slowed down to make the turn. They asked questions I couldn’t make out because they were all talking at once.

My mom powered down her driver’s window and was rewarded with a microphone in her face.

“I will run you down,” my mom said. Her voice was so calm, so even. It was genuinely scary. “I swear. You stay twenty or thirty feet back from this car or I swear I’ll run you over. I’ll say it was an accident. That there were so many of you I couldn’t avoid hitting at least one. Got that? Don’t test me.”

Six people backed up fast.

The garage door powered up, and we pulled in. My mom hit the remote to roll the door back down. The world went dark.

“Wait,” my mom said, and turned off the engine. Then the world went silent as well. “Don’t move yet.”

We didn’t.

“I don’t want you to say even a word to those snakes. If they have the nerve to get close to you, you say ‘No comment.’ That’s
all
you say. You don’t tell them what jackals you think they are. You don’t defend your brother. You say ‘No comment.’ That’s all. Whatever you say, they’ll use it against you.”

“Like if you threaten to run them down with your car?” Ruth asked. “They might use that against you?”

She was mad, my sister. And when Ruth was mad, she ran to sarcasm.

“Exactly. That’s exactly what I’m trying to tell you, Ruth. Don’t make the mistake I just made. Now I’ll probably be on the news tonight, threatening them. And we’ll just look like a horrible family.”

“So you’re telling us to do as you say, not as you do.”

“I’m telling you to learn from my mistake.”

And with that, even my sister, Ruth, shut up.

I looked for Joseph everywhere. In every room of the house. He hadn’t been at dinner the night before. In fact, I hadn’t seen him since I found him in my room in the middle of that first night. And yet it never occurred to me he might be gone for good.

Not only did I not find him, but the basement was free of any Joseph belongings. His big duffel bag, his hanging shirts. Gone. Even the little bathroom off the rec room was cleared. No toothbrush. No shaving cream. No comb.

I found my mom upstairs, in the kitchen. Drinking coffee. Looking out at the intruders on the sidewalk through the filmy curtain. As if she could keep herself safe by watching their every move.

“Where is he?” I asked.

“Your dad? I think he finally went into the office.”

“No. Joseph.”

“Oh. Joseph. He’s gone.”

“Gone where?”

“I wouldn’t know, Aubrey. Your father went downstairs to tell him to pack up and get out, but he already had.”

“When’s he coming back?”

“He’s not. Not if your father has anything to say about it. And he does.”

“Well, how am I supposed to talk to him if I don’t know where he is?”

“You’re
not
. You’re
not
supposed to talk to him. Your father would have a coronary if he thought you were in touch with your brother. He’s no longer part of this family.”