Ask Him Why (9 page)

“All the time he has
one
client cancel. Today your mom say
three
clients canceled.”

I had no idea what to say to that. Inside, I’m ashamed to report, I thought mostly of myself.

What if he couldn’t make a living as a lawyer anymore? How would he pay the bills? He was always complaining about how close to the line we were on this gigantic mortgage and how much pressure it put on him to have to come up with all that money every month. Except he called it “making the monthly nut.” What happened to the monthly nut if you all of a sudden couldn’t make it? What could the nut do to punish you if you failed?

“Is Aubrey upstairs?”

“In his room, yes,” Isabella said.

In a rare act of sibling bonding, I decided to go upstairs and commiserate with my little brother.

“I need to go see Joseph,” he said. And then when the conversation lagged he said it again. And then again. Every time we ran out the thread of a topic and every time I allowed too long a gap between sentences, Aubrey said, “I need to go see Joseph.”

Behind his head, planets hung silently in space as he spoke.

“We don’t even know where he is, though,” I said after the third time.

“We can find out, though. Because we’re family.”

“How do you know that?”

“I just know.”

“How?”

“I just do, okay? Don’t ask. Please.”

I sighed and looked up through the Milky Way with unfocused eyes.

“So let’s say you find out where he is,” I said, “and he can have visitors. It could be three or four states away from here, this place where they’re holding him. They could have him anywhere in the country. How will you get there? You’re not even old enough to ride a bus or a train by yourself.”

“You could come with me.”

I snorted. “Yeah. Some big help that would be. I’m a whole two years older. I’m just barely old enough to ride a bus or a train by myself if I can prove there’s a grown-up waiting to pick me up at the station. No, if you’re going to pull off a thing like that, you’ll need a lot more than just me.”

We looked out into space for a minute more, then at each other. Aubrey had a look on his face I wasn’t used to seeing, as if he were doing calculus in his head.

“Aunt Sheila,” he said.

“Oh, I don’t know about that.”

“Aunt Sheila is great for things like this.”

“Things like this,”
I repeated. “Aubrey. There are no
things like this
. Nothing in our lives has ever been remotely like this and you know it.”

“But she always helps us get around Dad.”

“She likes to be a thorn in his side, yeah. That doesn’t mean she’ll be willing to wade into a stink pile like this one.”

“I’m calling her,” he said, and reached for his backpack, where I’m guessing his phone had been hiding since he got suspended. Aubrey didn’t have much of a circle of friends, to put it mildly. Then again, look who’s talking.

“It’s the middle of the day,” I said. He just looked blank, like he was barely listening hard enough to understand, so I added, “She’ll be at school. You know. Teaching.”

“Oh. Right. Well, later, then, I’m calling her. I’ll come get you so you’ll know what she says.”

But I couldn’t help noticing I felt less obsessed about the situation than my little brother seemed to feel. I didn’t say so. It would have been cruel, so I didn’t say anything.

“How do I find out where he is?” he asked. He pulled his PowerBook onto his lap and opened the cover, as if the info were right there on the Internet just waiting for him to come up with good search terms.

“I have no idea,” I said. “But I’m not sure you’re going to find it on the web.”

“I was going to look for something more like info for families of military prisoners. You know. Instructions for how to contact the military to find out where your family member’s being held. They have that somewhere, right?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe. Or maybe . . .” But then I just trailed off—not because I didn’t know where I was going, but because I wasn’t anxious to get there.

“What?” he asked.

“I just think maybe it’s a problem most army families don’t have. Because maybe they just wait for their relative to contact them and
tell
them where they’re being held.”

“Oh,” he said, and closed the cover of his laptop. He sat a minute, looking a little queasy and like he was downshifting his gears inside—from fifth gear on the highway down to neutral. Idling isn’t always easy. Then he said, “What would you do if you were me?”

“Um. Probably wait a few days and see if they print where he is in the paper.”

“Oh,” he said. “Right.” Then he looked straight into my face for the first time. Or, at least, for the first time it seemed he was actually seeing me. “Why were you crying?” he asked, his head tilted slightly like a dog who wants to understand but doesn’t.

“Why would you think I was crying?”

“You can tell. Your eyes are all puffy.”

“I don’t really want to talk about it.”

“I just—”

“Look,” I said. “Remember when you asked me to please not ask you any questions? Well, it works both ways.”

“Got it,” he said. “Sorry.”

Then I decided that was more than enough commiseration, and I headed back to my own room.

About four thirty that afternoon, Aubrey came and got me by rapping on my bedroom door. When I opened it, he pointed to the cell phone in his hand in absolute silence. Then he gave me a hand signal for “follow me.”

I followed him through the house. As far as I could tell, nobody was around except Isabella, who was making a pie from scratch in the kitchen. She only smiled and asked no questions.

I followed Aubrey through the backyard and out the gate in our back fence.

“Where are we going?” I asked when I knew we were too far from the house to be heard.

“Down by the creek.”

Calling it a creek was really elevating its status, I have to say in retrospect. Only city kids who hadn’t spent much time in nature, like we were back then, would even see it as a natural body of water. It was more of a culvert carrying water down through the canyon from the fancier yards of the still fancier houses up on the hill. It ran open for a few flat stretches, then disappeared through concrete pipes again. But it was flowing water, and it had a few trees on either side, and the closer we got to it, the less I could hear voices and engines and car doors slamming and mic checks on the street in front of our house. It was a relief, a lifting of a great weight I’d forgotten was compressing me.

Aubrey stopped by the flowing water, looked around three hundred and sixty-five degrees, then held the phone to his ear.

“Sorry, Aunt Sheila,” he said. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

I was surprised, of course. I thought he’d dragged me down there just to try dialing her house.

“So, okay, maybe when school gets out for the summer. Because, like you said, it would be a little weird to tell Mom and Dad we want to go stay with you during school. I’m suspended, but only for the rest of this week. And Ruth has to go to school.”

I watched his forehead knit as he listened, and watched the sunlight flash in and out between the leaves of the blowing trees overhead, and listened to the water gurgle.

Then he said, “I don’t know yet, but I can call as soon as we find out.”

His forehead scrunched down even more tightly.

“Really? Why there? Why so far away?”

Another long silence during which I had no idea what was going on. I started to wonder why he’d dragged me down here with him. Three people can’t really talk on a cell phone, and he could just as easily have told me later what she said.

A second later, he held the phone inches from my face. “She wants to talk to you.”

I took the phone, which was warm—more like hot, really—from Aubrey’s anxious ear.

“Hi, Aunt Sheila.”

“Ruth. Honey. How
are
you? How
is
everything over there?”

I was struck with a rush of having missed her. I hadn’t ever thought about missing Aunt Sheila when I didn’t see her, but it was unmistakable in that moment.

“Fine, Aunt Sheila,” I said.

“Really?”

Then I lost control of the tears again and had to swipe them away with the back of first one hand and then the other.

“No. Of course not. I don’t know why I even said that. The street in front of our house is packed with reporters and we can’t get through them without Mom guarding us like a pit bull and my new sort-of boyfriend just dumped me because his family said he had to, because the reporters wouldn’t leave them alone. And Dad’s home in the middle of the day because he’s losing clients over this . . .”

“Uh-oh,” Aunt Sheila said.

“Uh-oh which part?”

“Well, all of it, really. But especially the part about Brad losing clients. He’s not as rich as everybody thinks. More like comically overextended. Only, at a time like this it’s not so funny. But let’s not get into that now. Hopefully it’ll blow over. I’m not sure about what Aubrey’s asking me, kiddo. I mean, you’re welcome to come here for the summer, both of you. And it goes without saying that you can do all kinds of stuff here you can’t do at home. But I told Aubrey they might hold Joseph someplace like Leavenworth.”

“Leavenworth?” I asked, and I noticed Aubrey winced at the word.

“It’s in Kansas.”

“Kansas! Why so far away?”

“Look, I’m just guessing, kiddo. I’m guessing Leavenworth because it’s sort of a big central place for federal prisoners. But it could be anywhere. Once you’re in the federal system, I don’t know if they care much what part of the country you hail from, you know? And if I’m right, we can call him from here over the summer. If he can get calls. Or get him to call us or something. But you know kindergarten teachers aren’t exactly made of money, right? So three people on a plane to Kansas . . .”

“We might be able to come up with the money,” I said.

Aubrey bounced up and down. “I have money,” he said, about four times. Even after I was trying to hear Aunt Sheila again.

“Great,” she said into my ear. “Very nice. It’s always a good feeling when your niece and nephew can buy you and sell you a couple of times over. Look. Kiddo. I’m worried about your brother.”

“Which one?”

“The one I just talked to, although . . . both of them, now that you mention it. Aubrey sounds like he’s about to come apart. So look after him, okay? See if there’s anything you can do to help between now and summer. Without Joseph, he doesn’t have much if he doesn’t have you. I told him to start by writing a letter to Joseph and sending it to me. I’ll figure out where to mail it to. That way Joseph can write back through me and Brad doesn’t have to know. So encourage that, okay? Aubrey needs some kind of vent for all this. Otherwise he’s going to go off like a bomb. You know how he adores his big brother.”

The sun glared into my eyes off and on through the leaves as I listened, wondering why I wasn’t getting credit for loving Joseph or needing a vent for all this myself. I’m sure Aunt Sheila meant well, and maybe she was just giving me credit for being older and better put-together, but it hurt. I didn’t want credit for being together; I wanted help staying that way.

“Keep me posted,” she said, and then we said quick good-byes and got off the phone, and that was that.

I looked at Aubrey and he looked at me, and then I handed him his phone back.

“What?” he asked me. “What did she say?”

“She wants you to write a letter to Joseph.”

Out of all the information Aunt Sheila had just poured into my tender ear, that was the only part I dared repeat to my bomb of a little brother.