Families and Other Nonreturnable Gifts (3 page)

I once suggested to her that maybe there was a real problem there, that maybe something was wrong with Milton, something that he needed professional help with. She just shook her head and said, “Milton is one of the smartest people I know. He’ll be fine.”

Like intelligence is all that matters.

I even e-mailed Hopkins to try to get her to back me up, but she wrote back,
If Mom decides she wants to kick him out at any point, she will and he’ll be fine. He’s a little spectrumy, but perfectly competent. But so long as she’s happy having him at home, let them have each other.
Without any support from the actual neurologist in the family, I gave up.

The first few months after high school, Milton did at least go to movies and restaurants with us, but he’s stopped doing even that. He pulled back gradually, pretending he was in the middle of doing something important and couldn’t leave the house at first, but now he just shakes his head dismissively if you invite him somewhere, like you’re the one who’s nuts for thinking it’s even a possibility.

He’s more withdrawn, more reclusive, every time I see him. It scares me and I want to do something about it, but other than berating my mother and fretting to Tom, I don’t know what. I’m not there that often—a couple of times a month at the most—and I’m not his mother, as Milton has reminded me often enough.

 “You’ll have to take him with you to the new apartment,” I say now. It’s weird to think of Milton anywhere but here. Maybe a change will be good for him.

“I know. I will.” Mom puts down her mug a little too heavily and a few drops of tea fly out. “But I anticipate some awkwardness. Inviting a man back to my place when my adult son still lives there—”

“Whoa,” I say. “Whoa. Someone’s moving fast.” I mop up the tea drops with a napkin.

She regards me for a moment, then says, “Keats, I’m fifty-five years old. I have been married to a man twenty years my senior for the last thirty-three years. Please tell me you’re not going to be prudish about this. I don’t think it’s unreasonable for me to go on a date now and then, do you?”

I shake my head as I crumple up the napkin. “No. I’m sorry. It’s just an idea that takes some getting used to. But maybe it’s another argument for getting Milton to live on his own.”

“Maybe. So far it hasn’t been a problem.”

It takes a moment for that to register. “Wait,” I say. “So far? You mean—”

She plays with the tag on her tea bag, her face flushing. “I’ve gone on a few dates.”

“A few dates?” I repeat. “You mean a few dates with one guy or a few dates with a few different guys?”

“Both actually.”

“Are you seeing anyone special?”

“There are three men who interest me at the moment. One’s an old friend, another one I met online, and the third is in my creative writing class.”

“
What
creative writing class? You’re taking a creative writing class?” I slump down and say accusingly, “You don’t tell me anything.”

Mom tilts her head to study me. “Is this upsetting you?” she asks—not apologetically, just curiously.

“Not really. I’m glad you’re dating. It’s just
weird
.”

“Tell me about it,” she says.

2.

A
fter our conversation, Mom heads up the stairs to the third floor, and I’m about to follow her when I change my mind and knock on Milton’s closed door instead.

“Mom?”

“No. It’s me. Keats.”

“Hold on. I’m not decent.” There’s the sound of rustling, and then he opens the door. “Hi,” he says and pats my shoulder, which is his customary way of greeting me. “I didn’t know you were here.”

I hug him. His body goes rigid under my touch because he doesn’t like to be hugged, and he crosses his arms protectively over his concave chest and round stomach. I’m not trying to make him uncomfortable, but when he was a baby, I carefully carried him around the house for hours, so I figure I’m entitled to a hug every now and then.

He’s wearing a loose pair of sweats and a faded T-shirt. He’s gained weight since I last saw him. He’s been doing that a lot lately. He was a skinny teenager, but these days he’s got a real belly on him.

I release him and step back, looking around. The room is a mess. There’s old clothing everywhere and some dirty dishes and lots of books. You can see through the connecting bathroom into my old room, which Milton annexed for himself after I left for college. No one asked me if that was okay. It wasn’t, but by the time I came home for Thanksgiving break, he had already moved a bookcase and an iPod dock in there. And a lot of empty protein bar wrappers. Fortunately, I already preferred sleeping over at Tom’s by that point.

A Mac desktop with a huge monitor fills up the desk in front of us, but there are two more computers within reach: a PC on top of the dresser and a MacBook lying open on the bed.

“What are you working on?” I ask.

“This and that. I’ve been getting into game development.”

“Oh.” That means nothing to me. “How’s school?” He’s supposedly taking college courses online, working toward his degree, but I’m not sure anyone ever checks up on him. On the other hand, I’ve never known Milton to lie.

“It’s okay. Stupidly easy.”

“Maybe you should go to a real college. It would be more challenging.” He just shrugs, and I say abruptly, “You want to go get a sandwich or something?”

“No, thanks,” he says politely. “Hey, guess what? Dad’s book is required reading in my gov class.”

“Are you going to read it?”

“I already have,” he says. “Haven’t you?”

“I tried once. Not my kind of thing.”

“Really? It’s pretty good.”

“So I’ve heard.”

“The guy who grades us asked me if Lawrence Sedlak was my father.”

“What’d you say?”

“Nothing.” Milton’s skin is so pale it’s practically translucent except under the eyes where half-moon shapes turn the skin dark and coarse. “It was just in an e-mail, so I didn’t answer. Did Tom come with you?”

“He’s upstairs. So’s Jacob. What about a walk? Want to go for a walk with me? It’s really beautiful out.”

“Maybe later,” he says. “Jacob’s here to help pack up Dad’s stuff, right?”

I nod.

He tugs on a strand of hair. It’s too long, his hair—it falls in his eyes and curls along his neck like a girl’s. “It’s weird not hearing him moving around upstairs,” he says. “Especially in the middle of the night. It’s so quiet now with just me and Mom here.”

“Are you sleeping okay?”

“I don’t know,” he says. “Define
okay
.”

“Eight hours a night?”

“I don’t usually sleep in one big chunk.” There’s a ding from his computer. “I just have to check that,” he says and darts away.

From the way he settles on his seat and peers intently at the screen, I don’t get the feeling he’s going to come back to the conversation any time soon, so I wander out of his room, through the bathroom—ye gods, it’s filthy in there, hardened toothpaste in the sink, dirt crusted into the grout, rust stains all over the shower/bath combo—and into my old room.

There’s not much of mine left in there. I know some of my old clothes are still hanging in the closet and folded in the drawers because I just left behind whatever I didn’t take with me to college or Tom’s. But most of the visible signs that the room once belonged to me are gone. When he claimed the space for himself, Milton took down my posters and shoved my softball trophies to the back of the dresser top where they’re hidden by the flat-screen monitor he’s set up there. The bed once held a pink-and-purple quilt (the height of glamour to my ten-year-old self), but now the bare mattress has a sleeping bag and a pillow on it, like someone camps out there occasionally.

But my old digital alarm clock is still on the small white night table next to the bed. I pick up the clock and turn it around in my hands. I bought it with my allowance money when I was eleven, because I was tired of being late for school. I hated the stares I got when I walked in after class had already started, but Mom was a night owl and often overslept. So I’d slouch in after everyone else, embarrassed and frustrated.

It hit me one day that my mistake was letting Mom be in charge of our mornings. So I bought this clock with my own money. From then on, the alarm would ring in my room, I’d wake up my mother and Milton (Hopkins had gone off to college at the age of sixteen, so she was already out of the picture), and by yelling, scolding, begging, cajoling, I somehow managed to get the three of us all out the door in time.

I put the alarm clock back down on the night table and leave the room.

* * *

I cross the hallway and stand for a moment outside Hopkins’s room. She’s not there, of course, but then she never really
was
there much, not even when she lived at home: she was always running around, taking classes outside of school or heading off to work in various labs. Even when she was home, I had orders (from her and Mom) to leave her alone and be quiet so she could concentrate on the huge amount of homework and research she was always dealing with.

It’s amazing that someone I rarely see, and never really had all that much contact with, looms so large over my entire life. How do you describe the sister whose very existence makes you feel like the world’s biggest loser? And proud, at the same time, because you’re related to her?

Like I said, Hopkins and I didn’t interact all that much, even when we lived together. I was five years younger and eons less intellectually sophisticated. Still am. We passed each other in the hallway, and Mom talked about her all the time, but meals were scattered in our house, people eating by themselves at different times, solitary figures usually hunched over a book—and without that basic contact, our relationship was limited mostly to her knocking on the bathroom door and telling me to hurry up or asking me to turn my music down because she needed to concentrate.

I can remember watching her at the kitchen table working on some project or another, her long hair falling around her face as she frowned down at the book she was reading or the paper she was writing. She barely noticed me. She barely noticed anyone. She needed my mother to drive her places and to provide a little sustenance now and then, but otherwise Hopkins was too busy thinking her own thoughts and pursuing her own interests to sit around chatting with her family. I admired her, revered her, listened to my mother talk about her achievements ad nauseam, and got used to teachers telling me they had never had a student like her before or since. But I didn’t know her.

At eight, Hopkins skipped a grade. She skipped another one when she was twelve. She still got straight A’s effortlessly and probably could have skipped more, but she was already so much younger and smaller than the other kids in her class that the administration felt she might suffer socially if she did. My parents argued that she wasn’t being challenged enough. The school compromised by letting her take classes above her grade level for the first couple of years of high school and then at Boston College for the last two.

She was barely sixteen when she went off to college. Harvard, of course. Dad might not have been an involved parent, but that didn’t mean he wasn’t an influential one.

Since she already had a year’s worth of college credits under her belt and was taking five courses a semester, she finished in three years, making her a college grad at nineteen. She didn’t exactly take a break then, either: four years later, at the age of twenty-three, she had two degrees under her belt, a combined PhD and MD in neurology.

Note: none of this is normal. People don’t do this. Only my sister.

She stayed on in Boston for a few more years, her hospital and university connections providing her with plenty of job opportunities, which she was still working her way through when she was offered her current job running a brain injury clinic in New York, where they not only see patients but also do apparently groundbreaking research. She gets asked to speak at conferences all over the world and is always being flown in to various exotic locales to consult on cases that local doctors twice her age can’t handle. She doesn’t have a landline in her apartment, just a cell phone number, because she’s as likely to be in Stockholm or Tokyo as New York on any given day.

Not that I ever call her: we communicate by e-mail when we communicate at all, which isn’t very often.

About a year ago, I went to see her give a lecture on neural plasticity and recovery after injury—of which I understood maybe forty percent—and afterward she introduced me to a woman waiting to talk to her who gripped my arm as she said, “Thank God for your sister. They said my father would probably be a vegetable, but she didn’t give up on him. The work she does is nothing short of miraculous. Do you
know
how wonderful she is?”

Hopkins and I were supposed to go out for a late dinner after the talk, but there was a guy there from a big lab who was desperate to consult her about something, so she had to cancel our dinner. It was her only night in Boston.

Tom was glad: I got home in time to go to a movie with him that night.

* * *

I am, to put it succinctly, no Hopkins.

 I went to school in the usual way, one grade following the other in exactly the order you’d expect: got pats on my head from my teachers for my steady, decent work, graduated at eighteen like all my friends, and went on to Smith College, where I majored in English literature and wrote papers about Jane Austen for four years.

I spent every weekend riding the bus back and forth to Boston so I could be with Tom. I lived with him during the summers, too, working as an assistant at his father’s company.

I had no desire to go to graduate school, but my English degree wasn’t exactly a fast track to a specific career, so after I graduated, I decided to just look for a halfway decent job not too far from where Tom and I were already living together. He offered to find me something permanent at his dad’s company, but even though I was willing to settle, I wasn’t willing to settle
that
hard, at least not yet.