Laugh (12 page)
Authors: Mary Ann Rivers
She laughed.
“I’m serious. I don’t really see the point of them around you.”
She laughed again. She laughed in his arms, in his cold and barren temporary hospital office, in the hospital, the one where her best friend was at the very beginning of a war.
It meant something; that he could make her laugh, just where she was.
He kissed her laugh.
Kissed it until he couldn’t, because he was laughing, too.
Des—
It was no problem to authorize your cash card. Linda was the one working at Fifth Third and she said she had already talked to you. I hope you don’t have any more problems.
I like the picture of you at the London Eye.
Do you remember when Mom took us to the fairgrounds and they had a Ferris wheel? PJ was too young to ride, and so Sarah stayed with him, but Mom and Dad wanted to go up, and so did you. I was pissed that I couldn’t do the fair with my friends, but you cried until I said I’d take you.
I was so mad that I remember I grabbed your arm too tight getting you into the seat. There was just a bar that came down over both of us, no other safety belt, and you were so small and skinny that the bar didn’t even do anything, you were practically free in the seat. You were crying because I was being such a dick, but I didn’t care. Dad kept yelling at me to be nicer, ruining what was supposed to be this romantic ride for him and Mom.
Then the ride started moving, and you stopped crying, looking around. The ride was jerky and loud, and it went so much higher than it looked from the ground.
I was scared, but all I could be was mad. You were fearless and kept trying to look over the edge, and nothing was holding you in. I could only keep holding on to your arm, so tight, because I was certain you’d fall right out, and as we dipped over the top, the cab starting swinging. You were trying so hard to jerk away from me, and it only made the cab swing harder. My nuts were sucked into my fucking gut, and you were yelling at me, “Let go! Let go!”
I held on to your tiny arm, which didn’t even feel human, more like some kind of small animal, yanking you back, and you had tears in your eyes because I was hurting you, but you were laughing, too, because you loved it. How high it was, the motion of the ride, the hot air and the noise.
When we got to the bottom, Mom and Dad were really angry at me, because they could hear me yelling the entire time. When you got out of the cab, you went to Dad, and he picked you up even though you were too big for that anymore.
You had finger bruises on your upper arm from where I grabbed you too tight. I tried to tell Mom and Dad they were from keeping you safe, but they didn’t talk to me for the rest of the
night and wouldn’t let me hook up with my friends. The thing is, you felt bad for me, and walked with me, and held my hand. Told Mom and Dad not to be mad, and I remember, you told them that you bruised easy and then showed them all these weird little kid bruises all over your legs as evidence.
Miss you, Des. I promise I’ll go see Sarah.
I do like the farming stuff. If you can believe it, I think it’s kind of relaxing, but also a hard thing to do, if that makes sense. Lots of things to think about that I didn’t even know were a thing to think about. Like, Nina’s store sells these garlic scapes, the young flowering part of hardneck garlic. It’s really hard to make all your money with small yields in a small farm, so they’re always thinking about things to sell, and garlic scapes are one of them. Normally they would just get cut off and thrown away so the garlic itself can grow bigger and fatter, but they are actually good to eat, so they harvest them and sell them, making way more money from their garlic yields.
Nina’s friend Rachel makes them deep-fried, and they are really good. When you come back, we’ll share an order.
Love,
Sam
* * *
“What are we doing, again?” PJ had his sunglasses pushed back on top of his head, raking his big hand through his dark curls, so much like their mother’s.
He had that wrinkle in his forehead he’d been getting lately when his older siblings gave him a hard time. He was always a bit sensitive, but in a watchful and serious way that meant no one knew he was hurt until they realized he hadn’t spoken for hours.
Sam had told him to wear clothes he could work in, and somehow this meant jeans that had fucking embroidery on the back pockets and a shirt that looked like something a country-western singer would wear, except it was really small, tight all over, and PJ had it unsnapped to halfway down his chest.
Sam knew better than to say anything about PJ and fashion, however.
“We’re going to harvest some onions.” Sam looked at his Garmin on the dash again, a little nervous. Even just ten miles out of Lakefield, with fields on both sides, sometimes the satellite feed would lag and he was afraid of missing his turn. Everything looked the same out here, and his sedan was kicking up dust from the
gravel road. He couldn’t see anything. He was certain he was going to hit a fucking cow or bear or something.
“You said that, but what I mean is what’s with the Outward Bound brotherly adventure?”
“I thought we could talk.” Sam slowed down and finally saw the turnoff, labeled with nothing but a small green reflective sign and a number. When Nina had driven him out here, she had navigated all of this farmland like she could see everything from above or something. Made it look easy.
After she had taken Tay home on learning that her oncologist would use her biopsy and the MRI and blood tests to do a preliminary stage on her cancer. Sam had gone back to the clinic. Later he’d gotten an email from Nina with his farm shifts.
Without thinking about it too hard, he called to ask PJ to join him on the next one. He didn’t know why. Maybe if he got himself and PJ in the middle of nowhere they’d have to really deal with some stuff because neither of them could just walk off.
Also, something about what he and Nina were trying to do, trying to learn at this point in their lives, got him thinking about what she’d said when she’d first met him. How he had loss all over him.
If he did, if he was just a walking representation of all the people he had lost, it seemed that he should plug the hole somewhere, and yelling at people might not be working. So he called PJ and asked him to come to the fields with him, and PJ had said yes. Just like that.
Yes.
Now PJ said, “We can’t talk at the diner? Over a beer?”
“You old enough to drink yet?”
“Yeah, baby, and think about this: the years between us are nearly old enough to drink.”
“Jesus. That’s not really true, is it?”
“No, but the years between us could go to prom.”
“Would they want to?”
“Hell yes, the years between us want to go to prom. They want to wear a tux, and dance with a pretty girl in one of those dresses that go all low in the back and make you think about bras all night, and they want to sit in Dad’s limo and get to second base.”
“You never got to second base in Dad’s limo.” Sam rolled down his window, despite the dust, so he could see better what rut through what field he was somehow supposed to find so it could break his Honda and he could bond with his brother and his onion-picking outfit that was better suited to
American Idol.
“You’re right, I did not, but the years between us did. The years between us, in fact, may have rounded third, but I’m not sure, because they don’t kiss and tell.”
Sam stopped the car, realizing it might work better to get out and walk around until he had his bearings. Though how he could get his bearings in the middle of nowhere he had no fucking idea.
Sam looked at PJ, sprawled in the passenger seat, his hair messy but in some fucking way that made him look like a male model. “What do you know about third base?”
PJ grinned. “Nothing, except what the internet tells me.”
“You’re serious.”
“You wouldn’t ask if you didn’t know that I was.”
“You’re good-looking, college-educated, twenty-two years old, you’ve seen the world with the orchestra—”
PJ unbuckled his seat belt and turned toward him. “Slow down, doc. You’ll break something feeding me all those compliments.”
Sam looked at his hands gripping the steering wheel. “I’m proud to be your brother, PJ. Just because I’m a dick and you’re crazy doesn’t make that untrue.”
PJ folded his hands over one of his knees. “Des wrote me to tell me to be nice to you. That you’re going through some stuff.”
Sam laughed. “She wrote me the same thing about you.”
“You pissed me off in the diner that day. She’s happy, Sam. She loves her guy Hefin. She loves traveling, doing new things, running her internet business. She’d been stuck in the neighborhood her whole life, and, dude, she was never like you.”
“What do you mean?” Sam wanted to know. He wanted to know what this alien, self-assured guy thought of his family. PJ had always been so sensitive, always seemed to sit back and watch everything with his big blue eyes. Never wanted to just go along with everything, and always, somehow, found a way to be apart from a family of six in a tiny house in a crowded south downtown neighborhood.
It was like he was a foundling. A prince left on the doorstep of a bunch of peasants.
When he was seven, he wanted to play the fucking
cello
, and the kid had been playing the piano like he was born to it since he was three.
“Look, I know you always depended on Des, like you and her had this deal to take care of everyone all the time. But the thing is, and it’s not like she doesn’t care, but she has all this love and it feeds her to see the world, to have a bunch of experiences. It makes her more able to love. You’re different.”
“How?” Sam felt like his heart stopped, like his mind got slow.
“You’ve gotta find your place here, right where you’re at. You’ve always just pinballed around, hitting the same stuff in your way, over and over, but if you slow it down, you’ll find your place, and I don’t know. You’ll be Dad.”
“What?”
“Yeah, I know. Beats the hell outta me but, yeah. I mean, I know Sarah always talks about you and
Mom, how close you were, but that’s because you loved Mom so much. I think you’re kind of like Dad, man. You just want to find your lady and make a house in the neighborhood, and sit on the stoop all evening waving at people like an asshole.”
Sam looked at PJ, shook his head back and forth. He didn’t know if he was denying what PJ said or trying to clear his brain out.
“It’s true, Sam. Why do you think you get so bent about what we’re all doing all the time? About Des moving overseas? Sarah not talking to you? Which is your fucking fault, by the way. You want us all to stick around and behave and eat pot roast together on Sundays after mass. You’re opening a clinic in the neighborhood, and, dude, after you do that you’ll never have any privacy ever again. People’ll be knocking on your door every
A.M.
talkin’ to you about their prostates ’n’ shit. Just like Dad. Driving all over Lakefield in his limo, everyone knowin’ him.”
“This is the kind of thing you think about? When you’re sitting all quiet in the corner?”
“I don’t think about this stuff. I think about music and I think about Lacey. This is all just stuff I
know
and no one ever bothers to ask me about.”
“Lacey was your
babysitter
, PJ.”
“I fuckin’ know that, Sam.” PJ slid his sunglasses back down on his face. Looked out the windshield.
“Look—”
PJ turned back and looked at Sam, and Sam looked at himself reflected back in the lenses of PJ’s sunglasses. Sam realized, surprised, that he looked
angry
, gunning for a fight.
He wasn’t. He really wasn’t. Maybe PJ was right and he just wanted this life that seemed goddamned impossible to actually get, but he didn’t want to fight because he didn’t want to lose.
He just wanted to, well,
win.
But maybe you didn’t win just by thinking your own way was the best way in the moment. Frankly, most of the time, his way in the moment completely sucked, but he went after it anyway.
What was he fighting about all the time, exactly? To avoid the inevitable shame that came from when he inevitably discovered he was wrong?
Probably.
This was something to think about.
“No, you look.” PJ leaned forward. “Just like you can’t help that you’re an asshole, I can’t help who I love. And yeah, I love Lacey. I do. I’ve known that since I was a kid, and because I was once a kid and Lacey happened to be older and knew how to run a stove to make mac and cheese without burning the house down, she was my babysitter. Big deal. It doesn’t make me less of a man to love a woman, to know I’ve loved the same woman practically my whole life, and it doesn’t make me less of a man that I’ve backed off rounding the
bases until I can be absolutely goddamned positive I won’t be able to round them with her. I’d like to think, actually, that my honest and forthright confrontation of my own heart makes me more of a man, as well as the fact that I could just give a fuck what the rest of you think about it.”
Sam leaned back in the car seat and let out a breath. “Shit.”
“Yeah, no shit.”
“Does Lacey know all this?” There was a way that Lacey drove Sam kind of crazy. She’d been Sarah’s best friend when they were girls, and then, for some unknown girl reason, Lacey and Des had ended up best friends and still were today. Lacey’d had a rough home life, and because he was older and wrapped up in his own stuff, he’d never known what all went on at the Radcliffes’, but he gathered it wasn’t good, and it was why Lacey was always at the Burnsides’ place.
Lacey was always kind of that perfect good girl, a little annoying because of it. Kind of a pleaser. It had shocked everyone when she’d turned up pregnant in college, especially with that southie loser Mark Lockwood.
But she’d just kept her chin up, where it always was, and went on like it was totally normal to get straight A’s, go on to grad school, and do everything in the whole world as a single mom.
Maybe it was.
“Lacey knows,” PJ said. “Mostly.”