When You Were Older
I was doing my best to get out the door. And then the phone rang. I almost let it go.
New York, September 11th 2001
Russell Ammiano is rushing to work when he gets a phone call that saves his life. As the city he loves is hit by unimaginable tragedy, Russell must turn his back and hurry home to Kansas.
Kansas, September 14th 2001
Ben Ammiano is mentally disabled, and a creature of habit. Any change to his routine sends him into a spin. But now his estranged brother has reappeared, and Ben’s simple, ordered world has turned upside down.
In a story as heartbreaking as it is uplifting, two brothers must bury their pasts and learn from each other, if they are to survive.
Part Two: That’s a Hard Question
For Dad and Monika
Tumbling Down
15 September 2001
IT WAS FOUR
days after the towers fell, and I woke in the morning to see a giant standing over my bed. I was all set to scream a very unmanly scream, but it came out silent. I never managed any sound. Good thing, too. Because that would have scared this particular giant right under the bed.
It only took me a second or two to figure out who it was. And, worse yet, where I was.
Then, as I’d done every time I’d wakened from post-9/11 sleep – usually just a vague nap in somebody’s moving car – I ran the list in my mind. What was lost, what had changed.
New York is over, the job is gone, Mom is gone, all my friends went down with the towers, all the work I did to leave Kansas behind for ever has come to nothing. I’m back in Nowhere-ville, right where I swore I’d never be again. And I’m stuck
.
It was a perfect storm of nightmare scenarios. All was quite effectively lost.
I looked up again at the skinny giant, who was only my brother Ben. Not that I hadn’t expected to bump into him, but … I’d gotten in late the night before – well, late by Ben standards – and he’d already gone to bed.
He still wouldn’t look at anybody. But it was nothing like that old business trick of focusing on a spot between the other person’s eyebrows. Ben did everything big. He turned his head away and looked off at a forty-five-degree angle, eyes turned down to the floor.
So there it was. Something that hadn’t changed.
‘Hey, Buddy,’ I said.
‘You have to take me to work. You have to get up.’
And those were the first words my brother Ben and I had said to each other in over six years.
I sat up in bed, in just my boxer shorts, blinking. That had not been nearly enough sleep. Not even close. My eyes felt sandy, my stomach borderline.
‘Do you have a car?’ he asked.
I could tell he was nervous about his ride.
‘I don’t.’
‘Then how are you going to take me to work?’
‘Mrs Jespers said I should start using Mom’s car.’
‘Oh.’
‘But she didn’t know where Mom kept her keys. Do you know?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said. ‘I know.’
‘Will you tell me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Now? Or at least now-ish?’
‘She keeps them on the hook by the front door.’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘Progress.’ I didn’t say, Finally. ‘So … look … do you know who I am?’
‘Yeah,’ Ben said.
‘So you remember me?’
‘Yeah.’
‘So, who am I?’
‘My brother.’
‘Right. Good. Do you remember my name?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Why don’t you say it?’
‘You didn’t say I should. Just if I remember it.’
‘Actually, I meant, why don’t you? Like, how about saying it?’
‘Rusty.’
That old identity, so long left behind, sliced me like jagged metal. Jagged and, well … rusty.
‘I go by Russell now.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m all grown up.’
‘I have to get to work. I have to be there by quarter to seven. I can’t be late. Mr McCaskill wouldn’t like it if I was late.’
‘Sure. Fine. Let’s get you to work, then. Have you eaten?’
‘Yeah.’
‘What did you eat?’
‘I ate cereal.’
‘How long have you been up?’
‘I get up at five.’
‘I didn’t hear an alarm.’
‘I don’t have an alarm. I don’t need an alarm. Every morning I just get up at five.’
‘Why aren’t you getting in?’ I asked, raising my voice a little so he’d hear me, but keeping it down for the neighbors’ sake at the same time.
Our mom’s old Buick was running, warming up. I could feel the vibrations under my butt. It ran rough. I’d opened the driver’s side door to lean out and talk to Ben, who was standing by the open garage door, not getting in.
‘It’s not one of those doors that closes all by itself,’ Ben said. Loudly, with no concern for sleeping neighbors. And impatiently. As if I should have known already. As if everybody in the world should be just as informed as Ben figured they should be. ‘I wait here by the garage door till Mom pulls the car out. Then I close the garage door.
Then
I get in.’
I sighed, and backed the car carefully out of the garage. I hadn’t driven in years. In fact, I no longer had a valid license. But this was hardly the time to address any of that.
Ben jumped into the passenger seat and buckled his shoulder belt. I threw Mom’s Buick into reverse again.
‘You can’t leave the driveway,’ he said. Before I could
even
ask why not, he said, ‘You can’t leave the driveway till your seat belt is on.’
I nodded a couple of times, and put on the belt. It was the fastest, most stress-free way to settle the issue.
I glanced over at Ben as we drove. Gathering up six years’ worth of changes. But as far as I could see, he just looked older. He was over six foot six, which of course I hadn’t expected to change. Still lanky and skinny and long, with a looseness in his joints, like the world’s weirdest example of a young horse; though Ben himself no longer looked young. His brown hair was longer, shaggy. Probably just a lack of maintenance, but it looked purposeful. It looked like a style someone would wear to seem unconcerned and cool. Girls and young women traditionally found Ben absolutely irresistible. Especially when he was silent and standing still. They thought he was being enigmatic. Fascinatingly reserved. Until he spoke. Then they hurried off to tend to some important business they’d only briefly forgotten.
‘Turn here,’ Ben said.
‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’
‘No.’
‘I think you are.’
‘What, then?’
‘To tell me which way I should turn.’
‘That way,’ he said, pointing right.
Every street, every building that rolled by, was a scene straight out of my worst and most common recurring
nightmare:
suddenly waking up to find myself back in this bizarrely tiny town where I’d been stranded for the first eighteen years of my life. So I tried to experience it that way. As a bad dream. It was easier and less upsetting than accepting it as my actual reality.
Ben’s voice startled me. ‘You want to know … what?’
‘What?’
‘You want to know … something?’
‘Oh. That kind of what. OK. Tell me something.’
‘In this big city. There are these big buildings. And somebody flew a plane. Into them. I mean, two planes. And they burned up. The buildings, not the planes. Well, both.’
‘I know, Buddy. I was there.’
‘You were? You’re not burned up.’
‘I was close enough to see it, but not close enough to get burned up.’
‘Oh,’ Ben said. ‘You want to know … something else?’
‘Sure,’ I said, though it was not entirely true.
‘Where’d you go, Buddy?’
I pulled in one long, forced breath and then slowly let it leave again. I knew sooner or later he’d have questions. But I really thought the first one would be about Mom.
‘I went away to college. You knew that.’
‘Oh. Did you … what do you call that? When you finish? School.’
‘Graduate.’
‘Yeah. Did you?’
‘I did.’
‘When did you?’
‘About two years ago.’
‘Oh.’
A block or two rolled by in awkward silence.
‘Then I went to New York.’
‘New York! That’s the name of that big city where the buildings …’
‘Right, Buddy. I know.’
‘You want to know something else?’ He didn’t wait to hear if I wanted that or not. ‘I know a lot about bagging groceries. It’s not as easy as it looks. There’s a lot to know. You shouldn’t put too many glass bottles and jars together cause they can hit against each other and break. And no eggs on the bottom. And no bread on the bottom. You can put some fruit on the bottom, if it’s hard like a coconut, but not if it’s soft like peaches. And it all has to balance, otherwise it’s hard for people to carry. And it can’t be so heavy that it breaks right through the bottom of the bag. And I bet you didn’t know there was so much to know about it.’
‘I guess I didn’t,’ I said, suddenly thinking I would kill for a cigarette. I hadn’t smoked in more than four years. And I had watched the towers fall without ever once craving a smoke.
‘I bet I know more about it than you do.’
I couldn’t tell if he was feeling petulant or proud. Or both.
‘Definitely, you do.’
‘I bet you didn’t think there was anything I knew better than you.’
‘You used to know everything better than me.’
‘I did? I don’t remember that.’
‘Well, you did.’
‘But I don’t remember. It’s there. It’s right there. Gerson’s Market. Right there on the corner.’
I pulled into the parking lot. Stopped. Waited for him to get out. But he seemed to have lost his sense of rush. I glanced at my watch. He had three whole minutes to spare. He unbuckled his seat belt, but didn’t otherwise move.
‘Hey, Buddy,’ he said. ‘Want to know something?’
‘Sure,’ I said. But I already knew I wouldn’t like it.
‘When’s Mom coming back?’
My lungs filled up with air all on their own. Not that they didn’t usually. But in this case their capability surprised me. Did we really want to do this at the start of his work day?
‘She’s not.’
Ben shook his head. ‘She always does.’
‘And she would now. If she could. But she can’t.’
‘That doesn’t sound right. You don’t know Mom like I do. She always comes back. I only wanted to know when.’
He jumped out, slamming the door behind him.
I watched him move the long stilts of his legs toward the door as if they belonged to somebody else entirely.
I’d
had plenty of time to see that gait before going off to college, but I still hadn’t shaken the image of the way he’d used to walk. So self-possessed as to be dangerous. A magnet for girls and trouble. And that was back when the girls never hurried away.
The market was only half-lit inside. Obviously not open. Ben rapped on the automatic sliding door, and in time a woman came and opened it with a key and slid it aside manually. Just enough for Ben to squeeze in.
And I thought, That’s my older brother. What can you do?
I was cruising back slowly toward the house … I still absolutely refused to call it home … and I saw the kitchen lights on in a little corner bakery. I couldn’t tell if the place was open or not.
The bakery was new. Or, at least, less than six years old. I was pretty sure there had used to be a dry cleaner’s on that corner.
I pulled up and parked out front. The street felt weirdly empty for nearly seven in the morning. Like one of those old science-fiction movies where you find out you’re the only person left alive. Whatever happened to the concept of Kansans getting up early? A lot of work shifts started at seven here, rather than the big-city nine. But if people were awake, they were hidden.