Josie And Jack: A Novel Part 1

Josie and Jack.

Kelly Braffet.

This is for my parents, Jim and Theresa, and also for Casey, who put Bunny on the roof.

When the moon came they set out, but they found no crumbs, for the many thousands of birds which fly about in the woods and fields had picked them all up. Hansel said to Grethel, "We shall soon find the way," but they did not find it.

-"Hansel and Grethel,"

JACOB AND WILHELM GRIMM.

1.

THE WORST HANGOVERS come on the sunniest days. Even at sixteen I knew enough to expect that. The day when Jack drove me into town to buy aspirin, the sun was s.h.i.+ning and the sky was the brilliant blue of a crayon drawing. Late summer in western Pennsylvania is muggy and oppressive enough to make your head spin even on a good day, and the air conditioning in the truck hadn't worked for years. My stomach rolled with each curve and dip in the road, and my head was impaled on a hot hard spike that made my eyes throb. I felt weighed down by the heat and barely alive.

"Josie," Jack said. "Okay?"

"There's a jackhammer in my head," I said. "Other than that, I'm fine."

"Someone's grumpy."

"You're not helping."

"I'm driving you to get aspirin, aren't I?" he said.

We turned onto the highway, the sun hit us head-on, and I didn't bother to answer. Jack took a pair of sungla.s.ses from above the sun visor. He had the radio on. The beat was jarring and obnoxious and the announcer's voice sounded like metal on asphalt. The glare off the road made my eyes hurt, and underneath the sourness of my whiskey-burned stomach the old familiar dread was taking shape.

I hated going into town. Town people stared.

Meanwhile, there was Jack, undamaged and cool as you could possibly please behind his sungla.s.ses, just as if we hadn't been up till dawn drinking everything but the drain cleaner under the sink. That was my brother: it was like he was his own species, one that had sneaked a couple thousand extra years in while evolution was looking the other way.

"You never feel a thing, do you?" I said.

"Not like you do," he answered.

I leaned my head back against the rear window and closed my eyes. The truck hit a pothole and my head bounced hard against the gla.s.s.

"I want a pair of sungla.s.ses," I said.

Which was how it came to pa.s.s that instead of getting the trip to town over with as soon as possible, the way we usually did, I found myself wasting precious time at the revolving display rack in the drugstore, picking up and discarding one pair of sungla.s.ses after another as I tried to find some that would hide me from the world and still leave me able to recognize myself in the mirror. Jack was standing by the paperbacks, reading the back covers of the novels.

There had been a woman standing at the cash register when we came in. The bell over the door jingled as she left, and Jack was suddenly standing at my elbow.

"You've got an audience," he said, and I froze, the pair of gla.s.ses in my hand halfway to my face. I thought he meant the woman. Like I said, people in town stared.

"No, it's okay," he said. "The kid behind the counter."

I put the gla.s.ses on, turned the rack slightly so that I could see the boy in the mirror, and looked.

The boy behind the cash register was about my age, with longish hair and thin, rangy limbs. He wore a black T-s.h.i.+rt and jeans underneath his blue store ap.r.o.n. Jack was right, he was staring; but as I turned my head to get a better look he bent hastily over the magazine that lay open on the counter in front of him, as if he'd been reading it all along, and started flipping through the pages too quickly to see what was on them.

"So?" I said to my brother, who looked so easy by comparison in his old stained s.h.i.+rt and sleep-twisted hair.

Jack turned back to the rack of gla.s.ses and started to spin it lazily. "He's been looking at you since we came in."

"That's ridiculous."

Jack said, "We're undeniably charismatic," and picked a pair of sungla.s.ses at random. Then he told me to go ask my new boyfriend where the aspirin was. I said I knew where the aspirin was, but he squeezed my elbow and said to trust him, so I did.

When the boy saw me coming, he pushed his gla.s.ses up his nose and ran his hands through his hair.

"Aisle five," he said when I asked about the aspirin. I noticed, almost clinically, that his gla.s.ses hid a nice set of eyelashes, for a boy. They weren't as thick as Jack's, but they were straight and dark. His long, thin fingers, tapping on the counter, were tanned to a rich golden brown.

He was making me nervous, this boy, watching me too closely. I realized that I was turning the sungla.s.ses Jack had given me over and over in my hands, and stopped.

"They'll look good on you," the boy said shyly.

I knew I was supposed to say something in return, but I didn't know what. So I just smiled. The smile felt strained on my lips.

Jack saved me by coming up behind me. "I found it, Jo," he said and held up the bottle of aspirin. He took the sungla.s.ses and put both items on the counter. The look on his face was distant and bored.

The boy's movements were studied, too casual, as he rang us up. His eyes kept darting up at one or the other of us. Usually me.

"You're those Raeburn kids, aren't you?" he asked as he gave us our change.

"No, we're the other ones," Jack said and handed me the sungla.s.ses as we turned away.

As the door jangled behind us, the boy called, "See you around?" as if it were a question.

Back in the battered blue truck, Jack used his keys to break the seal on the aspirin. He pulled out the wad of cotton stuffed in the top of the bottle and threw it out the window. Shaking out four tablets, he handed two of them to me and took the other two himself.

I wished that we'd thought of getting something to wash the pills down with and dry-swallowed them.

"What was all that about?" I said when I could talk.

Jack stretched his arm across the back of the seat and tugged lightly on my braid. His green eyes were amused. He said, "He likes you."

"You're still drunk," I said.

"He couldn't take his eyes off you," Jack said. "But he could barely talk to you, and he was afraid to look you in the eye." He winked. "Broadcasting loud and clear, little sister."

I pulled my knees up and braced them against the dashboard. I could still feel the pills in my throat.

"He doesn't like me," I said. "He doesn't even know me."

"He doesn't need to," Jack said, pinching my thigh. He started the truck's tired old engine. "You're good-looking. You take after me that way."

"Ha," I said, watching Jack, the good lines of his profile and his hair, warm and golden in the afternoon sun.

"I know, it's hard to believe," he said. "Are you going to try on those sungla.s.ses I bought you?"

I'd forgotten them. They were sleek and narrow and the lenses were a deep, smoky gray. When I put them on the world went mute.

"Look at me," Jack said as we pulled up to a stoplight.

I did.

He smiled. "Beautiful."

We lived about fifteen miles outside of Janesville, on a winding road that led through a scattering of houses collectively called the Hill. In the nineteenth century, the Hill had been purchased, parceled, and developed by small-time industrialists from Pittsburgh, forty miles or so to the south. They came north to try to escape the toxins that their steel mills and c.o.ke ovens disgorged into the air, and when the wind was blowing in the right direction, they succeeded. When the wind was blowing in the wrong direction, they took their families and headed up to Presque Isle to take in the cleaner breezes that blew off the surface of Lake Erie. These folks weren't Mellons, Carnegies, or Fricks; they were Smiths, Johnsons, and Browns. A century later, each of them was as long forgotten as the next, but their houses still stood: decaying old palaces that were never as grand as they wanted to be, with overwrought architecture that was both confused and confusing. Corinthian columns supporting veranda roofs trimmed with pale pink Victorian gingerbread. That kind of thing. Some of them had been kept up-there was even a "Historic Homes of Janesville" tour, which split the town's less-than-hearty tourist trade with a lackl.u.s.ter establishment called the Janesville s.h.i.+pping and Transport Museum-but most of them were like ours: too expensive to maintain and too ugly and weird to sell. Every now and again we found outraged fliers tucked into our mailbox about some developer who was trying to buy a chunk of land and put in a crop of split-levels. Not being particularly community-minded, we never did anything about them. Somebody must have, though, because none of the new houses were ever built.

None of the ten or so houses on the Hill was visible to its neighbors, but most of them faced the road with vast green lawns and maple trees whose leaves swayed gently in the breeze. Our house was higher up the mountain and deeper into the wilderness. It sat at the end of a long, twisting driveway, hidden from sight by a tall overgrowth of hemlock until you were nearly at the front porch and shadowed by two huge old elms that were the last Janesville survivors of Dutch elm disease. It was always late afternoon under those trees, and the path leading up to the porch was always ankle deep with dead leaves, even in the summer.

Jack and I lived there, for the most part, alone. Our father, whom we called Raeburn, taught physics at a small college three hours away. Too far to drive every day, he said, but the house had been in his family too long to sell and he'd never give up the tenure he'd spent so many years earning. So he kept a room at the college's faculty house and lived there during the week while Jack and I stayed home together.

Once, one of the men who taught with Raeburn stayed the night with us on his way up to Canada, and he asked how we managed, staying by ourselves all the time and not going to school. Raeburn told him that since he wasn't around, we'd cut four days out of five anyway, so why bother? "The American public school system is a doomed inst.i.tution," he told the man. "All they'd learn at that a.s.sembly-line idiot factory is how to sink to meet the lowest common denominator. If they study with me, they'll learn things they need." A nice theory, but the truth is that we rarely if ever actually studied with him; when he left the house every Monday morning, there were two piles of books on the kitchen table, with lists of a.s.signments tucked between their pages, to be finished by the time he returned. When he was home, he preferred to spend his time locked in his study, listening to the radio, so actually studying with him was restricted to the two or three grueling hours that the three of us spent gathered in his study on Sat.u.r.day afternoons. Raeburn's version of education was grim and absolute: hard sciences, mostly-physics, mathematics, chemistry-with some fringe politics and economic theory thrown in, to show us what colossal messes human beings could create when they attempted to form an organized society.

We were alone a lot, but we had always been alone a lot, and Jack said that we were the sort of people who always would be. Crazy Mary-which was what we called the mother we'd briefly shared-left my father when I was two and my brother was four, and took Jack with her. I didn't see him again for four years.

But then one morning when I was six years old, a strained-looking social worker showed up on our doorstep with one hand holding an inch-thick stack of paperwork and with the other holding-barely-my squirming and fighting brother. I hadn't even known that I had a brother-I only vaguely knew that I had a mother, and still wasn't entirely clear how I was related to the man who called himself my father-and now there Jack was, in the flesh, and he was the first person I'd ever seen who was even close to my size, and besides, he looked like me. He had the same wide, smooth forehead, pointed chin, and tawny hair, although his hair had been cut brutally short somewhere along the line. There was an ugly gash near his left ear that had been st.i.tched up with spiky black thread. He looked straight into my eyes and I looked straight into his, which were strikingly green, and we knew each other instantly.

Later, when we were left alone together while Raeburn went through the paperwork with the social worker, eight-year-old Jack reached out and took a lock of my hair between his fingers. The housekeeper Raeburn paid to take care of me had long since given up on my hair; it was snarled and matted and it hadn't ever been cut, but Jack didn't seem to notice. He looked at the greasy golden hank as if it were something miraculous.

"You have hair like Mary's," he said, his voice full of wonder. Then his expression changed, became firm and efficient. "But you need to brush it."

"I don't know how," small Josie said. It's the first sentence I can actually remember speaking.

"I'll show you," Jack said, and he did. Ten years later, I was probably the only sixteen-year-old in America who still gave her hair the legendary hundred strokes each night, and sometimes during the day, because Jack loved to watch me do it.

Raeburn told me that Jack had come to live with us because my mother was dead; it was Jack who filled in the blanks by telling me that my mother and his mother and Mary were all the same person. "We're on our own now," he said. "Just you and me." The world I lived in was a third again as big as it had been a week before; I no longer felt alone, but I read the solemn look in his eyes and nodded soberly.

Not long after that, the housekeeper was fired-I'd hated her anyway, and much preferred spending time with my new brother-and the stacks of schoolbooks began. By the time Jack and I were teenagers, we had come to a silent understanding with Raeburn: as long as we spent the weekends pretending to pay attention, Raeburn couldn't have cared less what we did with ourselves during the week. And what we did, left alone in our decaying old house, was this: ice skate in winter and stargaze in summer, get stinking drunk on cheap whiskey and cheaper wine, smoke cigarettes in bed, smoke pot on the front lawn, climb trees, walk in the woods, daydream, sleep, fight, scream, laugh, and do whatever else we wanted to do. I used to think that was all we'd ever do.

"Take functional relations.h.i.+ps," Raeburn said, his mouth full of half-chewed chicken wing. "We design the experiments that define them, we give them names, we spend centuries proving and re-proving them; but we don't create them. They are entirely separate from us. They're like invisible machines, but far more intricate and fine than anything we could ever build. I am talking, children, about constants." He brought one hand down hard on the table, making the silverware jump. "John."

Jack, on my left, was staring blankly at the table. He looked up when our father spoke. Raeburn liked us to dress for dinner, so he was wearing a jacket and tie despite the heat. His eyes, the same green as the beer bottles we'd buried in the trash that afternoon, were s.h.i.+elded and cold. They might as well have been closed.

"Give me an example of a constant." A piece of breading from the chicken fell onto Raeburn's s.h.i.+rt as he spoke. He didn't notice.

"Gravity," my brother answered.

Raeburn shook his head. "You might have been half right sixty years ago, before s.p.a.ce travel and experimental antigravity aircraft. The U.S. government has successfully defeated gravity. Bully for it." He belched and dropped the chicken bone, picked clean.

I kept my eyes on my own plate, with its untouched drumstick and soggy heap of broccoli. When we'd returned from the drugstore, Raeburn was already there, even though we hadn't expected him for another couple of hours. He'd brought a whole chicken home with the regular groceries. Jack had cut it into pieces and I had fried it at the stove, despite the summer heat. It didn't take long, in the full stench of cooking meat and hot grease, for my hangover to resurface. By the time I put the frozen spears of broccoli in a pot of water to boil, my legs were shaky and the hair at the back of my neck was damp with sweat. I'd wiped the sweat away with a cool rag when I was upstairs dressing for dinner, but my stomach rebelled anew at the sight of the separated chicken leg on my plate, the white k.n.o.b of bone glistening through the cooked tendons. It didn't look like food. It looked like a piece of a dismembered corpse. Eating it, I knew, was a practical impossibility.

And yet somehow I couldn't look away from it. Maybe I was making sure it didn't move.

"Josephine," Raeburn said. "There are many wrong answers and only one correct one."

There are actually over a dozen universal physical constants, but it didn't matter. There was never more than one correct answer with my father. I knew this one; if Jack hadn't convinced me to do his physics for him, he would have known it, too. I tore myself away from contemplation of the thing on my plate and said, "Hooke's law."

"Which is?"

"The ratio of a weight on a spring to the elongation of the spring."

Jack's eyes flickered at me.

"The relations.h.i.+p of weight to tension. Good." Raeburn picked up a fork, speared a limp piece of broccoli, and stuffed it into his mouth. "Always constant. Always the same. Nature makes sense, children. Logical, concise, direct. It's humanity that's f.u.c.ked it all up."

"Gravity is a natural constant," Jack said.

"Not once we've violated it. Then it becomes another part of the universe that we've irrevocably destroyed." My stomach lurched dangerously. "We've made all the technological advances we can make without dooming ourselves; all that's left to us is destruction. This is our dusk, children. This is our twilight." He paused. His eyes were sparkling and his cheeks flushed. Our father liked nothing better than contemplating humanity's imminent self-destruction. He gloried in it.

One of Jack's hands fell casually beneath the table and I felt a light pinch through my crisp wool skirt. I grabbed for his hand. The tips of my fingers brushed his skin as he pulled it away.

Raeburn looked from Jack to me and back again. He grunted and took the other chicken wing. "One of my students-an exceptionally perceptive young woman-she used the most wonderful phrase in her final paper last term. 'Anything that humanity does from here on out,' she wrote, 'is a wave at the band as we leave the dance floor.' Brilliant," he said and tore the wing into two pieces.

Under the table, Jack's hand crept back into my lap and found my hand.

"Josephine," Raeburn said, "you're not eating."

I tried to pull my hand away. Jack wouldn't let go. "I know. I'm sorry," I said. "I'm not feeling very well."

My father stared pitilessly at me and said, "Will starving yourself make you feel better?"

I didn't answer.

"Eat, girl," he said.

The dismembered chicken leg lay, lifeless and greasy, on my plate. I picked it up and began to eat.

After dinner Raeburn sent Jack to put gas in his Buick and went to bed early with a bottle of brandy and a hand-rolled cigarette. I stayed downstairs to clean the kitchen. I moved slowly; my stomach felt swollen and hot and I could still taste the grease from the fried chicken. I could still feel the squeak of the meat between my teeth.

Eventually all the dishes were dried and put back in the cupboard, the table and countertops were wiped down with a wet rag, and the garbage was bagged and placed outside on the back porch, where it would ripen in the heat overnight. By Monday night, when Raeburn left, the kitchen would reek of rotting chicken parts. I tried not to think about it and crept upstairs to bed.

I hung my blouse and skirt carefully in the closet, where they wouldn't be wrinkled, and let my bra fall to the floor. Raeburn didn't care what our bedrooms looked like as long as the rest of the house was clean. One of Jack's T-s.h.i.+rts was balled up on the floor next to my bed and I put it on. I turned off my light and stretched out on my unmade bed, pulling the sheet over me so that I could feel the cool cotton against my legs.

My stomach moved inside my gut. I lay without moving and waited for it to decide what it wanted to do, either throw up or calm down or leap out of my body in one sick, throbbing piece. At some point I must have fallen asleep, because when Jack pulled back the sheet and put an icy bottle of beer against my bare leg, I woke with a start.