Emerald City Part 7

"I'm saying he didn't mean it," Dad says.

"Of course he didn't."

Dad watches her and Sheila, like something is still not settled.

"I just saw it coming," Peggy says.

Sheila parades her skinned knee with its bandage and orange stain for the Belson girls, who are close to her age. Peggy lays our pie in the oven, and Dad puts on his goofy chef's hat as soon as the coals are hot enough for grilling. He and Neil Belson each sip a Beck's and argue over whether the Cubs will make it to the World Series.

I lean against Dad's arm. He has big, solid arms that make you safe when he hugs you, like you're inside a house with its front and back doors locked. "Well, look at you, miss," he says, pressing a spatula down on the spitting meat. "This one's got my heart," he tells Neil Belson, raising his Beck's. "Forever and always."

They both laugh. "Who could blame you?" Mr. Belson says. I pretend to rub smoke from my eyes, embarra.s.sed.

Sometimes I feel like the simplest things I do-chew gum, cartwheel across the lawn, even bite my nails, which I'm trying to quitfill Dad up with happiness. His eyes get soft, and I know no matter what I ask, he'll say yes in a minute.

"Do me a favor, baby?" he says. "Use your magic to cheer up your big brother?"

I try to. I offer Bradley my pickle and bites of my burger, even though he already has one. I tell him a few dead baby jokes, which are the only kind I can remember. But he bites his lips and stares at his hands like he's trying to figure something out.

"Is Bradley feeling okay?" Celia Belson asks Peggy during lunch. Peggy leans over and whispers to her. They give each other a look that surprises me, like they both know something they don't need to talk about.

"How about a game of softball?" Dad says, wrapping his arms around me from behind and speaking to the group. He has a good, warm smell of beer and bread. Dad likes games: football, soccer, Parcheesi. Tic-tac-toe if there's nothing else. Our mom did, too, and when she was alive they'd play gin rummy late into the night.

Brad says he'll sit out.

"C'mon, Brad," Dad coaxes. "We need your power hitting." He wants to make up but doesn't know how. His hands hang at his sides.

"No thanks," Bradley says. "Really."

I catch another fast look between Peggy and Celia. Brad sees it, too.

I sit out with him. I watch the rest of them play, and Bradley tears blades of gra.s.s in two and piles the pieces at his feet. Everything is wrong: Dad's shoulders droop as he stands at first base. Peggy scowls while waiting her turn to bat. Celia Belson keeps glancing over at us. I stare at each one of them the way I stare at Brad when he's doing a stunt. But nothing improves.

Sometimes I have these thoughts. I imagine walking onto a battlefield where men are shooting at each other, and making them stop. Just by walking out there, just by looking at them a certain way and holding my arms up. I imagine how quiet it would be, like a scene from a movie where something happens to hundreds of people at once. In my scene the soldiers drop their guns and slap each other on the back the way men do when they're glad about something. They look at me in awe.

"I'll get the pie," I tell Bradley.

I run back to the house and open the oven. The pie looks delicious, sugar bubbling along its edges. The dish is hot. I hold it with the oven mitts and sniff the steam coming out of the top. It's just what we need, I think.

I hurry back up the lawn. Sun s.h.i.+nes in my eyes, and I blink a few times because it looks like Brad is at bat. I keep walking, holding the pie without noticing where I'm headed. He looks mad as h.e.l.l. His jaw moves as he grinds his teeth, and I wonder what they said to make him play.

Dad is pitching, his back to me. Only after he throws the ball do I realize where I'm standing. Everyone sees it at once. It happens both slow and fast, slow because there's enough time after Dad pitches for parents and children to shout, "Bradley, wait!" and there's enough time for Brad to get the most awful look on his face, like he's seeing the worst thing on earth and he can't avoid it. Like he's the one about to get hit.

I just stand there, holding the pie. I know what will happen, like I've already seen it.

Then Bradley is shaking me hard, so my head b.u.mps the gra.s.s. "Stand up," he hollers. "You're getting everyone scared."

I'm dizzy. I smell baked apples and sugar glaze. I hear people shouting, "Leave her alone for G.o.d's sake!" But Bradley keeps shaking my arm so it tugs in the socket.

I stand up and push the hair out of my face. Bradley puts his arm around me. "See? She's fine," he declares in a thin voice. "F-I-N-E. Fine."

The group stands in a quiet circle around us.

Brad takes my hand and pulls me. "C'mon," he says. "You need some water."

I try walking, but something doesn't work right. My feet aren't attached to my body.

"Come on!" Bradley urges, pulling my arm. I look at his face and see how his lips shake, how wide and scared his eyes are, and I try my best to follow. But the next time he pulls I fall onto the gra.s.s and then I hear more shouting, Dad's voice louder than the rest. "You get the h.e.l.l away from her!" he bellows, and that's the last thing I hear.

I have a minor concussion, which is mainly just a greenish bruise near my temple and a bad headache. I stay in bed for a week, and every day Bradley comes to the doorway and stands there looking at me.

"I'm fine," I say the second I see him. "Completely fine." He nods and looks at me like there's something he wants to say but can't figure out how.

One day he comes in. He sits on the edge of my bed and stares at my face. "How well do you remember Mom?" he says.

It's the first time he's ever asked me that. I tell him about the shadow bending over, the singing. I want to tell him how I hurt her with my tricycle wheel, but for some reason I don't.

"She was beautiful," he says. "Like an angel." Then he leans back on his elbows, looking tired. "Know something?"

"What?"

"Dad's probably told you. Probably a hundred times. But I never did."

"Told me what?"

"You look the same. Like she did."

He's staring at me. There is a bluish color around his mouth, and his eyes have that spooked look you get when you stare in a mirror late at night. I watch the sheets. "No," I say. "Dad never told me that."

I think of pictures I've seen of our mother and try to compare us. But I can't remember what I look like.

"You're the same," he says. "No joke."

I twist the edge of my sheet, shaping it into the head of a rabbit.

Brad clears his throat. "Dad says I should stay away from you," he says. "He ordered me. Grabbed my s.h.i.+rt in front of everyone. Like this." He leans forward and grips the top of my nightgown, pulling me toward him. I must look shocked, because he lets go instantly. "s.h.i.+t!" he cries, shaking his hand like he doesn't know who it belongs to. "Christ Almighty!"

"It's okay," I tell him, leaning back against the pillows. But my heart is beating fast.

Brad pulls a miniature rowboat out of his pocket and bounces it in his palm. He takes a small, crinkled tube of glue and dabs some on two plastic oars. "Look, Holly," he says. "I'm sorry for that."

He carefully glues the oars onto the boat. I wish he would go away.

After a while Bradley looks up at me. "You were there," he says.

"Where?"

He's staring at me in a desperate way. And then I know where he means: in that car, six years ago.

"What happened?" he says. "I want you to tell me."

"I don't know. I can't remember it."

Brad narrows his eyes. "I think you do. I think you're afraid to say."

"Well, I don't." It frightens me to talk about it. I keep trying to catch my breath, and it makes me dizzy. Brad looks more scared than I am.

"You saw," he says. "You know the truth about it."

I know I should tell about the thing with my tricycle. I should say how the worst things happen sometimes on purpose but they're not your fault. I should say the truth wouldn't matter even if I knew what it was.

Instead, I just lie there.

After that day Brad makes sure we stay apart.

There's a wall between my brother's room and mine. If I listen I can tell exactly where he is, standing up or sitting down, whether he's building something or lying on his bed, looking at the ceiling. When he walks I feel the floor shake under me. I can almost see him, I guess the way blind people do. Sometimes I see him so well I forget what else I'm doing.

My friends call. There are swimming parties, tennis games, all the summer things. I hardly go. I stay in my room and listen to Bradley, the same as I used to watch him. When I don't know where he is, I start to worry.

One time I knock and go in. He's working on a model of the Apollo 13, building the launchpad. I start arranging pieces by their codes, E's with E's, G's with G's, different piles for small and big. I know how he likes them.

"That's nice," I say, looking at the s.p.a.ces.h.i.+p.

Bradley shrugs. I look around at the planes and boats covered in s.h.i.+ny paint, the racing cars and station wagons. They hang from the ceiling by strings. "They're all nice," I tell him.

Brad frowns. I remember going with him parachuting a couple of months ago. It was windy, and I stood by the side of the runway with long dry gra.s.s whipping my legs. Bradley waved to me from the plane before they shut the door, and his expression reminded me of astronauts I'd seen on the news, just before they went into s.p.a.ce. You could tell they knew they'd be heroes if they ever made it back. So when Brad came staggering toward me through the long gra.s.s, dragging the parachute behind him, I started clapping. He had a streak of dirt on his face and was limping. He stood there smiling at me like he hardly ever smiles, and I think for a minute he felt like he'd been to the moon and back.

"You know, I do this stuff?" he says, looking up from the launchpad. "And I have no idea why? It's like it's all broken, and my job is to fix it." He laughs like it isn't funny, just weird.

"I know what you mean."

And I do. But Brad shakes his head like I'm just saying that to cheer him up. He goes back to his glueing.

The Belsons have a summer house. It's right on Lake Michigan, with a dock and a little beach and lots of tall trees that stick out over the sand. If you climb high enough in one of those trees, you see a whole new sh.o.r.e with houses bigger than the Belsons' on it. Brad taught me climbing three years ago, before it got too easy for him.

"I'd rather stay here alone," he tells Dad the day before we're supposed to visit them. I'm listening from the kitchen.

The leather in Dad's chair squeaks. "Brad, let's have a talk," he says. "I think it's time."

"If it's about Holly, you can save it," Brad says. "She comes in my room, I can't lock her out, okay? There's limits."

"Not about Holly."

"I'm following orders," Brad continues, more loudly. "Keeping away like you said." He lets out two hoots of laughter. I stare out the kitchen window at the tire swing hanging in the heat.

"You think I'm dangerous," Bradley says.

"Now you're talking crazy."

"You think I'm one of those people who causes disasters."

"Bradley," Dad pleads. "Son, don't say things like that."

"And what if you're right? What if I am?" His voice is thin and high, a crying voice. "I walk in the room and Peggy flinches like I might hit her, and you know what? I want to! I want to beat the s.h.i.+t out of her, I'm so mad. Maybe it's true!"

"Brad, stop. Stop, Brad, this is nonsense." I hear Dad getting out of his chair. "We're spooked a little, all of us. G.o.d knows why." His voice is wheezy. "I want you to come with us to Lake Michigan," he says. "We need to straighten this out. Clear it right up."

Brad doesn't answer, but I know he'll be there.

During the ride we play twenty questions and license plate bingo. Dad starts a contest counting gas stations, and Brad wins it. When I look at Dad's face in the mirror, I see him smiling.

After three hours of driving we park along a shady road and cross the soft ground to the Belsons'. Bradley helps Dad unload the groceries and sleeping bags from the car and bring them to the kitchen, then says he'll go take a swim before lunch. Sheila and Meg want to swim, too.

"I can't take you now," Peggy says, chopping an onion for Celia Belson's chicken salad. "Brad, would you mind-" She breaks off, and the room goes quiet. Even the kids stop talking. Peggy stares at that onion, blinking at her wet hands. The screen door snaps shut as Brad runs outside.

"-taking them with you?" Peggy finishes, like nothing happened.

I'm so mad at Peggy I bite my own tongue. I stare at the knife she's holding and want to take a swipe at her arm with it. But when she looks at Dad, I see she's mad at herself, madder than I am, afraid of what he'll say.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. There are tears on her face, but it might be the onion. Neil and Celia Belson work hard at gathering their trash into a bigger bag. Dad comes over and rubs Peggy's neck. He tells the girls he'll take them swimming after lunch.

I follow Brad. Between the house and the beach are dunes covered with tough reeds that scratch your legs when they brush you. Brad runs over those dunes, letting the reeds whip his calves. He splashes into the lake and starts swimming.

He goes straight out. I keep my eyes on him until he's so small I wouldn't know it was a person if I wasn't already watching.

"Turn around," I say out loud.

But he keeps going. In a hurry I run to a tree we used to climb, a tall one that sticks out over the sand and has a few boards nailed to the trunk. Bark flakes in my hands, but once I reach the first limb, the climbing gets easier. I see him again, moving out there like a spider on a big gray web. The higher I go, the better I see him, and I climb so high that the ground looks miles away. The branches are soft up here, and I hear lots of creaking. I straddle a branch and lean back against the trunk. I keep my eyes on Bradley, holding him up.

Then I see Dad below me on the beach. He goes to the water's edge and looks out. After a while Peggy comes out and stands beside him. She's brought him something in a napkin, but Dad takes a bite and drops it on the sand when she isn't looking. They just stand there, watching the lake.

I let them worry. They deserve it.

Brad is floating now, staring up at the sky. I glance up, too, just for a minute, at the thin clouds overhead. When I look back at Brad, he's disappeared. I stare at the spot where I last saw him and hold my breath, letting the seconds pa.s.s until I'm gasping. Finally Bradley splashes back to the surface-a big splash, like he's gone a long way down. He starts swimming in.

When Brad leaves the water, we're waiting for him. He keeps his head down. Dad gives his wet back a clumsy slap, then glances at his watch. "You've been gone almost an hour," he says.

"I floated a lot."

"We saved you some lunch," Peggy says.

In the kitchen I pull Brad aside, where no one can hear us. "They were scared to death," I tell him.

"Were you?"

I shake my head. "I watched you from the tree."

Bradley smiles a little, brushes some sand off my face. "I knew there was a reason I kept on floating," he says.