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“Thanks for this, Axel. I owe you one.”
My brother left after hugging and kissing his kids goodbye extravagantly, as if they were going off to war and he’d never see them again. When he closed the door, I frowned and they burst out laughing.
“Okay, boys, what do you feel like doing?”
Connor and Max smiled, revealing their gap teeth.
“Eat candy!”
“Paint with you!”
“Get into the hammock!”
“Best if we make a list.” I went to my desk, grabbed a piece of paper, and started to write down every stupid thing my nephews uttered. Nonsense, and of course most of it sounded like a blast. That was the best part of being an uncle: every time I saw them, all I had to do was have fun.
When night fell, we’d had our dinner of spaghetti and ketchup (Connor’s plate was more ketchup and spaghetti), I’d taken out the old video game console I kept in the closet to play with them, and they’d gotten my permission to swing around in the hammock for a while. I let them use some of my paints, and when I came back to the living room after washing the dishes, I found Max painting a tree on the wall next to the television. I shrugged, thinking I had more than enough paint and that I’d repair the disaster tomorrow. I got behind him and grabbed the hand with the brush in it.
“Softer lines, see?”
“I want to paint too,” Connor said.
Before I realized it, it was past midnight and I had a stretch of wall covered in children’s paintings and I hadn’t turned on my phone. Justin was going to kill me. It was bedtime. Both of them complained at once.
“What about the candy?”
“It’s on the list,” Max reminded me.
“I don’t have any. Well, now that you mention it…”
That week, when I went to the store, I had grabbed a handful of those strawberry suckers shaped like hearts that Leah liked when she was little. I took a few out of the cupboard and handed them out. I found my cell in my underwear drawer. I had six calls from Justin. I wrote him to tell him all was well. I also had a message from Madison saying we should see each other Saturday night. I responded with a simple yes and went back to the living room.
“Okay, boys, now it really is bedtime.”
They didn’t put up a fight. I accompanied them to the guest room and they both curled up in the same bed. Just before turning out the lamp on the nightstand, I saw the papers Leah had left on the table. I grabbed them and took them out onto the porch. I lit a cigarette and looked at them. One by one. Slowly. Looking closely at the spirals that filled the first page, a mechanical, numb drawing, like the kind I did. I looked through a few more until I found something that truly caught my eye. I blew out a lungful of smoke all at once and turned the page as I realized that, viewed horizontally, those quivering lines made a face in profile. It was drawn in charcoal. Black tears were sliding down a girl’s face, frozen forever now on that paper, and something in her expression struck me as tender within her sorrow. I ran the tip of my fingers over the tears, smearing them until they became grayish streaks. Then I pulled my hand away as though they’d burned me, because I never drew that way, trying to express something intimate; it just didn’t work that way for me.
14
_________
Leah
For months, i’d felt selfish and useless, unable to get ahead, but I didn’t know what to do about it. One day, with my eyes red and swollen from so much crying, I found myself throwing on a raincoat so the pain wouldn’t get me wet, and somehow I realized then that happiness, laughter, love, and all the good things I’d known couldn’t touch me either.
I read once that feelings are somehow mutable, that sorrow can transform into apathy, for example, and manifest itself through other sensations. I had provoked this. I had made my emotions remain ravaged, frozen in a way that made it possible for me to cope with them. And yet…Axel had poked holes in that raincoat in fewer than three weeks. I had been afraid of that from the beginning. So much so that I didn’t want to return to his hope, that place that was so his that it made me feel hemmed in.
I guess I was still thinking about that when, on the last night before he left, Oliver said we should have pizza for dinner and watch a movie. My first impulse was to say no. My second one was to take off running and shut myself up in my room. And the third…the third would have been something similar if Axel’s words about the effort my brother was making for me hadn’t kept repeating in my head. My voice shook when I uttered that soft yes. Oliver smiled, leaned over toward me, and gave me a kiss on the forehead.
March
* * *
(AUTUMN)
15
_________
Axel
