On the BNSF Railway to Downers Grove, Barkley searched for Ginny’s profile on Facebook, though he didn’t know her last name. He felt queasy, unprepared. Charlie was coming home tonight, his mother had said, blathering on the phone about schedule changes and altered timetables. He’d rushed off to take the train, his heart pounding at the thought of his brother. The plan: have dinner with the family, spend time with Charlie, and then take his mother’s car into the city for Ginny’s concert. And afterward—depending on how fortuitous the night was—return to Downers Grove postconcert or the following morning.
Across from him, a man in a navy business suit took a seat, crossed his legs, and removed a small paperback book from his corporate satchel. The novel’s front cover displayed a man with a suave tie and a silver pistol, running from an ominous silhouette. Beach reading, Barkley scoffed. It was as if even the small population of Americans who did read were determined not to delve into real literature. Judging by the wrinkled picture, the businessman’s book was about a detective, probably alcoholic, whose past was going to “catch up” with him, likely in regard to the guilt rendered by a dead partner, the love of a reformed hooker, and the obsession of a serial killer with a penchant for scrapbooking. Barkley thanked his lucky stars for being given a discerning mind. Around him, the train rattled and slowed, and the intercom intoned that they were approaching Congress Park. Still a ways to go.
Ginny’s concert would be a great chance to move in a new direction. Barkley thought about what a girlfriend could do for his confidence, his sex life, his writing—even his application to high schools for an English teaching job. Teaching. Ugh. Student teaching had been well over a year ago, and still, no schools had even given him a whiff of a face-to-face interview. And while other friends had enjoyed jobs straight out of college, he’d been left to tread water and make excuses in the thirteen months that followed. Was he cursed? Was the economy-crushed job market for new teachers really that bad? He’d applied for positions in March and April, the entire process online now, and received nothing but confirmation e-mails and a deep swell of digital silence. Then May and June had rolled by with more applications and still no human response, and the realization sank in that he might not get a teaching job, period. His father said he had to be more aggressive in the application process, said he had to start calling and e-mailing and pounding the pavement like an honest-to-God salesman, to move beyond the online applications, but regardless, Chicago Public Schools had just laid off over a thousand more instructors, which would only make things more difficult.
In fact, all he’d gotten in months was a phone interview—no more than ten minutes long—with Eastwick High School, the castlelike Catholic school located on the south end of Downers Grove. His mother had practically exploded into confetti flakes of joy, saying she was going to call his father, to call everyone they knew, the whole time Barkley repeating again and again—it’s a phone interview, Mom, I’m not Catholic, I went to a public school, I seriously have no chance. The interview itself, over a week ago, had been tepid and unreadable for the first eight or so minutes. His reception was bad, he’d fumbled over his words and forgotten to mention that his great-uncle had attended the school for two years. But by the end, he’d gotten something of a second wind, and made what he thought was a decent speech about literature and education and a metaphor about young minds being akin to water wells. But it was stupid to call it a speech, he thought. He likely had no chance to move forward, and the only option was to continue applying for work before the summer ran out.
But he needed a job, and he needed money. He’d checked his account balance earlier today and almost suffered a panic attack. (His monetary survival, at least for now, existed on the graces of his father’s college graduation gift—a cash installment that was down to its final embers—and the paltry, bimonthly sum he received from working as a part-time ACT tutor.) Beyond that, he needed, as always, to get organized. When was the last time he’d done laundry? Weeks. There were totem poles of dirty clothes lining his studio apartment. And the White Sox comforter that Charlie had given him as a gag gift? The comforter he flaunted while telling people it was from his brother, who was “in the shit”? He hadn’t washed that in a long time, if ever.
What he didn’t want to think about was Charlie. Home again. He didn’t want to think about how during the first twenty-two years of his life Charlie had all but ignored him, stopping only to laugh at his mismatched outfits or lack of plans on a Friday night. In those days, before Barkley established a wall of defense against those who judged who was and wasn’t cool, he had simply retreated to his bedroom and his books: Hemingway and Yeats, Salinger and Faulkner—well, maybe Faulkner had gotten the best of him, but the rest he’d read. It would have been easier if that had been how it stayed, if Charlie had left and there had been no relationship at all, no sibling bond, just emptiness, absence. But during those weeks last summer between AIT and first duty, when Barkley was decompressing after college graduation, a switch flipped. Charlie started taking him to rooftop parties and small-venue concerts in the city, shooting hoops with him on their parents’ net-less, garage-mounted backboard, even reading his poorly written short stories about goblins and knights—feigning interest, maybe. For a long time after Charlie shipped out, Barkley hoped he had actually earned his brother’s acceptance, that he was suddenly a better, more interesting sibling. And he was, wasn’t he? College was where he met his largest group of friends, when he started drinking, when he finally had something to do on Fridays, although there was no older brother around to prove it to. Barkley remembered one June night in particular before Charlie left, when he answered all his questions. They were shooting hoops, playing H-O-R-S-E, and Barkley, finally, was winning. He had his brother down to the last letter.
“You letting me win?” Barkley asked. The spotlights on the garage illuminated the asphalt driveway, and made the acrylic backboard shine and glare.
“Nope,” Charlie said, his voice raw as ever. He dribbled absentmindedly between his legs, fluid without even trying. And then he threw up a shot that careened off the top of the backboard.
“What the hell was that?” Barkley whined. “I want to beat you for real.”
Charlie said nothing. There was a wall of evergreens at the edge of the driveway, separating their house from the other lots, and Charlie stepped back until he was against the needles, until all Barkley saw was a shadow.
Barkley retrieved the ball and tried to pinpoint where his brother was standing. Everything around the glowing driveway was ink.
“Charlie?”
His brother never showed real emotion. Always he joked, mocking himself, mocking others, physical comedy or verbal comedy—none of it mattered. He was witty in a way that Barkley could only try to capture on paper, through stories that still didn’t do his brother justice. But as Barkley approached the line of trees, he saw that Charlie was seated, looking out at the road, at the distant flare of a streetlight.
“Charlie?”
His brother finally looked. His shaggy dark hair was gone now, his face shaved, his eyes like black marbles.
“I’ve got this feeling,” Charlie said.
Barkley waited. His brother had joined the army spontaneously, as he did many things, but had managed to make his decision appear like the only natural course of action. Real men served. Heroes were being made every day. It was a privilege to be an American. Barkley’s parents had never spouted such talk, but that’s the type of person Charlie was. He got ideas, believed in them, made others believe in them, too. And then, unlike the rest of the family, he followed through.
Charlie shook his head in the darkness. “I know something is going to happen, Bark. I feel it. Every day I feel it. At night I can almost hold it.”
“What’s going to happen?”
Charlie looked out at the streetlight. He frowned and crinkled up his eyes.
Barkley sat next to him, felt the wet grass on his rear and the needles of the evergreens against the back of his head. “What’s going to happen?”
“Change. Something. I can’t describe it.” He massaged his eyes. “I have no idea what I’m doing, you know that?”
Barkley laughed. “Yeah, you do. I’ve heard your speeches on why you have to serve. Almost made me want to join.”
Charlie picked a handful of grass from the ground, held it up to his mouth, and harshly blew it away. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I’m just saying—”
“Everything is going to change, Bark. I don’t know how or what. I feel strong. I feel ready. I’m a surgeon with the fucking M4. But there’s this feeling.”
“It’s going to be fine,” Barkley said. “You’re going to have like fifty pounds of medals.”
“It’s waiting for me—that’s what I know. And I’m trying to fix what I can before it gets here.”
Barkley knew his brother had fixed a couple of things already. He had gone out to Hinsdale to apologize to Karen Simon, his ex-girlfriend, a nice girl whom Barkley thought Charlie had broken up with too quickly. He paid their father back most of the money he’d lent, sent an e-mail to an old teacher, even cleaned the gutters on the house. But Barkley saw that the biggest thing Charlie had fixed was them. They were finally—what? It was okay to say it. They were brothers. And he didn’t know how he felt about that, or what to say, but before long his brother was gone, across the ocean and in the shit, and the hollow feeling of his absence said it for him. All Barkley could do was wonder, every night under the weight of that White Sox comforter, if that thing waiting for his brother had found him yet.
Focus on Ginny, Barkley thought as the train rattled and swerved. Charlie was going to be fine. He stared into his BlackBerry’s tiny screen. Ginny. Focus. Maybe she shared the same last name as his teacher. He typed in Ginny Doring, and Facebook gave him two results, one of which depicted a middle-aged woman hugging an old man at a Greyhound bus stop, the other a close-up of a timeworn Raggedy Ann doll. Both of those had to be fails, unless Ginny thought a weird, obsolete doll’s head would garner a laugh—come to think of it, maybe it was her. She would probably describe Raggedy Ann as vintage.
His BlackBerry beeped: a friend request.
“I’ll be damned,” Barkley said, causing the suit-and-tie businessman to frown at him. Unbelievably, Ginny had just friended him. He tried to remember the last time a female had sent him a friend request.
“Ginny Morton,” Barkley said, sounding the words out. He felt the businessman watching him again.
Her profile picture was of a dark, backlit stage in midconcert. There were four musicians on it, one of whom had an arsenal of cymbals and drums and appeared to be banging away. Looked like it was all chicks. There were purple lights streaming down from the ceiling, and Barkley found what had to be Ginny on the right side, holding up an electric guitar, in the middle of a Pete Townshend power strum. Barkley chuckled to himself. He couldn’t see her face clearly but imagined that it matched the mock seriousness of her rock-and-roll pose.
What else? Her band name was the Flaming Nostrils. Nostrils, he said to himself. Kind of a gross word. Flaming worked, except it copied directly off the Flaming Lips, simply choosing a different part of the face. He wondered if they were a Flaming Lips cover band, but hoped not—cover bands were notoriously uncool unless they were fucking flawless. He clicked on Info and checked out her likes—this was a big one—God forbid she watched reality TV on any channel but Bravo. But look here, Barkley thought. Favorite TV shows: The Wire, Californication, Futurama. Interesting. Wasn’t that last show the cartoon that was forever being canceled and uncanceled? He pictured Ginny watching cartoons. A bowl of cereal in her lap and matching four-leaf-clover pajamas, the top two buttons of her shirt undone. And then he pictured his hand crawling forward like a pink spider, lifting open that flap of cloth—
“Now approaching Downers Grove,” the voice on the speaker said, bringing Barkley back to reality, away from Ginny’s shirt.
* * *
Barkley swung open the screened back door of the family’s powder-blue Cape Cod, and there he was—back where everything started. His mother was at the stove in a kitchen lined with maple cabinets and stainless steel, one pot bubbling with a thick broth of meats and sauce, the other boiling water and linguine. Barkley dropped his overnight bag on the floor.
“Barkley!” she cooed. She held a wooden ladle up in the air. “Want to try?”
“Where’s Charlie?”
“Upstairs,” his mother said. “Give him space.”
“Where am I sleeping?”
“Your old room is filled with boxes,” his mother said. She was still as tiny as ever, almost like a pixie. She moved from the stainless steel fridge to the maple cabinets and back to the fridge before finally settling at the stove again. If anything, age was making her move faster, as if she were reaching the end of a race.
“So … couch? I get to take the family room couch? Score.”
“Yes, you do. Hold on, honey.” And she let go of a wooden ladle and ran forward to give him a hug. “How are you? Have you sent any work out yet? Any new stories?”
“Eh,” Barkley said. “Nothing is ready yet.”
“Any news on the interview?”
“The phone interview? No, still waiting.”
“What about that intramural football league? Didn’t you say you were going to do that, sign up, get some exercise? You could wear your old high school uniform—I still have it upstairs. Number twenty-four, right?”
“Right, Mom, twenty-four. That old uniform would be great.”
In truth, he’d played only one game of varsity football during his time at Downers North High School, and that was because both Tommy Gardocki and Lenny Spatz were injured. He remembered wearing a helmet that seemed too loose, feeling it slide back and forth across his grimy cheeks, stirring up fresh trails of acne. His face would clear up later, by the end of high school, but not before he had lived through a dermatological house of horrors—worst on the memory list were all those secret trips he made to the bathroom, hoping to apply Retin-A face cream across skin that looked covered in barnacles.
He’d finished that day with three tackles. And yet, looking back, more than the smell of the wet grass and mud that was stuck to his face mask, more than the defensive huddles brought together by barking alpha males he could barely understand, Barkley remembered cursing himself out, berating his ever-monologuing mind—why can’t I shut myself off and just play? Why can’t I stop remembering that Dad is watching in the stands and that I don’t want to get hit and that every play holds the risk of looking like a total idiot? And everyone around him—every single person on that testosterone-soaked field—seemed to shut off their minds just fine.
He left the kitchen and wandered toward the fringes of the living room, which was unchanged—in fact, it seemed that not even a stray pencil or discarded Chicago magazine had moved since he was a freshman in high school, over eight years ago. The L-shaped couch, made of wrinkled, milk chocolate leather, faced the far end of the vaulted room, across from which stood the rectangular coffee table, with an underlying shelf that held more expired magazines. Barkley saw an Entertainment Weekly from January 2010, Rolling Stone from August 2009. It wasn’t that his mother didn’t clean, Barkley thought, it was that she took a degree of comfort in certain things staying the same. And Barkley saw wisdom in that, too. A lot of things she did were absurd—her stubborn optimism in the face of failure, for instance, and the fact that she refused to acknowledge that Dad’s leaving was a bad thing, a wrong thing. Pictures of them together were still up around the house, posing in front of red-bricked college campuses, trailing wakes of autumn leaves, more evidence of her stubborn refusal to accept reality. But the way she left the living room? There was a comforting nostalgia to that. It was like walking into the museum of his childhood. And even though his childhood hadn’t necessarily made him happy, he still took comfort in the evidence that it existed, that it was his, and that other people had shared memories of that same, self-contained space.
He padded over to the coffee table, picked up the remote, and flicked on the television. His mother still hadn’t gone for a flat screen, opting instead for a converter box, and that was a part of the living room that didn’t have to stay the same. Their old Sony model had a big enough screen, maybe forty-two inches, but it had the girth and weight of a loaded safe. Dense wooden paneling made up the television’s frame, adding even more to its absurd heaviness.
“Mom,” he called into the kitchen, “you’ve got to get up-to-date with the television. Have you seen my LED? Fifty inches. And it weighs like ten pounds.”
“I’m focusing on remodeling the bathroom, honey.”
Barkley sighed and sank into the folds of the couch. The television’s picture finally came to life and revealed the scrolling headlines of CNN. Images of the tsunami in Japan flooded the screen, and Barkley watched a helicopter-eye view of water rushing through tiny streets, picking up compact cars and vans as if they were cardboard boxes. The disaster had happened in March, he thought—and they were still talking about the clean-up strategy. No quick fixes to be found.
“Who’s been watching CNN?” Barkley said. “Mom, are you watching those political talk shows again?”
Barkley felt a nagging awareness in the back of his head, a knowledge that Charlie was actually home, in this house, drifting around upstairs, staying upstairs—but why? They were hiding something from him. A conspiracy. And then he heard a door open above him and felt his entire body go rigid.
Charlie. He heard footsteps above; the living room ceiling creaked. A throat cleared. Knobs turned and water ran. Barkley wanted to shout hello, to bound up the stairs like a Labrador retriever, but stopped himself. The water went off. He heard the ceiling creak again, but only once. Charlie was just standing there. Barkley sat frozen, unable to operate. He decided to count to twenty, and if Charlie was still standing, he’d go upstairs and see him. But by the time he got to fifteen, the bedroom door had closed again.
The smell of pasta and Italian sausage drifted into the living room. Barkley flipped from channel to channel. Comcast SportsNet was flashing the pregame introductions for the White Sox–Indians Friday night game in Cleveland, which the rain, moving east, had delayed. Charlie would want to watch it, of course. For Barkley, the only sport that had any measure of relevance was basketball. He was only ten when Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls won their final championship in 1998, but it was Charlie’s fanatical devotion—his door-framed poster of Pippen’s dunk on Ewing in ’94, his Dennis Rodman bobbleheads and color-changing collectors mugs, his VHS collection of taped games during the 1996 championship season—that made Barkley the stout follower of the Chicago Bulls that he was. He had a vague self-awareness regarding his lack of knowledge about basketball, an inability to describe plays and sets and zone defenses, and even accurately fathom what a pick-and-roll was, but he did appreciate the rhythm of the game. It was constant, it was fluid, it was exciting—unlike baseball, which was like golf with meathead posturing. Baseball he couldn’t do. It didn’t matter how much Charlie loved the White Sox or his father brayed about the Cubs.
Barkley thought again about the stray pictures around the house. It was infuriating, really, to see that his father still existed in this home, on coffee tables and wall frames, his mother displaying his likeness as if he were a wild game trophy. In the family room, there was a picture on the entertainment center to the right of the TV, a picture of his father holding a wriggling barracuda off the coast of Florida, surrounded by choppy green water. His father—tan, muscled, shaggy-haired, and smiling, everything Barkley was not—had a spare arm slung around his mother, who leaned against his tropical shirt as if he contained all the world’s supply of warmth and joy. The picture must have been from the 1980s, or at most, the early 1990s. College sweethearts, married for more than thirty years, and then gone. And Dad wasn’t just gone but never in the house. On the occasions when he’d come to pick Barkley up last summer, his father had idled by the curb, the black Mercedes purring, the windows tinted. And no one punished him for leaving. Certainly not his mother.
And, thinking about his father and the overall ignorance that permeated the house, Barkley stood up, walked over to the entertainment center, and snatched up the picture of his father with the barracuda. He had the pleasant idea of smashing it, of watching the glass shatter like ice around his feet, but something like that wouldn’t destroy the picture, just the frame. Instead he tucked it under his arm and walked up the stairs toward the second floor. He reached the landing, considered his choices, thought about what he was trying to do. Just hiding the picture would be enough. Ahead of him was the hallway leading to the master bedroom, to the right was the entrance to his old room, congested with the shadows of boxes, and to the left and back was Charlie’s abode. His brother. His brother was home and still hadn’t come downstairs. Barkley, staring at the whitewashed door of his older brother’s bedroom, carried the barracuda picture over and placed his hand on the knob. Who said he couldn’t just say hello? It’s what he would have done in the past, anyway. He turned the knob.
The door clicked and the wood moved outward a crack. Barkley could tell it was dark in there. He felt his heart rev up. He clutched the picture of his father against his chest, considered pulling the door closed, leaving Charlie to whatever he was doing in that darkness. But instead, Barkley peered into the room, his pulse quickening with something akin to danger.
It took him a moment to properly focus. The light was off. Charlie’s bed was made, unoccupied, untouched—he hadn’t even slept in it yet. But there, at the other end of the room: his brother. Charlie was on his knees, bent over prayerlike in front of a wooden stool. And there were two candles lit on either side, bouncing twin shadows of Charlie across the opposing walls. On the middle of the stool was an object. Barkley craned his neck in, mindful of the floorboard just outside the door that creaked. The object on the stool was a key chain. A red, plastic key chain.
His older brother was bent down in a kind of trance. Normally he jumped at any sound within hearing distance, but he hadn’t even heard him open the door and remained hunkered over, his muscled body in a perpetual flex, hands folded in front of that key chain. Barkley noticed that as close as his hands were to the object, they did not touch it. He pulled the door shut slowly, a strange bubbling rising in the pit of his stomach. The picture frame felt heavy. There was a chill beneath his skin as he walked down the staircase and back into the living room. He placed the picture of his father, as it was, back on the entertainment center. He thought about Charlie, up there with the candles and the key chain and the prayer. He knew now that his brother had been right. Whatever had been waiting for Charlie had finally found him.