When I pull into Mark’s driveway, I turn off my car and unbuckle my seat belt.
The basement window’s open. Eyes watering, teeth trembling, I try to picture what Mark’s done with the place where I spent so many of my college weekends. Maybe it’s the same—same shitty Walmart futon, hand-me-down Playstation 2, tattered Red Hot Chili Peppers posters. Maybe he burned it all the day after he found out about Beth and me. The questions circle through my head, crashing into and flipping over one another, and I’m tempted to pull out of the driveway and go back to Louisville. I can do this, though, I remind myself. Things have changed. I’ve changed. I owe it to Mark to help sort this all out.
The outside of the house is exactly as I remember it. Vines creep up the brick walls as if holding them together. The lawn’s a splotch of different shades of green, islands of dirt speckled throughout like stepping stones across a creek, leading their way up to the front porch. There’s a swing up there, probably the one Beth and I shared beers on the night we slept together. Only it’s tattered now, some of the boards warped and curling upward as if they’re trying to get away. One of the windows on the door has been replaced with plywood.
Mark hated this place. Said the owner couldn’t give two shits about it. By now, I guess I thought he would have done something about it.
When I make my way up to the door, I notice a drawing in the middle of the plywood. It’s the lightsaber fight from the end of Empire, Luke handless, Vader calm. Only it’s not Luke and Vader, it’s two basset hounds. They’re dressed for the scene—the Vader basset in black armor, the Luke basset in that off-white jumper thing he wears—and I try to picture Mark drawing it. I run my thumb over the pen marks, feeling the indentations against the grain of the wood, but I’ve got nothing. I can’t picture a Mark that existed within the last few years, so I turn the doorknob and head inside.
Beth’s not supposed to be here. At least, Brian didn’t mention she would be here. A bandanna keeps her hair back, and while I can’t see it, I know her hair’s shorter. She has a bottle of cleaner in one hand and a wad of paper towels in the other, and the sleeves of her flannel shirt are rolled up just enough to reveal a tattoo on her arm that I didn’t know existed.
My bag rolls off my shoulder and lands in a heap next to the door. My palms start to sweat, and my breaths come a little faster. “What are you doing here?”
She narrows her eyes.
“I didn’t expect to see you.”
“I could say the same for you,” she says. “Nobody expects the disappearing Jack Dotson to come home, you know.”
“Well, I did,” I say, shrugging. There are a million questions I want to ask her—questions about us and Mark and them—but I swallow them down, focusing on the here and now instead. “Where is everyone?”
“Brian’s out running errands. Kenny’s doing God-knows-what. How are you?”
“I’m good,” I tell her. The house is darker than I remember. Tapestries hang over the windows, dangling from crooked nails and swooping over the tops of one another in dramatic fashion. Books and comics litter the tables, most sitting open atop paper plates and pizza boxes. In the corner is a picture of Mark and Beth, and I wonder how recently it was taken. Mark’s hair is cropped short, and his shoulders are broad, arms thick. Beth’s huddled up next to him, one hand on his chest. The same tattoo that creeps out from under her sleeve today is on her forearm, front and center. On Mark’s is one that, at least from here, appears identical, and, for the first time, it hits me that they might have gotten back together.
Well, did get back together, by the look of things.
Beth walks over to the picture. She stares at it for a few seconds, running her thumb over the edge of the frame, then sets it facedown on the table.
“How are you?” I say.
“Good.” She walks toward me, and I open my arms to hug her. Beth sidesteps me and picks up my bag, though. “You’ll be in the basement,” she adds, slinging it over her shoulder. “Thought it would be familiar.”
Beth walks out of the room. I start to speak, but my throat catches and the words freeze. It’s nice of her to take my bag, sure, but it doesn’t do much to help me understand what’s happening or why she’s here. Why nobody told me about her and Mark. Why I still can’t put together that Mark and Beth were, well, together. I don’t know what I expected—to pack boxes, share some memories, maybe order out or something—but it wasn’t this.
“You’re sharing the futon with your brother,” she yells from downstairs.
I’d forgotten how thin the floors are. It takes me back to my life in that basement six years ago, lying on the futon, trying to sleep while Beth and Mark talked about whatever it was they had going on. Some nights, they’d talk about trivial shit, like which one of them needed to sweep the kitchen or what bills they had to pay. Other nights, though, they’d talk about deep things, like where they’d want to go on their honeymoon (Mexico) or how many kids they thought they’d have (two). Those nights, I felt like an intruder for listening, and I probably was. There wasn’t much else to listen to except for Brian’s snores, though, so it was hard to turn off my ears.
I shake my head, trying to put those memories behind me. “Isn’t there another room?”
“I’m upstairs,” she shouts from the basement. “Kenny’s in the spare room.”
I walk over to the bookshelf, running my fingers over the spines and looking for some evidence of what their life was like here while conversing with what appears to be the floor. “Why does he get the spare room?”
Beth’s feet creak on the steps as she makes her way back upstairs. “We knew he’d be here.” She walks into the living room with a pizza box and throws it into one of the large trash cans she’s strategically placed for cleanup. “You’ll get by,” she adds. She says this without looking at me, then disappears into the kitchen.
I start to ask her if she’s mad, or if I did something wrong by coming, but the back door flies open, slamming against the wall with a force that sends the tapestries whipping through the air. “Brochacho!” Brian shouts, stepping past Beth to surround me in a hug. “You really came.” He claps me on the back before turning to Beth. “And you guys finally get to reunite after your awkward hookup, huh?”
I take in a long breath through my nose. Brian’s as smug as ever, smirking like he’s drunk or in love. He’s bigger than me—always has been—but if age has been unkind to me, it’s been worse to him. His hairline has started to creep back and gray at the edges, so he keeps it trimmed short. He’d still wreck me in a fight, too, but he’s not all muscle like he was in college. His T-shirt sleeves stretch tight around his arms, but they’re less forgiving in his waist, where a roll of a belly has started spilling over his jeans. He doesn’t look at himself and worry about these things, though. He has a six-figure salary to look forward to after residency, fancy dinners with even fancier people, a loft in downtown Indianapolis, and a car that draws the attention of everyone around him. He has nothing and everything all at once, and he couldn’t care less.
A noise comes from the basement. It sounds like a broken doorbell, or maybe even a toy firetruck with dying batteries, but before any of us can question it, the basement door pops open and a cat pokes through, meowing as if he’s been trying to get a hold of us for hours. He’s a small guy, with thick, fading black fur and bright yellow eyes.
“What the hell is this?” Brian says.
Beth bites her lower lip. “That’s Jack.” The cat stops by Beth’s feet and stares up at her. “Mark adopted him a year or so ago.”
Brian’s cheeks shine red beneath his beard, and he’s working so hard to contain a grin that his face looks ready to explode. “Please tell us the story.”
My stomach tightens into a thick knot, feeling like it’s going to sink through my body and splatter on the floor.
“There’s no story,” Beth says.
Brian snorts half a giggle. “Come on. There has to be.”
Jack meows, and Beth scoops him into her arms and rocks him like a baby. “If there is, I don’t know it. Mark never told me anything. Just that he wanted him called Jack.”
“Come on,” Brian whines, slumping his shoulders. “It’s got to be some sort of revenge after what you two did, right? Naming some mangy little thing like this after Jack?”
Beth forces a smile and walks downstairs.
“Good one,” I tell him.
Brian shrugs. “What’s she so pissed about?”
“Probably the hooking up bit you mentioned.”
He narrows his eyes and tilts his head to the side. “Is it too soon to talk about you guys?”
I take in a breath and force myself to think through everything I want to say. It’s something Lauren’s tried to get me to do since the “Dr. Fuckface” Christmas, and now seems as good a time as any to give it a go. I’m here for Mark, after all. To make things right and get together with these people, even my brother. Mend some fences, I guess.
After working through “Are you shitting me?” and “How the fuck are you a doctor?”, I settle on a response. Exhale.
“I don’t know, man. Probably so.”
“That sucks. How was the trip?”
And we’re normal. I think to ask him about Beth, why she’s here an how things worked out with Mark, then remember the thin floors. “Good. Yours? I thought you were getting here days ago.”
“Got called in,” he says. “I popped a drunk guy’s ankle into place last night, though. That was pretty cool. I don’t think he saw it coming.”
I take a seat at the table. “Don’t you have to ask for permission?”
“God no,” he says. “That would be awful. Have you ever tried to tell a hammered dude that you need to pop his ankle into place? It’s like telling a kid he can’t have a piece of candy. They throw a fucking fit.”
Listening to him, it’s hard to picture a doctor. I can’t get past it sometimes—the crassness, the lack of empathy—but it’s true. There’s a Brian Dotson, MD badge in his car, along with a Brian Dotson, MD flight suit for his helicopter shifts. There are embroidered Brian Dotson, MD fleeces, vests, business cards—anything you can put a name on, really. Sitting next to him, listening to him talk down about this patient and that one while he paces back and forth in his sweater and khakis that look so nice they almost smell like money, I can’t help but feel small. Suddenly, my Wilco T-shirt and tattered jeans feel wrong. Dirty.
I push that back, though. I’m moving on up, making strides.
Brian pounds a fist on the table. “People are fucked up,” he says. “That’s why I do what I do. Have you heard from Kenny?”
I kick at a wadded napkin on the floor. “No. Beth doesn’t know where he is, either. What’s the plan, though?”
Brian opens the fridge and pulls out a beer. “What do you mean?”
My mouth falls open, and my eyes go from the empty takeout boxes to the sticky stains on the floor to eventually my brother. “Your plan? Us picking up the place and getting Mark’s stuff together?”
“I don’t know,” he says, knocking back half his beer in a couple gulps. “Guess we’ll figure it out.”
My mind races back to my promotion, asking for time off at the worst possible moment, the moment when, on my last go-around, everything fell through my grasp. Lauren’s voice echoes through my head, reminding me that this isn’t an entry-level job anymore, that I ought to stay home and focus on work, and it hits me that I might have screwed up by coming here. That I put it all on the line for a pit of a house with no plan of attack so I could stay with a handful of people I don’t get along with.
“You’re kidding, right?”
Brian rolls his eyes and chugs the rest of his beer, then crunches the can in his fist and tosses it toward the trash. It misses. “What? No. How hard can it be?”
I run my hands down my face. “How the fuck are you a doctor?”
“What does that have to do with anything? At least I don’t sit in a fucking cubicle all day.”
I think to tell him about the promotion, that I’m about to have an office and a raise and all that, but it won’t do any good. Brian’s understanding of professional life outside of a hospital is nonexistent, so I walk toward the fridge and grab a beer of my own, then head toward the stairs to the basement.
“Hey, Jack?”
By the time I turn around, Brian’s grabbed another beer. “What?”
“Could you get me your status report on the quality of that beer by five? I need it before I head out for the golf course this afternoon. Chop-chop.”
I turn away before I say something stupid, then head downstairs.
The basement’s the same as I remember it. Mark never finished it—the walls are as gray as a sidewalk, and the texture not much better—but he decorated it as if he had, with a bright red futon against the far wall and a TV across from it. The same old PS2 is hooked up, waiting to be brought to life with the push of a button. Posters hang haphazardly at varying angles, some overlapping each other, all signs of an early 2000s high school experience. The Red Hot Chili Peppers, Smallville, Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man—all staring at me, as if wondering what I’m doing here.
“Not much has changed since you lived down here,” Beth says. She’s bent over the far end of the futon, stretching a sheet over it. I can almost picture the lot of us. Mark and me on the futon, sharing a bowl of chips; Brian and Kenny sitting in front of the TV, yelling at each other over Metal Gear Solid or Dragonball Z: Budokai. Laughing. Smiling. We didn’t even try back then; we just did things, became friends, and stayed friends because that’s who we were. It’s what we did. It was effortless. Yet here we are, years later, being pulled back together into some sort of awkward tumbleweed of emotion.
Well, except for Mark.
“You remember that we all but gave this space to you and Brian, right? That you two used to be inseparable?”
I lean against the stair railing. “Can we not? Things are different now.”
“That’s shit,” Beth says, tucking a pillow under her chin while she slides a case up over it. “You guys just decided you were better off competing over everything.”
“You don’t know us.”
She tosses the pillow down, then turns to look at me. “I think I do.” Hand on her hip, face red, she stares me down as if challenging me to respond. I don’t know how, though. She does know us. She did, at least, but that’s different now. She knew us before this all fell apart, and between her attitude and Brian’s shitty jokes, all I want is for her to drop the know-it-all act. I came here to help, for God’s sake, to pack up boxes and clean the place up, maybe even rekindle a friendship or two, and all I am is the butt of a joke or the focus of a lecture.
I’d say this isn’t going according to plan, but there apparently isn’t one.
“I’m going to go,” I tell her. “Get some fresh air or something.”
Beth goes to the closet and pulls out a comforter, grabbing it in quick bursts like a cat tearing at a roll of toilet paper. “That’s probably a good idea,” she says, throwing it on the bed. Her voice is charged yet restrained, like a parent who’s disappointed, and I have no idea how to respond.
“I’ll come back later.”
Beth says something as I make my way up the stairs. I should probably listen, but I can’t, focusing instead on how terrible of an idea it was for me to come here and pondering how I can get back to Louisville as quickly as possible. Brian asks me if I want another beer, and I grab one from him and carry it with me on my way out, swinging the door shut behind me. I stop at the sound of a pattering on the ground, though, and turn to find Mark’s plywood window pane facedown on the porch. I take a long swig of my beer, letting it fizzle and funnel down my throat, before throwing the can down in the yard and picking up the piece of wood. The indentations prick at my skin as I run my thumbs over the drawing one last time. Some part of me—the part of me that said it was a good idea to come here, I guess—tells me to fix it, but I swallow it down, toss the wood back to the ground, and leave.