Jimmy and I were almost home, just crossing the last street before mine, when a big chunk of sadness landed on my skull and soaked in. Like it dropped down out of the sky, a snowflake the size of Remo's car. I could see the house. I could see the street as I walked, lugging the thing inside me. Melting down to gelatin at the base of my skull and thickening, a memory tumor capable of affecting my breathing and heartbeat, shutting down systems on my brain stem with the spun-out truth I was intent on not thinking about: my brother was gone forever.
There were no cars. No kids out. I didn't see a single bird. Even though Jimmy was just behind me, crunching in the gritty, freezing slush still left on the side of the sanded road—the stuff pushed all the way to the rain gutters by passing car tires that hardened when it got to twilight—I wasn't all there. Still, I stepped and he stepped too. When boots landed in the grubby snow mush, they crunched. Water not yet frozen pushed away from our soles in thin, chocolate milk swirls. Shards of ice, with trapped pebbles and sand grains inside, broke and settled in the empty space of the uneven boot prints we left behind. The dirt would just have to wait for the melt before it was free. For those moments of walking in unison, it kind of felt like Jimmy was tagging along on this journey, like we were kids again, but then we were there too quickly, thirty feet from where it happened, moving closer in a gray daylight so different from that night, and I wasn't much more than a ghost skirting the ground beside him, carrying nothing.
It was the first time I'd actually looked at my neighborhood in I don't even know how long. Before, it was just something to pass through as quickly as possible: walking fast, always on high alert, watching my back and everyone else's, not concerned with the squat houses in seventeen different shades of brown, not a single one over a story tall. Most had cracked driveways. None had front porches. All had tin screen doors. All had chimneys but none worked. Only two trees grew, each in ill-defined yards for a whole block to share. No fences in those front yards. No grass. It used to be just those things—wood, brick, concrete—but now it was marked by something invisible. A place I had to pay respects. Soiled ground. Every house looked to me like it had moved a few inches closer to the edge of the cul-de-sac and huddled, or maybe each one had imploded a fraction of an inch, had constricted to its foundation a little, all with windows as eyes, sagged and sad. I was losing it. It was all in my head. Had to be.
Halting at where I thought the edge started, where asphalt met the slope of the curb, I was almost floating in the spot. The big spot. I purposely didn't look in its direction the last few days. Maybe that way, it wouldn't be any realer than it was. You know? If I didn't look, it wouldn't be there. Wouldn't be the rough size and shape of a kiddie pool and the color of squashed plum skin. The opposite of an ostrich, I'd kept my eyes buried up, on everything eye level and higher, away from the street. Maybe that's not such an opposite. The tumor was becoming a headache.
A late snowfall on Tuesday night had taken most of the big bloodstain with it. The last of Cue, for real. At that moment, I was kind of glad that the lazy cops hadn't bothered to clean it up. It'll snow, they must've told each other over one last cigarette before going home to their wives and lives. Only a vague circle remained visible on the blacktop, underneath the milky-clear slush layer. To someone else looking, it could've been anything. Old oil, maybe grease, an exploded carton of grape juice that fell from a ripped grocery bag. Somehow, it was comforting to see. Like he wasn't quite gone yet. Part of Cue was still there, preserved and frozen, under the tooth-width of ice.
Low and stupid and sentimental, gaining form, Ghost Jen evaporated and left me there to deal with what was left. I turned, feeling my soreness, the weight of my backpack, and fatigue. I'd gotten sloppy with the last kick to Merrick's face and I was pretty sure I jammed my right big toe. I always did that. It's never been the same since I broke it a year ago. Checked the mailbox even though I knew we didn't have any, but we did: a small manila envelope for Jimmy, from his mother. Weird that she'd write and not call. I handed him the letter and he put it in his pocket without opening it. My hand shook while unlocking the door.
First thing I noticed when it opened: the heat was on, and not from the oven because I couldn't smell casserole. Dad was in the living room, sitting down and leaning over an old easel on the portable table. With his back the way it was, he couldn't paint at an angle. It needed to be flat. He looked up and smiled at us, just a little one but I could see the vein in his neck move. It was the best sight I'd seen in a long time.
"Why's the heat on?" I put my bag down and moved in behind him to see what he was painting.
"Remo got it turned on. Said we were ruining the oven," Dad said.
He was laying down a real thin white line over a darker brown background: for my shirt. He was painting from a picture, an old family portrait that we had taken in some crappy studio at least five years ago. My hair was all frizzy and Cue's ears were too big because he hadn't grown into them yet. Mom wore her hair up and had taken her glasses off for the picture. You could see the double pressure marks from them on the sides of her nose. Dad was wearing a shirt that was too tight and he had huge sideburns but he looked strong, real strong. I hadn't seen the picture in years.
"Heat is heat, but he's right," I said. "Is that where you got the paints too?"
I couldn't believe Remo did it. If he got the gas on so fast, it meant he used a credit card or something.
"Yup, he was here on his lunch break." Dad put his tongue back in his mouth to say it, then stuck it out again, and leaned close to the canvas, putting the first brushstroke in on my nose.
"Make it good and crooked," I said.
There was a real big difference between my nose and Jen-the-ten-year-old's nose but sometimes when I look in the mirror, I can't remember what the old one looked like. It takes pictures to recall, but why bother? Paint that kid how I am now. I didn't tell Dad that, just left him to his painting, his re-remembering. Can't say I completely approved of the subject matter. Maybe a landscape would've been more relaxing or productive but I wasn't going to tell him what to paint. I wish I knew what Remo had said to him.
Unlaced my boot and slid it off to check my toe. It was definitely jammed so I clutched it between thumb and forefinger and corkscrewed it into the joint until it popped. Took me almost three minutes. The more times I hurt it, the longer it takes to get it back to working condition. Great. I'd probably get arthritis in that joint because of it. I checked my face in the mirror, washed, and got some bacitracin zinc on over the scabbing spots. Then I made sure to rinse my mouth with saltwater real well. At least the gums were trying to close the gap on the hole. That had to be good.
Just before Dad went to bed, and before I started icing my knee and hip, I had Jimmy help me move the new bedframe into Dad's room, the one Cue and I made, and removed the old one. It fell apart in our hands, which made it easier to carry out in pieces. I asked Jimmy if he was okay about moving into Cue's room and he said he was, which was great because I needed to sleep in my own bed again. The couch was messing up my back. Already I had a baseball-size knot where my neck met my shoulders. The tumor-headache was overwhelming that though.
Taking the last of Dad's bed outside and putting it with the other scrap wood, Jimmy opened his mouth.
"So what happens now?"
"We wait for everyone else to make their moves, and then we react," I said, dropping the last armful of wood onto the concrete edge of the back porch.
Jimmy just nodded, looking all kinds of serious. It was a relief that he didn't say that he wouldn't fight right then.
Needing that ice bad, I went back inside and closed the rolling patio door behind us. By the time I had a cold pack wrapped on my leg and one stuffed in the back of my waistband, I changed the subject. For some reason that look on his face made me think of the looks in the eyes of all those kids at school that made sure they were at least six feet away from him at all times. Some of them even ran when he was near.
"What's it like having people fuckin' terrified of you?"
"How do I feel about it? I don't."
Jimmy moved toward the hallway but stopped after he'd passed the couch.
"It used to worry me, in Hong Kong mostly. People would light incense and say prayers and stuff when I walked by so my 'evil spirit' wouldn't infect them or take their luck away. It was pretty crazy. I should've never gone back after that last World Championship. But what could I do? All my stuff was there." And he half laughed after he said it. That was the first time he'd laughed since Cue died. It made me feel a little better for having heard it, even if it was a kind of sad sound. Like giving up, or maybe surrendering to Fate. He disappeared into the bathroom and the door made a hollow bang against the frame behind him, not quite closing all the way.
I took the second shower of the night right after Jimmy, waded through his leftover steam to do it. I had homework to do but I didn't really feel like doing it anymore. What was the point? I just wanted to sleep in my bed. The headache was a fist just then. The tumor was a hard hand and closed fingers smashed into the disk-space between my neck and cranium. I couldn't deal with the pain anymore. I took one and a half pills of Vicodin and crashed in my own sheets, finally.