MEMORIAL DAY, sophomore year. Don returned home a skeleton, a ragged voodoo doll, a ghost of my brother come back to reclaim his room. The eyeball on the door must have been watching me the whole time, relaying information to my brother on the other side of the country.
But Don didn't take back his room. He dropped his duffle bag in my old room across the hall. My mother took him outside and placed a chair on the deck. She threw a black cape around him, the same one she used when she ran her beauty parlor out of our basement, where she gave volume to our neighbors' limp hair. She studied Don's unruly black locks separating in the comb's teeth and snipped them with her silver scissors. Some of his hair dropped through the deck. The rest my mother pushed back and forth with a broom, until each strand fell between the boards.
A knock on my door. Don entered with his hair damp from a shower and said, "I hope you don't think differently of me." I felt strange listening to him say this, as if he were apologizing for something he did to me, when he looked like he'd hurt himself the most. Blood rushed loud in my ears as my brother looked up at me, as if he were the last person in the audience.
I never visited Don in California. I didn't know what his room there looked like. I tried to picture him getting off the plane, hailing a cab, riding through the streets of San Francisco, pulling up outside the college, walking through the doors with a duffle bag slung over his shoulders and—then what? Or I tried to imagine my parents packing up the Explorer and driving him to California. My father would have double parked in front of the college, leaned against the side of the Explorer with his black sunglasses on, a Winston clenched in his teeth, while my mother pestered Don about the curtains that were on sale at TJ Maxx, right around the corner. My father would carry Don's mattress up three flights of stairs, pinching Don on the back of the neck once they reached the landing. After he set it down, my father would tell Don to fetch him a ginger ale.
I just couldn't see it.
For months, years, my mother spoke in code—California was the place where my brother "messed around" or "screwed up" or "started with all that crap." Then she stopped talking about it. My father said the whole thing got blown out of proportion: Your brother took a two-year vacation and now he's paying for it. End of story.
A couple times a week, the three of them got in Mom's Taurus and drove somewhere. Maybe I had asked to go with them; maybe I didn't. Maybe my father spoke to me the way he did when my cousin Matt died, letting me know that it was okay if I stayed home.
I do remember going with them once, but my father wasn't there. My mother drove. Don sat in the passenger seat, and I was in the backseat. We drove through Kings Park and a few other towns I recognized, but then we turned down streets I'd never seen—long, treeless roads lined with parking lots and plain buildings, like an abandoned strip mall or a modern-day ghost town.
We parked in the back. My mother told me to wait in the car. I watched them walk up to a squat brick building, Don a few steps ahead of my mother. The building had dozens of windows, but only one door. From my position in the back seat, the building looked like a big red face full of eyes, the ears lopped off. My mother and brother slowly entered the mouth.
Don and I started spending long nights together, driving around, smoking weed in parking lots. It felt the same as before he left, except now we hung out more and talked for hours. He told me stories about all the different places he and his high school friends used to party. It seemed like each patch of woods we drove by contained a secret spot I couldn't see from the main road. I wanted to ask him questions about California, but I stayed quiet.
On those long rides, he always drove. Sometimes I'd stare out the window, replaying scenes from my own childhood: that's where I jammed a stick in Marlon's spokes. That's where I used to play soccer. My father and I fished in that pond.
We drove for hours in Mom's Taurus. Our usual route: past the high school, over the train tracks, near the other side of town. We bought Taco Bell along the way and, afterwards, smoked the cigarettes we stole from our parents.
We often ended up at the garbage dump. Perhaps it was just a quiet spot to park, but we could have stopped at any of the parking lots or side streets along the way. Why didn't the dump smell? I wondered. A mountain of trash lay buried before us, and I could not smell one rotten egg, one container of sour milk.
Don crunched nacho after nacho, the incinerator's vaporous flame flickering from the torch at the top of the dump. I slurped my soda. All that lay beneath smoldered. Invisible gas rose up through the torch and burned blue as water.