Hayley Garrison Phillips

The Absence

“Sit still,” his father’s voice commanded. Jimmy watched as his father’s creased hands disappeared into the chalky black medicine bag. With his right hand, his father held open the kiss-lock closure, tilting the bag towards the room’s solitary bulb so that his weak eyes might better distinguish its contents. His left hand darted in and out of the dim interior, carefully laying out a neat assemblage of surgeon’s tools.

As his father worked, Jimmy’s eyes scavenged the room searching for something to take his concentration away from the procedure at hand. They found the long, homemade shelves lining the laundry room’s wall, and scrutinized them with the slow, forced intensity of discomfort, following the shelves’ linear slope to the corner where a pair of fishing nets leaned, ready with their green nylon traps. They were old-fashioned, bulky instruments, which he and his younger brother Stevie, attempted to use down at the lake and the nearby creeks. For the most part, these escapades resulted in the abandonment of the tactless tools, and a search for salamanders instead. They would slide down the creek’s steep embankment and wade in its crystalline current, checking rocks for the amphibious sunbathers.

Beside the nets were stacked his father’s coveted car parts. Jimmy did not yet know the specific names and functions of these parts, but he knew from which car each had been slowly and mechanically excavated. He often assisted his father in the dissection of his vehicles. Even when the dedicated old man wasn’t working on them, Jimmy would sneak down to the barn to witness their slumber. Slipping under their tarp covers and into the musty leather interior, he could etch out a few hours of reclusiveness. His father owned four vehicles: three Porsches and a Camaro, along with a small private airplane, a yellow relic dubbed The Marigold, which he occasionally took the boys up in. Beside the barn stretched the plane’s own grassy runway, a stretch of flattened earth sloping down to the wood’s edge, from which the plane could take off and land. However much he enjoyed these aerial expeditions, Jimmy found himself invariably partial to the ground vehicles, particularly the white Porsche. He preferred its milky-tan, polished interior that would grow warm in the afternoon sun, acquiring an incredible, comforting smell of oil and must. Curled up in the backseat he would wait for dusk to fall, watching the coppery slats of sunlight fade through the barn’s rotted paneling. As the light wandered across the cars’ stoic frames he always wondered if there wasn’t something profoundly sacred in their odd, automotive emptiness.

There were other items accenting the shelves’ disorder; his mother’s cleaning products, camping and farming equipment, old art supplies and disregarded family heirlooms. These things were of lesser interest. He recognized one of his first school science projects, a three-dimensional model of the atom, sitting wedged near the top shelf. It was constructed of black pipe cleaners strung with red and blue beads to denote protons and electrons, but the pipe cleaners had been disfigured in the attempt to fit the project into the upper cubby. The atom was no longer a true representation. It no longer spoke of the molecule’s miraculous spherical symmetry.

His gaze traveled upwards to the unfinished ceiling and the sole bulb, dangling its chain eye-level before him; a lifeline he might grab hold of should things need, absolutely need, to stop. But the thought was superficial: he would never have had the boldness to switch off the light while his father was working. Al, however, might be capable of such brazenness. Jimmy imagined his older brother Al, midway through his father’s procedure, reaching out from the laundry machine, which served as the at-home doctor’s chair, and yanking the light switch off.

Al might, but not Jimmy.

Jimmy could sense that his father was almost ready. The hands had come out of the bag and were moving things around on a dingy, sea-foam colored washrag that had been flattened over the dryer. They found the pair of steel-rimmed glasses and brought them up to an expressionless gaze.

Jimmy’s focus shifted around the small linen closet, a thick constriction beginning to tighten in his chest, the deep-seated undulations of panic unconquerable, resonating down through the immense passage of time from an intrinsic, unrecognized human instinct. The important thing was not to let his thoughts surface enough to take cohesive form, and augment his fear. The important thing was to reject any kind of thoughts concerning what was about to happen. But it was a rough task: to avoid the envisionment of what was so proximate and inevitable, avoid bracing oneself in a false fortification against that certain touch of the steel.

The boy’s attention moved to his Sunday button-downs, still hanging off the clothesline in the corner, where his atrociously diligent sister, Nancy, had pinned them yesterday next to her own carefully tailored frock. Their mother (the original Nancy) had asked Jimmy to take them down earlier during breakfast, but throughout the course of the day he had forgotten. Jimmy looked over at his father to see if he had noticed the indiscretion, but the man was deep into his own thoughts, hovering stoical, nearly motionless over the medical instruments. In his left hand he held a miniature scalpel.

When he glanced down further, taking into view all of the tools, laid out naked across the towel in their terrible, neat sterility, Jimmy’s knee involuntarily kicked forward a little towards his father’s elbow. The old man paused, eying the adolescent as if about to speak, but he did not repeat his warning. He removed his moss-colored sports coat and began methodically rolling up his sleeves. In this gesture, Jimmy saw his father transform into a man of medicine. He could smell the cigarettes and the doctor’s office, and could see the artful surgeon at the core of each of his father’s movements. Jimmy began to bounce nervously, jostling his leg like he did when he was impatient or bored.

“—Maybe I should wait though, Pop. I mean, I could just ask Dr. Tansy if maybe he knows what it is—,” he blurted out, trailing off as he sensed his father’s attention turned onto him, folding him away with its flat impenetrability. Jimmy looked down, ashamed of his plea.

“Sit still” were the only words his father offered in response. Jimmy’s eyes began to flick nervously from his father’s hands, to the tools laid out on the laundry machine, to the inside of his left thigh, where the lone growth protruded. Its wrinkled, raised surface stood out against the plane of pale white flesh, a condemning presence within a sprawl of complacent beige freckles. “All right—now hold this,” his father instructed, balling up a worn washrag and handing it to Jimmy. He wet a cotton ball and began to systematically disinfect the area around the growth. The left leg of his boxer shorts was rolled up, leaving his skin exposed to the cool sting of the alcohol. The room began to fill with the sickly chemical aroma. He looked away as his father picked up a delicate instrument, which, Jimmy knew, was used to slice.

Although it was flatly forbidden to touch his father’s medical equipment, Jimmy and his brothers, under the most covert of circumstances, sometimes did anyway. Just to look at them. They liked to guess the respective uses for each of the individual tools. They knew how to use the stethoscope, and how to take one another’s blood pressure. They knew that their father’s occupation was serious, maybe even noble, and so, in their minds, the tools were approached with a particular reverence. Jimmy thought of the weighty scissors and the thin rubber tubing. He thought of the reflex-testing tool that looked tantalizingly like an Indian-warrior’s tomahawk, and of the odd hooked device that seemed more appropriate for a dentist’s office. The stark metal images made him shiver. Jimmy made an effort to stop thinking about the instruments.

Just at that very moment, as his mind waned blank, he felt the pain of the blade against his thigh. His leg jumped upwards into the sharp point of the scalpel as he lurched forward instinctively.

“STOP,” his father glanced up into his eyes, paralyzing him. He held the bleeding thigh firmly against the laundry machine. Jimmy craned his neck away as his father continued. He could feel the warmth of his blood flowing, and he could feel his heart, beating prominently in the quiet of the room. Deep in the veins of his thigh, too, he could feel it, an unusually strong, persistent pulse. He could hear his mother in the kitchen, talking on the telephone, and Nancy watching the television down the hall. He listened for his brother Stevie, but was not sure where he was, or what he was doing.

The pain seemed unbearable. It was only with intense willpower that he managed to contain himself through each second, onto the next. As each instant passed, a sensation flashed through his mind: it was absolutely impossible for him to physically endure another moment. Urgency overtook him. He couldn’t bear it—the immediate, irrefutable, overwhelming pain. His eyes glossed over; the surgical air tasted stale in his lungs and stung against his face. His leg felt like it was being prodded with a branding iron. But when he glanced down to face that fierce sizzle, the pain he was certain could only be that of his own, smoldering flesh, he encountered instead his father’s slow, unflinching arms and the strange white of his skin’s intimate layers.

“Jimmy,” his father addressed him, “JIM. Hand me the towel.” Jimmy looked down at the towel clenched in his hands and surrendered it to his father. The instruments were all removed, set in a pan of disinfectant to soak. The removal was over. He watched as his dad pressed the cloth to his leg. “See? Now that’s taken care of. Won’t have to worry about it any- more. Just hold that on there for a minute, while I do this,” he gestured to a needle and thread lying out on the table. “This will hurt some, but if you stay still it should only take a moment or so. Try not to move.”

Before Jimmy could protest, his father was back, hunched over the wound on his leg where the mysterious mole used to be. Jimmy had felt a strange affection for the small tumor bud- ding off his thigh. What could his body have been producing? Could it have been something important or useful? It seemed unfair; to reap it away before it came to its conglomerated fruition, before it announced its cause. His dad hadn’t liked it, and with his doctor’s credentials backing an already weighty patriarchal authority, his father’s verdict was absolute: the growth would be removed now, today. Jimmy would never know what it was. Using the needle with a skilled, utilitarian grace, his father had begun to suture up the gash. Jimmy wasn’t sure that there was still feeling in his leg. He watched, fascinated, as the tip of the needle punctured his flesh and then his skin went taunt and the sliver of silver reappeared on the other side. The flesh was as soft and malleable as fabric. The stitches drew the lips of the wound together until they met. His father tied off the final stitch in the row and applied an ointment meant to prevent infection and promote fast healing. The scarecrow thigh sloped fat and languid off of the edge of the machine, red, weeping.

“Thank you, sir,” Jimmy managed. His father acknowledged the boy without looking, offering a light pat on the knee. He dressed the site using a flat cotton bandage and a roll of gauze. After taping off the ends, he went immediately to the business of cleaning up the tools and supplies. Jimmy sat absorbing the aching in his leg.

“We’ll change the bandage tomorrow, don’t touch it,” his father turned to look at the boy, as though to ensure his son had fully digested these directions, and their blue irises locked momentarily. “All right, then,” he said, and he moved to the door, lighting a cigarette in the open doorframe. The light from the family room was blinding.

“Thank you, sir,” Jimmy repeated, but his father had already gone, shutting the door behind him. Jimmy sat alone relishing the absence of the sharper pain. The leg seemed to be pulsing with a certain life of its own. Perched on the laundry machine, a dirty towel propped under his left leg, he leaned back against the wall to listen for the other family members. His mother was still talking on the phone.

He used one hand to press around the bandage a bit. The dressed area was still oozing and sensitive, as it would probably be for days. He slid off of the laundry machine stiffly, careful to favor his right leg. Passing under the dim light, his temples and crown glistened with the faint halo of perspiration. His rigid, imposed frame limped over to the clothesline with a juvenile grace that would not yield to injury. The throbbing in his leg would linger for a while yet.

Jimmy reached the clothesline, where he pulled down a pair of hand-me-down khakis, a gift from Al. He put the pants on without too much trouble, careful to avoid contact with the bandaging. Then, he proceeded to unclip each of the dry oxfords. The cotton was starchy and stiff against his fingertips. Tugging down the last white button-down, he pivoted towards the center of the room, switched off the light, and walked out.

That evening, Jimmy was pulled away from his reading by hesitant knock at his door. He looked up from his book, slipping a blue jay’s feather in-between the pages to mark his spot. Its fibers were a sweet, Prussian blue, dappled with stripes of black, and near the feathers’ rounded end the black globbed up into a fat, charcoal mark reminiscent of an inkblot. Jimmy often pulled it out and ran his fingers down along the sides as he read, listening to the neat, stiff strands part only to instantly realign themselves, the blue glimmering with a faint iridescence. Momentarily he wondered at human beings having been created completely devoid of such kind of vibrant, primary coloring. But then he remembered the human eye—his own eyes, in fact—and their odd, glacier-like hue.

“Jimmy,” his sister called, cautiously turning the door- knob and cracking the door. “Jimmy?” This time her voice was quieter. Finding him unoccupied, Nancy shimmied into the room, shutting the door behind her. Her soft, amber locks were curled in a modest bob about her face, secured with a baby-blue barrette. Jimmy watched her as she entered the room, taking in its boyish plainness with an eye that reflected the distasteful quality of its observances.

“Are you ever going to change anything in here? This room is so drab Jimmy,” she commented, making her way across his room to sink down beside him on the low twin bed. She smoothed her hand across the comforter and began to pick at a knot of frayed stitching. “What are you reading now? Could it be another alien thriller?” she surmised mockingly, picking up the book. “The wonders of the unknown!” she proclaimed in a theatrical voice, laughing. Jimmy looked away with a blush that transformed into a sulky scowl. “Ooooh, Ringworld!” Nancy read aloud with a faintly sarcastic wonder. On the cover was a fantastical, stylized landscape of a green and untouched paradise, its atmosphere so pure that a flock of birds seemed to be transcending directly into space. She examined with a mild interest the detailed lines of the cover artwork then flicked the tip of the feather serving as a book- mark. Catching her brother’s expression, her face straightened up; she hadn’t meant to poke fun at his interests. She had forgotten her younger sibling’s soft skin, his unusual sensitivity. “Maybe I’ll sit down with this sometime, you know, I’ve seen you reading it before,” she casually amended. “If it’s any good,” she added after a pause. Nancy placed the worn novel back down on the bedspread in front of Jimmy, shooting it a last, lingering glance of feigned interest.

But Jimmy was no longer listening. His thoughts were still spellbound, operating under the residual delirium that accompanies a particularly good work of fiction. The poetic introspection that the book had triggered was settling, a frail, mystic gossamer over everything he perceived. Nancy dissipated until she held no presence beside him, her body an entity from which he could separate himself from, view objectively. He began, in the way he thought, to step away from her, build- ing a space of distance and detachment. His thoughts moved outdoors to where the temperature was settling in accordance with the farm’s familiar procession into night. To the fields of dusk-scented grass. Out to the hexapedal choir budding from the garden and the trees and the old buildings. The room’s sole window was open and the pastoral echoes chronicling the comings-and-goings of the farm could be heard off in the distance. Jimmy could sense that both he and his sibling were listening to the pale croak of the geese, roosting down by the lake, halfway through their lengthy journey South.

Their house, a 19th century colonial revival, crowned the top of a broad hill, and was surrounded on two sides by fenced-in pasture. To the right, perhaps three hundred meters down the sparse, grassy slope, the ground plateaued into a narrow field, which had been further leveled, its dimensions now just barely meeting the needs of their father’s 1930s biplane for takeoff. Beyond the landing strip, the slope continued until it lost momentum, slinking gradually up to the edge of their barn, a squat grey structure, boxed-in by forest. To the other side of the farmhouse the pasture stretched much farther, the cleared meadow rolling across twenty acres composing of a sequence of smaller summits, until it drained into the midsize lake from which the geese were sending out their evening lullaby. Jimmy’s first floor bedroom was adjacent to part of the field above the airstrip. At night he could sense the animals retiring, the horses migrating wordlessly towards the safety of the barn, and at times he would find his breath had fallen into time with the slow, gaited sound of their hooves meeting the earth.

There was a pause in which the two of them stilled, witnessing those familiar—and somehow wholesome—sounds permeate the evening, and then Nancy made a move to stand, conscious of the time.

“Well, dinner is all ready downstairs.” She turned to face Jimmy hesitantly, with the neutral, stunted movement of a sunflower. “Thing is, I just don’t really know where Al or Stevie are. I haven’t seen either of them all afternoon. Ma is all worked up, and I’m supposed to track them down for supper.” She paused, eventually adding: “You don’t by chance know where they went, do you?”

At this, Jimmy propped himself up onto his elbows on the plaid bedspread, his feet flopping careless across the pillow and his face lifted towards the door where Nancy stood. Her sandy brow was gently folded in a learned expression of concern, her lips buttoned flatly in a harsh line across the youthful fullness of her face. As she shifted, awaiting Jimmy’s response, he detected a trace of hesitancy embedded in each of her actions, as though grappling with some deeper source of uncertainty. Her hands dug into the pockets of her gray jumper and then reemerged followed by a sigh, before crossing impatiently over her chest. When they were younger, she too had sometimes come down to the creek to chase salamanders and play in the woods until sunset. However, her composed frame now countered, in Jimmy’s mind, those long, juvenile days.

He shrugged. “No, but let’s just go then, I guess.”

Jimmy shuffled off the bed and followed Nancy out the door and down the hallway to the dining room. Its paneled doors were slid open, exposing the elegant room, with its dark, mustard-colored walls and fine artwork, to the rest of the house. In the center, the dining room table was set for six. Nancy’s class notes were spread out over the setting beside their mother’s usual place, and Jimmy slid onto the cushioned chair in between her and their father. They sat side-by-side, careful not to disturb the place settings any more than their tasks required. Their father was already seated comfortably reading the newspaper at the head of the table. He continued smoking his cigarette even as Jimmy’s mother began bringing out the food from the kitchen. As Jimmy’s mother paced to and fro, repositioning silverware and the various dishes, she eyed the lit cigarette with disapproval.

“Alfred—,” she let her voice waver, and then succumb to the tense atmosphere, the rest of her words failing her. Their mother was a pretty woman. A polite, girlish woman whose soft demeanor lent a feminine grace to the household of boys. The children lifted their faces towards her concern, receptive to their mother’s presence, her familiar yellow dress, and the golden, well-kept locks. Nancy had paused writing to observe her parents’ interaction, but Jimmy had immediately returned to his book, his eyes slanting greedily ahead through each line, before his mind had time either to picture or process it. He was used to his father’s silences, his mother’s meek words.

The phone rang and their mother rose, quick to make it over to the rotary in the kitchen. Jimmy watched the thin arm reach up for the phone and bring it up to her ear nervously.

“Hello? Garrison residence,” she answered. Jimmy watched as his mother’s free hand moved from the telephone chord to her forehead and back. Her nails were painted a deli- cate peach color that nearly matched the color of the device it- self. There was a pause, a long, thick silence and then Jimmy’s mother turned away from the dining room and moved beyond his line of sight. “Oh, yes, of course—,” she conciliated. “Yes that’s fine, fine,” the clear melody of relief radiating within her voice. She managed a light, brief laugh. “Oh we were just worried when he wasn’t here by dinner but—,” “No, of course you couldn’t have known, but thank you so much for calling LeAnn,” “Un-huh,” Gregory is welcome here any time.” “Wonderful, wonderful.” “I’ll see you then.” She set the phone into the receiver mounted on the side of the kitchen cabinet and re-entered the dining room. Placing one arm across her husband’s neck, she smiled contently. It seemed Stevie, her youngest, would be spending the night at the Popefield’s.

With that knowledge coddled fast in her matronly thoughts there was a softening in her expressions and movements and a feeling of receptiveness welled within her towards the pleasant family meal laid out before them. The evening had suddenly settled into a more comfortable place of relaxed routine.

“Stevie is at Gregory’s, of course,” she nodded apologetically to the table, repeating the words softly. “I’m so sorry I let myself get worked into such a fuss sweethearts,” she said to the two kids, hovering—still hovering, always hovering—without sitting.

Nancy crossed her arms and her father began to fold up the newspaper.

“Shall we?” he murmured, addressing the napkin which cocooned his set of silverware. He slid off the antique napkin ring, spreading the cloth across his lap without a hint of flourish. Jimmy shut his book energetically; the stiff pages made a light ‘thwap!’ as they met. He looked around the table.

“Where’s Stevie?” he asked.

“At Gregory’s—Ma just told you,” Nancy said. “Where’s Al?”

“We aren’t going to wait for Al.” Jimmy’s father spoke.

The syllables deadpanned across the dining room table. He extended his hands out to either side, despite the fact that there was no one to his left, and Jimmy reached out obediently. Nancy slid her homework down to the floor, and took Jimmy’s other hand in her own. Their mother hovered another moment and then sat. She re-inspected the meal laid out across the table in one final assessment to ensure that everything was just so, before finally bowing her head to recite The Lord’s Prayer. Her hands folded into her child’s with a domestic piety.

“Our Father, which art in Heaven, hallowed be thy name,” she began with a quiet reverence. “Thy kingdom come; thy will be done, in Earth as it is in Hea—,” she paused, and the children looked up from their bows of false observance. Then, shaking her head, she continued: “in Earth as it is in Heaven; give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our...” she trailed off. In the silence, they became aware of the snazzy clip-clap of Al’s shoes down the front walkway. They stayed quiet, listening to his approach. A moment passed in which, standing before the screen door, Al must have paused to gather his wits. Then, suddenly the front door swung open in a bustle of tapping, heavy breathing and the rearrangement of packages.

“I’m HOME!” Al announced, dragging out the last syllable of the word ‘Home’ so that it rang throughout the household. Jimmy looked to his father for a reaction, but the old man had barely seemed to register the turn in events.

He turned to Nancy, whose small, manicured fingers were squeezing his hand with urgency. When their eyes finally met, she imparted, in a single glance, the nervous panic of a small animal frozen in fear. They listened as Al wrestled through the door and threw something, presumably his bag, down onto the couch. “I’m home!” he repeated, still oblivious to the dinner in progress. They listened as he strode through the kitchen, his shoes making a soft, melodic tapping across the tile floor.

Finally he made his way into the dining room, fresh-faced and vibrant in a narrow pair of drainpipe jeans, a casual tee, and wearing a purple scarf loosely strung around his neck in a style-conscious nod to bohemia. And, of course, Jimmy marveled, the shoes: Al’s infamous Chelsea boots. Jimmy stared down at them as he approached, admiring the rich brown leather, the pointed toes and Cuban heels. With one arm Al was balancing a small, cardboard box across his hip, and his lean figure seemed effortless, endowed with spark of liveliness somehow inaccessible to the rest of the household.

“Ah, shit,” he mustered upon reaching the doorway, instantly aware that his entry had occurred at an inopportune moment. Jimmy took in his brother’s hapless grin and tried to emulate it in return, but his brother had already begun addressing the doctor. “Sorry Pop,” Al began, “I was—”

“Your mother is in the middle of saying The Lord’s Prayer, Alfred,” their father announced, interrupting him casually.

Al stood there, unsure of what to do. Jimmy felt the moment telescoping into a series of distinct, small, nevertheless intense components. He was aware of his own breathing, his sister’s palpable anxiety beside him, and then, too, the various dishes cooling on the Staffordshire before him, passed down through the family since the 1800s. The dinnerware was print- ed with a mishmash of ruby, gold and brown floral patterns, that looked exotic, Persian. Relatives of his from generations past must have sat around similar tables years ago and eaten off those exact plates using that same set of silverware. The idea seemed somehow pertinent. Perhaps someone somewhere along the line, a great great great someone, had made a similar study of the decorative sepia print along the rim of this particular plate, avoiding whatever subject matter had been unfolding before them.

Jimmy’s hand still rested awkwardly in his father’s grip, the same hand which, only hours ago, had forcibly removed some small inconsequential entity from his own body. It was not a weak hand, and it was a hand that only operated gently when occupied by work or prayer. Jimmy wanted to take it back, to reclaim the hand, escaping the strange, light clasp of his father’s fingers, but he knew that no measure of self-will could remove them from their altar.

Al made his move. He walked up to the table, passing behind Jimmy and Nancy, and kissed his mother on the cheek. “Sorry, Ma,” he whispered, and despite her removed expression, Jimmy caught the small twitch at the corner of her mouth; the slight flush across her cheek. For some, Al was already forgiven.

“I brought cake,” he gestured with the box, carefully tossing it onto the table in his father’s general direction. He took off his jacket and scarf and sat down, falling into a position of contemplative reverence, reaching his hands out to fill in the circle between his father and mother. From across the table, Jimmy could faintly smell his brother’s trademark odor; a meld of sweaty cologne and marijuana cigarettes, stronger now that he had removed his outer layers. Al arched his brows expectantly. “Shall we continue?” He smiled a dopey, confident smile.

But their father did not take his hand. Instead, he exhaled and turned towards the boy, looking him up and down with undisguised dissatisfaction. He did this using only his eyes, changing neither his expression nor the position of his head. There was no spoken criticism, only the clean line of his mouth puckered into a gentle frown. “Albert,” he finally spoke, quietly, giving the lanky youth a final glance before finishing his sentence, “You will remove this box from our dinner table. You may be excused early tonight. I will come find you after dinner so that we can speak privately.” He finished his sentence and then looked about the table. Jimmy did not meet his gaze, but he felt the cold eyes move over him. He looked to his mother, whose focus had moved from Al and was now honed in upon the chicken roast, cooling on the platter before her. What was she thinking of now? Had she, too, become engrossed in sepia print? Was she thinking of those before her, and their family dinners? Jim- my’s father leaned back with a sigh, using his tongue to clean his molars, as if the words themselves were distasteful. Then, he released Jimmy’s hand.

“That’s all.” He directed casually towards Al. But Al was staring him down, eyes wide, unaccepting. “Aw, come on Pop,” he prodded, “...Are you serious?

You’re really not going to let me eat dinner at the table?” His words were met with a grudged silence. “Look, I didn’t mean to interrupt or anything. You know? I didn’t mean anything by it.” By now, Al’s face had acquired a look of true earnestness, the intelligent eyes alive and exerting themselves.

Years later, Jimmy would remember his silence in this moment, and be ashamed. For some reason, the guilt would lodge itself clear and poignant in his thoughts. He would look back, and think of his mother’s subservience, and the shared powerlessness between them, and of his sister Nancy, watch- ing, making her own study. He had wanted to make things cleaner, more clear, more fair, but he wasn’t sure how to fix the things that were already in place, things that had begun before he was born, even. And more than that, he was scared.

But even in his fearful silence he still knew the meaning of family, and he knew cutting his brother out was not anything stipulated by its bond. His brother was a part of him, much more so than any knob of flesh, and any physical removal of him would be an incomplete operation, because there were other, much more permanent ways in which his brother was attached.

After a moment, Al faded. His smiled grew sludgy and warped. His jaw locked, and the eyes grew distant with a hard, seething insolence. The look he shot his father was one of thorough spite.

“Christ you’re a bastard,” he said under his breath as he got up, purposefully knocking the table with his knees, “a goddamn fucking bastard.” The words came out raw, honestly meant. Each syllable spiked with a pointed articulation that pinched something deep in Jimmy’s gut. He watched Al stand, watched him watch their dad. It was clear he was hoping the words would somehow resonate within the doctor, perhaps wound something. Al had wanted the words to somehow come out different, much harsher and more hurtful than they were in any normal context, but they echoed back to him, dead, failed catalysts festering in the air, creating a stagnant maliciousness. They sounded vulgar, trite even. Al resigned.

“They don’t hate you yet,” he said, low and certain as he was leaving, “but whether I’m around or not... They will.”

The next morning the sharp orange glow of sunrIse made slow conquest of Jimmy’s bedroom until it was a flood of early-hour neon. Along his bookshelf the bindings of the protruding paperbacks were illuminated with fine vertical threads of yellow, and the thicker hardbacks titles were haloed in inscriptions of gold and shadow. The sheets on the bed had been writhed around and rolled to the side, so that the comforter was Jimmy’s only insulation, a contrived shell of a cocoon over his body in its fetal slumber. The tenseness of dinner from the night before was still exerting an odd unnerving feeling, deep against his breastbone—a tightening dull ache in his chest.

He had kicked off his pajama pants in the night, and as he stood, mashing his palms against the malleable folds of his face, he caught a glimpse of them heaped limp beside the bedpost. Picking them up, he put them on and headed towards the door, then paused, surveying the room. He admired a vine of purple flowers wreathed around his window, the sleepy blossoms creasing open to expose sorrowful morning farewells, and then left, shutting the door carefully behind him.

Walking slowly down the creaky hallways of the old farmhouse, Jimmy cautiously preserved the stillness of the morning. When he reached Al’s room the door was ajar. He pushed forward into his older brother’s room, momentarily struck with a juvenile sense of mischief for entering the forbidden chamber. Again he met a flood of morning light.

As his eyes adjusted, the walls and furniture came to him with a bright, stylized dimension and he sensed that the room had been abandoned. The uncharacteristic orderliness of the remains, the lack of clutter, immediately hit him with a pang of poignancy. He was stepping into the fossilized remains of his brother’s life, something that had taken place long ago, and already everything was overlaid and radiating with nostalgia. The bed was made, the pinstriped sheets stretched taut and tucked in around the mattress, the blue comforter folded into a neat ribbon over the foot of his bed. Where Al’s beloved music posters had discreetly rebelled against the quiet domesticity of the house, there was nothing left but a vulgar constellation of thumbtacks, which left stubby shadows against the grain of the wallpaper.

Jimmy moved to the bed and sat down in a slow, dumb- founded process of mourning. He opened the bedside table and sifted around through the clutter left behind. The drawer was inlaid with a yellow and orange paisley paper that wasn’t cut quite right in the corners. There was a nice black ballpoint pen, some pennies, a pocketknife, rolling papers, a lighter, an empty glasses case, and some loose flakes of tobacco accumulating into little drifts in the corners of the drawer. Jimmy got down on his knees to examine the stack of books below, the watery magnification of his eyes building until the titles kaleidoscoped and ran and bled through each other.

He ran his fingers down the tattered spines of Steinbeck, Kerouac, and Whitman, and paused to read the names of the titles which he did not know. He moved them together until they were all neatly aligned and then stood and walked over to the desk.

The crate of vinyl records was gone, and only one record had been spared, left stranded on the record player, a series of neon circles framed in the glare. Jimmy opened and closed each of the heavy desk drawers, sometimes pausing to stare down a particular article, but no longer touching anything. He found a half-emptied bottle of Jack Daniels in one of the drawers but decided to leave it. He no longer felt the urge to touch anything, in case it somehow disturbed his brother’s remains. There was nothing engraved on the desk. There was no note. Al’s schoolbooks were stacked on the corner of his desk next to a neat pile of lined notebooks weighed down by a rose colored ash tray. The floor was clean. There were no clothes left littered around or draped inside-out emerging from the dresser drawers to dapple up the stark cream carpet. There was a large Persian rug laid out straight, flat and parallel to the bed, its tassels on each end brushed out in a tidy symmetry. Everything neat and in its place.

Jimmy stepped backwards away from the desk, looking again from wall to bed, from bedside table to window, and then back to the desk. He greedily and faithfully took in each of those final details and catalogued them in his thoughts as he let the new, more permanent quiet of the house sink in. Already, he felt his brother’s absence fermenting within his bones, aching. Even worse, he was suddenly aware of the years before him, which would now be longer, less full. Outside he could see the old draft horse, Oakey, making his way slow up the path, his dull chestnut mane and coat angelically endowed, luminously aflame amid a glow of pollen and sun-dust. He paused momentarily and took in the uphill slope that awaited his arthritic joints and brittle, flaking hooves. Each step he made with each gentle, saucered hoof made a muffled plod against the monotonous, consistent earth. His forelock whisked needlessly in soft, dandelion layers, as the wind followed him forward and his body brought him over the crest of the hill.

He was old.

Jimmy stood up to leave. It was not until he had almost reached the door that he noticed them. A slight glint of warm leather through the darkness of the closet. He backtracked a few steps until the top shelf of Al’s closet slipped into his peripheral vision and he paused to analyze the shape. Then, he slid open the left and right paneled doors of the shallow closet and stepped back again so he could get a clearer view as the light tumbled in. Tucked in the far corner of the closet on top of a large cardboard box were Al’s brown, Cuban-heeled boots.

Jimmy acted quickly. Grabbing the desk chair, he dragged it along on its two back legs across the room, accidentally turn- ing up the corner of the rug. He flipped the chair around and pushed it up as close to the folded doors and the corner of the closet as he could, and, keeping one hand firm along its back, he stepped up. The chair was a wooden dinner table chair, not actually a desk chair, and had an uneven and gently hollowed surface. Jimmy found his balance and made a slow, quivering reach for the shoes. His fingertips brushed the cool metal of the heel. The hands met the leather and hooked over the opening of the boots and he brought them down and cradled them in towards his chest, standing on the chair in the early morning, barefoot and still in his pajama pants.

Jimmy stifled everything until he had reached the safety of his chamber, where he closed the door and sprung over to the bed. He softly unfolded the shoes into his lap. Picking up the right shoe he ran his pointer finger around its silhouette, and then straight down its center to the toe. The leather was worn in and supple from wear, but the boots themselves were still clean and had retained their deep mahogany hue. Jimmy admired them for a moment, in awe, rubbing the left boot gently along the heel and toe, taking in the feel of the broken leather. He used his finger to trace each of the deeply made creases trenched around the ankle. He smelled them and they had that com- forting blended scent of polish and earthiness and leather, like when he lay down in the backseat of the Porsche. Flipping the shoe over, Jimmy tapped against the metal square responsible for the shoes’ jazzy signature sound. He thought of Al’s slow approach up the front walkway, and the familiarity of his brother’s approach.

They were spectacular.

Reaching inside, he felt along the leather sole of each shoe, in the left finding something mashed up and quartered in the toe. He stiffened and with a panicked care pinched a corner of the papery material between his two longest fingers, and drew it out from the toe. His hand was shaking with a sad, misplaced sort of anticipation, as though whatever was written might undo the thousand things already set into motion. But as his hand emerged from the boot Jimmy discovered that it was only a faded post card, folded into four quadrants, each left mercilessly bare. The only writing on the entire card was a stylized font printed across the front: Greetings From Santa Monica! it announced in one cursive sweep. The words were punchy and playful, arched over a beach scene in which sever- al attractive, busty girls lay lounging, sunbathing and smoking somewhere on the other end of the continent, apparently gloriously content under the California sun. There was a blonde in a red two-piece with lots of ruffles and a dark-haired girl in hip blue sunglasses. There was a girl kneeling in the sand kissing the forehead of a small black and white dog, and then another blonde standing to the very right of the picture and posed like a sailor, her hand shading her eyes as she looked out across the eternal Pacific.