This sounds absurd in hindsight, but my mother still had hope, was always willing to try. She made it so all he had to do was walk into the right office and remain calm and he'd have a low-wage, low-interaction job. They also offered low-rent housing for park employees.
My father thought someone might just pull him off the street to workâlabor, construction, lawn care. He might straighten out once he saw that he had to. He might check himself into a hospital. One thing was for sure, though, he could not live at home. He could live on the street. He could go to jail. He could even die. But my father was not letting that drug-addicted loser back into this house he was still trying to pay for.
My life improved. I could not have missed my brother less. I'd wake up every morning happy that he was gone. My family would eat breakfast together, which we hadnât done in years, and it was as if he had been erased. I canât even explain what it was like to be free of him. It was like finding out you didnât have cancer anymore, I imagine, or that your newborn baby was healthy after all, that it was just a smear on the X-ray of its chest. A wave of such overwhelming relief fell about our house that I remember at one point simply breaking down in tears, actual tears of happiness, when I picked up a butcher knife and it didnât seem like anything but something you used to cut chicken or celery.
In fact, his absence from our lives was such a relief that it was only then that I realized the true extent of the turmoil he, or his disease, had caused. My family took a vacation to Nags Head, North Carolina, and we laughed and went out and ate seafood and no one stared at usâa real family vacation. During the day, I surfed while Ron made sand castles and my parents lay on the beach holding hands, like newlyweds.
This kind of happiness was bizarre, alien. We were so starved for it that all we wanted was life without small tragedies, without violence and anger and uncomfortable silence. Heaven, for us, was not expecting a call at four in the morning. Heaven was not having to sleep with your bedroom door locked.
Six months passed, six eventless months. Ah, the beauty of inertia, the grace of absolute, mind-numbing suburban ennui.
I stopped thinking of Michael because I blissfully had no knowledge of the future, no inkling of the shape of this story.
My parents had their friends over to the house without the possibility of something surreal happeningâa fire, or a sermon on the Sodomites. They had parties. I had girlfriends over. My younger brother had friends sleep over and watch movies and play video games. So this was life, we thought. Not bad.
Michael did, however, call home several times from Florida, crying, but my parents kept me in the dark about his whereabouts and well-being. I didnât care; I didnât ask. I'd ask my mother who had called and she'd hesitate and say, No one, your aunt, no one.
My mother worried privately, and sent Michael cash overnight several times. My father took a sterner stanceâMichael was an adult who had proven himself to be worthless, criminal; they had given him money and a chance and that was enough.
It didnât last. Six months after he left, almost to the day, Michael showed up at the doorâjust like that, no warning, nothing. A knock at the door and there he was.
He stood in the doorway, suffused in sunlight, near death. He had lost forty pounds, had almost starved. He stared, wide-eyed, eyes sunk deep in their sockets, and at first I donât think he recognized anyone but my mother. He didnât know what day or month it was, didnât know his middle name, couldnât remember what state he had just been in, when or where he was born.
He said, I think I'm very old and hungry. I went to school. I was born in a manger. I am very old and hungry.
Pale, sick, mouth agape, bewildered to the point almost of catatonia, sitting on the couch as