Free The Blonde of the Joke by Bennett Madison Page A

perfect scheme.
    Now she was gone, and I felt myself going.
    But a funny thing happened. At almost the exact moment that Francie vanished, my brother rematerialized—showed up on Christmas Eve, just like Liz said he would. A click at the door, and then he was stepping inside, like notime had passed. Like it was nothing at all. That was just Jesse.
    On Christmas Eve, when Jesse walked through the door, he didn’t have to say a word. He dropped his old keys on the front table, and then my mom was running from the kitchen like a cat who’s heard the crunch of a can opener. Jesse just stood there, with that old who me? look on his face, the furrow of mock apology he’d perfected as a teenager, and my mom threw her arms around him, sniffling, and he looked over and winked at me as if to tell me I was the only person in the world who was in on his conspiracy. Everything felt pretty normal for a second. We hadn’t seen him for close to two years.
    Jesse was handsome. He had always been handsome, and he would always be handsome. Even when he was at his sickest, it had manifested itself—in terms of his appearance—as a fashionable wasting. Cheekbones, cheekbones, cheekbones. Now, in a ratty, pilled cashmere sweater and a pair of tattered jeans, he looked like a teen idol who had hit hard times. It was an improvement over the last time I’d seen him, but still. His face was drawn, his hair was patchy, and his eyes had sunk deep into his face. His beard was scraggly and uneven.
    It was always hard to tell how serious things really were with him. He had been sick for four years, but I sometimes wondered if it had been longer than that. If he had been sick for forever. There was something that was so mysterious about the whole thing—it was more like a curse than an illness. Like he’d been born under a dark and reckless star.
    When my mom finally let him go, Jesse turned to me and gave me an awkward kiss with icy lips. He had to really hunch to reach my cheek, and his bag swung around and hit me in the side.
    “Hey,” I said.
    “Is this my same little sister?” he asked. I shrugged like I didn’t know what he was talking about, but I was happy that he had noticed the change.
    I didn’t talk to Jesse much that day. My mom wouldn’t let him out of her sight, and I couldn’t deal with listening to her grill him for information that we all knew he’d never give up. Jack knew that he wasn’t really welcome where Jesse was concerned, so he was keeping to himself, too, holed up in the basement in front of the television.
    I spent hours wrapping and rewrapping my Christmas presents, making sure the creases in the paper were all scored perfectly, that all patterns matched up exactly where the ends met. Everything tight and straight and absolutely flawless. Beautiful.
    When I was finally finished, I walked to 7-Eleven and bought a pack of Marlboro Lights, then headed down to the creek by myself, where I sat shivering and smoking until it was almost dark. I wondered where Francie was. I wondered where my brother had been for the last couple of years. New York, okay, but beyond that he had never really bothered to tell. It was no surprise. That’s how he had always been.
    Jesse had always been so much older than me. He was nine years old when I was born. I knew him first as a teenager, when he had seemed constantly engaged in some larger battle that I couldn’t know. He was always ready to attack: ears pricked, ropy muscles coiled and twitching.
    Practically the only thing I remembered about my brother living at home were his fights with my stepfather, over who-knows-what and probably nothing, both of them screaming and throwing things across the room at each other, my mother sitting on the kitchen floor looking hopeless, running her fingers anxiously through her hair, and then Jesse just walking out the door. He always showed back up on the threshold a few days later looking sheepish and none the worse for wear, backpack