Photo by Waldemar Brandt on Unsplash
My brother James didn’t seem normal to me, even by his standards. Standing in my kitchen at dawn, smelling like morning in a college bar, his potbelly peeping through his button-down, his five-day-old beard crusty with yogurt, he didn’t seem right.
Sure, his wife had kicked him out months before, taking their two elementary-aged kids to live with her boyfriend on the other side of town. Yes, he’d gone on bender after bender until no one was sure he worked anymore. But, this man standing before me wasn’t even that James. His eyes looked wild; his mind raced behind them; he chewed his lips between words; I wondered if he’d moved on to speed.
Craig and I’d been asleep when he entered. The sound of the back door flying open jarred us awake. “Belle!” Craig said, smacking me. We tiptoed together down the center stairs, hidden only by the angles of our mid-century modern, I crouched behind Craig who clutched a number-three golf club. “Stay behind me,” he whispered. Dishes rattled in the kitchen. The coffee maker beeped. The refrigerator opened and slammed. A stair creaked when Craig stepped on it. We pressed ourselves against the wall.
A laugh echoed through the hall, and, then, “Dude, relax! I can smell your fear from here.”
Like I said, not normal.
“You scared us to death,” I said as we moved into the kitchen, where we found James standing behind the island.
“Could’ve called first,” Craig said. He leaned the golf club against a kitchen stool and rested his palms flat against the marble counter. His sleep-torn eyes focused on James. “I mean, I get it.” Craig blinked and glanced at me. “But, dude, Benji’s not even up.”
“How is Benji?” James said, rubbing his belly as he stretched, his back cracking in three places. He didn’t wait for Craig’s answer. He leaned in, examined Craig’s eyes, and said, “You look like shit, man.”
“That’s rich, coming from you.”
“Like shit, Craig. Up late partying?”
Craig’s lip curled. “Working. Until midnight.”
James reached behind Craig, yanked open the fridge again, pulled out the milk carton, and took a long swig right from it, the milk forming a line in his beard.
“Ahh,” he said, standing chest-to-chest with Craig. And then he sniffed Craig. Sniffed him, like a dog might.
“Dude.”
“Hmm,” James said, raising one bushy brow.
Once, years ago, when my son Benji and I lived in pajama onesies, Craig came home late from a work dinner smelling not like whiskey and cigars—his usual steak-house adornment—but like buttery chardonnay and musky fruit. The smell lingered after he bent in to kiss me on the forehead, little Benji staring up at him from my breast, the two of us new best friends in our three-thousand-square-foot world.
“Rough night?” I had asked, hoping Craig would say no, that he’d had a dynamic meeting run mostly by women wearing pencil skirts and sharp haircuts; that they’d talked books instead of golf, Pilates instead of straight-razor shaves, the stakes instead of steak. Instead, Craig nodded, as though the night had gone like every other business dinner, full of Old Boys with Deep Pockets. Like I hadn’t smelled chardonnay and sexy flowers on him at all.
I wondered what James smelled on Craig now.
“Yeah, well, not everyone gets to stay out drinking all night, James,” Craig said, smiling at my brother. Craig reached past him for our half-read morning paper and nodded to us as he left the room.
“Listen, Izzy,” James whispered when the two of us stood alone. I hated the variations of name: Izzy, Belle, Isabel. Like I could never just be one person.
“What now?”
“I’ve got to tell you something. You can’t tell anyone.”
Admittedly, my ears perked. James was a master at spinning tales, inventing legend, drumming up inane details and sharing them with such fervor they sounded grand, gleaming, believable.
“I have special powers.”
“Again?” I said.
When James was little, he pretended he was a different superhero every month or two, at first Superman, Spiderman, Batman. When he turned eight, the heroes grew more obscure, with less defined superpower: Green Lantern, Stingray, Torpedo. And, then, one day, he was normalman, an average guy with average looks, baseball skills and grades, riding an average bike, drinking generic orange drink out of a strawed cup. I thought normalman was James’ way of growing up, of accepting his own skin. But, as it turned out, normalman is a comic-book character, too—a reversal of sorts, the only normal guy among a planet of superheroes. It was James’ least believable role.
“I had this crazy dream last night. About an old dude with a long, white beard, like a wizard, and he asked me a riddle. I solved it! And then I woke, and the room seemed different.”
“Different.”
“Like I’d never been there before.”
“It’s a hotel room, James.”
“I mean, different-different. Everything seemed sharper, more in focus. For ALL my senses. The room service guy dropped off pancakes and I knew he’d just slept with the maid in the utility closet. I could smell it on him.”
“This is manic.”
“So, I said to the guy, ‘Hey, man, I don’t think I need to tip ya’, ‘cause I know the maid is doing that, amiright?’ and the guy laughed hysterically, stopped, and backed out of the room, looking behind him for a camera or some shit.”
“I’d be weirded out, too.”
“What I mean is that I know things now.”
“You know things.”
“I’m a genius.”
“A genius.”
“I’ll prove it.”
“Okay, what’s the square root of 647?”
I imagined James pulling out his phone, or a piece of paper, stumbling for a few minutes before making a number up and then distracting me. I’d meant the question as a joke test, one he’d definitely fail. But he didn’t flinch. He answered before I could laugh.
“Like 25 or some horseshit.”
I pulled my cell from my robe pocket and typed “square root of 647.” 25.43. I looked up at James, into his eyes, like I might be able to see the machinations behind them. I’d never known James to be good with numbers.
“James?”
“That one’s stupid. Anyone can do it.”
“No, they can’t.” I was getting a headache.
“Listen, Izzy. It’s not about that baby stuff. I’m a GENIUS now. I know things other people don’t.”
“Have you seen the kids lately, James?” I asked. Not because I wanted to know about the kids. They were doing normal kid things, like going to piano lessons and auditioning for the lead in the school play. But because I couldn’t help but wonder if, in their absence, James had become a tangle of wires left in a junk drawer.
“No, but now I know how to get them back.”
Above my head, upstairs, heavy footsteps and crying echoed through the halls. I realized the sun had risen, its autumn rays piercing the kitchen window. Craig emerged carrying Benji, whose legs now almost reached Craig’s knees, his truck pajamas soaked to the ankles. Craig thrust my son into my arms. I could feel urine clinging to my robe, spreading up my chest.
“Hi, buddy,” I said. “Have a little accident?” Benji nodded, dropped his head into my shoulder, and sobbed.
“Third time this week, huh, Benji?” Craig said, peeling off his wet shirt and tossing it at the basement door. The shirt sat there pitifully, wet against the rug under it, waiting for me to take it to the laundry. Craig slipped on a green, silk men’s robe, the kind Hugh Heffner would’ve worn, and I couldn’t help but cringe at the chest hair peeping from it.
James leaned over, peered into Benji’s ear and sniffed, one short inhale, like a quick yoga breath, like someone clearing his nostrils of a bothersome hair. He pulled my son’s lobe back and felt it between his fingers.
“He’s got an ear infection. That’s why he’s peeing.”
“What’s that got to do with bed wetting?” I said.
“When did you go to medical school?” Craig said.
I felt Benji’s forehead: warm. I pressed under Benji’s ear. “Ouey,” he said. I shot James a look, and James smirked.
“Can you do me a favor?” I said to Craig, cringing at my choice of words. A favor. As though Benji wasn’t also Craig’s responsibility.
“I suppose.”
“Can you call the doctor, leave a message on the nurse’s line to get Benji in today?”
“Dr.—? The number?” Craig said.
James bristled. “Seriously, fucknut? You don’t know your son’s doctor’s name?”
“Yup, and you once lost your only pair of unsoiled pants, so I don’t want to hear it,” Craig said.
“Okay, not helping, guys.”
Craig huffed and stomped off, his bare feet thumping against the cold, kitchen stone. I stood Benji on the floor and glanced at James. “Could you—?”
“I got this,” he said, extending his arms for his nephew. “Come on, buddy. Let’s find some dry clothes.”
I followed Craig down the hall into the study, watching as his robe drifted up behind him like strange, beastly wings. I shut the door behind us. Craig stood behind the clean table-desk and turned to face me, his cheeks burning hot. “What the hell?”
“Craig—”
“Do you believe that shit about the ear infection?” Craig fell in the swivel desk chair, which turned by the force of it.
“Well, Benji was warm.”
“Benji just woke from a twelve-hour sleep. And he’s four. He’s a firebox!”
I slumped into one of the brown cracked-leather chairs facing Craig and slid my hands down their armrests. I thought I could fall asleep there, leaning back, the din of the now-awake house like a lullaby. My eyes floated over Craig’s head and landed on the built-ins Craig had installed to hold nothing. Once, I’d tried to line my piles of books on them and Craig told me they were distracting. I thought, with all I did trying to make the three men in my life happy, what a luxury it would be to find books on a shelf distracting.
“You have to do something about him,” Craig said. “He’s out of control.”
“He’s my brother.”
“He needs help.”
Once, when James was in eighth grade and I was in seventh, I went to the library’s comic section to look up normalman. I’d seen James’s stack of comic books, each with a decimal number on its cover, and knew he’d found them somewhere in those stacks. There, at the end of the row, sat several issues of normalman, the title printed in all lowercase, the doofus antihero in glasses and a green jacket on the front. I picked it up and read a page in which a drunk normalman learned he couldn’t fly home.
“Why did you have those bookshelves built?” I said.
“What are you talking about?”
“Why did you build them if you weren’t going to allow books on them?”
“You’re just now asking me this question?”
“Yes,” I said, realizing that I’d trained myself not to ask Craig too many questions. Perhaps I was afraid of the answers. Now, watching Craig sit as though in a captain’s chair, his fingers gripping the end of the arm rests, his feet swaying him back and forth, I couldn’t stop myself from asking. I wanted to know why all of Craig’s efforts in our relationship—even the red roses he occasionally brought me after a fight, instead of the pink lilies he knew I liked—seemed as empty as that ridiculous bookshelf backdrop.
Craig stood and leaned on the desk, his fingertips going white as they splayed and pressed against the wood. “You’re about as crazy as your brother, you know that?”
I started to wonder what character Craig might play in a comic, his green, silk robe, his hair all but slicked back, leaning like an insect about to crawl on top of me. I thought being a comic-book character sounded like a lot of unnecessary work.
James was sitting with Benji on the couch when I returned, Benji wearing Osh Kosh B’gosh overalls and a blue turtleneck, nestled against his uncle’s side, munching on a banana, watching cartoons.
“All ok?” James asked.
“Will be. Craig’s just tired.”
“Jeeze, Izzy, he’s not a toddler.”
I sat on the ottoman across from my brother. He looked like he belonged there, on that couch with my kid, his stocky frame somehow fitting the space.
“Look, I know you’re going through something,” I said.
James leaned forward, his chest twice the width of my body, and I felt in that moment the largeness of him. “Yes, it is something, isn’t it?”
“I just don’t know how I can help you.” I felt tired, then, suddenly—not tired like Craig, who’d snuck in at midnight and showered, his whistling echoing through room, finding my ear like a pesky mosquito, but like a mother who hadn’t slept much in four years. Like a woman with a needy brother. Like a woman. No one told me I’d be so tired at thirty-two.
James shook his head and sighed. “You still don’t get it,” he said.
“I’m sure it’s hard, being where you are.”
“Izzy, this isn’t about me.” James chewed the side of his cheek and let his eyes drift to the ceiling. They appeared more reddish than whitish. I wondered what would become of him, the price he’d pay for his eccentricity. I imagined what he could’ve been had he actually been normal—with a basic wife, an ordinary house, a typical job—a banker, maybe—some hobbies, tennis on Thursdays. Something safer. Then maybe he could’ve held a life together. Maybe he’d be worse off still.
“I’m not here for me, at all,” James said. He brought his eyes down to rest on mine and smiled his know-it-all grin. I shivered.
“Oh?”
James leaned forward a bit and took in a long inhale through his nose. What did I imagine he smelled on me? Benji pee? Morning breath? Bitter disappointment? Definitely not sex in a utility closet, or the sting of chardonnay and cheap perfume, or even the waft of a fever from a child’s ear. I let my nose drop to my pajama top and snuck a quick whiff: dryer sheets and pink silk.
“But I think you know that already. Don’t you?”
Jody Gerbig lives in the Midwest, where she is raising young triplets and a writing career. Her recent work appears in Columbus Monthly, Queen Mob’s Tea House, Typishly, and Litro.
