A Cloud in the Shape of a Girl Page 12

  He ducked his head, chewing. “Gyut,” he managed, meaning, “Quiet.”

  “Seriously? You better not get caught.”

  “Gont.” He finally swallowed. “I won’t.”

  “Right, because nobody ever does.” She guessed it was his business if he wanted to risk a fine or some other expensive shit storm just to get into a bar. “So how are your classes?”

  “Boring. I have to take all basic requirements. ‘Bum jeer, mon sewer.’ That’s conversational French.”

  “Is it now. How’s things at home?”

  “Ah, I’m never there. Some guys I know have a practice space, we’re getting a band going.”

  “What happened to the last band?”

  “Keyboard player sucked.” Her brother was scanning the room, looking for someone he wasn’t finding. He wore a grubby T-shirt that said “I Can’t Adult Today.” He’d done something with his hair that Grace couldn’t quite figure out, until she realized he’d pulled some of it into a knob at the back of his neck. It was as if he was wearing a costume. He felt her staring. “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Michael pulled out his phone and checked the screen. “Gotta go.” He maneuvered himself to come into Brian’s field of vision. “Later, man.”

  Brian raised a hand in acknowledgment, and they watched Michael work his way through the crowd and out the door. Brian said, “That’s your brother, huh.”

  Grace waited while he found his beer on the bar and drank from it. “All right, maybe I shouldn’t say this—”

  “Say what.”

  “—but I saw him a few nights ago, I’m pretty sure it was him, leaned up against a car in a cop stop.”

  Grace felt something within her go dead quiet. “Where?”

  He mentioned an intersection. Grace knew it, a stretch of busy crosstown street, but after dark a no-man’s-land of closed businesses and the kind of glaring, anticrime lighting that always seemed to encourage crime. “It was late, after eleven. I went out for groceries,” he explained, but Grace waved this away.

  “What kind of car was it?”

  “Old Toyota. Green, I think.”

  It was Michael’s car. “What was going on?”

  “Not much. Couple of cops talking to him. They didn’t have him cuffed or anything.”

  “All right,” Grace said. The noise and racket of the bar rose up around her. She didn’t know what to think about Michael, if there was anything to think at all. They didn’t get into each other’s shit, didn’t interfere. She wasn’t that kind of crummy big sister. She would let things ride.

  But the next time her mother called, Grace waited for her to finish going on about the usual, her father had a cold, her uncle Mark called and talked about maybe coming out for a visit. Once her mother’s stream of talk ran down, Grace asked how her brother was.

  “Michael? He’s fine. Why?”

  “I hardly ever see him these days.”

  “You hardly ever see any of us,” her mother pointed out.

  Noted. Thanks. “I was just asking.”

  “He’s not around that much either, he’s always off at school or practicing. He has a new band, did you know? It has some silly name. The Idiots. No, The Useful Idiots. I have no idea. It’s been very expensive, they have to buy amps and microphones and who knows what else.”

  They talked for a while longer, and Grace promised to stop by the house sometime soon.

  Should any of them have known or guessed? Perhaps. But it was secret behavior and people took pains to hide it, at least until there was no more hiding possible. Her mother did say at one point that she didn’t care for a couple of the boys that Michael was spending time with, although she disapproved of most young people aside from her own children, and sometimes them as well. There was a refrain of complaints about money, about Michael needing money. Grace’s father said Michael was going to have to get a real job soon, not just screw around with this music thing, which was money down a rat hole, but that also was one of his usual complaints.

  In September, Michael got a DUI. “I thought you knew,” Grace’s mother said to her in another phone call. “I thought he would have told you. It’s the biggest mess. At least nobody got hurt. This had better be a wake-up call.”

  It took a while for Grace to get the story out of her, or at least some version of it. Michael had been out late as usual, musicians being late-night people, everyone understood that. Musicians were also the type to encourage the creative process with different kinds of self-indulgence, everyone understood that as well, or at least his mother was inclined to understand and excuse certain excesses. The cop who stopped Michael said he was weaving back and forth between lanes. He had failed a field sobriety test.

  “Anything else?” Grace asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Nothing, never mind.” Her mother was so, so thick. “How’s he doing?”

  “Embarrassed. He’s pretending it’s no big deal. Your father had to have a talk with him.”

  “I bet that was one for the books.”

  “What? You know, we’re having a crisis here, a serious situation, and it’s been very, very hard on all of us, and we’re trying to handle it the best we can, and if you can’t bring yourself to be helpful, maybe you could at least keep from making snotty observations.”

  “All right, I’m sorry.” Grace was a little surprised at her mother’s vehemence, but then, it had to be tough for her, worrying about Michael and how much the lawyer was going to cost and everything else. “How about I call him?”

  “Yes, that would be nice. Call him and try to be . . . encouraging.”

  Grace said that she would. And she did call, and got his voice mail, and called again but still couldn’t get through. Both times she left messages that she kept on the light side, saying she was trying to reach Uber and was this the right number, or call if he wanted to borrow her cross-country skis. Neither of which was all that funny, but she was trying not to sound like their parents, like it was the end of the world. Michael didn’t call her back.

  Well, he didn’t have to. He probably had his hands full dealing with their parents and the residual damage from the DUI. She assumed she’d hear anything she needed to hear, and went on about the business of her own life.

  Then, a couple of weeks later, there was a phone message from her mother sounding abrupt and rattled: “Grace? If Michael calls and asks you for money, do not give him any. Just don’t.”

  Grace called her back. “What’s this about money, what’s going on?”

  “I can’t stay on the phone.”

  “Mom? What’s going on there?”

  Her mother was whispering now. “He’ll use it to buy drugs. Tell him you don’t have any money.”

  “I don’t. What drugs? What happened?”

  “I have to go, he’s coming downstairs.”

  “What—” Grace began, but her mother had hung up.

  Grace tried to call her father, both on his cell phone and at work, and both times got his voice mail. She was at work herself, manning the cash register at a store at the mall that sold athletic shoes, and it took her some time to persuade them she had to leave. She tried calling the house again and no one answered.

  She kept calling as she drove. Still no answer. She swore, uselessly. She reached their street and slowed to a stop at the curb in front of the house. Her mother was sitting on the front porch steps. It was October and cold, but she wore only a sweater, her usual sweatpants, and slippers.

  “Mom? What’s the matter, what’s going on?”

  Her mother regarded her with a peculiar stony look. “I guess everybody thinks I’m stupid.”

  “What are you talking about, come on. What did Michael do?”

  “He stole money from my purse. It’s not the first time. I guess I was stupid, at the beginning.”

  “Is he all right?”

  “Not really. I don’t mean he’s bleeding or anything. Yes, I suppose he’s what you’d cal
l all right.”

  Her mother had wads of tissue scattered around her on the stairs, although her eyes behind her glasses were dry, and if she had been crying, she had stopped some time ago. Looking down on her, Grace could see the part in her mother’s gray hair, the scalp showing through the thin places. Grace looked away again. The front yard was covered in red and orange leaves. Someone, her mother probably, had begun raking them into piles and loading them into yard waste bags.

  Her mother was absorbed in picking at the sleeve of her sweater. “Go talk to him if you want to. I’m done talking for now.”

  “Come on in, Mom, it’s cold out here.”

  “It feels all right to me.”

  Grace left her there, crossed the porch, and let herself in the front door. They almost never went in that way. It was another thing that felt wrong. The front rooms were quiet and empty. She didn’t know what she’d expected. Overturned furniture, maybe. “Michael?”

  He was in the den, sitting in the middle of the couch. His feet were flat on the floor. His arms were at his sides and he appeared to be doing nothing at all. “Hey,” Grace said. “What’s up?”

  “She called you, huh?”

  “Yup.”

  “Such a stupid stunt.”

  “She’s worried about you.”

  Michael shrugged. He looked sweaty. His skin was unfresh, like the skin under a bandage. Grace said, “She told me you took money out of her purse. Did you?” He made an impatient face. “Talk about a stupid stunt.”

  “I told her I’d pay her back. I will too.”

  “What’s going on with you? You don’t look so good.”

  “Fuck you very much.”

  “Nice. I’m trying to get up to speed here.”

  “Don’t bother.”

  “Come on, Michael.”

  “Come on what, what do you want? Everybody needs to leave me the hell alone. All of a sudden I’m this great object of curiosity for people who don’t have anything better to do, and they can back off. That means you.”

  Grace was alarmed by him but she wasn’t afraid of him. “What are you doing, coke? Tweak? You a big tweaker now? A druggie kingpin? I wouldn’t care what you were polluting yourself with if you had it under control, but it sure doesn’t look that way.”

  He tried to stare her down but gave up and let his head fall back against the couch. “I can’t stand her. I can’t stand her worrying about me.”

  “Then don’t do crap that makes her worry.”

  “Everything makes her worry, it’s sick! Everything I do!”

  “So move out, Michael. Get your own place. That’s what grown-ups do.” Her brother muttered something. “What’s that? You don’t have any money because you spend it all on partying? Wow, that is a problem.”

  The front door opened and shut and their mother walked through the kitchen to stand in the doorway. “He hates me,” she said to Grace. “What did I do to make him hate me?”

  “Mom, he doesn’t hate you, come on.”

  “Then why is he doing this to me?”

  “Doing what?” Michael said. “Doing what to you? It’s not about you. Nothing is. Why are you supposed to be so important, huh? Where’d you get that idea?”

  Their mother started crying. She slid down the wall behind her until she was sitting cross-legged on the floor. “Oh, way to go,” Michael said. “I still don’t feel sorry for you. You stick your nose into everything and then you act all hurt when the door slams on it.”

  “I’ve wasted my life on you children.”

  “Looks like,” Michael agreed.

  “He doesn’t mean it, Mom,” Grace said.

  “Sure I do.”

  “Stop it, both of you,” Grace ordered uselessly. There was a feel of performance about what she was seeing, as if the two of them had needed her as an audience, a witness to their unhappiness.

  “I have to get back to work, I can’t stay here and referee.”

  Her mother had found another wad of tissues and was applying them to her nose. “He needs to admit he has a problem. Nothing’s going to get better until he does.”

  “She’s the one with the problem.”

  “Adios,” Grace told them. She went through the kitchen and out the side door to the driveway. She couldn’t have stayed inside for another minute.

  She drove back to work through the pretty, leafy streets where she’d grown up, the houses decorated with pumpkins and seasonal wreaths, or maybe flying the team flag for another doomed football season, or one of those gift-shoppy banners depicting autumn leaves. The same mass-produced, expected stuff you saw every year, and she thought for the hundredth hundredth time that she had to move to Alaska or Costa Rica or anywhere that people didn’t take so much pride in commercially available self-expression.

  She felt bad for walking away from her mother and Michael, but not bad enough to go back. She had no doubt that her brother was screwing up, and would keep doing so for a while. He was probably making a mess of school too. That would be enough to make her parents lose it. They’d lay down the law, stop providing free room and board, and everyone would go on from there. Michael would have to do some growing up. It looked as if he was determined to do it the hard way.

  It was simple self-preservation not to get involved in her family’s messier dramas. It was like trying to save a drowning person and getting dragged under yourself. It was what you had to do. There was no way to feel good about it.

  Her father called her a week later. “Oh, hi Dad.” She steeled herself for one or another variety of unpleasant conversation. “What’s up?”

  “Ah, your brother can’t get his head on straight.”

  Grace waited for him to elaborate. “He wants to be a drug addict. It’s part of being a creative type, you know?” Her father had a low regard for anyone who chose to pursue the arts. How many people ever managed to make a living from it? One in ten thousand.

  Grace had heard this view expressed many times. Sometimes it was one in a hundred thousand, or a million. “What’s happening, is Michael all right?”

  “No he’s not all right. He’s a drug addict.”

  “What does that mean, exactly.”

  “He takes whatever it is he takes and stays out all night and comes home and is disrespectful. Your mother wants us all to go to counseling,” her father said abruptly. The real purpose of his call.

  “What kind of counseling, what for?”

  “Family counseling.” Her father didn’t like the taste of the words, Grace could tell.

  “Well, I don’t know about that.” It was the last thing she wanted to do. “Michael’s the one who needs counseling. I don’t see where any of us can help.”

  “That’s what I told your mother, but you know how she gets.” Her father sounded relieved. He hadn’t wanted to sit in an office sharing his feelings any more than Grace did. She was glad he wasn’t going to go along with it, but she didn’t like this invitation to consider everything, somehow, as being her mother’s fault. For being oversensitive and unreasonable and failing to instill desirable character traits in her children.

  “I’m sure she just wants to help,” Grace said, offering up this weak tea of a defense. Was there anything about her family that didn’t make her feel bad? “So what’s going on with Michael, is he getting some help?”

  “He hasn’t been around for a while. He’s staying with some girl. Just as well. Your mother doesn’t see it that way.”

  Her mother would want Michael home. “Is he going to get help, you know, a program or something?”

  “He says he will. Believe it when I see it.” Her father shifted gears. “All right, I’ll tell your mother you don’t want to do any family counseling.”

  “Not right now.”

  “You’re a smart girl,” her father said, making Grace feel he was approving of her for all the wrong reasons. For being coldhearted and reluctant to take on any more of her family’s unhappiness and discontents. For being grudging and wary ar
ound them and not wanting anything to do with Michael’s new, self-inflicted catastrophe. She disliked her father’s anger and impatience as she disliked these things in herself. But neither did she wish to be her mother, who carried her complaints around in a basket and kept collecting more of them and was so endlessly willing to be hurt.

  Michael had come back home after a spell, she heard that from her mother, and after that she didn’t hear much of anything for a time. Then her mother called to say they were taking Michael to an in-patient treatment program in Chicago and if it wasn’t too much trouble, would Grace come over a couple of times to take in the mail and water the plants?

  Grace recognized the spitefulness in this, and the intent to make her feel guilty, but she wasn’t immune from either anger or guilt. She asked her mother if the program was one of the religion-based ones where you prayed to have your druggie sins lifted from you? Or did they use a more cognitive approach?

  “They use the very expensive approach.”

  After a moment Grace said, “Well, it’s probably good to have professionals, people who know what they’re doing—”

  “We had to call the police. We thought he was going to hurt himself. Hurt us. He spent two nights in the hospital. Yes, I am happy to turn things over to the professionals. I don’t understand him anymore. I don’t understand why he’s doing this to us.”

  “Mom, addicts don’t do things on purpose. And they don’t think about anybody but themselves.”

  Michael’s problems were bringing out the worst in everybody: her mother’s grievances, her father’s anger, her own cowardice. “Try and, ah, detach,” she added. She knew that was something you were supposed to say.

  “I always wanted a family. I still do. But sometimes I wish you were all different people.”

  She hung up then, leaving Grace to put the phone down quick, as if it burned.

  Michael stayed in the rehab program for three weeks. He was said to be making progress. He came back home. He was all rehabbed, he said. Or maybe he was a retread, like a tire. “Really, I’m great, I’m just making dumb jokes, I mean you gotta laugh, right?”

  Grace met him for coffee. It felt awkward and stagey, like a date of some kind, like an inspection of his new, tuned-up self. She asked him how the place was, you know, the program, as her parents called it, as if it were something other than an expensive semijail, and Michael said, “It’s tough. They have to be tough, they know all the bullshit you try to sell. They’re big on slogans. There’s a lot of cheerleading. One day at a time! Let go and let God! Gratitude is an Attitude!”