2
We sit around the room in a big horseshoe shape that almost meets in the middle and puts me in mind of an ancient amphitheater. One of those old stone stages where people wore masks to let the audience know what their role was - a keening, open, downturned mouth to indicate tragedy, a grotesque grin for a comic character. We don’t do that here. We’re all wearing the same mask, one of apprehensive concern.
When we hear the crunch of tires on the gravel drive our expressions shift as one. We set them to neutral the way we’ve been told to do. No judgment, no outward anger or hostility. Our audience is liable to turn skittish if we’re not careful.
Matt walks into the room, rolls his eyes to the ceiling and turns to go back out again, but Dad is standing there in the door, blocking the way.
“Right,” Matt says. “Guess I should have seen this coming, shouldn’t I?”
“Sit down, son.”
Something in Dad’s voice – quiet but firm – makes him do as he’s told. Matt sighs as he sits, and the first person he looks at is Rocco, who’s sitting next to me. “You?” he says. “Of all the people…”
He doesn’t slur, but it’s only ten o’clock in the morning. People always remarked on the resemblance between my brother and I. Same blue-gray eyes, same sandy hair that turns paler in the sun. Matt was always shorter, broader, the bridge of his nose wider than mine, his lips thicker, lending him the sensuous, young Jim Morrison look that made him a star. I always thought our similarity was superficial – I was sharper around the lips and nose, my build much lighter – but it’s strange since he started sliding off the rails. I can see it now. It’s like looking in some prophetic mirror that shows you your own ruin. I can see where the booze bloat would settle around my jaw, how neglect would tinge my teeth and lack of sleep would thicken my eyelids.
“We’re here because we love you,” says Rocco, forced to commit to the opening salvo. “And because I’ve been here. Where you are.”
“Have not,” says Matt, like we’re teenagers all over again. “I had more sense than to pump that shit into my veins.”
“No,” I say. “Instead you’re killing yourself with booze. Which is much more sensible.”
Meg gives me a look. Right. No sarcasm. It’s not helpful.
Matt sighs and scrubs a hand through his hair. “Well, fuck,” he says, and that right there is a sure sign he’s sloshed, because sober he would never say that word in front of our mother. “Okay. Let’s do this thing, since the gang’s all here. I can see you’re not going to give me a break on this one.”
“Please, baby,” says Mom. “Just hear us out. There’s help for you, if you’re willing to take it. We’re going to go round the circle and everyone is going to say their piece.”
Meg goes first, reading stiffly from a page of prepared notes about her last birthday, when we’d been supposed to be having a happy, bar-hopping time but Matt had seen someone he said looked at him funny and the thing ended in a fight and an arrest. Next up is Mom’s best friend, Matt’s godmother, Carrie, who has a lot to say about Jesus and the power of faith and sets Matt’s eyes rolling harder than ever. Immediately I wonder how the hell my atheist brother is ever going to cope with the whole higher power aspect of AA, and I can already see the ways he’ll use it as an excuse to quit.
Rocco is next, and he cuts straight to the chase. “You put my car in the swimming pool,” he says. “And you almost drowned.”
Matt stares at him in disgust, like he can’t believe Rocco is dragging up something so totally tabloid. “I was trying to help you,” he said. “Remember?”
“You drove into the swimming pool. If you hadn’t been too drunk to panic you probably would have drowned before the water pressure equalized enough for me to open the door.”
“Sure,” says Matt. “You’re a real hero for saving me when I was the one trying to drive your ass to the hospital, or have you conveniently forgotten that part?” He waves a hand around the room. “Perhaps – while you’re acting like your shit doesn’t stink – you’d like to tell my friends and family about how you had a pus-filled hole the size of a goddamn grapefruit in your thigh and how there was all kinds of nightmare shit pouring out of it–”
“–yeah, because I tried to inject into it,” says Rocco. “You know what I was doing when you found me? I was still trying to find a vein. And I was still trying to find one when you were nose down in the fucking pool. That’s what rock bottom looks like, Matt – when you’re leaking body fluids you didn’t even know you had, your best friend has just driven your car into the pool and all you can think about is how you can’t cope with this right now because you need a hit. Yes, of course I’m grateful that you were trying to be there for me, but your disease was right there with you and we were just the blind leading the blind…”
Matt snorts. “Disease,” he says. “Great. They’ve got you, too.”
“Alcoholism is a sickness,” I say.
“Oh, stop, Daniel,” says Matt. “Even you don’t sound like you believe that. Jesus, we’re Irish, for God’s sake. Stop creating medical drama where there is none. We drink, we fight, we sing fucking Dannyboy. It’s genetic.”
“There are actually predispositions,” says Meg, and Matt covers his ears with his hands and la la las like a child.
“Stop it.”
He lowers his hands, because when Mom yells you know it’s serious. She was always the parent who seldom lost her temper.
“Perhaps you’d like to go back to the way it was?” she says, immediately returning to normal volume. “When every family had a drunk or two and nobody talked about it?”
He opens his mouth to deny it, but one look from her shuts it.
“You don’t remember your great-grandfather,” she says. “But I do. He used to buy these little violet candies – Parma Violets, they called them. Made in England. He always had a box of them sitting around. They didn’t come in a box. They came in a little roll, like Tums, but he’d buy a box, like the ones you used to see at the newsagent. Bulk buy. I always came away with a couple of packets every time we visited, and it was a joke to us kids, how much he loved those funny little purple sweeties.”
Matt says nothing, but I know this story. Maybe the ending shows on my face, because Rocco’s fingertips find mine between the chairs and squeeze.
“It wasn’t a joke,” says Mom. “Not to my Nana, because she knew the smell he was covering up with those Parma Violets. He was a bad one, your great-grandfather. Had it so bad he’d get out of bed in the morning and hit the whiskey, because if he didn’t he’d shake to pieces.”
My brother sighs, but Rocco’s grip tightens on my hand. Somehow I sense we’re in the same place. We’re daring to hope that Mom is making her point.
“When I was about twelve or so,” she says. “I learned enough to guess the smell he was trying to mask, but by then it didn’t smell the way I remembered. It was worse. It smelled like shit, Matthew, because his liver was rotting, and I was scared of him. I didn’t want to be around him any more. He knew it, too, and he’d try to buy his way back into my heart with candy, but that’s the part I remember most of all, because he was holding out his hand with these sweets in it. Parma Violets. They were a pale lilac sort of color, but I remember thinking they must have changed the recipe, because they looked even more purple. Almost blue.”
A tear crawls down Matt’s cheek.
“And then I realized why,” Mom says, with a catch in her voice. “They hadn’t changed color at all. He had. The purple looked that much more purple because his hand was yellow.”
Matt starts to cry, but she’s ruthless. “He was only sixty,” she says. “And he died in terrible pain, scared out of his mind. When your liver goes all the poisons it’s supposed to keep out of your body leak into your blood and your brain. You die crazy and screaming and afraid.”
He’s sobbing now, but my heart feels strangely light. Unable to stand it any more, Mom picks up her chair and hurries across the room to him. She puts her arms around him and it feels like a victory, a connection. I hear Rocco exhale. He lets go of my hand and gets up to join the huddle forming around my crying brother.
I’m bad at this. Matt was right when he said I wasn’t saying my lines convincingly. Already the flicker of triumph is dying down, and I’m picking holes, worrying if he means it, and whether his remorse will last long enough to carry him through rehab.
“We love you so much,” Mom says. “We do. You have to believe that, baby.”
“I do. I do, Mom.”
“There’s help,” says Rocco, kneeling beside the chair. “It’s all set up for you. There’s an amazing place just forty minutes away. Beautiful views of Puget Sound. So peaceful.”
Matt sniffs loudly and tears another Kleenex out of the box. “You’re not gonna stick me in some cuckoo’s nest shithole, are you?”
“God, no. It’s great up there. Kind of reminds me a little of Lost Lake, actually.”
“Yeah. We had some good times there, right?”
He looks at Rocco, not me. I was just the tagalong younger brother, after all. The one they had good times in spite of.
God, where the hell did that come from? I’m supposed to be loving and non-judgmental, but it’s like Dostoevsky trying not to think of a polar bear. As soon as Meg told me that resentment and aggression had no place in this process all those feelings came roaring into my head all at once. I’m supposed to be both nonresponsive and tender at the same time, soothing the way a panpipe album is soothing – expansive, bland, and calming because everyone tells you that it should be.
Only I’m not. I want to scream, shout and throw chairs. What is his fucking problem anyway? How is his life so hard that he’s driven to drink? He gets paid insane amounts of money for stuffing a sock down the front of his leather pants and crooning Rocco’s lyrics into a microphone. Yes, it’s so hard getting up there and lapping up the applause from people who treat you like a God. It’s a dog’s life, dear brother. No wonder you’re hitting the sauce.
“Excuse me,” I say, and escape to the deck. I’m a monster.
Rocco comes out to see what’s up. “You okay?” he asks, and I just shake my head.
“Come here.” He pulls me into one of his long, fierce hugs. I bury my face in his hair and wonder what he’d do if I just whispered it into his ear right now. I love you. I’ve loved you since before I even knew what love really was.
“You’re shaking,” he says.
“I know. I’m so fucking mad, Rocco. I know it’s wrong, but…”
He pulls away. “Hey. It’s okay. It’s all right to talk about your feelings.”
“Not now. He doesn’t need me unloading a belly full of resentment on him. This is supposed to be non-aggressive. Calm.”
“You’re always calm,” he says, taking a pack of smokes from his pocket.
“I know. That’s probably why I’m furious now.”
He leans on the deck rail and sighs, turning the pack over and over in his fingers. “I’m going with your dad to take Matt to the facility. You want to come?”
“I don’t know.”
“It might do you good to see him off.”
Yeah. Goodbye, or good riddance? “Maybe,” I say, and watch Rocco’s nervous fingers at work on the cigarette packet. My mouth waters. “Go ahead, if you want to.”
He draws one from the pack. “Thanks.” He lights up and exhales slowly. He’s thirty-five years old and he still hasn’t lost the knack of making a filthy habit look picturesque.
I look down at the cigarette, the tan filter held between the knuckles of his right hand. It’s the softer hand, the nails longer than those on the left, which he keeps trimmed to the very quick. His right hand is long-fingered and graceful, and there’s the faint yellow shadow of a stain between the index and middle fingers. The one vice left to him, and it’s dying harder than all the others.
“Can I?” I reach out, glad to have an opportunity to touch him. He gives me a sidelong look and doesn’t surrender the cigarette. “Please?”
“Daniel…”
“I’m an adult. I can make my own poor decisions. Please – just a puff. I’ve been craving it for some reason.”
Rocco sighs and hands it over. I know I shouldn’t, but I want to anyway. The smoke scorches my tongue the way it did when I was fourteen and stealing them out of my mother’s purse, but I’ve missed this. God knows why, because it tastes appalling. As soon as it hits my lungs I know I’m done. I hand it back, coughing like a kid all over again as my lungs protest, all the more outraged for the six years worth of clean air that they’ve been breathing in between smokes.
“Oh God,” I groan, as Rocco tries to rein in his I-told-you-so expression. Not very successfully. “Oh, fuck me.”
“See? That’s why you quit.”
“That’s terrible. Why did I ever think I missed it?”
“That’s the magic of addiction,” says Rocco. “It gets built up in your mind as the solution to all your problems, when actually it’s the cause of most of them.”
“Was it like that for you?”
He nods. “Yep.”
I try not to stare at his thighs, wondering which one it was. Perhaps it hadn’t been all that bad. My brother always did have a knack for exaggeration, after all. “With the…with your leg and all?”
Rocco catches his breath with a slight shiver. “Yeah,” he says, flicking ash. “I gotta say, I never imagined I would find myself telling that story in front of your mother.”
“Was it as bad as he said?”
He grinds out the cigarette on the sole of his boot. “Worse,” he says. “They had to drain the pool, because of all the shit that leaked out of me.”
“Jesus.”
“It wasn’t good. To this day nobody knows exactly where that staph infection came from. I might have had it already before I got in the water, but they weren’t taking any chances when I got out.”
This time I can’t help it. My eyes are drawn to the scar at the base of his neck. He touches it, self-conscious.
“You were brave,” I say.
“No, Daniel. No. I was fucking stupid. But…” He sighs and runs his hand through his salt and pepper hair. “You know what? If he can learn from my stupidity then maybe the whole thing wasn’t pointless after all.”
“I guess.”
Rocco reaches out and caresses my cheek like it’s nothing. Maybe it is. He was always tactile, but in that hypermasculine Italian way. Deep hugs, smacking kisses. “Come on,” he says. “Come with us. Grit your teeth, smile and tell him you love him. You can lose your shit later, I promise.”
*
The rehab facility is across the water, past the tip of Vashon Island. I know the area, but I don’t mention it. The history is kind of dark and Matt is going to have enough unsettling things going on in his brain once the alcohol withdrawal sets in. I heard it can make you see spiders, or bugs moving beneath your skin.
“Take it one day at a time,” I say, but I still don’t sound like myself. I’m spewing Twelve Step clichés like fortune cookie messages from my mouth. “And remember that we’re thinking of you.”
Matt hugs me too long and too tight, making my ribs ache and reminding me of how he used to be annoyed by the instruction to hold my hand all the time, so sometimes he’d crush my fingers until I let go. I can’t help but feel like he’s trying to goad me even now, so that we can have the fight that’s been hanging in the air for years and he’ll have a good reason to go off and get angry drunk.
“I love you, Danny,” he says, and my throat aches.
“I love you, too,” I say, but it feels as thin as paper. This whole thing has shone a light on the depths of my dysfunction, and I’m appalled by it. We were told there would be tears and upsets and pain, but not like this. I didn’t think I’d be the one turned upside down by self-revelations meant for my brother.
I’m far too glad to leave him behind, and I’m grateful that there will be a strip of water and a thirty-minute ferry crossing between us. I don’t like to think too much about what that says about me.
On the way back I go up on deck, the way we used to when we were kids, all three of us hanging on the rails and squinting out across the waves for the black, rubbery fins that signaled the presence of orcas. The sun is out but the wind is bitter, and I’m glad of the way it makes my eyes water. I always had trouble crying, even as a kid. Sobs always stuck in my throat somehow. They got caught in a thick, painful knot, and then I’d have to strain my eyes until they hurt in an attempt to produce tears. And even if I did manage to squeeze them out, the tears would only sting and bring me no relief at all.
The wind is helpful enough not only to make my eyes water, but to draw the tears to the corners of my eyes and dry them.
Rocco comes up to join me, cigarette on his lip, sunglasses black in the bright sunlight. He looks so starrish that I almost remind him that he’s in public and liable to be recognized, but he’s preoccupied, trying over and over again to light up against the wind. We try various configurations of cupped hands and coats held out to form windbreaks, but eventually he gives up and crumples the whole pack in his fist. Drops it into a nearby trashcan.
“Fuck it,” he says. “Probably time I quit anyway, right?”
“It can’t hurt,” I say. The sharp, sudden anger in his voice makes me feel less alone. Maybe even a little less monstrous.
The wind catches his long hair, whipping it back from the widow’s peak at the front. “Beautiful day,” he says, after a while.
“Yes. It is.”
His glasses slide down his nose as he looks out to sea. That old band photograph made an icon of his profile. Made an icon of him. Matt and the others knew how to crash around the stage and have a good time, but Rocco was always the talent.
“You know there’s was a sanatorium just over that way?” I say, because it’s easier to deal in stories sometimes. “From where we just came from. It was over a hundred years ago, give or take, when Seattle was a brand new logging town.”
“A sanatorium? What was it for? Lunatics?”
“No. Rich hypochondriacs, mostly. It was run by this quack doctor – a woman named Hazzard – and she took money from wealthy people who signed up for her fasting cure.”
Rocco frowns. “Oh, wait. I think I’ve heard of this. Wasn’t there a scandal? She starved some English heiress or something.”
“Yeah. Claire Williamson. She went over there for the fasting cure and died of it. Weighed only fifty pounds at the end.”
“Jesus Christ,” says Rocco, pulling his coat tight around himself. “I think I weighed three times that when I was on heroin.”
I want to ask him if he remembers those stories about fairies who sewed your lips shut with invisible threads, but that reminds me that I haven’t eaten a thing besides a slice of toast that I forced down to keep me from passing out at the intervention. It had tasted like drywall and I’d been so sick with nerves I’d had a hard time chewing, but now I could stand to eat once more. Crisis over.
Rocco takes my silence for introspection, when really I’m thinking about the way my stomach is rumbling. He pulls my head onto his shoulder and presses a kiss to the crown. “We’re doing the right thing, Daniel,” he says. “I know it feels rough. I know it feels like we’re tossing him aside, but this is how it has to be. He has to be away from us, because he’s the only one who can fix his own shit.”
“I know.” We draw apart and I let the wind tug the water to the corners of my eyes once more. “So what now? Are you going back to LA?”
He scrunches his nose. “I don’t know. I was thinking I might hang out here for a while. Be here to talk him back round if he busts out of rehab.”
“Sure. Do you think that’s likely?”
“I have no way of knowing, but it happens more often than not. Can’t hurt to be prepared.”
“You can stay with me, if you like.”
He gives me that smile, the same radiant, guileless grin that stole my heart before I was even a full-fledged teenager. “I would love that,” he says.
“Really?”
“Of course. It’s been too long since we hung out together.”
“It has,” I say, and realize for the first time that we have never hung out together without Matt.