Chapter One
The Suitcase
I remember the day my brother was brought to our house from the children’s home, and everything is tinted a lemony yellow. This is not unusual, for I see my momentous childhood memories as though through colored lenses. Red, I identify with illnesses, high fevers, and summer heat. I learned to ride a bicycle on a winter day, and our little street, my clothes, the cobblestones, and the surrounding buildings are tinted steely blue. At four I fell in love with Mathieu, a boy of five who smiled at me and then stuck his hand in my turtle aquarium. My turtles, Mathieu’s eyes, his sweater with sleeves pulled up past his elbows, live on in cool shades of green.
My fevers still seem red to me, and happy winter days steely blue. But I do not have other yellow memories, not even of the brightest summer afternoon. Yellow is the day my brother arrived from the children’s home.
It might be the fear and jealousy I felt-my parents never remembered the day as having been particularly yellow-but the sunlight seemed blinding outside our long French windows. We lived on a quai above the Seine in Paris, and the sun glinted so brightly on the river you could not look at it for long or without squinting.
My father stood on the balcony leaning on the railing with a Scotch and soda in his hand. I was restless. I did not have the patience to stand in one place for long, and ran to and from the balcony. Joining my father for the twentieth time, I pushed my head into his hip and tugged at his back pocket. But he was not in the mood to pay attention to me.
“DADDY-Y-Y-Y. Is the little brother coming soon?”
“Any minute now,” my father said, not looking at me. He was watching the taxis crossing the wide cement bridge.
“DADDY-Y-Y-Y. I changed my mind. Tell him not to come today.”
“Will you behave yourself?” he said, annoyed. “I mean, you really do have to behave yourself. He’s going to be scared to death.”
“Jesus, Bill,” my mother said from the other side of the long, cream-colored living room which was bathed in yellow light. She had gotten all dressed up in a pale Chanel suit with matching shoes and she could not sit still, like me. “You want to go to the park with Candida, Channe? Maybe she should go to the?”
“She’s got to be here, Marcella,” my father said in a completely calm voice. When he said something in that calm, even tone, no one had the courage to contradict him. I ran off toward the kitchen to bother my nurse for a glass of water. She had been told to stay in the kitchen so that the little brother would not be confused by too many strangers all at once. The waiting seemed interminable and everyone, including Candida, was tense and not in the mood to baby me.
“Here. Come here, Channe. Look,” my father called from the balcony. I ran to him and stuck my face between two iron bars decorated with iron leaves. A taxi had stopped before the house. The door flew open and a heavy shoe stepped out and landed on the pavement. It was followed by a gray skirt and then a gray head. The woman looked around for a moment and leaned into the taxi and tugged at something still hidden in the car. A little bare leg appeared on the edge of the seat, then another. The woman pulled at one of the knees and a blond head popped out.
My father moved away from the window, removing my hand from his back pocket. Feeling completely abandoned I went, dragging my feet, over to the fireplace and hid beneath the jutting wooden mantle.
Forever, I thought. He was coming to live with us forever and the thought was as confusing to me as the idea of the universe going on forever.
The little brother’s story had been explained to me in careful detail. I was three when the decision to adopt him had been made, and a year had passed since then. His natural parents had died in a car accident right after his birth. This was not true but I have never blamed my parents for withholding the truth, as it would have been too much for my intellect and the little brother’s as well.
He had spent his first three years with a French couple who had only fostered him, not adopted him, and when the foster mother had killed herself by taking sleeping pills, the father, unable to cope, had put the little boy in a children’s home. The couple had been acquaintances of my parents. One day the man called my father and said, “Bill, remember that little boy your wife thought was so adorable? As I remember, she said there was nothing in the world she wanted more than a boy like that-well, I can’t keep him, Bill. He’s in a children’s home right now and I can’t stand it.”
But it was illegal for Americans to adopt French children, and my parents had bribed and pleaded and paid thousands and thousands of dollars to some official to have my brother’s birth papers disappear. My mother had even had a private audience with Madame de Gaulle (my father’s position as a celebrated American writer living in Paris opened up all sorts of influential doors) and she, the wife of the President of France, had pushed the whole thing through by writing a letter of recommendation. Even with Madame de Gaulle’s recommendation, the deal was tenuous-I did not know this either until many years later: Once a month for the next several years a person from the social service agency came to check on us. One bad word from that person could have sent the little brother back to the children’s home. My parents lived in terror from the moment the little brother walked in the door.
“No two people ever fought harder to have a kid in the world,” my father had told me over and over again, during the year it took them to get through the bureaucracy.
“Didn’t you fight hard to have me?”
“Yes, we sure did. But it was a different kind of fight. Your mommy was sick. She can’t have any more babies and you always say you’re so lonely. Now you’ll have someone to play with all the time.”
Someone to play with all the time! Someone to share everything with, I thought. Someone who would be sleeping next door, in my old playroom!
I heard the doorbell ring and then some French being spoken. My parents spoke French badly, while I spoke almost fluently; I’d been such a terror they’d sent me off to school at the age of two. I heard my father ask the woman if she wanted a cup of tea or coffee or a cold drink. She said non, merci in a grave voice.
“Channe,” my father called out in the calm voice that everyone listened to, “come here.”
Out I came from under the fireplace mantle and there was the little brother. He stood as though frozen, his arms crossed over a small, battered black suitcase he kept pressed to his chest. He wore a plaid suit which must have fit him when he was two. My mother says it was blue, but I remember it was yellow with orange lines. The sleeves were too short and the shorts were stretched so that the front pockets bulged out. He would not look up from the floor. His knuckles were white from gripping the suitcase. He had a round head and juicy pink cheeks and a mouth like a rosebud. Every now and then a sigh escaped from his nose and his nostrils flared.
The woman’s head turned left and right, scrutinizing everything. She had purple wormlike blood vessels on her cheeks and a lipless mouth.
“Presentez-vous, Benoit,” she said softly to the little brother, giving him a slight push at the shoulder. He tottered, but kept his ground and his arms around the suitcase.
“It’s all right,” my father said in a gentle voice. He got down on one knee in front of the little brother and put out his hand.
“Je suis ton père,” he said in his awful American accent, making the little brother frown. I am your father, he said. He’s not his father! I thought, outraged.
“Et voici ton mère et ton soeur.”
Ton mère! I thought, it’s not ton mère, it’s ta mère. I came forward, not too close, and said in French to the strange woman and the little brother, “Please forgive my father, he doesn’t speak French very well, he’s a foreigner.”
“What does he have in the suitcase?” my mother asked the woman, trying to sound relaxed but her voice was too high, too enthusiastic.
“A pair of underwear, a pair of socks, and another shirt.”
“Channe,” my father said, stretching his arm out and encircling me conspiratorially. “Listen, sweetheart, do me a favor, will you? You know where the toys are we got for him. Will you bring the box up here? You can give them to him yourself.”
“No,” I said flatly.
The look my father gave me made me feel like the Wicked Witch of the West when the bucket of water is thrown at her.
“Excuse us a moment, please,” he said, and nodded sideways toward the hallway that led down to the kitchen, the playroom, my room, and my nanny Candida’s room. I knew I had to go or there would be serious trouble later on.
The old playroom had a red tile floor. My mother had brought in a little rug and a bed. I kicked the box with the new toys in it and it skidded across the floor and hit my father’s feet. He kicked the box out of the way, lifted me up, and sat me down on the little brother’s new bed.
“I want you to pick up that box and take it down the hall and give it to him,” he said calmly, slowly. “Right now. You are being awful and I’m embarrassed. Just look at that poor, terrified little boy and look at you. I’m horrified. He’s scared to death of us. You’re the only person his age around here. Maybe he’ll talk to you. Can’t you try to be nice?” He paused a moment, seeing that I was about to cry.
More gently, he said, “What if Mama and I were gone forever? Wouldn’t you want someone to be nice to you?”
I began to heave deep sighs and my face contorted completely. I jumped off the bed and threw myself around his thighs.
“Daddy-y-y, Daddy-y-y, don’t say that.”
“Please, baby. Please, for me, please go give him the box.”
I dragged the box down the long hall to the living room. My father helped a little by pushing it along with his foot. I left it in front of the little brother indifferently, as though I were abandoning something worthless.
“Tiens,” I said. “C’est pour toi.”
“P-pardon?” he said.
“C’EST POUR TOI!”
“Pour moi?” He frowned, pointing a finger inward, toward his chest, which was somewhere behind the suitcase. His eyes were round and blue and he had a little space between his front teeth.
“Open it,” I said.
He pinned the suitcase up under his left arm and with his free hand opened the box.
“Put your suitcase down,” I said. He shook his head.
“MAIS POSE TA VALISE!” I yelled.
My mother looked at my father and her mouth twitched.
“Darling, you’re too abrupt. Please don’t be so bossy,” she suggested to me. “Bill, darling, say something.” Tiny drops of sweat appeared above her eyebrows.
“Channe,” my father said, clearing his throat, “don’t be so bossy.”
The little brother pulled the red fire engine out of the box and held it up with difficulty. “Oh, the pretty truck,” he sighed. He looked toward the woman and then put the fire engine down on the carpet, resigned to giving it up.
“No, no, it’s for you,” my father insisted.
“They are not used to such expensive gifts, Madame,” the woman said in a quiet, disapproving tone.
The little brother placed the suitcase flat on the carpet and sat on it, admiring the fire engine from a distance.
“But look, silly!” I said, becoming enthusiastic. “I won’t take it from you, I just want to show you, see! It runs by itself and goes pin-pon-pin!” I turned it over and wound the key. The fire engine took off, a blaring yellow light flashing on top. Yellow, yellow, yellow! the light flashed. The siren made a terrible racket and I was thrilled because toys weren’t allowed in the living room.
The fire engine banged into an antique wooden chair at the other end of the room, turned around by itself, and headed back. It went straight to the little brother, as though it knew its rightful owner, and banged into the suitcase between his spread legs. He lifted it off the floor and hugged it as though it were a small dog. His face was so red it almost matched the truck.
“SEE! I told you. Pin-pon-pin!” I shouted.
He wound the toy, put it back on the floor, and after a moment of deliberation, left his suitcase to chase it around the room. He started to laugh then, his face all red and his eyes round, and I started to laugh too because I had never seen anybody get so excited over a toy.
The woman said she was leaving then, and the little brother immediately abandoned the fire truck and headed toward the door, grabbing his suitcase on the way.
“Non, Benoit,” she said, “you are staying here.”
“B-by myself?” he asked in a shaky voice.
“You’ll be very happy,” she said, patting his shoulder lightly. My father shook hands with the woman at the door and then closed it behind her. Benoit stood before the door and stared at it for a long time with the suitcase pressed once again to his chest. His rose lips curved downward and his face went completely white. He looked bereft, in pain, aghast. I mustn’t cry, his eyes said bravely, and I felt a pain I had never known before. I did not like myself at all and became furious at him for making me feel that way.
“Come on!” I said, pulling hard at his sleeve. “Let’s play. See? There’s another truck for you.” I ran to the box and dug inside it.
“COME HERE! Look at this one, it carries rocks and dumps them all over the floor, all by itself.”
I wound the truck and put my patent-leather shoes in the flatbed so that he could watch them being dumped on the floor. He took a few uncertain steps in my direction, but would not talk or play and continued to grip the suitcase.
My mother pulled together cookies and milk and ice cream in the kitchen while Candida followed her around pointing to the right cabinets and drawers. The little brother ate up everything quickly, as though he thought my mother might change her mind and take it all away from him.
“Won’t you put your suitcase down on the floor? Look, you can put it between your legs,” she said in French.
He conceded, finally, and moved it from his lap to the floor. This was after my mother agreed to let him have a second bowl of ice cream. Half of the first bowl had ended up on the suitcase and I was disgusted because if I had behaved that way I wouldn’t have been allowed to finish the first bowl.
We went from the kitchen to our rooms and the little brother almost fainted from shock at seeing my toys. I had twenty stuffed bears who lived on my bed whose names I changed every few days and five Barbie dolls with yellow hair who had their own beauty parlor and closet. They were spread out in different twisted positions, some undressed, some half-dressed, their tiny shoes scattered about like pieces of chewed gum. I also had a Lego set and was building a castle out of red, white, and blue bricks. There were half-constructed puzzles and coloring books everywhere.
The little brother stared but would not touch. He had his suitcase and his two trucks in his arms and these he would not part with. I naturally was bored with my own toys and wanted to play with his trucks and a tremendous fight erupted.
Candida dragged me off screaming to the kitchen, and my mother took the little brother out shopping for clothes in the neighborhood. In a moment of crisis (when I fell ill, for example) my mother’s reaction was always to buy, buy, buy. I was not the victim of this crisis but the cause; suddenly my whole little world was standing on its head.
Candida was peeling potatoes and onions at the kitchen table, her large, chafed hands moving swiftly over a glass bowl. She had come from Portugal at twenty-five, without her family, and had been with us since I was two months old. I spent more time with her than anyone else, watched her cook, sew, clean, shine our shoes, and these daily routines had a calming effect on me. “I am your second mommy,” she would tell me in all seriousness. She was my ally, my best friend, but she was not my protectrice although she often tried to be?she was as terrified of my father’s wrath as I was.
The kitchen was disturbingly quiet that afternoon. The radio was off and the bright light above our heads buzzed like a mosquito.
“I hate him,” I told her. Candida sighed deeply but for once would not agree with me.
“He’s ugly,” I said. “He’s dumb.”
“Ay, ay, ay, Channa,” she said. Candida added as, os, and is to the ends of words. “Don’t talk like that.”
“You don’t love me anymore too,” I said.
“Ay, ay, ay,” she said, sighing.
The little brother spread his new clothes out on his bed, organizing by color. He put the new blue shorts with the blue pajamas, the red shirt with the red socks, and so on.
“That’s not how you’re supposed to do it,” I said.
“Leave him alone,” my mother said.
“Pour moi, pour moi, et pour moi,” he said, touching each thing admiringly with a flat hand.
He brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed and opened it. He put all the clothes in and zipped it shut and put it back under the bed.
“You have a closet of your own here.” My mother pointed to the unvarnished wooden closet that had arrived yesterday.
“When I go, can I take the clothes and the trucks with me?” he asked her.
“You are going to stay with us forever,” she said.
He looked at her with the same expression he’d worn when the strange woman had left him at the front door.
Every day was like a holiday that first week. I was out of school for the summer, but instead of sending me to the park or shopping for groceries with Candida, my father quit work at lunchtime and took the family out. We went rowing on the Marne, picnicking in the country, out to fancy restaurants, and walking for hours around the Latin Quarter. He took us to the Lido Club on the Champs Élysées to eat hamburgers. The little brother ate four hamburgers with fried onions (since he was allowed to so was I, but I couldn’t finish my third) and then we went to the movies. We saw lots of cowboy movies in English and my father told the little brother about America.
“Ben-wa,” my father called the little brother. We only spoke to him in American now, except when we were with Candida.
“Ben-wa sounds terrible in English,” my father said one day. We were having lunch in the Brasserie Lipp and the little brother and I were eating escargots, pulling them out of the shells with a tiny fork and sopping the baguette in the rich butter sauce.
“Maybe we should change it?” he suggested.
“But to what?” my mother said.
“I don’t know. Let him decide.”
“He’s too little to decide his own name,” I said.
“No he’s not,” my mother said. She had this childish singsong tone in her voice sometimes, “Goody-goody gumdrops,” she called it; I hated it, and was convinced she was using it right then to inflame my already inflamed being.
“Then I want to change my name too,” I said with a mouth full of bread and sauce.
“No,” my father said flatly.
“I won’t answer unless you call me Jenny from now on,” I said.
“I’ll call you Agatha, how’s that?” my mother said in that same voice.
My mother’s father had died when she was sixteen and I think on some level she never grew up, was never given the opportunity to rebel against her strong father. She acted like a child with me, but the only time I ever saw her cry was when she’d describe her father, a strong-willed, handsome, blue-eyed Italian man. Sometimes she would wail like a baby and put her head down between her arms. Sometimes, in that childish voice, she would say, “My daddy was just as nice as your daddy.”
“Agatha,” my mother said as I sopped up the last of the escargot sauce, “would you like some dessert?”
“You’re Agatha,” I said.
“Cut it out, you two,” my father said. “Ben-wa, would you like a new name?” He said this in American, slowly, several times, and then in French.
The little brother shrugged indifferently. You could never tell what he was thinking or if he even understood what was going on around him, and that drove me crazy too.
“Think about it,” my father said. “You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do.”
After about five days he moved his clothes from the suitcase to the closet, but kept the suitcase under the bed.
It was that night, I think, that I was awakened by terrible whimpering sounds coming through the open archway that connected our two rooms. I got up and went to his bed in my bare feet. His tile floor was cold and I sat down on his bed and tucked my feet up under my nightgown.
“What is it?” I whispered.
“Le loup-garou,” he said.
“What loup-garou?” Loup-garou was the French werewolf.
“He’s here.”
“No he’s not.”
“I did pipi. They’re going to beat me.” He slid a hand out from under the covers and reached under the bed, his hand groping blindly in the dark space.
“Don’t worry, it’s still there,” I said as though he were the stupidest person in the world. “And they’re not going to beat you. I promise you nobody’s going to beat you.”
“You can draw already and you can write your own name,” he said in a dismal voice.
“Didn’t they teach you to draw and write There?”
He thought about this in silence for a minute. “Yes,” he said finally, “but I couldn’t.”
“Tomorrow we’ll ask Papa to show you how to write your own name. What was it like, There?” I asked.
“It was all right,” he said in that indifferent tone.
“Did you have lots of friends?”
“Everyone was all right except Sister Elene. She used to beat us for doing pipi in bed.”
“Where did you get that suitcase?”
“I don’t remember. Leave me alone.” He dug his head into the pillow.
“Take off your pajama if it’s wet. Here, I’ll get you another one.” I went to the wall and switched on the light. I opened his closet drawer and took out another brand-new pair of pajama pants which he had folded neatly, and placed according to color, next to some socks.
“Here.” I handed them to him. He changed quickly, under the sheets. His feet and knees kicked the sheets up in all directions. I put the wet pants on the floor in the corner and switched off the light.
“NON! Don’t turn off the light. The loup-garou comes in the dark. Sister Elene says he only eats bad children.”
“You’re not bad. You’re as good as can be. I’m much badder than you, and no loup-garou is going to get me.”
He thought about this for a while, frowning in that stubborn way. He did not seem convinced.
“Anyway, Papa would shoot any loup-garou that tried to get in our house. You want to come sleep with me? You can sleep with me if your bed is wet.”
“All right,” he said, throwing back the covers. He crouched down and brought his suitcase out from beneath the bed.
“You’re not going to bring that stupid old thing, too, are you? Nobody’s going to take it.”
“I’ll just put it down beside your bed. All right?”
It was strange to have him in my bed. I had a girlfriend who lived next door who slept over sometimes. We would talk and talk until we fell asleep. I didn’t know what to talk about with Benoit. It wasn’t as though he’d be gone tomorrow and everything had to be said right now.
“Well, then. Good night,” he said.
“Good night.”
I lay awake for a while, listening to his deep and even breathing and watching his round face, his heavy eyelids, his puffy mouth, finally at peace and comfortable in sleep. I hoped his dreams were good ones. I hoped that tomorrow I would be able to be nice. When we fought and my parents were not around, Candida took my side and smacked him or sent him to play in his room. Afterward I would watch him, feeling vindicated and righteous, through the crack in his door. He would sit on the floor hunched over his trucks and hum melancholy tunes he’d make up as he went along. I adored Candida for favoring me, but I knew it was not right. The strangest thing about it was that Benoit never told on us. My parents had no idea.
Why was it so hard all the time to be nice? Wasn’t it easier to be nice? Why, on the rare occasion that I was nice, did I suddenly feel so rotten about all the times I wasn’t nice to him? Why did he always make me want to pull his hair or bite him as hard as I could? Either that or he gave me a feeling of utter self-disgust, emptiness, and gloom. I wished there was a place they could send me to teach me to be nice. Like the place where he had been. I only wished this for a second, because I knew it was a place where there was no Candida, no parents, and no one to protect me.
For lunch on Saturday we went to the brasserie at the end of the island on which we lived, to celebrate that Benoit had been with us a week. It had been the longest week of my life and I did not think there was anything to celebrate at all, especially if the coming weeks were going to be as long as this one.
Benoit had two slices of tarte aux framboise for dessert and my father brought up the subject of changing his name again.
“J’ sais pas,” the little brother said. He had pieces of raspberry all over his face, even high on his cheeks, and I was disgusted.
“Bill,” my mother said, “why don’t we give him a name. How about Anthony, like my father?”
“I told you he’s too little to pick his own name. Look, he’s got sticky stuff all over the place.”
“Be quiet, Agatha,” my mother said.
“Let’s give it a little while,” my father said. “Let him think about it.”
After the brasserie, I liked to hold my father’s hand and run along the top of the four-foot-high cement rampart that ran all along the upper quai. It gave me the feeling I could fly. Below, on the lower quai, were dogs and fishermen and the murky river splashed loudly against the embankment.
“Daddy! On the wall! On the wall!” I reached up to him. My father lifted me onto the rampart and gripped my wrist. I skipped and yelled as I ran along the two-foot-wide wall, arms spread out and flailing the air.
“MORE! MORE!” I shouted, but my father lifted me off and put me down on the sidewalk.
“Ben-wa, do you want to walk on the wall?”
“Non.”
“He’s such a scaredy-cat he’ll never do it,” I said.
“Look, I’ll lift you up and you can see how you feel about it.” My father only spoke to the little brother in American now, and he seemed to understand the gist of things well enough, although he would only respond in French.
He lifted Benoit onto the rampart and Benoit started to scream. Tears poured from his wide-open eyes.
“NON! NON!” he cried. He threw his arms around my father’s neck and crawled onto him, his feet scrambling to hook onto something at my father’s waist.
“It’s all right. It’s all right,” my father kept saying.
“Papa, non, j’veux pas! J’veux pas!”
“I told you he’s scared,” I said. This didn’t make me feel better at all, though I had hoped it would. I felt sick inside from his fear and grabbed my mother’s hand. She squeezed it tightly.
“I’m sorry, Mommy.”
“It’s not your fault.”
My father’s hand held the back of the little brother’s neck while he rocked him from side to side. Benoit pressed his face into my father’s chest.
“O, Papa,” he said. “O, Papa Papa Papa. I’ll walk on the wall. You‘ll see, I can do it.”
“We’ll try it some other day,” my father said, walking toward our house with the little brother in his arms. “O, Papa Papa,” Benoit kept saying, as though it were the only word he could remember.
My father went upstairs to his office and wrote every day but Sunday. It was the only day of the week he slept late. It was also Candida’s day off and my mother had to go to the kitchen to pour the water into the coffeepot that Candida had left out on a tray with the cups and sugar the night before. Then we had a ritual. My mother called to me and I ran to the kitchen and went downstairs with her to their room which was below the living room. I crawled onto the enormous bed and had a glass of milk in a coffee cup while they had their coffee and discussed our plans for the day.
This was Benoit’s second Sunday. When my mother called from the kitchen I stopped by Benoit’s room on my way.
“It’s Sunday. Are you coming?”
“Not right away,” he said. He was organizing his suitcase again. It was lying open on his bed and he was taking things out and putting things in. I didn’t wait to see what and ran down the hall, happy to have my parents to myself for a few minutes.
My mother’s voice always sounded gravelly on Sunday mornings. She was slow to wake up and her eyes seemed puffier than on the other days.
“Where’s your brother?”
“Doing something in his room.”
“There’s a John Wayne cowboy movie on TV at two,” my father said. “We’ll go have Vietnamese and then watch the movie. Maybe I’ll put on my cowboy hat and boots. Maybe I’ll get my pistols out too.” My father had a real cowboy outfit he’d bought in the West when he was young; he liked to put it on when “humdinger” cowboy movies were on TV. He had gotten Benoit a toy cowboy hat and a gun belt, a special belt for bullets, two big black pistols, and a little cowboy vest with fringes. They’ll probably both get dressed up together from now on, I thought, wanting a cowboy suit.
We heard Benoit’s footsteps coming down the stairs. Something thumped on the stairs behind him.
He came in carrying the suitcase. He hopped up onto my father’s side of the bed and crawled toward him with the suitcase dragging beside him. He put it down on my father’s lap, over the sheet, and said, “C’est pour vous.”
“For me?” my father said.
“Pour vous.”
“Are you sure? My God, Ben-wa, that’s the nicest present I’ve ever gotten in my life.” My father unzipped the little suitcase and peered inside. In it was everything the little brother had arrived with, including the plaid suit he had been wearing.
In French, the little brother said, “I want to call myself little Bill.”
“Little Bill? Billy. All right.” My father’s voice went quiet.
“Billy Anthony Willis,” my mother said. “How’s that, everybody? All right?”
“Billy,” the little brother said.
“Isn’t that something? I’ve hated that name all my life and he wants my name.”
“Billy! Billy!” I said, jumping up and down on the bed. The cups jiggled on their saucers, my mother grabbed the tray and steadied it. She did not reprimand me.
“I just have this feeling,” she said in her gravelly voice, “I really had no idea but now I think everything’s going to be all right.”
I see the rich velvety colors of the curtains and bedspread and the antique bedside lamps bathing us in amber light. I see the little brother’s flushed and smiling face, his sweet blue eyes all watery, and the dark space glinting between his front teeth.
We had our first four-way kiss. The little brother put one arm around my father’s neck and one around my mother’s. I was on the other side. Our four mouths came together in a loud smack.
The happiness I felt did not last through the day, nor did it return the next day, but at the moment of the four-way kiss I was happy that he was mine and that I was his. For a short moment, I was almost in love with him, for he was certainly brave, much more so that I would ever be, and had somehow found it possible to forgive me.
