A Hole in the Universe - Mary McGarry Morris [1]
He took deep breaths to block out the nasally thrum of Dennis’s voice. “I don’t get it. Lisa and I had you all set up in Mom and Dad’s room. So why’d you go and move your stuff in here? It’s the smallest room in the house.”
“It’s my bedroom,” Gordon grunted, chin raised and straining, the button almost fastened.
“Was your bedroom. Was—twenty-five years ago. But life moves on, Gordon! Right? It does, doesn’t it?” His brother’s pained smile rose like a welt on his lean, boyish face.
Gordon knew better than to answer. His younger brother was as thin-skinned and mercurial as he was generous. It couldn’t have been easy all these years with his greatest desire, Gordon’s freedom, so fraught with expectations of disaster. In the week that Gordon had been home, Dennis had criticized his every decision. His brother’s confidence in him was strongest with visitors’ Plexiglas between them.
“It’s so damn dark back here.” Dennis looked out the window into the leaf-tented patch of shade, the old tree’s crown grown bigger than the yard. Now Gordon would hear how he should have gone to California: he’d have a fresh start there, complete anonymity.
“Damn!” he muttered, and Dennis started toward him just as the button went through.
“You’re so nervous!” Dennis handed him the tie. “It’s just an interview. What’s there to be nervous about?”
Gordon turned his damp collar over the tie. The interview was too soon. He wasn’t ready. Freedom was like this new suit Dennis had bought for him. It might look a perfect fit, but it felt as if it belonged to someone else. Gordon tried to knot the tie, then yanked it apart. “I never could do this!” He threw it down on the bureau.
“C’mon, big guy,” Dennis coaxed, slipping it back around Gordon’s neck. “Hey! After all you’ve been through, this’ll be a piece of cake! You’ll do fine!”
Gordon glared until Dennis stepped away. His hands trembled as he fastened the tie himself.
“Knot’s too big,” Dennis said, shaking his head.
Gordon pulled tighter, his face a mask again, eyes half-lidded to this speck in the mirror, not a man, but a point in time, that was all. No more than a moment. A moment. And then it would pass without pain, without anger or loss.
“Now what’d you do? You got the wrong end too long.” Dennis chuckled. “Here, let me.” He reached out.
Gordon stiffened. “There.” He stuffed the longer narrow end into his shirtfront. “You can’t even see it.”
“No!” Dennis howled with dismayed laughter.
“That’s the way I always did it,” he said.
“Sure, when you were a kid. C’mere!” Dennis was undoing the tie. “We don’t have much time left.”
Gordon recoiled from the sour intimacy of his brother’s breath. According to the corrections manual, each inmate had his own space, a circumference of twenty-four inviolable inches.
“That guy I told you about, Kinnon, my patient?” Dennis murmured with the last loop. “I called last night to double-check, and he said it was all set. He said he’d already laid the ground work. He’d already explained things.”
“What things?”
“Things. You know what I mean, the details.”
The knot dug into his gullet. Details. The scrapings of flesh—his—gleaned from under her fingernails. The cuts on his enormous arms measured, photographed: the quantifiable proof of her grasping, desperate struggle against the pillow. Details, twenty-five years deep, most like flotsam released in pieces, surfacing through dreams, or snatches from a song, certain smells: the damp sweetness of shampooed hair, or even abrupt silence into which would rise her muffled pleas, soft moans, the last earthly sounds of Janine Walters and male fetus. Kevin.
“He said he explained it all, you know, how young you were and everything,” Dennis said