Henry makes us go farther even after everyone else goes in. Catherine asked him to marry her last week and he said yes. Her parents say he has their blessing. We walk a little in silence until we reach the edge of their neighborhood and encounter one with more modest houses. CROOK, LIAR, THIEF, says the sign in one window.
“I’m going to do it wrong,” my brother tells me. “I can feel all the wrong thoughts coming. What if I mess it up?” he wants to know. He is smoking now, one cigarette after another after another. “You will be forgiven,” I tell him.
* * *
…
Somehow I have stuffed a too-full garbage bag down the chute. I am flushed with triumph as I enter the hallway. Then I see Mrs. Kovinski by the elevator. She’s got a cane now. She slipped and fell while on jury duty. Funny thing is it was a slip-and-fall case, she tells me. And tells me and tells me.
Sometimes I bring her books to read. She likes mysteries, she told me. Regular-type mysteries. But this last one I gave her was no good, she says. It was all jumbled up. In it, the detective investigated the crime, tracked down every clue, interviewed every possible suspect, only to discover that he himself was the murderer.
You don’t say.
* * *
…
Catherine wrote Self Care on my brother’s hand in black marker. This is to remind him to go outside more, to eat better food, to step away from the computer.
The problem is that when he’s left to his own devices, he just watches those scenes of refugees trying to make their way to safety over and over again. They keep showing pictures of this one island that is running out of resources. The people who live there have formed their own rescue teams. The fishermen go out in their boats and pull survivors out of the water. Others bring dry clothes to the beach.
Ben told me that in Greek culture it has historically been considered both a duty and an honor to take care of strangers. You can see it with the villagers. The way they go out to rescue people in their boats or bring food to the exhausted ones on the beach. In ancient times, the gods used to test mortals by arriving on their doorsteps clothed in rags to see if they would be welcomed or turned away.
Henry has bookmarked this one photograph of a man carrying his child up a hill. The caption said he had traveled with her for days on a dinghy to Greece. Then he walked with her thirty-four miles to the camp. “I don’t think I could do that. I don’t think I’m strong enough,” Henry says. “You are not going to have to walk thirty-four miles with your child on your back,” I tell him.
“But if I did,” he says.
* * *
…
Anytime I think I am a semidecent person, I remember this story someone told me once about her ex-husband. He was always late getting home. He never came home when he said he would, and I thought I knew this story before she told it, but I was wrong. It was just that he had a rule that if anyone asked him for help he would pause to see what that person needed. And then he would try to get them that thing if he could. Sometimes it was money, sometimes food; once a man needed a belt and he gave him his. The reason he was always late was that his office was next door to Penn Station. They broke up because he was a mean drunk, but still.
* * *
…
“You don’t really even have a job, do you?” Ben says one day when I come home early. It’s true. I could be one of those people who got fired months ago but still pretends to go to work every day. You see them in the library sometimes.
“Can you put sheets on his bed?”
“I fixed the drain.”
“I made corn.”
* * *
…
I hate weddings because I cry and drink too much, but this time I get lucky. Catherine gets pregnant and they have a shotgun wedding at city hall.
Maybe I can stop having that dream now. The one where my brother shows up at my apartment and says, Lizzie, can I die here?
Because suddenly I have a sister-in-law. “Oh, don’t buy that,” Catherine says at the bodega. “It has Blue No. 1 in it.” I look at her, pretend to read the package. “It’s the only dye that is known to cross the blood-brain barrier. That’s what protects the brain from toxins.”
I put the package back on the shelf to see if that will end the conversation, but she has more terrible knowledge she must impart to me. “Blue No. 1 enters the fluid inside the skull, but scientists don’t know what it does once it’s there,” she tells me. Apparently, they’ve done research, but they still don’t understand it. “Okay,” I say, “but I mean, they don’t even know how aspirin works, right? There is no ‘theory of aspirin.’ ”
* * *
…
A woman in her forties was told by her doctor that she had to improve her health. The doctor suggested that she take up jogging and run two miles every day. He told her to call him in two weeks and tell him how she felt. Two weeks later, the woman checked in. “So how are you doing?” the doctor asked. “I feel pretty good,” the woman said, “but I’m twenty-eight miles from home.”
* * *
…
If I stand far enough back in the crowd, I can hide until the kids are released. I figured this out last year. The white parents tend to come to the front and stand there like some sort of battalion. Most of us have kids in the EAGLE thing. It’s noticeable when those classes come out because they’re such a small part of the school’s population. Ten percent maybe. Almost everyone else in the school is Southeast Asian. Little Bangladesh, people call our neighborhood sometimes. Or Little Pakistan. Not the people who live here though.
* * *
…
Sylvia calls to tell me she’s losing heart. “These people,” she says. At one house in the hills, the kids had piñatas full of candy in their rooms just for the hell of it.
Later, I look through her old letters. It’s true. She is. In the beginning, she answered questions like this.
Q: Why do humans like applause?
A: I suspect it is because we are at a disadvantage compared with much of the animal kingdom. We lack sharp teeth or claws. We are not the biggest or the fastest. And we evolved in an environment where we lived nomadically and were exposed daily to the terrifying forces of nature. Accordingly, we banded together in tight-knit groups to better protect ourselves. We built fires and told stories to make the dark nights pass by. Applause may be a way for us to make our weak hands sound thunderous.