"Well, it wasn't a fight, per se," Miss Thomas corrected. "Jake had a bit of an accident earlier—"
"What kind of an accident?" I asked, and Miss Thomas grimaced apologetically. I immediately recognized that look and understood just what kind of accident she was referring to. "Ah," I muttered with a nod.
"He wasn't too happy about being cleaned up."
"Yeah," I replied. "He never is."
"We put his dirty clothes in a plastic bag. They're in his backpack."
"Thanks," I tried to say without muttering and without the niggling embarrassment I often felt for Jake. The embarrassment he never felt for himself.
Jake bounded over, zipped up and ready to go. His Mickey Mouse backpack was looped securely over both shoulders and his hands gripped the straps. His chocolate-covered grin was that of a five-year-old boy, an attribute frozen in time, while his body continued to age along with mine. We would be thirty-four this year, in just a month, and I was the only one of us to feel it.
"We going home, Blake?"
I smiled patiently at my brother and nodded. "Yeah, buddy. We are. Just ..." I grabbed a wet wipe from a container near the door and gripped his chin in my palm as I swiped gently at his face. The chocolate faded, leaving behind the adoring expression of my big brother, born two minutes before me. I laid a hand on the top of his head and ruffled his thick brown mop of hair. "There we go. All set."
Miss Thomas wished us a good day and gave Jake a big hug. "I'll see you tomorrow, okay?"
"Bright and early, right?" Jake asked, grinning wide with anticipation.
"Bright and early," she repeated, and we left the building.
***
Our parents, Paul and Diana Carson, lived in Beverly, Massachusetts. Still in the same colonial farmhouse they had moved into right after getting married forty years ago, and after all those years, it was still painted the same shade of sunny yellow. The drive from Salem was a quick one, less than ten minutes, and as usual, I wished it’d been longer, a lot longer, but there was no chance I’d ever move further away.
“Will you let me give you a shave before I head home?” I asked my brother as we pulled onto the dirt driveway.
Jake nodded with his gaze affixed to the house. “Sure, Blake. Sure.”
I pulled in a preparatory breath and turned the car off. With just about everything, Jake was always initially agreeable, but the execution was regularly a battle. He didn’t handle change well, even if it was something as simple as removing three days’ worth of scruff from his face and neck.
“Come on, buddy,” I said, before climbing out and rounding to his side. I grabbed his backpack while he got out and waited patiently for me to lock up. We walked up the porch steps, and like every other day, our mother pulled the door open before I could take my keys out.
“There’s my boy,” she said, welcoming Jake inside with outstretched arms. He fell into her embrace, wrapping her in a hug that nearly swallowed them both. “How was your day today, huh? Was it good?”
He nodded against her shoulder. “It was good.”
“That’s great,” she replied, patting his back. “Mickey missed you today,” and at the sound of his name, Jake’s lumbering idiot of a dog trotted over to the open door.
Jake released Mom immediately and pushed his way into the house to drop down and land on the living room floor with a laugh. Overgrown boy and dog rolled in a tumble of fur and long limbs while my mother addressed me with a tight smile. She crossed her arms over her chest and for just one fraction of a second, I wished she would just hug me the way she hugged my brother. Like I was a child trapped in a man's body, unburdened by adulthood and the truth about the world and her god.
“Are you staying for dinner?” she asked, probably out of obligation and not out of want.
I stepped inside and hung Jake’s backpack on a hook beside the door. “I guess I could, if you have enough. I actually thought I’d give him a shave—”
“Dad can do it,” she brushed me off with a shake of her head.
“But I always do it.”
“Well, you don’t always have to,” she insisted brusquely. “Dad is perfectly capable, if you, for some reason, can’t do it.”
“You know it would be a battle if someone else did it,” I retorted, my patience wearing thinner by the second.
“Oh, come on,” she rolled her eyes, “it’s always a battle, regardless of who does it, and you know that.”
“Yeah,” I shot back, sufficiently irritated, “and it’ll be even more of one if—”
“Hey, why is it I always have to catch the two of you fighting?” Dad intervened, stepping into the living room from the kitchen wearing a strained grin. He worked a dishtowel around his hands and nudged his chin in my direction. “Hey, Blake. How’s it going?”
“Great,” I muttered, raking a hand through my hair and turning to watch Jake scrub his hands over Mickey’s furry face.
“I was just telling Blake that you’re perfectly capable of shaving Jake’s face,” Mom said to Dad, her tone so full of aggravation, I thought she might explode.
With a glance toward Dad, I saw the grin slip from his face, just as I thought it would. He pinched his lips and shrugged stiffly. “Yeah, yeah, sure. I could do that, if Blake was too busy or something.” He shifted his eyes toward me and asked, “Are you too busy?”
“No,” I shook my head and shot Mom a glare tinged with triumph and disdain, “I’m fine.”
A thick discomfort swallowed the room in the way it always did. We were always so quick to irritate each other, so quick to fill the extensive spaces between us with even more distance, packed tight with tension. I immediately felt stifled and a desperation for just a single breath of air wrapped its cold hands around my throat. I needed to get out. I needed to get back to Salem and back into my house, miles away from this place and the suffocation. Turning from my parents, I reached down to lightly rap my knuckles against Jake’s shoulder, to instruct him to get upstairs and into the bathroom. But when he looked to me with an oblivious innocence, completely unaware of the lack of oxygen and enough silent threats to smother us all, I pulled a smile and decided to force my way through dinner. For him.
There wasn’t anything I wouldn’t do for him. Not when I owed him my life.
***
“Okay, buddy, I think you’re all set,” I said, rinsing his razor in the sink.
He sat shirtless on the toilet, with speckled remnants of shaving cream dotted around his jaw, neck, and cheeks. He watched me intently as I laid the razor on the vanity and grabbed a towel from the back of the bathroom door. It was as though he was trying to memorize the tasks I knew he’d never perform himself.
“Maybe next time, I can shave by myself,” he told me. As he always did.
I smiled as I patted his face with the towel. “Yeah, maybe,” I replied with a nod.
“You shave by yourself, right?” he asked, furrowing his brows as he tried to work through the quandary he seemed to face on a regular basis: why can’t I do the things Blake can?