Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

He was back to how she’d first seen him, when she was four, staring down from the second-story landing on a lump of meat wrapped in a blue baby blanket her parents had just dragged home. Her earliest memory: standing at the top of the stairs, wondering why her parents bothered cooing over something far stupider than the outdoor cats. But she soon learned to love this baby, the greatest toy a girl could ask for. She hauled him around like a doll for a year until he finally took a few dazed steps without her. She jabbered at him, wheedled and bribed, kept crayons and bits of food just out of reach until he called for them by their real names. She’d raised her brother, while her mother was busy laying up treasures in heaven. Karin had gotten Mark to walk and talk once already. Surely, with help from Good Samaritan, she could do it twice. Something in her almost prized this second chance to raise him right this time.

Alone by his bed between nurses’ visits, she started talking to him again. Her words might focus his brain. None of the neurology books she pored over denied that possibility. No one knew enough about the brain to say what her brother might or might not hear. She felt as she had through childhood, putting him to bed while their parents were out wailing on homesteader hymns around the neighbor’s Hammond chord organ, before their parents’ first bankruptcy and the end of socializing. Karin, from the earliest age, playing babysitter, earning her two dollars by keeping her little brother alive for another night. Markie, skyrocketing from an overdose of Milk Duds and cherry colas, demanding they count to infinity or run telepathic experiments on each other or relate long epics from Animalia, the country humans couldn’t get to, populated by heroes, rogues, tricksters, and victims, all based on the creatures of their family farm.

Always animals. The good ones and the evil, the ones to protect and the ones to destroy. “You remember the bull snake in the barn?” she asked him. His eyes flickered, watching the idea of the creature. “You must have been nine. Took a stick and killed it all by yourself. Protecting everyone. Went to Cappy and bragged, and he beat the shit out of you. ‘ You just cost us eight hundred dollars’ worth of grain. Don’t you know what those creatures eat? What have you got for brains, boy? ’ Last snake you ever killed.”

He studied her, the edges of his mouth working. He seemed to be listening.

“Remember Horace?” The injured crane they’d adopted when Mark was ten and Karin fourteen. Winged by a power line, the bird had ditched on their property during the spring migration. It went into a dance of total panic as they approached. They spent an afternoon closing in, letting the bird adjust to them, until it resigned itself to capture.

“Remember, when we washed him, how he took the towel from you with his beak and started drying himself? Instinct, like how they coat themselves with mud to darken their feathers. But God. We thought that bird was smarter than any human being alive. Remember how we tried to teach it to shake?”

All at once, Mark started keening. One arm tomahawked and the other swung wide. His torso slashed upward and his head thrust out. Tubes tore off and the monitor alarm squealed. Karin called the attendants while Mark flapped about on the sheets, his body lurching toward her. She was in tears by the time the orderly showed. “I don’t know what I did. What’s wrong with him?”

“Would you look at that,” the orderly said. “He’s trying to hug you!”

She ran up to Sioux, to put out fires. She’d missed her return-to-work date, and she’d reached the limit of what she could ask for by phone. She went in to talk to her supervisor. He listened to the details, shaking his head with concern. He had a cousin, hit in the skull with a seven iron once. Damaged a lobe that sounded like varietal . Never the same afterward. Her supervisor hoped that wouldn’t happen to Karin’s brother.

She thanked him, and asked if she could stay out just a little while longer.

How much longer?

She couldn’t say.

Wasn’t her brother in the hospital? Didn’t he have professional care?

She could take an unpaid leave, she bargained. Just for a month.

Her supervisor explained that the Family Medical Leave Act did not extend to siblings. A brother, in the eyes of the medical-leave law, was not family.

Maybe she might give notice, and they could hire her back when her brother was better.

It wasn’t impossible, the supervisor said. But he could guarantee nothing.

This hurt. “I’m good,” she said. “I’m as good as anyone else on the lines.”

“You’re better than good,” the supervisor conceded, and even now she swelled with pride. “But I don’t need good. I just need here .”

She cleaned out her cubicle in a daze. A few embarrassed officemates expressed concern and wished her well. Over before she’d really started. A year ago, she’d thought she might rise in the firm, make a career, start a life up here with people who knew only her friendly readiness and nothing of her messy past. She should have known that Kearney — the Schluter touch — would come back to claim her. She considered walking down to tech support, to break the news to her flirtation, Chris. Instead, she called him on her cell phone from the parking lot. When he heard her voice, he gave her the silent treatment, both barrels. Two weeks without a call or e-mail. She kept apologizing until he talked. When he got over his sulk, Chris was all concern. He asked what had happened. Bottomless familial shame blocked her from telling all. She’d made herself witty for him, light, easygoing, even sophisticated, by local standards. In fact, she was just a shit-kicker raised by zealots, with a shiftless brother who’d managed to reduce himself to infancy. Family emergency , she just repeated.

“When are you coming back?”

She told him the emergency had just cost her her job. Chris cursed the firm nobly. He even threatened to go have it out with her supervisor. She thanked him, but said he had to think about himself. His own job. She didn’t know this man, and he didn’t know her. Yet when he didn’t argue with her, she felt betrayed.

“Where are you?” he asked. She panicked and said home . “I can come down,” he volunteered. “This weekend, or some time. Help out. Anything you need.”

She held the phone away from her spasming face. She told him he was too good, that he shouldn’t have to worry like that about her. This made him sullen again. “That’s okay, then,” he said. “Nice knowing you. Take care. Have a good life.”

She hung up, cursing. But life in Sioux had never really belonged to her. It was, at most, a binge of simplicity that she now had to detox from. She drove to her condo to check on the place and pack a more realistic wardrobe. The trash hadn’t been taken out in weeks and the place reeked. Mice had chewed through her matching plastic sealable bowls, and lentils covered the counters and beautiful new floor. The philodendrons, schefflera, and peace lily were all past saving.

She cleaned up, shut off the water main, and paid the delinquent bills. No new monthly paycheck would cover them. Locking the door behind her as she left, she wondered how much more she might have to give up, for Mark. On the ride back south, she tapped all the anger-management tricks they’d given her in job training. They played across her windshield like PowerPoint slides. Number One: It’s not about you. Number Two: Your plan is not the world’s. Number Three: The mind can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

She owed her own competence to raising her brother. He was her psychology experiment: Given another parent, with everything else the same, could her own flesh and blood grow up worthwhile? But in exchange for her selfless care, he gave her back, at best, an endless supply of his chief attribute: total aimlessness. Animals like me , the eleven-year-old claimed. And they did, without fail. Everything on the farm trusted him. Even ladybugs would crawl fearlessly across his face, finding a place in his eyebrows to nest. What do you want to be when you grow up? she once made the mistake of asking. His face burst with excitement: I could be a real good chicken calmer.