Alice McDermott - After This

“Did you ever see this house?” he asked her and once more raised his hand from the steering wheel. She looked. A house like all the others but as they passed she saw that the bushes beneath the front windows were scattered with garden gnomes, maybe a dozen of them. And then that the front steps were full of ceramic animals-dogs, geese, rabbits. And then, as they passed, that the garage door was painted with a huge, colorful portrait of the Blessed Mother, surrounded by stars and rainbows. “Not sure what’s going on there,” he said.

She said, “It’s pretty.”

They passed a woman pushing a baby carriage. Lawns with sprinklers going. He reached to turn on the radio. He said, “Don’t let me hear you listening to anybody but the Good Guys while I’m gone.”

She said, “I won’t,” and remembered for the first time that last night before she went to bed her mother had said that when she got home from school today Jacob would be gone off to the army. Like their father had done.

He turned again, the signal making a ticking sound, and she recognized the street once more. They were nearly home. “Do me a favor,” he said. “Scoot down.” She looked at him, unsure. “Scoot down,” he said, more urgently. He put his hand on the top of her head, over her beanie, and pushed her a little. The terry-cloth cover slid with her. He did not increase his speed. “Just in case Mom’s looking out the window,” he said.

All she could see were the tops of the trees and the blue sky, but she knew they were passing their house, the driveway and the lawn, the white shingles and the dark red trim, the sheer white curtains in the front window and the drapes upstairs, in their parents’ room.

She knew her brother had turned and was looking at their house over the top of her head. It was like a dream of passing her own house and not turning in. There was a slow song on the radio and the tick tick tick of the turn signal seemed to mar it somehow. Jacob looked down at her over the rolled-up sleeve of his arm. Her beanie had come down over her forehead and she had buried her chin in her chest. He glanced back at the street and then reached out to touch her thin elbow. “Okay,” he said, softly. “Sit up again.” But the terry-cloth cover was slipping under her and it was more of a struggle than she would have imagined. She wiggled and pressed her palms against the seat and raised her legs and pulled at her skirt. Her saddle shoes flashed black and white beneath the dashboard. He watched her, his eyes going back and forth from the windshield. “Jeepers,” he said, finally, when she had settled herself, pushed the beanie to the back of her head. “A little spastic there,” he said, and although he was smiling, not teasing, she pouted at him anyway, for saying spastic. He reached out again and put his palm on her head.

They drove on, through an intersection and up a hill and then around the front of the high school with its long row of gray doors. Past the football field and the tennis courts, then, turning again, back among houses that over here were all single-story with long front lawns. He gave names to only a few of them. He was mostly listening to the music, only occasionally, softly, singing along. His sleeves were rolled up and his arms looked strong to her, although his hands, fingers and nails, were pale and thin, like her own. He said, “This can be Michael’s car when he gets home from school, Thanksgiving and Christmas. But Dad’s got to go out and turn the engine over every other day or so. Remind him.”

She said okay. They were driving back down the hill. She could see the wiry spire stuck on top of St. Gabriel’s round roof. There was the stubble of a beard on her brother’s cheek and his hair brushed the collar of his shirt. She was beginning to feel the first pinpricks of doubt, or guilt. The morning was growing long. The sun was now hot through the windshield. She was supposed to be in school. Surely it was not her first memory of her older brother-he had once helped her make a bus for dolls out of a cardboard box and pushed it across the living-room carpet, from bus stop to bus stop-but it was, perhaps, the first memory in which she saw him distinctly, on his own, apart from their house and their family, separate. He took his hands from the steering wheel one at a time and rubbed the palms against his jeans. He glanced at her again. “Got me a ticket for an aeroplane,” he said, and grinned, but stopped at a light at the next intersection, he leaned his head back and blew air at the cloth ceiling. He closed his eyes and for a moment she was afraid that he had forgotten about her completely. But then the car behind them beeped to get them going again. “Hold your horses,” he said, his eyes on the rearview mirror. There was a brown scapular, a small picture of the Sacred Heart, dangling from it. They were now passing the far side of the church and her school, the cemetery and the gray incinerators.

“I don’t want to get yelled at,” she told him.

He nodded slowly, as if she had said much more and he was slowly, bit by bit, agreeing with it all. He pulled into the parking lot beside the church and walked her only to the door of her school. He pushed the door open for her and she walked under his arm, from the heavy autumn sun to the cool shadows of the hallway. The entire school was reciting the prayers before lunch-Sister Rose’s voice on the PA sounding from every classroom, the children’s collective voice following along-Our Father and Hail Mary and Bless us, O Lord, and these Thy gifts, which we are about to receive from Thy bounty… She walked along the shining linoleum, down the stairs, and pulled back with a start as she began to turn into the wrong classroom. By the time she found her own, the prayers were over and the children were reaching under their desks for their lunch boxes. When she saw Mrs. Walters’s powdered face, smiling at her, she began to cry, all unaccountably until she felt the woman’s hand stroking her head and realized that somewhere along the way she had lost her beanie. In the parking lot where they played during recess, she recruited a pair of friends to help her search for it, but with no luck, although one of them spotted Jacob, coming through one of the doors of the church and called to Clare. She looked up just in time to see him leave.

Later that afternoon, on the plane, his first flight, he leaned his head against the window and tried to distinguish the streets and highways and parks below, looking for the thrill of spotting something familiar. He looked for the church and the school, certain they would be his surest landmarks: the roof of St. Gabriel’s, from up here, would indeed look like a flying saucer. The school and the gym made identifiable, from up here, by the way they jogged around Mr. Krause’s store. But the plane was banking already and wisps of cloud touched the rising wing. He could not get his bearings. Down below, there were green yards and long gray roads and more baseball diamonds than he would have imagined. There were the blue ovals of backyard pools. There was the Unisphere and then the stadium and then the spires of the city, a glimpse of limitless ocean before the plane banked again and the clouds took over. He sat back. He was aware of an obligation to say something to the woman beside him-she was a smallish woman, older than the girls he knew, younger than his mother, she was already reading a paperback-but he was uncertain of the protocol. Where you headed, maybe. Or, Good book? Fly much? He was leaving home for the first time and already he saw how ill equipped he was, how unready. He could not make conversation with strangers, and yet conversations with strangers were perhaps the first thing required of him in his new life. He touched his seat belt. Put his hands in his lap. He closed his eyes and thought to pray but all petition was undermined by Jesus’ superior prayer, on the night before his death: Your will, not mine. Jacob wanted only to say, Take care of me. Give me a break. The change of light in the cabin made him open his eyes again. The plane had cleared the clouds-they now ran like a great white field just below the wing, they were touched with gold-and the sky was a solid blue. “Incredible,” Jacob said, and the woman beside him put down her book and leaned forward, their shoulders brushing, her hair smelling fresh, like green leaves. He had a memory of the scent of green willow leaves on yellow, pliant stems, small starbursts of blood on his palms. “Isn’t it pretty?” she said.