her. Even in this, his movements were clinical. Though he held the magazine, she did not imagine he was thinking about the black woman with bright pink nipples on the cover, or even of a boy. Nothing so human as that. Just an itch to be scratched. She shut the door and moved on, hating herself as she thought it, but thinking it nonetheless: Why Julian? Why not Xavier?
Next, Clemson’s room. She found him sleeping soundly. He’d come home from his last year at Harvard for the funeral, and would be leave again in a few days. You’d think he’d have gotten cocky with those smarts and looks, but no. Like Tom, he made a point of putting people at ease. Less like Tom, he always had to win, be it lacrosse, grades, or squiring the best-looking girl to the University Club. If she had any complaints, it was that he was too perfect. People like that, you always wonder what lies beneath. Probably, they wonder, too.
Farther down the hall. She didn’t turn on the light, and instead felt her way with her hands through the dark. Last year, when her parents had visited from Dayton during Julian’s first round of chemo, her father had asked, “What does the mortgage on this place set you back a month? Forty grand? You know, there’s kids starving in Africa.” Then he’d looked her up and down like she wasn’t his daughter, but a stranger, and said something she still hadn’t forgiven. “There’s kids with cancer. Leukemia. You sell this place for something half the size and donate the difference to charity, you could save some lives. Maybe start going to church again and say a prayer to St. Jude, and you could save his life.”
“Shut your fat mouth before I shut it for you,” Jill’s mother had answered, but by then, Jill was already in tears. Not a day had gone by since, that she hadn’t remembered those words and wondered if they were true.
Finally, she checked on Markus. He’d moved into Julian’s bedroom after the diagnosis, to keep him company. They’d slept in narrow beds separated by a night table like an old married couple, and after only a few weeks, had been finishing each other’s sentences. Irish twins separated by ten months. Markus had been the most present during Julian’s illness, and perhaps the only one to understand how much that time had mattered. But the end stages had wrecked him. In sympathy with Julian, or maybe in grief, Markus, too, had lost so much weight that his ribs protruded. He’d even shaved his head. In a matter of months, both boys had shrunken inside their skins like mirror-image ghosts.
She opened the door and saw that Markus was not alone. He’d sneaked his boyfriend Charles through the service entrance. In sleep, they were pressed together like spoons in the far bed. She sighed.
She might have found Charles more palatable, were he not so limp-wristed and fey. So easy to bully, with simply a frown. The boy was a runaway that Markus had met in Times Square. His parents had disowned him at fifteen, and he would have become a street walker if Markus hadn’t helped him get a job waiting tables. He lived with a bunch of kids in a studio apartment in the Bronx now, didn’t go to school, and dyed his hair platinum blonde. A white cotton sheet concealed their nakedness.
She cleared her throat. Dead brother or no, if she’d done something like this back in Dayton, her mother would have made her pick her own switch, then shipped her to a convent. It occurred to her that she had erred. Nurses, nannies, the house in Amagansett, private schools, then the Ivy League. The boob lift last year that’d had nothing to do with back pain. The constant diets that left the refrigerator bare: four (now three) growing boys, and not a single sandwich fixing. Her job at Vesuvius, which provided her the excuse to neglect her family, when she should instead have quit as soon as she’d gotten pregnant and raised them right.
If she’d been around more often, Xavier might not have gotten lost in the shuffle. Clemson wouldn’t be so smug. Markus might have learned affection for the fairer sex. Tom might not have cheated with his secretary, and almost lost his job after that sexual harassment suit that had cost the company millions. The things she’d traded, all for vanity.