Mom, and Ben, kneeling, put a gentle hand on her soft cheek as if to cushion the blow.
Her long hoarse scream awakened Max, who lurched in, one hand outstretched. Ben wanted to hug him, but Dad had never encouraged such intimacy. His father's breath was fetid. His few strands of gray hair were matted, in wild disarray. There's been an accident Peter... At times like these we speak in cliches and mind it not a bit. Cliches are comforting; they're well-worn grooves through which we can move easily, unthinkingly.
Max had at first reacted not at all as Ben had expected: the old man's expression was stern, his eyes flashed with anger, not grief; his mouth came open in an O. Then he shook his head slowly, closing his eyes, and tears coursed down his pale lined cheeks as he shook his head and then collapsed to the floor. Now he seemed vulnerable, small, defenseless. Not the powerful, formidable man in the perfectly tailored suits, always composed, always in control.
Max didn't go to comfort his wife. The two wept separately, islands of grief.
Now, like his father at the funeral, Ben squeezed his eyes shut, felt his extremities give out, unequal to the task of supporting him. He toppled forward, hands outstretched, touching his brother as he crumpled into his arms, feeling him to see if this phantasm were real.
Peter said, "Hey, bro'."
"Oh, my God," Ben whispered. "Oh, my God."
It was like seeing a ghost.
Ben took in a deep gulp of air, embraced his brother, and hugged him hard. "You bastard ... You bastard!..."
"Is that the best you can do?" Peter asked.
Ben released the hold. "What the hell "
But Peter's face was stern. "You have to get out of here. Get out of the country as fast as you can. Immediately."
Ben realized that his eyes were flooded with tears, which blurred his vision. "You bastard," he said.
"You have to get out of Switzerland. They tried to get me. Now they're after you, too."
"What the hell... ?" Ben repeated dully. "How could you ... ? What kind of twisted, sick joke? Mom died ... she didn't want to... You killed her." Anger surged into his body, his veins and arteries, flushing his face. The two of them sat on the carpeted floor, staring at each other: an unconscious reenactment of their infancy, their toddler days, when they'd sit facing each other for hours, babbling in their invented language, the secret code no one else could understand. "What the hell was the idea!"
"You don't sound happy to see me, Benno," Peter said.
Peter was the only one who called him Benno. Ben rose to his feet, and Peter did the same.
It was always strange, looking into his twin brother's face: all he ever saw were the differences. How one of Peter's eyes was slightly larger than the other. The eyebrows that arched differently. The mouth wider than his, downwardly curved. The overall expression more serious, more dour. To Ben, Peter looked completely different. To anyone else the differences were microscopic.
He was almost bowled over by the sudden realization of how much he'd missed Peter, what a gaping wound his brother's absence had been.
He couldn't help thinking of Peter's absence as a form of bodily violence, a maiming.
For years, for all of their childhood, they had been adversaries, competitors, antagonists. Their father had brought them up that way. Max, fearing that wealth would make his boys soft, had sent them to just about every "character-building" wilderness school and camp there was-the survival course where you had to subsist for three days on water and grass; camps for rock-climbing and canoeing and kayaking. Whether Max intended to or not he pushed his two sons to compete against each other.
Only when the two were separated during high school did the competitiveness wane. The distance from each other, and from their parents, finally allowed the boys to break free of the struggle.
Peter said, "Let's get out of here. If you checked into this place under your own name, we're screwed."
Peter's pickup truck, a rusty Toyota, was caked with mud. The cabin was littered with trash, the seats stained and smelling of dog. It was hidden in a copse a hundred feet or so from the inn.
Ben told him about the horrific pursuit on the roadways near Chur. "But that's not all," he went on. "I think I was followed most of the way here by another guy. All the way from Zurich."