sounded tense but happy, and since Esme still had no idea how her mother felt about Chris in a coma all these years, she assumed this meant he was dead. A twenty-four-year nap comes to an end, and her mother is released from the emotional vigil she’d been on or wanted to be on: both seemed exhausting.
Linda leaned forward, elbows on the table. She spoke the next part slow. “He said something. Out loud. A nurse just happened to be there.”
The news blew Esme well back into her chair. Her brother’s voice. She didn’t even know its sound. “Out of the blue?” she said. “He’s awake? What did he say?”
Linda picked up a bird carved out of wood, small as soap, and hopped it along the edge of the table. “The doctors said this could be prelude to waking up. But not to get excited.”
Esme was surprised the doctors would presume interest let alone enthusiasm in relatives who never came, never called, but then maybe to them family was just family; you can’t judge ’em all.
“Wow,” she said, because what else was there? Apparently, a lot. Linda got in close to the bird, as though talking to the bird. In fact she was talking to the bird; it sure as hell beat talking to Esme. She said, “Of all the things. Of all the times I imagined this happening.”
Now the bird was in her palm, eye to eye. “What’s that? You want to know what he said?” She faced the thing at Esme. “Go on, tell her,” and then, “Oh, fine, I’ll tell her. He said, you ready for this? He said Esme. Loud and clear, too. They were amazed. Not like he’d been asleep for a quarter of a century, not like he hadn’t used his lips in as long, but just like he was in the middle of a conversation. A heated one, too. They said he sounded mad.”
Esme had been shaking her head for a while. Her darling brother reliving their fight day after day, the anger still on his lips, with no sense of the years that had passed, him still fourteen years old. It is 1981. Ronald Reagan has just taken the oath. The president says, “We’re going to begin to act, beginning today,” and the next day, her brother’s life stops, and all because she let his friend ejaculate on her chest.
Linda continued to hop the bird across the table and even to chirp on its behalf, the stupid smile back on her face.
“Have you been to see him?” Esme said.
“He’s been screaming for a year, what do you think?”
“What screaming? He screams? Why didn’t anyone tell me?”
“Are you serious?”
Esme had begun to take issue with the bird and to concentrate anger in the bird and to make the bird proxy for all the ways she did not love her brother, daughter, parents, enough, and so, yes, she snatched it from Linda’s hand and hurled it over the balustrade.
Linda stood. She seemed verged on the kind of laugh that sizes you down for life. But no, she just stood. Stood and stretched and said, “Ida and me made pineapple upside-down cake. Let’s eat.”
“Now? I want to talk to you.”
“I’m hungry.” And with that she slapped the table, and the laugh Esme had braced for came out. Her brother speaks for the first time in twenty-four years and her mother wants pineapple upside-down cake? Esme leaned forward and had a good look—at her mother’s face and mostly her eyes. The red tracery of veins fencing her pupils. The Windex shine in each lens. The part where her lids were barely half-open, in contrast to Esme’s mouth, which was hanging way open now that she realized her mother was stoned. Had been stoned this whole time.
Esme knew Linda had smoked in the sixties, was a big old hippie. But she was seventy-one, and how did someone her age even acquire marijuana? The nearest neighbor was a soldier just back from Iraq. Maybe he got high for having killed in a war without cause and maybe because he also tended chickens and harvested their eggs and brought her mother a dozen every week, he brought her a little something else, too.
Linda cleared her throat, and, with the firmness Esme had come to expect from her but which was no comfort now, she said, “I want cake.”
Fine. They went inside. Her dad was at the computer in the living room, under a bearskin nailed to the wall. Not