The Open Curtain Read online

  He stopped at the cement plant and telephoned but nobody answered. He kept driving anyway. Lael was not waiting outside. He parked outside the house, blew his horn, waited straddling the Vespa’s saddle to see if he would come out. When he did not, Rudd kicked the scooter onto its stand, slipped off the back, picked his way across the lawn and to the door.

  Lael’s mother was already opening the door by the time he reached out to ring the doorbell.

  “Don’t walk across the lawn,” she said through the screen. “How many times do I have to tell you?”

  She had never spoken to him before, at least not face-to-face. He had only seen her peering through the drapes and, once, on the front porch with her arms folded across her front. “Sorry,” he said.

  “What do you want here? Why do you come around here?”

  “To see Lael.”

  “To see what?” she said.

  “Lael,” he said.

  “Lyle?” she said.

  “Uh,” he said. Your son, he was about to say, but she was already shutting the door.

  He stood on the concrete porch. After a while he walked back to his scooter, sat on it. Putting his hands on the grips, he twisted the rubber. He could see Lael’s mother still looking at him through the window from behind the curtains.

  He got off the scooter, started across the lawn toward the door, then doubled back and went up the walk. He rang the doorbell, was surprised when she opened it.

  “What is it?” she said. But before he could answer she’d turned, was walking slowly back down the hall, away from him. Then she was gone. He stepped into the house and stood just inside the door. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. After a while, he stepped out again.

  Five minutes later he could see her coming down the hall again, toward him. Her hair was wet now, mascara streaking her face. And there was Lael suddenly behind her, gliding past. He came past her and onto the porch and past Rudd and across the lawn to the scooter. In the house Lael’s mother kept coming slowly toward Rudd, arms out. Rudd stood hesitating at the doorway, watching her. Her wrists, pushed in front of her, seemed thick, almost swollen. Behind him, he heard Lael kick the scooter to life.

  “Come on,” Lael called, cupping his hands around his mouth. “Come on.”

  Rudd turned to go and left the porch, trying not to look behind him. He ran out to the street, climbed on.

  “What was that all about?” Rudd asked.

  Lael shook his head, laughed. “Welcome to my world,” he said, and drove.

  It was a phrase that for a time was caught in his head. Welcome to my world. He heard it for hours at a time, over and over again, always in Lael’s voice.

  Sometimes, he realized, his own lips were moving. It was like a virus, as if a part of Lael, translated into speech, had penetrated his skull. As it cycled, he waited to see if it would take hold of a portion of his head completely or fade into the babble of borrowed and now indecipherable voices upon which the whole anxious and tenuous surface of his thought was awash.

  At night, in bed, he stared up at the ceiling and thought of Lael. It had taken Rudd weeks to tell him what he knew, to reveal to Lael that they were half-brothers. Yet when he had, there had been no shock, no surprise.

  “Tell me something I don’t know,” Lael had said.

  “You already knew? Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I could ask the same of you.”

  He always had a sense that at any moment Lael would be willing to walk away and never see him again, that the only reason Lael saw him now was out of a kind of indulgence—whether of Rudd or of himself was hard to say. He was little more than tolerated, Rudd felt, and the closer he grew to Lael the more he felt how much he held himself apart. It made him wish that Lael’s voice saying welcome to my world would swell and expand and take him and consume him.

  And then in his worry he forgot the phrase for a time before it sprang on him again unawares, a static vision of Lael flashing up before his eyes in accompaniment.

  5

  Things began to go odd on one of their many long rides, this one up Provo Canyon, to the picnic tables at the foot of the mountain and beside the railroad trestle that crossed the river. They were sitting there, beside the scooter they had driven past the chains and over the gravel paths, watching the swirl of the water, the motor ticking as it cooled, when Rudd realized Lael was staring at him.

  “What is it?” Rudd asked.

  Lael shrugged, kept staring.

  Rudd made a point of looking away, down at the water. He kept his eyes there, then followed the trestle up to the top, to where some kids were drinking beer from Seven-Up bottles and sunning themselves, sometimes jumping into the pool below. When he allowed himself to flick his gaze back, Lael was still looking at him.

  “What?”

  “You really don’t hide anything, do you?”

  “What do I have to hide?”

  “Nothing,” said Lael. “Not yet.”

  Rudd tried to press him but he would speak no further. They stayed idly near the river another half hour, then wandered across the trestle and climbed a shale draw to the dull hospital-green water pipe winding along the mountainside.

  Rudd watched Lael put his feet on the bolts at a joint, climb up the side and onto the top. He stood balanced atop the pipe.

  “Come on up,” he said.

  “No,” said Rudd.

  “What?” said Lael, suddenly interested. “Don’t you love your brother enough to join him?”

  “It’s got nothing to do with you,” Rudd said. “I can’t stand heights.”

  “Hell, Rudd,” said Lael. “You just climbed the side of a mountain.”

  “That’s different,” said Rudd. “There’s no drop, just a steady slope.”

  “Could kill you either way. Come up.”

  “No.”

  Lael danced atop the pipe. “Come on,” he said. “It’s perfectly safe.” He squatted, reached his hand down. “If you can’t trust your brother, who can you trust?”

  “It isn’t that,” said Rudd.

  “Trust me. Prove you’re my brother. Trust me.”

  Later Rudd thought, I am only his half-brother, I can only trust him halfway. But at the time he did not think it. Instead, he reached out and took his half-brother’s proffered hand, put his foot on a bolt, and let himself be drawn up. He was on his hands and knees atop the warm pipe, not moving, the world slowly swaying around him. He felt Lael drag him up, felt his brother’s hands pushing him, the world slowly yawing and turning. Things were going dim. After that, he remembered nothing.

  He awoke in the hospital, his mother beside him. His arm was broken, in a cast to the elbow, his head wrapped in gauze. There were cuts up and down his arm.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “You’re awake,” said his mother, then slapped him hard. “Don’t you ever,” she said. “You’re lucky I came at all.”

  “Lael brought me?”

  “What?” she said. “You brought yourself in.”

  “Where’s Lael?”

  “Lyle who?”

  “No,” he said. “There’s—”

  “Listen to me,” she said. “It was just you.”

  He was given pills. He listened to her talk, her voice blurring and growing faint. He closed his eyes. When he opened them again, she was gone, Lael occupying her place, exactly.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked Lael.

  “Do what?”

  “Push me.”

  “I didn’t push you,” Lael said. “You let yourself go.”

  Rudd went home, asking the desk on the way out who had admitted him. They looked up the file. He had driven himself in, broken arm and all, on his scooter.

  Each day, his mother changed the dressing on his head, bathing his cuts with lukewarm water. The arm began to itch in the cast, and he scratched inside of it first with a pen and then with a bent coat hanger. At school, the novelty of a cast got a few people to talk to him who no
rmally didn’t acknowledge him. He invited them to sign his cast. Get well, most wrote. David Nimblett wrote, Injured in the Line of Duty and drew a saluting stick figure. Bryan King, smirking, wrote, Break a leg. Then the doctor cut the cast off and his life went back to normal, only his forearm was smaller and lumped in the middle.

  He would not see Lael, he told himself the first weekend his cast was off, but by noon he was sick to death of his mother and changed his mind. He drove with one hand, precariously, the injured arm resting against his thigh.

  He saw Lael once a week after that. He knew immediately something was different, yet it took days for him to realize Lael had started making a game out of everything, testing him. Lael offered the oddest appeals to brotherhood, at the oddest possible moments. Outside of these moments he did not mention their being brothers at all—as if brotherhood were a kind of bond activated only in extremis. Most of the time, Lael was detached, hardly present. Only at those moments when he dared Rudd to do what he would otherwise have avoided did Lael turn fully toward him. This turning was unpredictable, hardly encouraged by the same thing twice. It could come in his trying to convince Rudd to turn around and lie down while the scooter was in mid-flight, to put his chest on the back rack and hang his fingers down close enough to the ground to brush against the asphalt. Or in suggesting that Rudd throw a rock at a dog or at a window. But it could be something simpler, like forcing Rudd to ask a question of an attractive girl working at JCPenney Indeed, Lael always had an ability to single out from very different situations what would make Rudd most uncomfortable. Rudd himself never could guess when his half-brother would turn toward him, call him brother, try to coax him into a painful fellowship.

  Three months later, cruising south on farm roads near Spanish Fork, Rudd looked over Lael’s shoulder, saw the gas gauge near empty.

  “We have to get back to town,” he said, speaking loud against the wind.

  Lael slowed, then sped up again.

  Rudd leaned forward, putting his mouth near Lael’s ear. “Turn around,” he said.

  Lael didn’t look back, didn’t slow down. Rudd pushed up against him, reached past to tap the gas gauge.

  “We’re almost out of gas.”

  “Just a mile more,” said Lael. “Then I’ll turn around.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Nowhere.”

  They drove past a farmhouse, then a whitewashed barn, lines offences with cattle scattered behind them. A drainage pipe appeared, opened into a narrow, slow-moving creek.

  “Lael,” he said.

  “Just a little more.”

  They went through a crossing, past an old rusted-out tractor that was rolled off the road, nose-first into a ditch. The barbed-wire fencing gave way to simple split-rail, the pasture to an organized field, thick with the crenate leaves of a plant he couldn’t identify, then another field, this one corn. A feed truck rattled past, flecks of hay swirling across their windscreen and over their faces, tufting on Lael’s shirt and in his hair. An old man in a red Chevy two-ton waved slowly, as if underwater.

  “Lael, now,” Rudd said.

  “No,” said Lael.

  “What?”

  “I’m not turning back.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Let’s see how far we can go.”

  “But we won’t get back,” Rudd shouted.

  “Who cares if we get back?”

  “I do,” he said, and then, when Lael did not answer, again, “I do.”

  Rudd reached forward, tried to pry Lael’s hands off the grips. Lael held fast, the scooter swerving slightly.

  “Swear to God,” said Lael. “Keep that up and I’ll kill us both.”

  Rudd let go, gave up. He leaned back, kept silent until he heard the engine sputter and surge, then die. As they coasted to a stop, he got the sense somehow, through the back of Lael’s head, that his half-brother was smiling.

  6

  It was essential, Rudd’s senior English teacher, Mrs. Madison, insisted, that they learn how to do research. Whether they were going on to college or planning to work in the common sector, researching was a useful skill. For several days, attempting to convince herself as much as the students, Mrs. Madison kept repeating the words common sector until Rudd found them lodged in his own head.

  On the third day Jenny Kindt, a pale and freckled redhead whose cheeriness had suffered a setback after her sister’s drug overdose and subsequent death the year before, called the bluff and asked how research could possibly be important in the common sector. Mrs. Madison made the mistake of resorting to day-to-day, hands-on examples.

  “Say you’re working in a grocery story and a customer asks you a fact about broccoli. You’ve got to know how to research it.”

  “I’d tell her to ask the manager,” said Jenny. The class laughed.

  Mrs. Madison shook her head. She stood before the class looking somewhat bedraggled. She hooked her stringy hair behind an ear.

  “No,” she said. “Say it’s not something the grocery store manager would know offhand. Something else.”

  “Like what?”

  “What culture was the first to use broccoli as a food?”

  “I don’t want to know that.” Laughter again.

  “But what if a customer wants to know?”

  “I’d tell her to go ask the manager. If the manager doesn’t know, that’s his problem, not mine.”

  “Look,” said Mrs. Madison, her voice rising. “Research is just important. It just is.”

  Rudd found himself on both sides, sympathizing with Mrs. Madison, whom he liked, who seemed to like him, yet wanting to laugh. It was not as simple as feeling torn, for while at one moment he was torn, in the next he found himself at a cold remove, the people and the room as a whole crystalline and distinct.

  Common sector, he heard in his head, the speech in the room and the laughter coming to him as though swaddled in cotton. Common sector. This coldness was, he felt he knew somehow, the way that Lael must feel all the time. He felt that if he had been before a mirror he would see not his own face but the face of his half-brother. He tried to catch his reflection in Mrs. Madison’s glasses, but she was too far away. And almost immediately the vibratory moment passed.

  There were strange spattered moments like that, where he felt he had understood something about his half-brother, something he could never quite verify and which he could hardly ask Lael about. As if the weekly proximity to Lael had weakened his skin and let his brother leak in. As he rode on the back of the scooter, his face pressed against Lael’s back, he felt that even once he was separated from him he would be joined to him still.

  Lael did not seem to feel this. It was as if Lael remained always unscathed, self-contained. Lael could leak into him but not he into Lael. What he felt only rarely and infrequently—the cold remove—seemed to him, at least as far as he could tell, Lael’s dominant state. For if Lael felt anything, he rarely expressed it, and anything Lael did express toward Rudd felt pasted on, not so much an actual feeling as a kind of taunt or dare.

  Yet perhaps he had gotten his half-brother all wrong.

  Rudd stared at a blank sheet of paper. He was asked to write down ideas.

  “Ideas for what?” he said.

  “For the research topic, stupid,” Steve Kilpatrick told him.

  On the blackboard, overlaying a haze of chalk dust, had been written:

  Start simple:

  Where would you like to live?

  What is your heritage?

  What decade fascinates you?

  Who is your hero?

  He did not have any heros, he told himself. None at all. In Sunday school when he was twelve they had asked him the same question, some strategy for an object lesson, and he sat there holding his pencil trying to come up with something. When they went around the circle giving their responses he hadn’t known what to say, so remained silent until they passed him by. Jesus, the others had said, except for one who said Rush Limbaugh
.

  He copied the questions off the blackboard and onto his paper, leaving four blank lines between each.

  Where would you like to live?

  Springville, he wrote, then crossed it out and wrote, Anywhere but here. But on reflection it seemed like the sort of response likely to get him into trouble. Debbie White, seated next to him, had written California. He knew that he wanted to be as far from Debbie White as possible. He crossed his phrase out and wrote, New York.

  What is your heritage?

  He did not know what to say. His father was dead and his mother, he felt, had reduced him in memory to a nonspecific and general figure of good, a sort of vague and lifeless avatar of Mormon ideals. Yet his father, he knew, had slept with Anne Korth—had perhaps even been secretly and polygamously married to her or perhaps simply had no qualms, despite being an avatar of Mormonism, about committing adultery. But for the purpose of a school assignment, he would give both his father and mother the benefit of the doubt.

  Mormonism, he wrote. In the classical sense.

  What decade fascinates you?

  What was this about? What did Mrs. Madison want to hear? He looked up and judged her hairstyle, the cut of her white dress, then wrote, 1900s.

  Mrs. Madison was in the front of the class, hands behind her back, stepping tentatively from one end of the blackboard to the other. When he capped his pen, she hurried to his desk.

  “Finished?” she asked. “May I?”

  She took the sheet of paper off his desk, read through it quickly.

  “Surely you have a hero.”

  “Not really.”

  “It doesn’t have to be someone famous, Rudd,” she said. “It can be anyone. Your father, say.”

  “My father’s dead,” he said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, and pretended to be reading the list again.

  He died in the common sector, Rudd thought to himself, though he knew this was not precisely true.

  “So what do we have?” she said. “New York, Mormonism, 1900s. What’s at the intersection of those words?”