Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt Page A

grass pressed against his back and with muddy, open shoes. He brought home a smell of something she had forgotten, with Martin in the broad bed crying out, “Margaret!”
    Of course, there were resentments, she explained, Martin’s version of things, what he called “assaults by that punk-mouthed brother of yours,” then added, “Yours the family with the fucked-up genes—lucky you can’t pass them along.”
    “My fault,” Margaret said to the girls, hands cupped between her legs. “My fault he was my brother. I could not scold him. I liked to kiss him instead. I liked to rub my thumb along his front teeth, sit in his room and watch him sleep.” In sleep, his body was newly heavy and unmarked—breath fluttering the hollow of his neck. She said, “I was meant to see him, but not like that.”
    “No, no, no, no, no,” Margaret cried, but when the girls appeared confused, she said, “Remember who saw him last.”
    Late night or early morning, the hallway narrowedto a tunnel in the light from the end where he stood. He was returned but about to leave. His loose clothes undone confused her, but his sideways moves she understood. She had experienced before the unexpected charge of his unexpected smile, the hands lifted as in blessing: good-bye, good-bye!
    But wait!
    She had been waiting for him; she was awake, brushing aside other versions of his story—the one with the coroner’s instruments or the one where the heart gave out softly, and she pointed to that place on herself.
    “My brother’s heart,” she told the girls. “I have heard its tricked beat. I have kept him company here,” Margaret said, and she opened the door for the girls to see his bedroom, the sheeted windows and the cutouts, things tossed, tented or on a tilt—in some ways just a boy’s room, no matter what was written on the wall. Impossible to make out anyway, his aggressive urban scrawl, his tag—whatever was his name—he wrote it where she walked from work past the diplomatic row, the promenade, the padlocked buildings. His bullying design was everywhere she looked.
    His face, too, his wounded face—the bruised hollows of his eyes and his eyes so thickly lashed and sleepy—was the first version of his face Margaret saw. Here the skin’s imperfections, summer-oiled and over-wrought, were more pronounced than in the colder seasons when confronted with the smallness of his face behind a scarf. Outside, or on the way outside, the brother’s skin was close in winter, blown clear, cheeks a wind-scratched rouge. Yet she did not move to touchthat face or the others that occurred to her out of order but up-to-date. Margaret told the girls, “Of the little boy he was, I remember less and less.”
    A swatch of baby hair—shades lighter—and the slatted cage that was his chest, veiny threading everywhere.
    Nails soft enough to bite off.
    A new body very clean.
    Shoes.
    Hands again.
    The sweated valleys between his fingers, his fingers ringed at the knuckles—and then not—but squaring at the ends to an older boy’s hands, drumming the kitchen counter.
    “Hush with that noise! You’ll wake Martin,” she scolded, then asked, “What is it you want?”
    The brother grinned his hungry face, the one he wore when the drugs wore off, and he propped himself against the cupboards. This face was a face she knew regardless of season—slack or sly, it was hard to tell—but his eyelids twitched and his speech slurred in its wavering volume of request. “Do you still—” he began.
    “Still what?” she asked. “What?” She could not understand! “What is it you want?” she asked this brother again and again. “What is it?”
    When anything, she told the girls, she would have given him anything—and he knew this.
    He was spoiled.
    “Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes,” the girls said. They said, “Margaret, we’ve been there.”
    “But he didn’t answer,” Margaret said. “That timehe was in my arms—flat out on the floor I found him