The Reconstructionist by Nick Arvin Page A

houses – two storeys of white aluminum siding with faux shutters bracketing the windows, a TV antenna stuck up over the roof, every room carpeted, cottage-cheese texture on the ceilings, pink tile in the bathroom, green appliances in the kitchen, and an unfinished basement that was his father’s refuge and hiding place. He liked it for the isolation, but probably also because it stayed cool in the summer. Upstairs, as the concrete gathered the sun’s heat, they put box fans in the doorways and windows and ran them on high, so that loose papers and magazines lifted and fluttered and everyone yelled to be heard.
    Ellis and Christopher had always been separated by a certain incomprehension, and Christopher had often treated Ellis with disdain, but he also usually showed enough blithe kindness to pull Ellis’s guard down before eventually hitting him with something from his arsenal of understatement – the stare, the sneer, the too-childish compliment, the glance away, the unanswered question, the joke not laughed at. Even this treatment, at least, represented a kind of attention.
    What changed in the two years that Christopher was away never became clear to Ellis, and he could hardly even mount a reasonable theory of an answer. His only evidence was a series of very long low-voiced telephone conversations that his father had held during that period, slumped, staring down at the kitchen table, careful of being overheard. Years later Ellis asked his mother, and she claimed to be unaware of any change in Christopher’s manner. It surprised Ellis, and it took him some time to realise that her sense of permissible gossip was limited to the living.
    When Christopher returned, he couldn’t bear, it seemed, to talk to Ellis or his parents or even to look at them, as if to see their faces would give him hives. He made concessions for his father and, to a lesser degree, his stepmother, but he literally refused to speak to Ellis. Days passed before Christopher allowed Ellis so much as a chance meeting of eye contact. Ellis would have liked to return the disregard, but he wasn’t as good at it, he couldn’t entirely avoid, dismiss or forget his half-brother who, after all, lived under the same roof and ate at the same dinner table. He didn’t know what to do about it, and so he lived with it, like a needle in his skin. It pained and pained.
    One day he heard over the fans a lifted voice, his mother’s, outside. From the window he saw his father, his mother and Christopher standing around a large black coupé. When he stepped outside his mother was yelling, ‘– buy this?’
    ‘For Christopher, darling.’
    ‘You didn’t buy Christopher a car!’
    Dad’s gaze didn’t quite meet Mom’s. He turned and paced back and forward along the length of the car. Tall and thin except for a bulge at the belly, he walked with an up-and-down bob, like a towering bird. He looked bewildered and said over and over, ‘It’s only an old Fairlane,’ as if an old Fairlane weren’t a car, exactly.
    Then he added, excitedly, ‘And the radio only gets AM.’ Mom stared, then set her head back, held her arms straight and fisted at her sides, and made a long, thin wailing noise. Ellis and Christopher and Dad watched her, Dad grimacing. When she breathed he said, ‘Gosh, Denise.’
    She did it again.
    Dad slouched, and when she stopped he said, ‘Christopher’s sixteen.’
    She took a breath, but then Christopher opened the car door and slid into the driver’s seat. Mom said, ‘You’re not driving that.’
    Christopher closed the door and stared at her. After a second Dad said quietly, ‘Sure, you can go for a drive.’
    Mom shook her head, but hopelessly. Then she moved, at a run, around the car to the passenger door and opened it, as if to get inside. But she turned to Ellis. ‘Go with him.’ She leaned to peer at Christopher. ‘Take him.’
    While Ellis climbed in Christopher started the car and adjusted the rear-view mirror.