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  “I came by to tell you I was sorry,” he said at long last.

  “What for?”

  We were keeping our voices down. Almost to a whisper. Because my brother and my parents were sleeping in rooms down the hall.

  “Because I haven’t been talking to you much lately. I go out and talk to Zoe, and then I come back and I don’t even tell you what we talked about. And the whole thing was your idea. I wouldn’t even know her if it wasn’t for you. But . . . it’s kind of hard to explain. Have you ever been sitting on a bus bench with some total stranger and started thinking that you could tell them your whole life—everything you were thinking—even though you couldn’t tell your best friend?”

  Unfortunately, the answer to his question was no. I hadn’t had that feeling. But I wanted to be encouraging.

  Then I remembered how it was easier to hold the hand of a total stranger in an NA meeting than to hold hands with my own brother. It was less embarrassing somehow.

  It was confusing, so all I said was, “I’m not sure. Tell me more about it.”

  “It’s like you can talk to somebody who’s completely outside your life, and it feels safe. Because then when you’re done, you just go back to your life and there’s still nobody there who’s heard about all those feelings. It’s just feelings, Lucas. It’s nothing you don’t know. I’m not keeping any big secrets from you.”

  I was looking out the window at the birds. There were some birds—I think they were swallows—that had been making nests in the eaves right over my bedroom window. I like to watch them swoop and dive.

  “I didn’t figure it was any big secret,” I said.

  I mean, I knew his life. And what I knew felt bad enough. Then again, it didn’t seem much worse than mine. But I guess you never can tell. You know. From the outside like that.

  I remembered something Darren Weller had said to me. Different people have different reactions to things. That’s all.

  “You seem like you feel better,” I said after a time, when I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to answer. “I mean, I see you outside your house and everything. Do you feel better?”

  “Kind of yes and kind of no,” he said. “You put all that stuff out, and then it’s not really very different. But I guess at least it’s out. I’m not entirely sure what that does, just getting it on the outside of you like that, but it seems like it does something. But I did figure out one thing for sure.”

  He fell silent for a minute. I watched him fingering the loose threads around the hole in his jeans, and I didn’t ask. I didn’t dare ask what was the one thing he’d figured out.

  “It’s like . . . ,” he began. Then he faded, and I thought I might never know. “Zoe almost died. Well, you know that. You know it better than anybody. I guess she felt like nobody needed her around. But I do. I need her around. But she didn’t know it yet because she hadn’t even met me. But she was just about to meet me. All those years thinking nobody needed her or wanted her around, and she was just about to meet me and she didn’t know it. You get what I’m driving at?”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Well . . . now I’m starting to think . . . you don’t know what might be coming next. And it might even be something nice. Something good, even though everything before it wasn’t good at all. You see where I’m going with this?”

  “You’re saying you have to stick around to see what happens next.”

  I watched his face light up, and I knew I had hit it.

  “I knew you’d get it,” he said.

  It was a moment the likes of which we hadn’t had in a very long time. If we had ever had a moment like that one.

  He seemed satisfied that we had covered that topic, so he flew in an entirely new direction.

  “I’m trying to talk my mom into getting me a dog. Wouldn’t that be good?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “It would be great. Think she’ll do it?”

  “Not sure. She’s trying to talk me into a cat instead. She’s really paranoid about a dog doing something nasty on the rugs. She figures a cat would be trained to a litter box. I guess a cat would be okay, but . . . you can run with a dog.”

  “You’re thinking about taking up running?”

  “Yeah. Maybe. It sure did you a lot of good.”

  I took a deep breath and said something I really wanted badly not to say. But here’s the way I looked at it, and I still see it the same way now: you’re either a guy’s friend or you’re not.

  “You could always try running with Zoe’s dogs.”

  It actually hurt coming out. But I don’t think that mattered. I think what mattered is that I said it. No matter how it felt.

  “Nah,” he said. “That wouldn’t be right. I couldn’t do that to you. It’s enough that you shared Zoe with me. Running with those dogs, that’s your thing. I couldn’t horn in on that.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and didn’t elaborate. Or need to.

  “I’m going to go out there now,” he said. “But I figured it was high time I came by and talked.”

  Speaking of talking, I think by then we had forgotten to whisper and had begun to talk in our natural voices. Because my bedroom door flew open. Suddenly and almost violently. My mother stuck her head into the room as if she could catch me in some dastardly act. What act, I still don’t know. Did she think I had a girl in there?

  “Oh,” she said. “It’s you, Connor.”

  “I was just leaving,” Connor said.

  “Probably just as well,” she said. “Not that you’re not welcome here. But everybody else is asleep.” Of course, she said it pretty loudly. That was my mom for you.

  So that was the end of that talk. But it was okay, because we’d said enough. Really, we’d said everything we needed to say. At least for the moment.

  When Wednesday came around, I walked up to my brother Roy’s room to ask if he wanted me to go with him on the bus to the meeting. It was really a polite way of letting him know that I was pushing him to go, whether I was welcome in the Wednesday meeting or not.

  “You said you couldn’t go on Wednesdays,” he said. “You told me the Wednesday one was a closed meeting.”

  He was lying on his bed, bare chested, on his back. Curtains drawn closed. Hands linked behind his head. He seemed to be keeping himself busy by staring at the ceiling in the strangely dim room.

  “I’d still go with you,” I said. “I just wouldn’t come in. I could just sit outside and wait for you.”

  Speaking of waiting, I waited for him to tell me all about how it was an utterly ridiculous idea. I waited for him to say, “Why on earth would I need you to go back and forth on the bus with me just to sit outside?”

  He didn’t.

  “Yeah,” he said. “That would be good.”

  I was surprised, of course. But I didn’t argue.

  The first time we’d ridden the bus to the meeting together, we hadn’t talked much. This time was a slight improvement, because this time at least I talked.

  I told him about how I’d been running in the woods almost every day. And how I’d earned myself a place on the track team come fall, if I wanted it. But that I still didn’t think I wanted it.

  I told him about the guys on the track team who had given me trouble, and even about how Connor had gone after them.

  I told him about Libby Weller, though I didn’t state the exact reasons for our breakup. I just told him I learned pretty suddenly that she wasn’t a very nice person.

  I was purposely leaving out any mention of Zoe Dinsmore, because if it turned out he didn’t approve of her either, well . . . that just felt like more than I could take.

  I talked until I felt weird about doing so much talking. About filling the air of the mostly deserted bus with so many words. Especially since he was saying nothing in return.

  I watched him look out at the passing houses. His eyes were turned away from me, but I could see a perfect reflection of them in the bus window. He seemed to be focusing intently, but I had n
o idea on what. Maybe what I was saying. Maybe something else entirely. I got the sense that he was either listening carefully or not at all.

  I stopped talking. I think I’d run out of things to say.

  I got that feeling again—like I was looking at my brother but he wasn’t really my brother. Close, but not quite. I thought maybe when his foot was healed and he didn’t have to take the pain meds anymore, I would get him back.

  Maybe that’s why I’d gotten so wrapped up in the idea of his recovery.

  He turned and looked right into my face. Possibly for the first time since he’d gotten home.

  “Why didn’t you tell me all this?” he asked.

  “When?”

  “In your letters.”

  “Because it wasn’t important.”

  “Who says it wasn’t?”

  “How could it matter? You were seeing horrible things, and you had bullets whizzing by your ears. What difference did it make if I got a place on the track team or not? It’s stupid. It’s nothing. It wasn’t even worth wasting your time with stuff like that.”

  “But that’s the stuff I wanted to hear about. You know. Regular stuff. From home. Normal stuff, like my life was before.”

  “Oh,” I said. And then I felt absolutely horrible. “I didn’t think of that. I’m sorry.”

  He turned away and looked out the window again.

  “Whatever,” he said. “Don’t worry about it. You didn’t know.”

  I sat on the curb outside the meeting room door, watching the sun go down. The more it went down, the more I could stare at it without burning out my eyes and going blind.

  I couldn’t hear what was being said inside the meeting room, with one exception. When a person said his name, or her name, the whole group said hi back to them. I couldn’t hear the first part. I couldn’t hear anybody named Joe say his name, but I could hear the group say, “Hi, Joe.” And three or four minutes later, “Hi, Evelyn.” And five minutes after that, “Hi, Carlo.”

  Once, at what I thought was getting near the end, I heard everybody say, “Hi, Roy.”

  But if my brother was sharing, I never heard what he said.

  Maybe five minutes later the door flew open behind me. Light spilled out, followed by the sound of voices, followed by people. I got up and dusted off the seat of my jeans.

  Roy came limping out on his crutches and we walked off toward the bus stop together. Slowly.

  “Did you talk?” I asked him.

  “No.”

  “Oh. I heard them say hi to you.”

  “Yeah. That guy Joe called on me to share. But I didn’t want to. But he said, ‘Well, anyway, who are you?’”

  “Oh.” I tried not to let on that I was disappointed. I was guessing I failed. “Well, at least you said your name was Roy and you’re an addict. That’s something.”

  “I didn’t say that. I just said my name was Roy.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Okay.”

  We traveled the rest of the way home in complete silence.

  “That guy Joe” was leading the meeting on Friday. The one where I got to come in and listen again.

  He was a compact little guy with neatly combed hair and wire-rimmed glasses. Sort of the opposite of the tattooed motorcycle guys. Joe looked like more of a college man or a bookworm. Somebody you wouldn’t expect to see at an NA meeting, except for the fact that I was already learning not to cling too much to types. Addicts were more different kinds of people than I might’ve imagined.

  “My name is Joe and I’m an addict,” he said, when it was time for him to lead the sharing.

  Everyone in the room said, “Hi, Joe.” Even me.

  That is, everybody except Roy.

  “I don’t usually tell my whole story,” Joe began. “Because it’s a small town and I figure you guys have heard it, like, a gazillion times. But we have a newcomer, so . . .”

  His eyes flickered up to my brother Roy. Roy’s eyes did not flicker back. They remained glued to the table in front of us.

  “I never touched drugs ’til I was nineteen,” Joe said. “Never wanted to touch them, and never thought I would. And then I was in Nam. Sixty-five and sixty-six.”

  At that, Roy’s eyes flickered. They darted up and met Joe’s for just a fraction of a second, and then both guys looked away again. Quickly. Like the way you recoil after touching a hot stove.

  “You hear a lot about the drugs guys do over there, and everybody always figures you’re talking street drugs. Well, there was plenty of that, and I’ll get to it. But it didn’t start with that. It started with the drugs the army gave me.

  “I probably should’ve mentioned that I was never drafted. I joined up and volunteered to go. I thought there was something going on over there that was worth getting behind. I thought my government knew exactly what it was doing, which I guess is why, when they issued me drugs, I thought they must be okay. I mean, they wouldn’t give them to us if they weren’t okay. Right?”

  He paused for just a brief second, and I could feel Roy hanging on the pause. He was listening in a way I hadn’t seen him listen before. I could see it on his face.

  “When we’d go out on a mission, they’d issue us Darvon and codeine, which I didn’t much use. They were for the pain, and I was lucky enough not to have gotten injured. And then they gave us Dex. You know. Dexedrine. Heavy-duty speed. Really good-quality stuff straight from Uncle Sam. And sometimes they’d give us a steroid shot. We kind of knew what they were doing. They were experimenting with supersoldiers. Pharma-created supersoldiers. I didn’t get tired so easy with Dex. I could do so much more in a day and hardly feel it. But it wasn’t just about physical energy. The Dex made me feel powerful. Hell, it made me feel invincible. I could face anything on that stuff.

  “I didn’t find out until about a year after I got home that there was another reason for all that ‘better living through chemistry’ stuff. They were trying to get on top of combat stress. They figured out that drugs could help guys hold it together through the worst Nam had to offer. Guys break down under the stress, and this was mostly keeping it from happening. I had a counselor at the VA after I got home, and I don’t know if he was supposed to tell me this or not, but he told me the breakdown rate was ten percent in World War Two. Four percent in Korea. But Nam? One percent. Better living through chemistry, like I said. But then he told me the downside. What they learned in the long run. You give a guy enough drugs to hold it together during combat, it doesn’t keep him from the effects of the trauma. Just postpones it. It’s all there waiting for him when the drugs wear off. But, hell, I didn’t need him to tell me that. I was a case study in it by then.”

  He stopped to take a breath, and you could’ve heard a pin drop in that room. And everybody but Roy and me had heard this a gazillion times before.

  “So I started doing a ton of Dex,” Joe said. “You would think there’d be a limit to how much I could get, but there wasn’t. There was an amount the army recommended, but in my unit they were handing the stuff out like candy. I don’t know what it was like in other guys’ units, but that stuff flowed like a waterfall in mine. But the problem was, it wore off. And when it wore off, you felt so bad. I mean, you just wanted to chew somebody’s head off. So here we are, a bunch of guys with guns who were just about ready to murder somebody over nothing because it’s so hard to come down off that stuff. The more Dex I took, the worse it felt at the end of the day. And I couldn’t sleep. I tried the Darvon and codeine, but it wasn’t enough. So that’s when I started smoking scag.”

  I thought he would say what scag was on his next breath, but he didn’t. So I missed a sentence or two of his sharing, catching Roy’s attention.

  “What is that?” I whispered in his ear.

  “Heroin,” he mouthed back. No real sound.

  “. . . like, two dollars for a hit of really pure stuff, and it was everywhere. So I leave to go over there like this perfect Boy Scout, and I come back stateside addicted to both speed and heroin. Los
t my marriage and my little boy. My wife took him away and never told me where. I have no way to get in touch with her and tell her I have seven months clean and sober. I’ve been looking for them this whole time, but nothing so far. But my sponsor’s always telling me it takes time to clean up the wreckage of my past. Anyway, I have a decent job now, and a car that runs about ninety-five percent of the time. And that’s not bad for seven months. And I can get to sleep at night without using anything. I still don’t usually sleep too long, though. Like, two hours at a time. If I get down too deep, the nightmares start to get their hooks in.”

  His eyes tracked over to Roy again.

  I wondered if Roy had nightmares. If so, he had them quietly.

  “That’s all I got to say for now,” Joe said. “Roy? You got anything you want to share?”

  “No,” Roy said.

  This time Joe did not even push him to say his name before the sharing moved on.

  “Give you guys a lift home?”

  We were walking through the parking lot when we heard it.

  I stopped and turned. Roy kept going.

  It was Joe.

  “Roy,” I called. “Wouldn’t it be a whole lot easier on your foot to take the ride?”

  I watched him teeter to a halt on his crutches. Secure his balance. I watched his resistance crumble.

  “I guess,” he said. “Yeah.”

  I knew he didn’t want to get into a car with Joe, so I took his agreement to mean that he was in even more pain than I realized.

  We moved off toward Joe’s car together. Slowly.

  Joe drove a powder-blue Corvair, which was a model of car my mother once told me she would never so much as go near. Apparently they were not big on safety, those Corvairs. I didn’t care. I could tell Roy was tired and discouraged, and I just wanted to get us home.

  Joe slid the seat way back on the passenger’s side to accommodate Roy’s crutches and bad foot. He helped my brother ease in. Then he came around the driver’s side and held his seat forward, and I had to practically fold myself in half to fit into the tiny back seat.