Fiction | Novella

How to Be a Family

A married couple and their twin sons weather the heartbreaks and savor the joys of family life over decades in this novella.

We moved to St. Louis Park when I got pregnant. It was winter, and mostly I wanted to die. Reagan was president. I vomited constantly. The twins kicked each other inside me, and though the nausea got better, the president and the kicking got worse. In the spring, you took me canoeing on Lake Calhoun, and I was afraid that the babies’ war in my uterus might capsize the boat. For the first few weeks after they were born, I felt a phantom kick each time one of them pedaled his little leg in the air.

We had thought twins would be convenient. We’d always wanted two, and I was happy not to repeat the cracked nipples and swollen flesh. Of course, there were longer-lasting appeals: the neat family unit, the air of compromise. Our boys would never be lonely. They would never have to scrabble for attention. No sibling rivalry, we told each other. No hand-me-downs. No imaginary friends.

Even our mothers were pleased. Our previous compromises, the intentional ones, had infuriated them both. At our wedding, my mother refused to shake the rabbi’s hand. Yours wrapped herself in Brighton Beach furs, though it was April and unseasonably warm. She gave a toast to the great state of Minnesota, may you remember it fondly when you leave.

She arrived in Minneapolis the day after the twins did, bearing two knit blankets, a suitcase of black-and-white cookies, and a horseshoe-shaped ice pack that she promised I would appreciate. She cradled Evan in my hospital room and observed, “He’s very red.”

He was red. Jacob was yellow and waxy in a way that disturbed me. He seemed puny, underdeveloped, like a plant left too far from the light. Once we brought the twins home, I noticed that both you and your mother preferred holding Evan, and that when our friends came to visit, you always handed them Evan first.

Jacob changed color slowly. He waved his fists slowly. His cry was a strange little bleat. When I returned to work, I asked the daycare owner to feed Jacob before she fed Evan.

“You know, bottles aren’t like breasts,” she pointed out. “I know when a bottle’s half done.”

I defended myself. “I just want to make sure he grows.”

For Christmas, we drove to Grand Rapids. It was the sole point on which I had refused to negotiate. Our sons were foreskin-free and unbaptized, our new house walking distance from three synagogues, but over my dead body would my children miss drinking eggnog and un-stuffing stockings with my sisters’ army of kids.

The first year, I regretted my insistence. Evan shrieked the whole time. You took him to our bedroom and sang for hours, camp songs and Bob Dylan, anything to keep him quiet. Jacob, on the other hand, allowed himself to be passed from aunt to aunt. He cooed and chirped at them, cheeks fat with health.

“He’s going to be a big boy,” my sister Caroline told me, and I believed her. For the first time since the boys were born, I looked at Jacob and felt love unmixed with fear.

Jacob was big, but Evan was bigger. He crawled, cruised, and stood before Jacob did. Jacob spoke first: Mama, then Evan, then spoon. Evan ate solid food at fourteen months. Jacob devoted months fifteen through eighteen to a Fisher-Price xylophone that you, exhausted and exasperated, threw away one long Sunday afternoon.

I replaced Jacob’s xylophone, and as the boys grew older, I replaced the toys Evan wrecked. He ripped ears from teddy bears, popped heads off soldiers, and shredded foam bath toys to bits. At the Aquatic Park, he cracked kickboards in half and lost two rubber torpedoes to the drain. You tried to rescue the first one and surfaced red-faced and panting, your empty hands coated in greenish-black muck.

“Nothing?” I asked.

You spat a stream of chlorinated water on the hot white cement. “Nothing.”

We’d imagined that our twins might speak a secret language, but instead, they invented a physical code. At home it resembled semaphore, but once school began, the signs became smaller and subtler. I had to work during second-grade parent conferences, and you called my office to report that Jacob was transmitting quiz answers to Evan via facial movement.

“Does the teacher know that for sure?”

“Rebecca.” You sounded annoyed. “Do you doubt it?”

“Fine. We’ll tell him to stop.”

Jacob was uninterested in stopping. “Evan is my brother,” he said that night, crossing his arms over his chest. At seven, he had your cowlicks, your feral amber eyes. “I will help him.”

“That’s not how school works,” I started, but Jacob sat down on the rug and shook his head alarmingly hard.

“Wrong,” he said. “I will help.”

When I returned to work, I asked the daycare owner to feed Jacob before she fed Evan.
“You know, bottles aren’t like breasts,” she pointed out. “I know when a bottle’s half done.”

After that, the school put the boys in separate classes, but you still worried that Jacob overshadowed Evan intellectually. I worried that Evan overshadowed Jacob socially. At birthday parties, Evan led swarms of kids from game to game, letting his brother trail within the pack. We signed them up for Little League, and Evan was team captain every year. In the summers, we took them camping in the Boundary Waters, and while Evan recruited gangs of kids to play Freeze Tag, Jacob parked himself on tree stumps and read. In Hebrew school, both twins revealed mischievous streaks, but where Evan was Whoopee cushion-oriented for the most part, Jacob’s pranks were slow burners, designed to impress not his classmates, but his father. He never admitted it, but I saw how his eyes locked on you when the rabbi called to report his latest crime: filling the teacher’s water bottle with clear gelatin, releasing a cricket in the cantor’s office, persuading his entire class to use the word xylophone in every sentence.

When you heard the last one, you flushed red. “We send you to Hebrew school to learn about your heritage,” you snapped, not bothering to hang up the phone. “Try to show some respect.”

That night, I told you not to be so hard on Jacob. “He’s only ten.”

“I was a ten-year-old wise-ass once, too.”

I cupped water in my hands, splashed and soaped my face. “So you should understand what he wants,” I said, eyes closed.

You didn’t reply, but I felt you move toward me, smelled your Listerine and office sweat. I ducked my head beneath the faucet, and you put your hands on my waist. Every Christmas, my sisters told me I gave you too much. He picked the neighborhood, they said. He picked the religion, the kids’ activities, their school. What does he leave up to you?

I never had an answer. Now, I kept my eyes shut as you guided me into the bedroom. After we finished, you settled your head in the crook of my neck. “I know I’m hard on Jacob,” you said. “I just don’t want him turning into one of those ratty little Jewish guys.”

“Ratty?”

“You know. The squirmy little ones. Shifty.”

“Listen to yourself.” I pushed you away. “Shifty. If I said that, you’d divorce me on grounds of anti-Semitism.”

“I don’t think they accept that in court.”

“Izzy.”

“I’m looking out for him.” Your voice twisted. “He’s not going to stay in St. Jewish Park his whole life.”

The pranks stopped after the xylophone incident, and Jacob’s social skills picked up. Middle school was supposed to be a difficult time to parent, but for us and for the twins, it was charmed. The boys had friends, shared and separate, and they were friends with each other. At their bar mitzvah, each one insisted on making a toast.

“To my brother,” Evan said, raising his glass of Sprite. His polyester kippah slid down the back of his head. “Who learned both our Torah portions so he could help me.”

“To my brother,” Jacob replied. “Who’s about to show me how to dance.”

Evan had rhythm, and enthusiasm. Mostly, he had a desperate need to move. When we visited your mother in Brooklyn, he ran up and down her building’s stairs. When we visited my mother in Grand Rapids, he tramped circles in her old snowshoes, organized the cousins into football teams, begged to be taught how to ski. He unearthed my father’s Nordic sweaters, which fit him perfectly. On Jacob, they looked absurd.

The Christmas the twins were thirteen, my sister Melinda took them ice fishing, reminding me of your first winters with my family, the afternoons we’d spend with my father in his ice house. What’s the point? you’d ask in bed. Why can’t he hate me where it’s warm?

“You don’t have to go,” you told the boys, but Melinda bundled them out the door. Jacob came back two hours later, stiff with boredom and cold.

“Where’s your brother?” I asked, and he shook his head.

“Loving it. I should have listened to Dad.”

When the boys began high school, we made a rule against going places alone. There were others—no closed bedroom doors, no undisclosed locations, curfew is eleven o’clock—but that was the most important. “No splitting up,” I told them. “Ever. We’re trusting you to keep each other safe.”

The risk we expected was drunk driving. Evan was on the varsity football team, and we knew he’d play varsity baseball. We didn’t want him returning from games in the seniors’ falling-apart Volvos, let alone coming home from parties late at night. “This way,” you reasoned, “he gets to participate, Jacob goes to some parties, and they both keep each other in check.”

We hadn’t anticipated the number of parties Jacob would want to go to. Football parties, baseball parties, theater parties, debate parties. All-ages punk shows, hip-hop shows, the occasional rave. In the car, I listened to the boys fighting about how close to the speakers to stand. “It gives me a headache,” Evan complained.

Jacob groaned. “Jesus, Ev,” he said. Then he leaned toward the front seat. “Mom, how much longer do I have to drag him around?”

“No splitting up,” I told them. “Ever. We’re trusting you to keep each other safe.”

Jacob hated our rules, but they suited Evan. He needed an excuse not to drink much. He was concerned with fitting in, but more concerned with his training regimen. He wanted a higher batting average. By sophomore year, his recruitment prospects were high.

“I don’t want to get you excited,” Coach Colvin told us at City finals. Evan stood behind him, pink-cheeked and exhausted, covered in grass stains and diamond dust. “But get excited.”

After that, we released the boys from the no-splitting-up rule. I intended it as an act of mercy. Jacob had begun treating Evan like a charge, or a chore. There was no more homework help, no more code. We’d forced them on each other too much.

The results were not what I had hoped. Evan vanished into a world of locker rooms and sunflower seeds, bench presses and endless jump rope in the backyard. Jacob seemed unaffected. He went to the same concerts, the same parties, spent the same amount of time prone on the couch with a book. Only when he got caught did we realize that he’d used his new freedom to become St. Louis Park’s most successful teenage drug dealer.

The cops called on our anniversary. Evan was at a teammate’s house, Jacob supposedly at a punk show. The charge was possession, but to us, he confessed his intent to distribute. You were irate. I felt betrayed. I had never imagined that our son would use his prodigious intelligence, his increasing social capital, his privilege, our trust in him, to— “What, Jacob? Sell speed to private-school girls?”

He was sentenced to six months of community service. His emotions were impossible to read. Both yours and Evan’s were clear. Evan refused to be seen with Jacob, or to walk into St. Louis Park High School through the same doors. And you: weeks later, you wouldn’t look Jacob in the eye.

Still, I asked you to talk to Evan. You gave me a bitter laugh. “About what?”

“Treating Jacob better.”

“Have you ever told Jacob to treat Evan better?”

“I thought—” There was no point rehashing. I thought Jacob would treat Evan well once they were no longer shackled together. Now I understood that the shackles were permanent, there from birth.

When I didn’t continue, you told me, “I’m teaching Evan how to drive. Starting tomorrow. That school’s driver’s ed is worthless.”

“What about Jacob?”

“He can drive when his community service is done.”

I bought Jacob a bus pass, but it went unused. While you and Evan wheeled through the suburbs together, he sprawled on the couch, watching Jeopardy! and refusing to speak. The house took on a frozen, silent quality. I maneuvered around him, reading the grant reports I brought home every Friday and washing Evan’s infinitely stained practice shorts. To fill air, I tried calling my sisters, but their voices were flat and robotic, the conversations stamped out like tin. Every child was happy, every husband thriving at work. Mom was still healthy. Dad was still dead. The ice on the lake was thinning. There was a new Mexican restaurant in town.

I tried NPR, then books on tape. I listened to the Current, which played only music I hated. I devoted myself to complex, chatty cookbooks—Julia Child, Madhur Jaffrey, Marcella Hazan—and though I’d only hoped for the authors’ company, the food woke Jacob from his six-month sulk. He began wandering through the kitchen, dipping his finger in the Bolognese pot or swiping carrot ends from my cutting board. The Saturday of Evan’s last football game, Jacob appeared in the living room with Classic Italian Cooking and said, “What if we made scaloppini?”

I tried calling my sisters, but their voices were flat and robotic, the conversations stamped out like tin. Every child was happy, every husband thriving at work. Mom was still healthy. Dad was still dead.

He was an excellent cook. He had the right flavor instincts, the patience to caramelize onions. We baked bread, stuffed dumplings, made tortellini from scratch. The Vikings got to NFC Championships that winter, and Jacob made his own nachos for the game, frying tortillas and mixing three cheeses for the sauce. Evan laughed at him, but when we lost, he cursed Gary Anderson with a mouth full of pickled jalapeños and cold chips. After the game, he told Jacob, “You could be a chef. Seriously. You could be the Nacho King.”

You sneered, but Jacob repeated the comment to me the next weekend with some pride. “He wasn’t being an asshole. And maybe he’s got the right idea.”

“You want to be the Nacho King?”

“I mean maybe I should be a chef. Go to culinary school.”

“I thought you were excited for college.”

“I won’t get any money.”

“Jacob.” I kept my voice level, but my thumb sank into the tomato I was grating. I set it down. “First of all, you don’t know that. Second, your father and I have been saving for your whole life.”

He ignored me. “I have a criminal record.”

“You know that won’t be true. It gets erased as soon as you finish community service.”

“I still have to report it. The colleges ask.” He was forming meatballs as he spoke, tossing each one from palm to palm.

“Have you talked to the guidance counselor?”

He nodded. Raw meat glistened on his hands. We had met with the guidance counselor together that fall. She had spoken of honors programs, merit scholarships. Unusually promising, she’d said.

“What did she tell you?”

“‘Save up.’”

Numbers clacked through my head. Two boys, two nonprofit jobs, one mortgage, one home nurse in Brooklyn, one combined college savings account. I put an arm around my second son, staining his shirt with tomato pulp. “We’ve got a year,” I told him. “We’ll figure it out.”

He was an excellent cook. He had the right flavor instincts, the patience to caramelize onions.

When I aired the issue to you that night, you were unsympathetic. “He needs to learn that his actions have consequences.”

“Izzy!” I sat up. “He’s our son.”

You pulled the quilt higher. “That’s why we have to make him take responsibility. We have to teach him.”

I didn’t know how to respond. After a moment, you closed your eyes, which made you look young and fragile. When we met, in college, it was your fragility that drew me to you. I loved your translucent eyelids, your hollow cheeks, your long narrow fingers that tapered at the ends. Your father had been a sculptor, you told me on our first date, and I’d imagined you shaping clay, or polishing marble to a slick shine.

Now, you spoke like the prosecutor you had briefly been. Your terms were a final punishment. Access to our college savings account was a privilege, not a right, and it was a privilege only Evan had earned. If Jacob didn’t get a scholarship, he would have to pay for his freshman year himself.

I couldn’t persuade you. Not with sex, not with pleading, not with silence. “You want to make Jacob hate you?” I asked, but you were implacable.

“When he’s an adult, he’ll be grateful.”

I tried to stay calm while you told Jacob. I knew it was important to present a united front. You spoke about responsibility and taking ownership. Jacob nodded, then turned to me. I shook my head.

“Any questions?” you asked, like you were conducting a board meeting.

“No questions.” Jacob’s face was contorted with effort. Overhead, I heard the rhythmic thud of Evan doing sit-ups. “Guess I better go work on my resume.”

That Saturday, I went to St. Paul to watch Evan play baseball. It was the first game I’d been to all season, and I’d forgotten—I always forgot—its pleasures: the perfect arc of the sky, the grass clipped like velvet, the satisfying crack of ball in glove. St. Louis Park won, and after the game, a blazered man approached Evan at the plate. Evan blushed and swung his mask in his hand, but I could see that he kept his composure. You and I sat in the bleachers, grabbing individual words. Opportunity. Talent. Arm.

In the car, I asked, “Where was he from?”

Evan rustled in the back seat, releasing a swell of athletic stink. “University of Virginia.”

“Ev!” Your hands flew from the wheel. “That’s fantastic.”

“Dad,” Evan said. “Drive,” but I could hear the pleasure in his voice. Once you resumed steering, he said, “They’re one of the best teams in the country this year.”

I turned to read his expression. Excitement, terror, satisfaction. He was so transparent. At his age, I had been the same.

“What, Mom?”

“I’m so proud.” The words brought a new wave of emotion.

“Don’t be proud yet. I’ve got to get in.” He massaged his shoulder muscle. “Which means I’ve got to bulk up. Think we can stop at Dairy Queen?”

When we got home, it was dark, and Jacob had left all the lights on. You growled something, and Evan, buoyant with prospects and milkshake, said, “Come on, Dad. Leave him be.”

Jacob was on the kitchen floor with a crushed, fluffy thing that I mistook at first for a rag. “Were you cooking?” I asked, and then it mewed.

Evan’s face lit. “Seriously?”

Jacob moved his hands in the old semaphore, then added, “Naomi Hartley. She told me you wanted one.”

Evan cupped his palms, beaming. “I do,” he said, and Jacob picked the kitten up and gave it to his brother.

The kitten was gray, with a flat, puckered face. Its nose and tongue were cotton-candy pink. It paddled in the basin of Evan’s hands. “Can I name him?” Evan asked, and you stepped forward.

“What do you mean, ‘Can I name him?’” The words were for Evan, but you were already glaring at Jacob. “You bring home a pet and only ask your brother’s permission?”

Jacob was on the kitchen floor with a crushed, fluffy thing that I mistook at first for a rag. “Were you cooking?” I asked, and then it mewed.

“Izzy,” I started.

Evan broadened his chest. “You have to let Jacob have something.”

You were too startled to respond. It was the first time Evan had sided with Jacob since the arrest. I watched him move closer to his brother, watched his gaze flick, once again, to the cat in his hands.

Quietly, Jacob said, “He’s for you, Ev. I brought him home for—”

“No.” Evan wheeled on his twin. “Make Dad give him to you.”

They looked at each other for a moment. There were no hand signals, but somehow, silently, a negotiation took place. Somehow, Jacob agreed. He lifted his chin, defiant. Evan drew the cat to his chest.

“Fine,” you said. “Fine. But one shitty litter box, and it’s gone.”

The incident changed something between the boys. They communicated without words more and more. Jacob still cooked with me, but only when Evan was at practice. When they were both home, they were in the basement together, playing with the kitten or engaged in what seemed to be a single, endless game of Risk. I wondered if you missed Evan’s company the way I missed Jacob’s, but I was too ashamed of myself to ask.

That summer, Jacob went to all Evan’s league games, and Evan spent his down time at the Thai-Chinese restaurant where Jacob now worked. Our house took on a constant smell of baseball socks, Stridex, and egg rolls. Jacob complained about grease-induced acne, Evan about the rash from his catcher’s mask. Evan showed Jacob how to do bicep curls, and Jacob coached Evan through the SAT II. The Virginia scout kept calling, and in September, twin application packets arrived in the mail.

I tried to hold my tongue, but it was impossible. You took Evan to a minor-league game, and I staked out Jacob’s room. I heard music within, heard Jacob talking to the cat, who the boys had named Alex Chilton. When the CD ended, I knocked.

The room was a mess. Books everywhere, shucked-off chef’s pants on the floor. Jacob still had the decorations we’d put up when he was five: prints of Daffy Duck and Elmer Fudd on the walls, a poster from his grandfather’s last Hauser & Wirth show, a framed photograph from a Boundary Waters trip in which he and Evan clung, gleaming with mud, to your sides. Jacob was at his wood desk, chair tilted dangerously back. I crossed the room to sit on his bed.

“Everything okay, Mom?”

“Everything’s fine.” I fluffed the pillow, covered with cat hair. “Jacob, do you really want to go to college with Evan?”

He gave a low, bubbling laugh that made him sound like my father. “Ev said Dad asked him the same thing.”

“And?”

“No and.” Jacob shrugged. “Yes.”

“I know how well you two have been getting along lately. It makes me so happy to watch. But Jacob, this could be your opportunity.”

“My opportunity,” he repeated, eyes narrowed, as if I’d spoken an unknown language. “To do what?”

“To be your own person.”

Jacob lowered his chair legs to the ground. His expression was difficult to read. “I appreciate you looking out for me, Mom,” he said after a moment.

“But?”

“But being friends with Ev is more important than that.”

That night, you reported that Evan had stonewalled you, too. “He acted like he didn’t understand the concept. Like separate schools weren’t even an option.”

“This is the kid who wouldn’t be in the same room as his brother nine months ago.”

You shook your head on the pillow. “I’m worried he said something to the scout.”

“What would he say?”

“That he’s a package deal.”

I tried to imagine Evan negotiating. It wouldn’t be a negotiation, really. Only a statement. He had always worked in black and white. Either he couldn’t stand to be near Jacob, or he had to be. That’s what he’d tell the coach: You want me to come to Virginia? Then make sure my brother gets in.

You turned onto your back. In the lamplight, you seemed sun-deprived, jaundiced. “I looked up out-of-state tuition,” you said. “$16,000.”

$16,000. More than three times what a year at the University of Minnesota would cost. We’d saved since the boys were born, but we had expected them to go in-state, and we had expected scholarship money for both. We hadn’t budgeted for your mother’s drawn-out dementia, which depleted her savings completely. We only understood how bad the situation had gotten when we arrived for a visit and found her apartment full of garment bags. For your father’s MOMA retrospective, she explained, then looked slyly at me. A girl’s got to have options, right?

There was no retrospective. There was a closet full of Chanel, and, shortly after, a live-in aide.

And now, there would be out-of-state tuition. Not for Evan—the baseball team would take care of that—but what were the odds Virginia offered Jacob a full ride?

“We could say no,” I suggested.

“Not to Evan.”

“Then we can’t say no to Jacob.”

“We’ve given Jacob terms already. It’s his money. He can make up his own mind.”

The boys got into the University of Virginia in December. Acceptance was binding. The head coach called to congratulate Evan, who thanked him, then added, “We can’t wait.”

I looked at Jacob, huddled on the couch. His lips were tense and dry. The cat, full-grown now, clawed at his sock. It was impossible that Jacob had saved $16,000 working the fryer basket at Angkor. I was tempted to ask how much he’d made in his six months selling diet pills, but I was a good mother. I held back.

Jacob insisted on cooking dinner. To celebrate, he said, but when I offered help, he shook his head, then turned the radio up full blast. Hip-hop leaked through the closed door, and you said, “Can you make him turn that shit down?”

“It’s not shit,” Evan said. “It’s Fat Joe.” He bounced his shoulders, then swayed his hips in a small, seated dance. “I can’t believe I got into UVA. Guys go to the majors from there.” He put on a sports announcer’s voice. “All the way from St. Jewish Park, it’s Eva-a-an Abrams!”

“Ev,” you warned.

“What? You call it that. And the only Gentile listening is Mom.”

“She doesn’t count,” Jacob said from the doorway. He was carrying a platter of chicken thighs, steam rising from their crisp skins. He’d made lentils, chimichurri, potatoes crusted with chili and salt. Evan wriggled in anticipation. You left the room and returned with champagne.

“To our boys,” you toasted, looking at Evan.

I met Jacob’s gaze. “To our boys.”

After Evan had crunched the marrow from the last chicken bone and scooped the last drying lentils from the bowl, he wiped his mouth and sat forward. “I want to talk to you about something.”

“You want me and Mom to move to Charlottesville so I can do stats for UVA?”

“Dad. I’m being serious.”

“That was a serious offer.” You leaned back, relaxed. I drank the last bit of my champagne. The windows were fogged with heat from the oven, and my reflection hovered like a ghost in the wet glass.

Evan shifted in his chair. “You guys saved for us to go to college. Both of us. Right?” You began to respond, but Evan held up a hand. “But you don’t have to pay for me. Not even housing. The athletic scholarship covers it all.” He was talking to you, but looking at his brother. “So I want you to pay for Jacob with the money you meant for me.”

Jacob’s eyes were wet. His cheeks were Evan-red. He made no secret gestures, no movements at all. “The money will go to the same place,” Evan said, speaking only to you. “You can think of it as paying my tuition if that makes you feel better.”

You looked at me across the table. I made no effort to hide my relief. It would be impossible to praise Evan’s generosity and then refuse to pay for Jacob’s freshman year.

In a very small voice, Jacob said, “What if you get injured?”

“I won’t.”

“Ev.”

“Then we’ll figure it out.”

You cleared your throat. “That’s very kind of you, Evan.”

Evan cocked his head. “It’s just common sense.”

“Maybe.” I could hear that you were conceding. Beneath the table, Alex Chilton started to purr.

“Maybe it’s common sense. But—” You swallowed. Evan grinned. “I’m so proud of both of you,” you said.

For Christmas, the boys gave each other UVA sweatshirts. We bought Evan new cleats and Jacob a George Foreman grill. “You think this is allowed in the dorms?” he asked.

“We’ll keep it in my room,” Evan said. “Just in case.”

Evan was All-County that season, then All-State. He was known across Minneapolis as the Hebrew Shield, which enraged you and delighted him. “I got the name from Tommy Levin,” he said. “Levin.”

“Doesn’t matter. You can’t let people say it.”

“What do you want me to do, Dad?” Evan said. “Start a fight on the mound?” You didn’t respond, but from the dark look on your face, I knew that the answer was yes.

Later, I told him not to provoke you. “Dad’s having a rough time. He’s worried about you two leaving.” Guilt flashed into Evan’s eyes, and I added, “And about your grandmother.”

“Is she getting sicker?”

Not sicker, but meaner. She’d plagued the health aide into quitting. We’d discussed putting her in a home, but she owned her apartment, no mortgage left. No mortgage, no money, no memory. No husband, no living friends. “It’s just a lot to handle,” I told Evan. “And I think she’s lost her will to live.”

Three weeks later, as if God had been listening, she died. It was May: final exams, baseball championships. You told Evan he could skip the funeral rather than miss the Walker game, and he recoiled. “Are you kidding?”

“Ev.”

“She was your mother.” He shook his head, disgusted. “You think I care more about a baseball game?”

At the funeral, you spoke about your family. Your father, the World War II veteran turned sculptor. Your mother, who shepherded him through his days. “The war made him gentle,” you said. “Marriage made her tough.”

The first time I met your mother, we had only been dating two months. You surprised me with tickets to New York. Your best friend went to Columbia, and he offered us his room for the week. We giggled at the Zabar’s fish counter, played hide-and-seek in the tombs at the Met. We visited your father’s three sculptures behind the Jewish Museum, each one thin and abstract, tense beams reaching into the sky. On the last day, we saw your mother. We sat at her Formica table, and you twisted your hands while I complimented her beet salad. I asked for the recipe, and she pushed her glasses down her nose and said, Maybe if you stick around.

I made beet salad and brisket for the shiva. Next to me, Jacob rolled dough for Linzer torte. Without warning, he let his head fall on my shoulder. I put my arm around him, and we looked out the window at the red sky and black water, the car lights running down Ocean Parkway like bugs. “I’m going to miss cooking with you,” he said, and for the first time since arriving in Brooklyn, I wept.

Jacob and I cooked through the summer: barbecue, salt-baked trout, homemade sausage wrapped in lamb caul that cost a fortune and then burst on the grill. The meat crumbled through the grate, releasing a black cloud of sweet-smelling smoke. Jacob buried his face in his hands. “My sausage,” he groaned, and Evan, doing push-ups in the nearby grass, lay down on his stomach to laugh.

You and I had discussed driving them to Charlottesville together, but it was impossible. Evan’s training camp began August 12th, orientation not till the 19th. The dorms weren’t open, hotels weren’t cheap, and you were back in Brooklyn, trying to sell your mother’s apartment and the last of your father’s works.

“It’s tough,” you told me on the phone. “He’s been dead too long. There’s not much of a market. Even the Jewish Museum wouldn’t look.”

“So bring them home,” I said, and you hesitated. “What?”

“I was thinking.”

“About bringing them home?”

The line crackled. I pictured you in your mother’s kitchen, the soup-green phone cord swaying beside you. “About staying here.”

We told the boys your absence was logistical. Complications with the estate. For Evan’s goodbye, I orchestrated a surprise dinner with his old teammates, and as they swarmed through the house, abandoning napkins on bookshelves and flicking chicken bones into the sink, I had empathy for your desire to leave. The house felt hollow and light, like a husk of our former life. Given the option, I would move somewhere else too.

“Why don’t you?” Jacob asked three days later. “There’s no rule saying you have to stay.”

“You don’t want to come back here? It’s your childhood home.”

Jacob shrugged. “Evan will.”

We were in the living room, watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on TV. He had his feet beneath our old plaid blanket and a metal bowl of popcorn at his side. On screen, Andie MacDowell began listing her sexual partners. Mike Carson in high school, I thought, with a flash of longing for Mike’s muscled back. Joe LaFarge in college. Then Robbie Putnam. Lee Higa. You.

“Did Dad pay my tuition already?” he asked.

“Of course.”

“For the semester, or the year?”

“The semester. But you don’t need to worry.”

He rummaged in the popcorn bowl. “Dad doesn’t like me.”

“Oh, Jacob.” I muted the movie. “That’s not true.”

“Yes, it is. Evan admits it, so you might as well. We even have a theory.”

“Which is?”

“He’s good at sports, and he doesn’t look Jewish.”

I sighed. Andie MacDowell’s hair flowed over her chest like a river. “Your father chose Evan too early for that to be right.”

“Then what is it?”

“Oh, Jacob.” I kissed his warm forehead. He smelled like Neutrogena and butter. “I wish I knew.”

A week later, he left for Virginia, and the house went from hollow to ghostly. I found bits of athletic tape clinging to carpets and dirty socks stuffed behind the couch. The CD players were full of bootlegged punk albums, and leftover lamb caul hardened slowly in the fridge. There was a divot in our mattress where you were meant to sleep, a pile of books on the nightstand that you’d meant to finish. In New York, would you buy a new American Pastoral? Would you ever read those Robert Pinsky poems? I boxed them up and put them in the basement. If you wanted them, you could ask.

We spoke every few weeks, which was more than I could bear. Hearing your voice made my body go numb. You told me you were selling your father’s last sculptures to a private collector in Houston. You had taken a formal leave from your job. The words seemed jagged and strange. Formal leave. My husband took a formal leave from me.

My life unfolded into a new series of firsts. First weekend alone. First long weekend. First psychiatrist’s appointment. First time clearing the gutters, first time mowing the lawn. First time without a ride home from the doctor’s.

I called Anna Schechter, who lived down the block. “Needle biopsy,” I told her. “Routine, but—”

“I know. They say not to drive.”

When the results came back—fatty cyst, not a tumor—I invited Anna over to celebrate. Jacob gave me a menu: lamb chops with roasted grapes, Greek salad without the feta, though she turned out not to keep kosher.

“I always wondered what it was like for you,” she said. “Living in St. Louis Park, raising your kids Jewish. The boys got bar mitzvahed, no?”

I nodded, then topped up our glasses of wine. The lamb chops released a faint, fatty smell. “I thought I was doing it for my marriage,” I said. “But now my marriage is on leave.”

“Will he come back?” Anna asked.

“I don’t know,” I told her. The admission was another first, and, to my surprise, it felt good.

You didn’t come for Christmas. My mother took down our wedding pictures and evangelized for Star-Tribune personal ads. In the spring, you watched Evan play baseball at Rutgers, Temple, New Paltz. Anna accompanied me to his Wisconsin game, and when he played Minnesota, Jacob flew home with the team.

You had taken a formal leave from your job. The words seemed jagged and strange. Formal leave. My husband took a formal leave from me.

The game was at Siebert Field, three blocks from the decrepit house where you lived when we met. You’d open the windows on spring afternoons to listen to the baseball team practicing. Like living near Mets Stadium, you used to say.

Now, the April air shone green with pollen. Jacob bought a hot dog, a gallon bottle of water, and a family-sized bag of peanut M&Ms, and we sat in the bleachers, courting sugar shock and talking about school. He’d gotten into an advanced fiction workshop, and his professor, he said, was a god. She was tiny, cashmere-covered, with a cloud of gray hair so fine it glowed. She spoke in the softest voice he’d ever heard, and in her soft voice, she’d told Jacob his instinct for dialogue was unerring.

“And she’s from the Midwest. She knows how Minnesotans talk.”

“Are all your stories about Minnesota?”

“They’re all set here. I don’t know what they’re about.”

“I’d love to read one,” I said, and Jacob dropped his gaze to his mustardy hands. “But only if you want me to.”

He bumped his shoulder gently into mine. “Someday.”

At the plate, Evan rocked on his heels. He pushed his mask up to signal the pitcher, and when I looked at Jacob, he was touching his own face in reply.

Jacob visited for the Virginia-Minnesota game the next year, and the year after that. Evan persuaded the coach to let him spend the weekend, and I cleaned the house and replaced my runny cheeses and soft lettuce with a fridge full of bacon and hamburger meat. In a fit of excitement, I tried to bathe Alex Chilton, who closed his crushed face up and cried.

“How often do you two see each other?” I asked Jacob at the game.

He shrugged. “Less now that Ev’s captain. And I don’t love his frat.”

“I thought you went to their parties.”

“I do.” Jacob stretched his long legs beneath the aluminum seat. The metal rippled in the sunlight. “But it’s a long walk, and Christine’s not a fan.”

“Christine?”

Jacob turned to face me. He was beaming. “Yeah. Christine.”

She was a sophomore, and a poet. Her parents lived in Richmond, but he hadn’t met them and didn’t expect to. When she told her father she was dating a boy named Jacob Abrams, he had sighed, then hung up the phone.

“And what did your father say when you told him your girlfriend was named Christine—what’s her last name?”

“Doty.”

“Christine Doty.” I reached into our bag of M&Ms. It was warm for April, and the candy shells were wet and grainy, loose with heat.

“I haven’t told him.”

“On purpose?”

Jacob ran a hand through his overlong hair. He wore a new watch, cheap black plastic. “I don’t talk to him much.”

“Much?”

Jacob didn’t respond. He was frozen, canted forward in his seat. On the field, a Minnesota player barreled toward home. Evan dove for the plate. Sun streamed from his helmet. The runner hit him head on, and he flew.

First I heard the howl. Jacob, not Evan. Then I registered the airless crash of Evan hitting dirt. I saw him roll once, then lie still. After that, there was nothing. No sound. The only movement on the diamond was Jacob, sprinting across the grass to his twin.

It was a cervical fracture. There are seven vertebrae in the neck, and the collision had jammed each one downward, cracking the seventh one. The doctor spoke about scans and cortisone shots.

I barely understood him. My ears were still ringing with terror.

Finally, Jacob stopped him. “Can my brother play baseball again?”

The doctor glanced at Evan, then Jacob. Evan, unconscious, breathed like an old man. The plastic brace crushed his red skin upward. His cheeks were inflated, and the room smelled like cut lawn and chewing tobacco, iodine and sweat. His eyes roved beneath his flaking lids.

“Son,” the doctor began, and Jacob leapt from his seat.

“Don’t talk down to me. Don’t you dare. Talk to me like I’m Evan. He’ll understand, okay? And he doesn’t want to hear about cortisone right now. He wants to hear whether he can catch again. Whether he can go back to school. Whether he can feel his dick any more. That’s what you should tell us. Not about shots.”

“Evan.” I only heard the name after it left my mouth. “Jacob. I’m sorry. Dr. Lewis, my sons are—my son is—”

“It’s all right.” The doctor’s voice was gentle. He took Jacob’s arm and lowered him into his chair. Jacob offered no resistance. He stared at the floor.

“I want to be very clear. This is a freak injury. I have no guarantees to make. My prediction,

which is only a prediction, is that Evan will make a full recovery. His limbs respond to stimulus. That’s a very good sign.”

When Jacob and I got home, there were voice messages from the Virginia coach, the Minnesota coach, and the local news. Worst NCAA collision in—the reporter said before I unplugged the phone.

I had no appetite, but I let Jacob assemble dinner. Freezer lasagna, green salad, warm bread that tasted like ash. He studied his hands between bites. I watched him ball and flex them, watched him tug at his thumbs. In the dark windows, his reflection looked like a waxing moon.

He asked to listen while I called you. I agreed, and was comforted by the soft buzz of Jacob on the extension as I described the crash, the odds against spinal injury, the injury itself. In the darkness, in Brooklyn, you sobbed.

“Are you coming?” I asked.

“I’ll be on the first flight I can get.”

You arrived the next day at noon, looking lost. You were thinner than when you left, too thin, and had let your curls develop into an old rock star’s iron thatch. Your breath smelled like beer and cinnamon Altoids, and when you hugged me I felt the rise of your collarbone, your shoulder blades, your fifty-three-year-old ribs.

You let go, and my jaw locked. My tongue was dry as snakeskin. The Alamo shuttle bus creaked away from the curb, and I felt an urge to shove you into its path. “We should get to the hospital,” I said.

In the car, you kept your face to the window. I took a shortcut through the University of Minnesota campus, and as we crossed the river, you sighed. “The boys should have gone here,” you said, and the rage that rose in me was so ferocious that I was afraid I would drive off the bridge.

I barely spoke to you at the hospital. I sat next to you, but only to avoid eye contact. Jacob told us a reporter had called the hospital, and that he’d told the reporter to go to hell. After that, he sat next to Evan’s bed, face tilted down. He wrote in a spiral-bound notebook and went down the hall hourly to call Christine. You read magazines and did the crosswords in People. You still wore your wedding ring, or else you’d put it back on. Evan slept, neck immobilized, thin bubbles popping between his lips. Dr. Lewis assured us that his sleep was morphine-induced.

“It’s better,” he said, directing his speech to you. “If he were awake, he’d be in a lot of pain.”

Evan woke that evening, as we were packing ourselves to leave. I saw his eyes land on you, then me. Jacob was near the door, invisible to Evan in his brace.

“Where is he?” Evan demanded, and Jacob bounded across the room. The moment Evan saw him, his face relaxed. “Jacob.”

“It’s okay, Ev.”

“What happened to me?”

The doctor had helped us prepare answers, soothing explanations we could manage without medical knowledge, but Jacob tossed them aside. “Plate collision,” he said. “Completely freak. A Minnesota runner broke your neck.”

Evan winced. “Sounds about right.” He moved a hand experimentally, and the sight of his opening palm stopped my breath. “Were you watching?” he asked Jacob.

“I was.”

“Did you feel it?”

Jacob touched his own neck. “It still hurts.”

He disappeared into his room the moment we got home. “Was he like this yesterday?” you asked, sounding wounded.

“No.”

You sighed, pushing your jaw forward, and the expression transformed your gaunt face into a younger, more familiar one. I remembered you surfacing from the Aquatic Park pool with your hands covered in slime. I remembered how you sang when you paddled our ancient canoe across Lake Calhoun, how you kept your face lifted to the sky.

“Izzy,” I said. It was the first time I had spoken your name in years, and when you heard it, you opened your arms.

We drank vodka and ate leftover lasagna on the couch. You kept your jacket on. You told me that you hadn’t worked in New York, that the sale of your father’s sculptures had been enough for you to get by, as much as you needed to. Books, subscriptions, diner breakfasts. Bus tickets to see Evan’s games. As you spoke, my anger returned.

“I’ve never asked you for money,” I said.

“I know.”

You tried to take my hand, but I pulled back. The lamps in the living room were too bright. My mouth was acrid with burnt tomato sauce. I didn’t want to hear your budgets. I didn’t want to listen at all, but you reached for me again. The look on your face was abject. I saw the shadow of a pack of cigarettes in your breast pocket and imagined you leaning out your mother’s kitchen window, exhaling smoke into the Brooklyn night. When I shut my eyes, I saw Coney Island before you, heard the wet lick of waves on the boardwalk. I smelled salt pretzels, salt-water taffy, pierogies and plantains and dumplings. Pollen, warm dried grass, hot dog water, tobacco spit, sweat.

“Rebecca,” you said, and I opened my eyes. “Please.”

“What?”

“I just wanted to be alone.”

You slept in the attic. I heard your footsteps, the toilet flushing in the night. At the hospital, Evan moved his toes. He had a physical therapist, a Halo brace, a treatment plan. Coach Paulson called daily. “Tell him we miss him,” he’d say, and behind him, I heard a gruff chorus and imagined the players shouldering each other, jockeying close.

On Evan’s second day home, he began lobbying Jacob to go back to Virginia. “Before your girlfriend forgets what you look like.”

I told Jacob his brother was right. “You don’t want to repeat the semester.” Nor can we pay for it, I added silently.

“Fine. But I’ll be home in a month,” he promised.

Evan struggled up from his pillows, drugged eyes wrathful. “Don’t even think about it.”

“Think about what?” I asked, and Evan winched his upper body toward me.

“He’s got an internship. And he’s taking it.”

I looked at Jacob, who was perched at the foot of Evan’s bed, cat cradled on his lap. He stroked the flat bone between Alex Chilton’s ears. “It’s at the Atlantic,” he said. “With the literary editor. But I’m not going.”

“Yes, you are.” Evan raised his hands to his plastic collar. “Or I’m taking this off.”

Jacob looked at him in mute appeal. Evan stared back, eyes feverish. From the set of his mouth, I knew he was in pain. Finally, Jacob dropped his gaze, and Evan allowed himself to sink back. “No more arguing,” he muttered. “Hurts.”

Jacob went. You stayed. While I was at work, you drove Evan to physical therapy, to doctor’s appointments, to the pharmacy and the pool. He spoke to you in monosyllables, but accepted the rides. The Halo gave way to a soft brace, the cane to a rolling, piratical limp. He left spit cups and resistance bands everywhere. When Coach Paulson called, he shut the door. After the conversations ended, he’d fake detachment, but unlike his brother, he’d never been a good actor.

In July, Evan told the coach he couldn’t play. He had permanent nerve damage. His right leg was frozen. He didn’t cry until he set the phone down.

That night, I cornered you in what had once been your study. “How much is left?” I demanded.

For a moment, you were silent. The room was small, and I heard your cautious breath. I looked from you to the bookshelves, filled now with my Anita Brookner novels, my Peter de Vries and Ivan Doig. I sat in the leather armchair that I bought for your fortieth birthday. Jacob’s tuition statement was on the shelf beside me. $22,700. I handed it to you.

“I’ve paid every year,” you said. “On time and in full.”

“Have you paid this year?”

“Of course.”

“Have you paid for Evan?” I asked, and, once again, you were silent.

The financial aid office got in touch three weeks later. They regretted Evan’s accident and wished him a speedy recovery. They further regretted the loss of his athletic scholarship. They were not able to transfer payment rendered for Jacob, but were pleased to offer Evan work-study options to suit his physical needs, as well as loans at a preferential rate.

I considered the options without consulting you. I had put Evan’s hospital bills on my Visa, his medications and rehab on my American Express. You had sworn to sell your mother’s apartment, but it was run-down and in Coney Island. A quick sale seemed unlikely. There wasn’t much else we could do.

In November, you came back to Minneapolis. John Kerry had just lost the election, and the neighborhood’s mood was grim. Anna and I went for walks in the early morning to discuss the nation’s fate, and mine. “I’m putting him in the attic,” I told her.

“And charging rent?”

“I can’t. He has no money.”

“So he’s moving back in.”

I told myself it would be easy. I told myself, and the boys, that this was the best option. “For who?” Jacob asked, and Evan answered for me.

“For him.”

They were furious at you. They felt abandoned. I wasn’t sure what I felt. I no longer loved you, but what remained was a lace of nostalgia and pity, desire and hate. There were nights I dreamed about you in the desert, lapping water from what proved to be a mirage. There were nights I took two Ambien and woke cotton-mouthed in the early morning, unable to remember where you’d gone. There was the night I returned late from a movie with Anna, drank a neat vodka for luck, and climbed the stairs to the attic, where I found out why you never came back.

In most ways, you were lucky. Early detection, rapid treatment at Sloan-Kettering, thanks to the sculpture money, now gone. You had surgery and radiation, but not chemo. You were fully continent—which, you told me, was in no way guaranteed after prostate cancer—but fully impotent.

“I thought the whole ordeal would be done in six months,” you told me, the words a thin thread in the dark. “I thought I’d sell the apartment and fly back to the Cities like it never happened. You and the boys would never have to worry. You’d never even know.”

You forbade me to tell Evan and Jacob. Not for medical history, not to earn forgiveness. When Evan asked that you not come to graduation, you agreed. I flew to Charlottesville alone. Jacob was graduating Phi Beta Kappa and magna cum laude, without a dollar of debt. Evan owed $16,000 and a summer course. At the English department ceremony, Jacob delivered a speech in which he managed, somehow, to evoke Evan’s hospital stay without directly mentioning it. He finished with a Delmore Schwartz poem, and I saw his advisor’s eyes fill with tears.

I no longer loved you, but what remained was a lace of nostalgia and pity, desire and hate.

After Jacob received his diploma, I ran to the biology ceremony, where I was barely in time to see Evan accept his degree. He moved stiffly, but the robe, billowing from his still-massive shoulders, concealed his limp. As he prepared to descend from the stage, a full pew of boys stood and roared. “Abrams!” the boys chanted. Each one wore his Virginia baseball jersey. “Abrams! Abrams!” the team cried, and Evan lifted his arms in victory.

While finishing his summer class, Evan found a job in commercial real estate, which, in Charlottesville, meant strip malls. He had a first-floor apartment and a physical therapist he liked. He volunteer-coached a Little League team and swam laps for exercise. On Yom Kippur, he called to say he’d been to synagogue, and promised that he’d be home for Thanksgiving.

You went to synagogue, and so Jacob wouldn’t. He was back in the Cities, working at an independent press. When I visited his St. Paul studio, there were papers stacked everywhere, books and bound manuscripts, notebooks filled with stories of his own. “When are you going to let me read something?” I asked from his coffee-stained couch.

“Aren’t you scared to?” Jacob said from the kitchenette. He was making tea by boiling water in a saucepan on the stove. “What if I write about you?”

“Why would that scare me? You think you know something worse about me than I know about myself?”

Jacob shut the burner off. Steam billowed from the pot and coated his glasses white. The apartment filled with chamomile, covering the ambient smells of cumin and mold. He carried our mugs over, sat next to me, and asked, “Is Dad still living in the attic?”

“You know the answer.”

“Has he found a job?” He blew on his tea. “Is he looking?”

“It’s not easy at our age.”

“You mean, it’s not easy when you have an unexplained four-year gap on your resume.” He sighed, then softened his tone. “He’s depressed, Mom.”

“I know.”

“You can’t—”

“Jacob.”

He put his arm around me. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry you have to live with him.”

It wasn’t living with. It was more like I lived in a haunted house. Creaks and rattles, the occasional pale presence in the hall. Maybe one day you’d spin your head like an owl and start vomiting blood. Until then, I could keep my eyes down.

Evan tried to leverage the Thanksgiving visit to get you out of the attic. He claimed he wouldn’t stay in a house with his father, but I knew he’d take one look at the leaky gaps in Jacob’s floorboards and reconsider. His childhood home might be morally compromised, but at least cold air couldn’t get in.

I told him your presence was minimal. You smoked on the back steps, took up half a fridge shelf with your monkish supplies. I remembered how little interest you had shown in Jacob’s cooking, how you ate his seven-spice chicken as if it were Popeye’s, wolfed his hand-wrapped tortellini like they came from a box. At the time, I interpreted your behavior as disregard for Jacob. Now, I told Evan, I understood that it was the first sign of your disregard for yourself.

Two weeks before Thanksgiving, he caved. He’d stay at home. “Has Dad asked whether I’m coming?”

“Of course,” I lied.

“And?”

“He wants to see you, but he understands if you’d rather not.”

Evan sighed into the phone. “Jacob says he’s depressed.”

I made a noncommittal sound.

“Do you think I can help him?”

“Oh, Ev.” It was a child’s question. The favored child. But it was true that he had the most reason to try, or the most reason to believe trying was worthwhile. “I don’t know.”

“Might as well, right?”

Some small piece of me sank. “Might as well.”

I suggested that Jacob come to dinner that week, for practice. He’d barely set foot in the house since moving back. Though I didn’t tell Jacob this, I intended it as a test: Would you hear his voice and come down? Would you hide?

We agreed to cook together, as always. I bought ingredients for tagine, and when Jacob arrived, his face lit at the cubed lamb, the spices arrayed on the counter. “God.” He flattened his hands on the butcher block. “I miss this kitchen.”

“It’s here when you want it.”

“Maybe I’ll help you cook Thanksgiving.” He cocked his chin at me, hopeful. Somehow his eyes had changed shape in college, become rounder, less like yours. “I could do wild rice. And yams.”

“That sounds great.”

He moved toward the fridge. “Should we get started?”

“Absolutely. And I got beer if you want, or I can open a bottle of wine.”

“This is perfect.” Jacob unhooked a Grain Belt from its plastic yoke. He tapped the beer’s tab and opened it, peering into the fluorescent light. “Jesus. What’s in here?”

I swung the fridge door wide and stood behind him. On your shelf, there was a loaf of bread, half a Vidalia onion, a jar of pickled beets swimming in brine. I had left you a chicken thigh three days ago, and it sat on its plate, fatty and pale.

“Jesus,” Jacob muttered again. “Dad?”

I nodded.

“You let him live like this?” Jacob asked, and I bit back my anger and shame. Let him. Like I could control Izzy Abrams, the Brooklyn ascetic. Saint Izzy of the Limp Dick. Like it was my fault you were starving yourself because you couldn’t get an erection. Like I told you to abandon me, abandon the twins—

“This is ridiculous.” Jacob shoved the refrigerator shut. “I’m going upstairs.”

I couldn’t persuade myself to follow him into the attic. I hadn’t set foot there since the night you told me about your cancer. I sat on the landing, and listened as Jacob demanded, and you gave, the explanation that I hadn’t stayed to hear.

You weren’t an ascetic. You were a Christian Scientist. “Classic Jewish-convert religion. Half the Christian Scientists in Brooklyn grew up kosher in Crown Heights.”

The teachings, you understood, were nonsense. Pure bullshit. There was a reason you’d never mentioned your new principles while Evan was recovering. But during your own recovery, while you wandered Brooklyn in an agonized, hormone-drained daze, the belief that the material world was an illusion spoke to you. You were in pain, both physical— “The stitches alone, my God”—and psychological. You liked the idea that you could shrug suffering off like a badly fit suit.

“So you did?”

“I did.” Your voice was calm. “I took it off. And now—” Your voice dropped below earshot, and the next sound I heard was an animal wail, then Jacob’s feet hammering at the stairs.

I retreated to my room, but he didn’t come looking for me. Instead, he called Evan and sobbed into the receiver. “He’s dying, Ev. You have to come home.”

The cancer had returned not long before Evan’s accident. It was in your stomach this time, or your intestines. You had stopped eating not because you were depressed, but because it hurt. Drinking hurt. Walking hurt. The entire time you’d lived in the attic, you had been quietly shitting blood.

You began losing energy as soon as we knew. It was as if the secret had kept you strong. Now that you’d admitted the truth, your eyes grew yellower every day. Your shoulders went from thin to sunken, and your chest seemed to collapse when you inhaled. The boys directed their fury at the two of us in equal measure: you for dying, me for not noticing.

I was furious, too. At you, at myself, at the sequence of decisions and non-decisions that brought us here. Evan should be in Charlottesville. Jacob should be at work. Nobody should be in this silent house with its new smell of Pedialyte and bile. Every room seemed filled with gray fog. I thought of your father collapsing in his studio, and my father collapsing at his desk. The day he died, the vice-principal called me in tears. The whole debate team was there, she said. Your dad was congratulating them, and then—

That was the right way to die. Busy. Surrounded. Not this miserable fade-out, refusing to go to a doctor, allowing your eldest son to carry you down the stairs. Evan shouldn’t have been carrying you. He still couldn’t bend his leg. But he wanted you at the dinner table, and he wouldn’t let Jacob help.

It was a horrible, eternal time. The twins turned twenty-three and vanished for a weekend, came home stinking of beer and stale casino air. “Win anything?” I asked, and Evan turned his pockets inside out.

The next night, I baked them a birthday cake. Double chocolate, with dollar-store sprinkles that looked less cheery than I had intended. When they blew out the candles, I wished for you to die.

It was what you wanted. It was what the boys needed. I wished for you to release them to their adult lives. I wanted them to leave the house. To marry non-Jews to spite your memory, or Jews to honor you and spite me. I wanted Jacob to start writing stories again, even stories he’d never show me, a novel he’d never finish, poetry he’d Xerox and staple to every lamp post in St. Paul. I wanted Evan to go back to coaching Little League, or to teach the Hmong kids in Midway to swing a bat. I wanted them to drink more. Gamble more. I couldn’t stand watching them change your soiled sheets.

“We used to be a normal family,” I said to Jacob one night. Evan was asleep, and we were sitting downstairs with the TV on, drinking a bad Chenin Blanc Anna brought me.

Jacob laughed, but his tone was sour. “When?”

“When you were kids.”

“When Dad threw out my toys?”

“Just the one toy.” I pulled my feet onto the couch. The movement was effortful in a new way.

My body was reworking itself, starting to stiffen. Menopause, I knew. It had taken long enough to start. A small irony: me bleeding into my toilet for a year, you bleeding into yours.

“We were never normal,” Jacob said. “It was never normal how you two played favorites.”

He hadn’t shaved for days, and his neck was covered with dark bristles and red, irritated pores. I remembered him as an infant, wax-skinned beneath his lanugo. All I had wanted was to protect him. To help him grow.

“It was my fault,” I said.

“No.” He reached over. “I didn’t mean it like that.”

“But it was.” The words barely seemed real. Maybe I was thinking, not talking. Maybe I was talking about another woman, some unknown mother who lay in her hospital bed and asked to nurse her second twin first. “I chose you.”

Jacob drew the plaid blanket around his shoulders. The cat was beside him, mat-tailed and bony.

“Evan and I used to talk about that.”

“What?”

“Whether you picked me or Dad picked him.” Jacob let out a sudden, small laugh. “Ev always said it was fine. He used to tell me not to be greedy.” He put on Evan’s deep voice. “‘You want them both to like you best.’ And he was right,” Jacob added, as himself. “I do.”

The next day, I went to the attic alone. Evan was at the pool, Jacob at work. I expected to have to wake you, but when I walked in, the radio was playing softly. You had a book open. The air was hot and close, and dust motes clung to the carpet. The smell of your sick breath was everywhere.

“Can I sit down?” I asked, and you lifted the covers and gestured for me to climb in.

I don’t know how long we were silent. Your body was warm, your breathing irregular. My waistband dug painfully into my hips. I closed my eyes and watched the afternoon light swell and bubble.

“Rebecca,” you said.

“Isaac.”

“Have you forgiven me?”

I opened my eyes. You were facing me, cheeks swollen, lips cracked and white. We were both fifty-five, but you looked ancient. You looked dead. The Izzy I knew had died long ago, but that Izzy would want honesty, not mercy.

“I can’t.”

You summoned the ghost of a laugh. “You probably shouldn’t.”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“No.”

We looked at each other for a moment. When we were young, this was my favorite version of you. On your side, eyes half-closed, you were so handsome it was unbearable.

“I came to talk about Jacob.”

“Ah.” Your voice was a notch softer. “I should have known.”

“He wants you to choose him.”

Your face went slack. “I never,” you began, and then caught your breath. Spit bubbled between your lips.

“I know,” I said, before you could try to continue. “I chose first. It was me.” I took your hands, which were balled at your chest. The skin was cold, the too-long nails thick and ridged. “It’s okay, Izzy.”

I stayed in bed while you slept. Our body heat leached slowly from the room. I remembered the nights we spent rocking babies in the cold. Red Evan in your arms, sallow Jacob in mine. I remembered how hard I worked to make Jacob latch. I remembered the bris, Evan kicking and wailing. Jacob’s cries were so quiet that the rabbi pulled me aside to suggest we get him a neurological workup.

A neurologist? I’d repeated. He’s eight days old.

I understand, the rabbi said. But you want to make sure the boy can feel.

You died two nights later. Jacob was in the attic, and Evan and I were caulking a leaking sink. His balance as he worked was beautiful to watch. When Jacob appeared in the doorway, Evan stood with his old athlete’s grace. “Now?” he asked.

“Now.”

You were on your back. Your eyes were open, but blind. White patches bloomed inside your mouth. Grief rose within me. “He’s not—” Evan whispered, and then you exhaled. The sound was tidal, like water receding.

I sat on the bed, and you felt for me. “Izzy,” I whispered, and your hand tightened on mine.

I wanted to know where you were. What you saw. Whether you were dying in this attic, or in Brooklyn, or in the bed we first shared. I wanted to meet the spirits that flocked to you. I wanted to know you weren’t afraid.

“Remember the first time you took me canoeing?” I began. Evan watched me with enormous, tear-filled eyes. “I was pregnant with the boys, and I was huge. I couldn’t reach around my stomach to paddle, but you’d learned how to do it at summer camp.”

Your grip loosened. Another breath rolled from you. I saw Jacob trembling, saw him cling to his brother. “The lake was like glass,” I went on. “It was sunset, and the mosquitoes were out, but so were the dragonflies. Huge ones, bright green, with wings like tissue. We went into the shallows, and we could see perch through the water, and lake trout. Little minnows.

“You picked a perfect day. Warm, but not hot. We could smell trees from the shore, and somebody grilling fresh fish. Remember? The boys were kicking me, and you sang camp songs. Fight songs, and a song about ducks. You sang ‘Like a Rolling Stone,’ and I laughed at you.

“After a long time, you stopped paddling. You let us drift.” Your hand was cold. I lowered my head to your silent chest. “Remember? The sun had gone down. We tried to find constellations, but we didn’t know any. Not even the Big Dipper.”

I heard our sons sobbing, felt my own tears soak into the sheets. Evan put his big hand on my shoulder. “Mom,” Jacob said. “It’s okay. You can stop talking,” but I went on. I stayed where I was, listening to your absent heartbeat, trying to warm your skin with my own. My words slipped between your ribs, headed to your diseased stomach and unmoving lungs. I imagined them as my own private army, soldiers marching through my mouth and occupying every inch of your body.

Evan lay down next to you. Jacob curled himself around me. I stopped for breath, and Evan told me to keep going.

“We’re listening,” he said.

I felt Jacob nod. “We’re both here.”