When I woke up the cat had peed on the rug and my mom was making pancakes. My dad was drinking chai in the kitchen. “How could he have known that?” my dad was saying.
“I don’t know,” said my mother. She was stirring the batter very hard, which made me think she was angry.
“To hear him say it—I’d never told anyone—and my mother, you know, I wasn’t there when she died . . .”
My mother put down the bowl and began to cry. “What are we going to do?”
“We don’t have to do anything.” He put a hand on her shoulder. “It’s okay.”
“I feel so crazy—” She saw me, standing in the doorway, and wiped her face. “Good morning,” she said.
“Good morning,” I said.
“Is that the neighbor’s cat in there?” said my mother.
I nodded.
“Go put it out,” she said, but didn’t scold me. When I came back she had put a plate on the table for me. She had made a pancake in the shape of Mickey Mouse.
“Is he okay?” I asked.
“He’s fine. Sleeping.”
I sat down and began to eat. I was very hungry. “Do you want another one?” said my mother.
“Yes,” I said.
“This one isn’t shaped like Mickey.”
“That’s okay.”
I finished my food and went to my brother’s room. He was sleeping on his side with his hands curled into tight fists. He slept with his eyes partially open so you never knew. But his breathing was slow and deep and sometimes his mouth twitched. So still and smiling like this I could pretend that he loved me. I put my face close to his face and put my mouth next to his mouth, so I could breathe his breath. His mouth was sour and spiky, held the ugly taste of medicine. I was so angry. I was strong enough to pick him up and crush him. I really could have. He looked smug. He could have kept them away from me forever if he wanted to. He let out a little mewling noise like a kitten. I spat at him. A globe of spit quivered on his cheek, but he didn’t wake.
These days when I sleep on my side, I have to put a pillow underneath my belly to hold it up. I had trouble sleeping even before I was pregnant, unlike my husband, who could sleep through an earthquake if I wasn’t there to wake him, which once he did. At university when I slept by myself, night was sticky and unbearable. But now, a body beside me, the night becomes something I can tolerate. I get up and go to the kitchen, and let myself eat something, anything I want. Lately what I have been craving is buttermilk, cool and thick from the fridge. Other times I will drink some hot milk with a little honey in it. I often wonder what kind of mother I will be. My mother used to pray a lot when she was pregnant with my brother. But I cannot whisper like her with the beads. I feel sorry for that.
Five weeks ago I shaved my head. I did it because I got infected with lice from the kids at the elementary school where I work part time, and it was becoming too much of a hassle. I wasn’t sure if my head would be lumpy or smooth; my parents never did the hair cutting ceremony for me, only for my brother. I remember how he never even flinched when the priest took out the razor. My husband fit his palm around the base of my skull.
“Your eyes look huge.”
“Maybe I should shave my eyebrows for emphasis.”
“Don’t shave your eyebrows.”
“Do I look like a freak?”
He thought for a moment. We were in our kitchen, me on a high stool and he beside me, standing, his hand on my head. “Not like a freak,” he said. “But strange. You know, the most beautiful faces are strange. Slightly off-kilter.”
“Oh, good. Off-kilter was what I was going for.”
“No, I’m not saying it right,” he said. He rubbed his hand over my scalp, scratchy one way, smooth the other. Air rested on the crown of my head in a new way, and I felt shivery and light. “You look—beautiful, of course you do. Sort of witchy. Go see for yourself.”
I turned to see myself reflected in the dark window. Like a nacreous ghost on the other side of the glass, my reflection gazed back. She looked older, suddenly, than I remembered. Her eyes were big and bruisey, her neck exposed, her ears naked. Was this the face of a bad woman? On the other side of the glass, a cat walked across the top of the fence, one delicate paw in front of the other. I put my hands on either side of my face and stretched my mouth into a grin.
The next day I saw my brother at the train station, which I normally walk by on the way to the grocery store. I was going for milk. At first I wasn’t sure that it was him, for I had been thinking about him, and felt for a few moments like my thought had put a wish onto a stranger, and lent him temporarily my brother’s face. But not so: it was my brother. Though I had not seen him in many years—indeed, in the space of the many years since I’d seen him, he’d grown from teenager to man—his features had traveled with him to the present, the proud nose and lips that were my mother’s, and his strange far-seeing eyes. He looked rough. He had an uneven beard and his fingernails were long, his pants, jeans, were threadbare and his camouflage jacket several sizes too large; still he looked better than I had expected. Actually I had not expected much. Some days I had expected him dead.
I stood on the platform and watched him. He sat on a bench with an intense stillness until the train came. He did not seem to be aware of my presence. Would he look to another eye like a college student, or someone without a home? When the train came I abandoned my milk on the platform and boarded it. I got on the same car through the rear door, and sat a few seats behind him so that I could see the top of his head. The train passed through the unwanted parts of towns, the backs of auto shops, the edges of mall parking lots, the dump, the impassive facades of apartment buildings that housed the poor. Even seated, my back hurt, my feet hurt, my hips were loose and tired. If I had not gotten on the train, I would have been back home by now, drinking milk while I lay in bed and read a book. As though sensing my agitation, the baby began to move inside me, a kind of turning that I found both reassuring and not very pleasant: it was the same feeling you had when a roller coaster tipped into its first descent, or an elevator began to drop very suddenly. At that time in my pregnancy, we wore each other like a kind of weather, the child and me, my moods, I imagined, passing over her like wind or rain, and her movements wild inside me some early mornings like an electrical storm.
If I called my parents now, they would urge me to speak to him, they would forget what they had promised each other and beg me to offer him money, however much I had, beg him to return home. So I switched off my phone. When we pulled into the final station I followed him off the train and onto the street, simply for the pleasure of watching him walk. The way he moved contrasted with the way I did at any time but especially now, when pregnancy inflected my every movement, making me more clumsy and graceless. Even when my brother was a boy he never slouched, he walked with an unconscious trust of both his body and the world surrounding it. He never hid his fists in his pockets or the folds of his coat, each hand with the bony elegance of cats. Feet too, but those were in busted sneakers whose soles were starting to separate at the toes. His hair was feathered with grease and long, past his ears; his shoulders looked narrow as a child’s in his jacket. We walked up the sidewalk of a wide street, then through the press of Market, then up Eddy, where the facades of the buildings were shamefaced and sad. I was having trouble keeping pace with him, slow as I was, tired and thirsty. It was windy but clear in the city with a low winter light. I imagined we were running a race, like when we were young, and at any moment he would turn back to smile at me—see, I’m winning. Only a few feet behind him it seemed impossible that he could not feel my presence, but he didn’t turn to look. Perhaps he didn’t recognize me, remember me, think of me anymore. But I was not so sorry for myself that I would allow that thought for long.