Chapter 20: Micah Comes Home
The Beemans brought Micah home on Friday with four boxes, a lamp, and a casserole, in that order of importance to Carol Beeman.
She had also written out a list, in her schoolteacher hand, of things a person needed to know to operate my brother: he does not eat crusts. He reads himself to sleep and lies about finishing the chapter. He will say he is not scared of the dark in a voice that means the hall light stays on. "He's a good boy," she said at the door, pressing the list on me like a deed. "He's the easiest of the nine. Don't tell the others."
The boxes went into the second room. That is where I found out about the paint.
I came home from the store at six to a smell like the inside of a hardware store and my brother standing in the doorway of a room that had been the color of old teeth when I left for work, and was now the blue of a July sky over the reservoir. Rita was on a step stool with a roller. Two of the club's steadiest — Denny and Marcus, if the record requires names — were doing the trim with the concentration of men defusing something. Hammer was supervising from my kitchen chair, braced leg up on a cooler, holding a paintbrush he had no intention of using.
"You broke into my apartment," I said.
"We used the spare key you gave Hammer," Rita said. "For emergencies."
"This was not an emergency."
"It was a color emergency," Hammer said from the kitchen. "A boy cannot start a new life in a room the color of a dentist's waiting room. It's in the bylaws."
I did my best. I stood in that blue doorway in my work smock with my keys still in my hand and performed anger the way I had performed it for the club a dozen times — hands on hips, a whole weather system in one girl — and it held for about four seconds, because Micah was watching me from inside the blue with an expression I recognized from my own mirror: a person checking whether good news is allowed. I laughed instead. Rita pretended not to notice I was crying while I did it, which in our family is close to a sacrament.
We ate burgers off the hot plate, because the apartment stove has two working burners and a grudge. Micah ate three. He put Carol's casserole in the refrigerator with both hands, like evidence. Then, plates cleared, with the seriousness of a diplomat opening negotiations, he commenced on the rules of the house.
"Can I have cereal for dinner?"
"On Fridays," I said. "This is Friday. Don't waste it."
"Can I sing in the shower?"
"Quietly. The walls are made of apology and cardboard."
"Can Hammer come for dinner?"
"Yes," I said. "He has to bring his own chair cushion and pretend to like my cooking, which he will fail at and then do the dishes to apologize, which is the whole arrangement."
He nodded, filing each ruling. Then he got to the one he had clearly been carrying around all day like a stone in his pocket.
"Can I sit on the bike?" he said. "Engine off. Just sit. Not ride. Sit."
I knew which bike. Hammer's Road King, which Micah has regarded for a year the way other boys regard weather on another planet — enormous, shining, and not for the likes of him.
"Yes," I said. "With a helmet on."
He stared at me, scandalized. "The bike isn't going anywhere. It's parked."
"Exactly," I said. "You wear the helmet precisely because you're not going anywhere in it. That's the house rule. The helmet is for sitting. The sitting is the whole event."
He considered this with the gravity of a judge reviewing a difficult statute. "Okay," he said at last. "That's a good rule."
Later — dishes in the rack, boxes broken down flat, Carol's casserole dish washed and set by the door to go back like a treaty — he fell asleep in the blue room with his lamp on and a book open facedown on his chest at chapter three. He had unpacked exactly one box — the books — and lined them along the blue wall by height. The rest could wait for morning. I stood in his doorway a long time. Then I checked the locks the way I always check them, front and back and the window over the sink, and then I did a thing I had not done since October: I left his door open a hand's width, so the hallway light fell across the blue wall, and I went to bed in a home with a boy asleep in it. The quiet in that apartment was not the quiet of being alone anymore. It was the other kind. The kind with a second set of breathing in it.