Touch and Shiver

The suburban streets are dusted with snow, cold enough that even in the afternoon sun the flakes don’t melt. I turn onto Thistle Road, towards Alex’s house.

He’s the friend I’ve kept up with most since we graduated, a year and a half ago. I’m picking him up and then we’re heading down to D.C. to stay with a few other college friends for New Years. I’d never been to his house before. He’s waiting by the mailbox.

Alex is tall and blond, lanky and loose-limbed. He’s wearing sweats, socks, and flip flops. I lower the window as I turn up the driveway. “Good to see you, brother,” he says, putting a hand through the open window.

“Same to you,” I reply, taking it.

“Mom's making dinner. Want to eat before we head out?”

“Sure, pretty hungry.”

He directs me to a spot in front of the garage. I get out and we hug. “The Taylor house,” he remarks, sweeping his hand. “In all her glory.”

The house is low and sprawling, a long, single story. It’s heavily decorated in Christmas lights. The front yard is littered with inflatable reindeer, elves, and snowmen.

“Festive,” I say.

Alex leads us through the front door. The first thing I notice is an enormous, almost overwhelming Christmas tree. It’s about as big around as a monster truck tire, the star atop it hunched against the relatively low ceiling. The tree blazes with thousands of LEDs. I can feel heat coming from it five feet away. It is adorned as well with countless figurines. Many of them I recognize as being that “Precious Moments” brand or style or whatever it is – with round-faced, big-eyed children.

“Hey one sec, saying ‘hi’ to Alex’s friend,” I hear a woman mutter. Alex’s mom emerges from behind the tree, holding her phone. “Hi there Conrad!” she says. We hug. She feels bony and delicate. Though I’m not particularly imposing, I’m careful to squeeze only lightly.

“You like beef stroganoff?” she asks.

“Yes, smells great.”

“Wonderful. It’ll all be ready in about five minutes. I set a place for you,” she says, pointing behind me at the dinner table, placed for five. I thank her as she goes back around the tree into the kitchen, resuming her call.

“Hey, what’s going on my man?” Alex’s brother, Kevin, comes through a doorway. He’s three years younger than Alex and, aside from being about six inches shorter, his virtual doppelganger, with the same angular chin, blue eyes, and perpetually grinning mouth.

Kevin, Alex, and I spend a few minutes talking there by the front door, between the enormous Christmas tree and the dinner table. Kevin’s a sophomore at the college from which Alex and I graduated. Kevin asks about my first semester at law school. Alex talks about California, where he’s been living since the previous Spring.

“You still coming with us tonight?” Alex asks his brother.

“Yessir.”

“Nice,” I say.

“Okay, dinner,” says Mrs. Taylor, rounding the tree again, this time holding a pan in oven mitts. “Leonard,” she calls towards the doorway, “dinner. And company.”

Alex, Kevin, and I take sets at the table, leaving the heads for the parents. Mrs. Taylor remains standing, double-checking that everything is accounted for – glasses of ice water, napkins, forks, salt and pepper. Satisfied, she takes a seat just as her husband comes through the doorway.

He’s a small man. No, I realize, standing to shake his hand as he comes around the table to the seat to my left, he’s just as tall as I am, average all-around, height and build. He’s older, in his sixties, with a gaunt face beneath gray, wispy hair. “Hello there,” Leonard says, taking my hand, “good to see you again.” He barely makes eye-contact with me, looking instead towards the windowsill behind the table.

“Same to you, sir,” I reply as we both sit. Alex and Kevin already have their plates loaded up with the steaming casserole.

“Help yourself, Conrad,” Mrs. Taylor says. I do, followed by Leonard. “I’ll pray,” she says. “Dear God, thank you for this day and this meal. Please grant safe travels to Alex, and Kevin, and Conrad this evening. Thank you for this wonderful season and our family and friends. Thank you for sending us your son as Christ our Lord and Savior...”

As she prays, Leonard has a coughing fit. His wife pauses, briefly. I open my eyes for a split second to look at her. She’s looking at her husband with annoyance. I shut my eyes again before she notices me looking. She says “Amen,” then scoops stroganoff onto her own plate and asks me about law school.

“It’s alright,” I tell her. “Don’t have grades yet so hard to say how it’s going on an academic front, but it’s interesting.”

“I bet! You’re probably learning so much. What was your favorite class?”

“Um... I liked torts. My civil procedure professor was great too, though.”

“Torts, that sounds fun. What is torts? Or, what are torts? I’m not sure how to say it.” She laughs.

I hold my hand over my mouth, chewing my first bite until I can reply. She still hasn’t lifted her fork. It continues like this for another few minutes, with her asking me question after question and me trying to squeeze in bites between answers.

“Hey, Mom,” Alex interjects, “how about letting Conrad eat a bit?” He laughs and she does too, though, it seems, a bit nervously. She takes her first bite and then asks Kevin about his girlfriend.

Leonard leans forward. It seems almost in slow motion, like he’d been four feet back from the table until he did so, barely there with us at all. He puts his hand on my left forearm. “She can make you go hungry with talking, can’t she?” he says, and chuckles. I smile politely in return, but his touch sends a flash of memory through me.

The previous winter, Alex and I drove Kevin back to school for his second semester and spent the night at our old frat house. We wound up talking late into the night in an otherwise empty common room. He told me that he’d recently met his older siblings for the first time, a half-brother and half-sister, same dad, different mom. Leonard never visited nor even spoke about them.

“I only knew about them because of Grandma,” he told me, there on adjacent couches in the quiet room. “And I decided I wanted to meet them. So I visited her at the nursing home, got my older sister’s phone number from her, called, and she wound up inviting me over Thanksgiving weekend. They only live like a half hour away. Same county, even.”

He didn’t tell his parents he was going, he just went, the Friday after the holiday. He said it was pleasant at first, if a bit awkward. They lived together, his half-siblings, Erica and Jamie, though they were both in their late thirties. “Well, really it’s him who lives with her,” Alex told me. “It’s her house, her and her husband with their kids, and he lives there too in the basement. After we had dinner, I hung out with him down there a bit. He reminded me of our dad – shy, awkward, same face, and I said so – told him he looks just like our dad, way more than me or Kevin, and when I said that, dude, it was like a crack just started forming, and about ten seconds later he’s crying. Just me and this thirty-seven-year-old guy I’d never met before in a basement, and he’s crying. So I asked him what was wrong.”

I’d been staring through the dark at him. He laid on his back, facing the ceiling.

“Jamie said when he was a little kid – he couldn’t even remember when it started – his dad – our dad – would come into his room to put him to bed... and touch him. Molest him.” He made a noise somewhere between a sigh and a groan.

“His mom was a nurse and worked nights a lot of the time. She’d come in and kiss him goodnight before leaving, and then a few minutes later the door would open again, and Dad would come in. Jamie would pretend to be sleeping, but Dad would touch him anyway, and he’d whisper to him, he’d say things like, ‘this is nice, Daddy loves you,’ while he’d slide his hands into his pajama pants.” Alex made the sigh/groan noise again. “Jamie said he felt like he was paralyzed.”

“Oh my God,” I whispered from my couch, trying to imagine what Alex must’ve felt, finding out about this. I didn’t want to imagine what Jamie must’ve felt.

“He said he never knew what was going to happen,” Alex went on. “Some nights, Dad just came in and kissed him on the forehead and said goodnight, especially if his mom was home. But even if she was, sometimes he did more, and if she wasn’t, he didn’t always do it. And it went on until Jamie was eight years old.

“There was something in school one day about body privacy, and that night, Jamie’s mom was home, but Dad started caressing him, whispering, and Jamie just screamed 'STOP IT' it as loud as he could.”

I swallowed, mouth dry with the stale taste of beer from the hours before.

“Dad ran out of the room,” Alex continued. “Jamie heard his mom running up the stairs. She came in the room but then Dad yanked her out and slammed the door. They yelled at each other outside. The next day, Jamie talked to his mom, and she took him and Erica both away and divorced him. Jamie thinks they had some agreement she wouldn’t tell the police if he’d roll right over on the divorce and never even try to see them again. He doesn’t know, though. She died young.

“And after he told me all that,” Alex said, “Jamie started crying even harder and saying, ‘I’m so sorry,’ over and over, and I didn’t know why. Then it hit me. He knew Dad had more kids, more sons. Probably through Grandma. And Jamie begged me to forgive him for never saying anything, never coming to make sure we were okay, for staying away.

“I told him that Dad had never touched me. I was pretty sure he never touched Kevin, either, because we shared a bedroom our whole lives.

“He just melted, dude. Melted. I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone look so relieved.”

Alex stayed the night with Jamie and Erica, and in the morning, Jamie seemed like a new person, with this weight lifted from him.

Then Alex told me what might have been the most shocking thing of all. He said, “You know, dude... when Jamie told me all that stuff, I remember thinking, ‘I should be surprised right now,’ but... I just wasn’t. I mean, some of the details, sure, but that Dad had molested his oldest son and that’s why he never talked about them... Yeah, I just wasn’t surprised.”

“What?” I asked him. “But he never did any of that to you, did he?”

“No. Never to me. I guess I just...” He struggled to explain it. “I just never respected him and didn’t know why. He always seemed so... I don’t know what the word would be. Shrunken? Shriveled? Far away? And when Jamie told me all that, it kind of made sense, all of a sudden, how he is. What he's been living with.”

That had been almost a year before, and I’d spoken of it with no one since, but as Leonard leans forward, touches my arm, and makes the joke about his wife talking too much, I remember that night, that whole story in an instant, and I nearly yank my arm away from him.

Alex says something to Kevin and the pair laugh along with their mother. Alex looks at me. “You good?” he asks.

“Yeah,” I say, blinking, “just zoned out.”

The brothers talk about a mutual friend from childhood. “Oh, I liked him!” their mother says. The father leans back, away from the table. I sit there wondering who knows what.

Kevin knows. Alex told me over the phone back in February that he’d promised Jamie he’d make sure Kevin hadn’t been a victim either. He told Kevin everything. But he didn’t tell Leonard that he’d met Erica and Jamie – that he knew.

He didn’t tell his mom, either. But did she know? Did she know any of it? She surely knows he’d had a previous wife and children, but does she know why they left? Does the grandma know? She must, right?.

There’s a lull in the conversation as Alex and Kevin continue eating. Mrs. Taylor makes a noise in her throat, a sort of anxious buzz. She looks at me, smiles, asks if I like the food. I tell her I do, it’s excellent.

She can’t have silence, I think. Does she know? Is that why she can’t have silence, and wherever it is she needs to fill it, like she’s terrified of what might be there in the silence if she doesn’t? She takes another bite, but the fingers of her non-fork hand patter on the table. She swallows. She asks Alex if he’s been to the Hollywood sign.

Alex and Kevin finish their plates. They have seconds at their mother’s urging. She’s still eaten less than half of her own. She keeps glancing at my plate, as though wanting to be ready, the second I clear it, to insist that I take more. I glance the other way. Leonard is staring down at the table, chewing his food.

When they finish eating, the brothers talk about Kevin’s hip-hop projects, about Alex’s trip to Death Valley, about their plans to fly Kevin to L.A. for a visit over spring break. Their mother leans forward, on her elbows, beaming at the talk, commenting, asking questions.

I participate, too, though half my mind at least is on wondering who knows what, how much it’s part of the whole family’s dynamic, what role it’s playing even now in the way we all interact. Part of me wants to say something, to tell them everything I know, to have it out in the open. Alex would never speak to me again, but Christ, maybe it would save his mother from...

Leonard clears his throat out there, way back in his chair, twice an arms-length from anyone else. He stands, says he’s going to go finish up some work in his office.

“Don’t work too hard, Dad,” Alex says, then goes back to telling us about getting in trouble with his landlord for letting a homeless man use his shower.

As Leonard leaves the room and as his wife presses Alex for detail, I imagine this couple aging into separate oblivions – he into silence and guilt, she into nervous talk. I was never going to say anything to stop it. Could anyone? Could they?

I finish my second plate of stroganoff. Alex looks at me and we nod.

“Ice cream?” Mrs. Taylor asks, pushing her chair back and standing, quickly. “We have mint chocolate chip, vanilla bean, cookies and cream...”

“Sure,” Kevin and I say at the same time.

She smiles, and I swear there’s relief in her face. She takes our flavor requests and goes back into the kitchen.

“Probably head out in, what, twenty minutes?” Alex asks, checking the time on his phone. “We can give you a little tour of the place.”

“Sounds good,” I say.

His mom comes back in with three bowls. It takes me fifteen minutes to eat mine, as I tell her about my family, my neighborhood, my pets. I want to give her everything. I’m terrified for her. She has the same eyes as her sons, except for the way they dart and blink.

“Alright, Mom,” Alex says, eventually, “we better get going.”

She looks at the clock on the wall. “Oh my gosh, I didn’t realize it was getting so late.” She jumps up and collects dishes. We help her clear the table. I offer to assist with dishes. “No, no, of course not, you’re a guest,” she says, “but that’s very sweet. No, thank you, it was lovely having you.”

I follow the brothers through the house. From the dining room by the front door, dominated by the massive, shining tree, we pass into a narrow hallway with professional family photos on the wall, then into this cramped room like a Victorian living room, with a burgundy, tasseled carpet and a small couch which looks as though it’s never been sat in, the seats almost completely covered by decorative pillows, the room lit by a single orange-bulb lamp in the corner, little glass tables everywhere with ornamental dolls and tea sets on them, and there’s a Christmas tree in here, too – a little silver one. The room is so full of fragile things that I walk carefully, nervous I’ll bump into something and break it.

There’s a door to the left. “Dad’s office,” Alex mutters, pointing at it. I imagine him sitting in there, just sitting, staring ahead, motionless.

We pass through another doorway to another small, clean little room with a beautiful Steinway baby grand piano upon a white carpet. There’s no seat at the piano. The room has even more low glass tables and pedestals, adorned with thin glass vases, some with plants in them, some empty, and the ceilings are no higher than those in the rest of the house but there’s a chandelier hanging down into its middle, the crystals dangling lower than eye-level, above a spotless white ottoman that also looks as though no one sits in it. Perhaps Mrs. Taylor, I imagine, when she’s home by herself, and even then, only on the very edge, crossing her legs neatly, barely breathing, just for a minute. In this room, too, I have to wind my way around these delicate things behind Alex and Kevin.

We pass through another doorway to the actual living room, which has a TV and gray carpeting and a couch that a person could actually sit on without feeling nervous, but even in here, shelves line the entire wall, covered with china dolls and china animals, and there are three more small Christmas trees, a pink one, a blue one, and a white one, in each corner of the room other than the one housing the television, and there are more small tables with porcelain lamps and decorative plate sets. I imagine Mrs. Taylor buying these hundreds of china figurines, the hundreds of Precious Moments figurines, the vases, the decorative plates and furniture and pillows, the Christmas trees, all of it, making the house fragile and claustrophobia-inducing, and I imagine the father’s office, and I imagine him again, sitting there, motionless, staring, and I imagine that the office is empty save a metal folding chair, with white walls unadorned and no other furniture.

We walk through another hallway. To the left is a game room, with shelves of board games on the wall surrounding a small, four-seat table, and I pray but dare not ask whether those games were used, played, back when the brothers were children. I think it would break me if they said no.

They lead me through another room, and I begin to wonder how long this house can possibly be, and this room, too makes me want to shrink, with all its small, unhospitable furniture, delicate glassware and pottery, and more figurines. It has a sewing machine on a round table in the corner, and handmade quilts hang from the ceiling along the walls, decorated with cartoon characters. I notice a sliding glass door to a back porch. I feel relieved that there’s another way out.

We walk through another hallway and need to turn our shoulders slightly, it’s so narrow with shelves covered with Nutcracker figurines. A door on the right goes into the basement. Facing that door is the one to the parents’ bedroom. I imagine them in bed, about to go to sleep, and one of them flicks off the light, and they both sense the secret between them but neither will ever touch it, and they kiss goodnight but feel like strangers there in the dark, sharing a bed, night after night, decade after decade. Or maybe she knows. Could she have forgiven him, I wonder. Could he have forgiven himself?

Then, finally, after walking through room after room of this low, narrow, delicate house, we get to Alex and Eric’s room, and I feel my tension release. Suddenly, we can speak without whispering. Suddenly, there’s space. It’s uncluttered though not particularly clean, with a wood floor, two twin beds, a full bookcase, a desk with a computer and piano keyboard, a big wooden dresser with a TV and Xbox on top, and a couch. Their blinds are open to the snowy yard in the night – I realize that the blinds had been shut through the rest of the house.

We don’t linger. Alex and Kevin grab their bags and we go out to the car. They hug their mother goodbye and I thank her again for dinner.

As I pull out of the driveway, Kevin leans forward from the backseat, putting his hand on my forearm. “She could make you go hungry with her talking, couldn’t she?” he says.

Alex bursts out laughing. “God, he’s so awkward.”

I’m stunned by their ease.

“I feel kind of bad when I see him trying to connect with people. He just doesn’t know how at all,” Kevin replies, leaning back away. “Alex told you about stuff, right?”

“Yes,” Alex and I say simultaneously.

“Yeah, fucking creep,” Kevin comments. “I feel bad for Mom, though.”

Alex agrees. “I just try to be there for her as much as I can. I couldn’t stay living here, though.”

“I get it,” his brother says. “I just don’t know what I’ll do when I graduate. I’d hate to leave her alone.”

“Does she know?” I ask.

They’re silent for a moment. Then Alex says, “I didn’t tell her.” Kevin whispers a reply, indicating he hadn’t either. We’re silent again, pulling off Thistle Road, then onto the highway.

“I ran into him back in the summer,” Kevin says. “Jamie.”

“Oh?”

“At the DMV. Dad and I both had to go renew our licenses. Jamie came in just before they get to our numbers. I didn’t know who he was – I’d never met him before. But he sees us, and stares for a few seconds, then he walks right over, and he stands in front of Dad, and he says, ‘I forgive you.’ He said it twice. ‘I forgive you.’ Dad wouldn’t even look at him. Jamie looked at me, and said, ‘I’m sorry,’ and he looks so much like Dad, he really does, and I realized who it was. He went and got his number, Dad and I got called up. We got our new license pictures, then drove home, didn’t say a word the whole time.”

“Christ,” I say.

“Yeah,” Alex replies, gazing out the passenger window.

The highway unrolls southward beneath our wheels.

“I just worry about Mom,” Alex says. “I don’t know what we should do. If there’s anything.”

I think about the pair of them in the house. Leonard in his office, Mrs. Taylor sitting carefully on the ottoman beneath the chandelier. I shiver.