The A-Word Read Free Page B

motions, my brother’s smile faded.
    “I’m not ever gonna be good enough, am I?” he asked, looking everywhere but my face. “That’s the real reason I’m still here, isn’t it? They turned me into … this.” He gestured down his body with his hands. “And I saved you. What the hell was I supposed to do? Let you die? They sent me back and made me your guardian, and when you needed me I was there. And now what? I’m stuck here forever. That’s what I think. Me but not me. Able to look and not touch. Wings I can’t use. Screw this, Jenna. Screw it all.”
    I started to reach for him and stopped, knowing that if I touched him I wouldn’t feel normal, here, present. “You’ll figure it out.”
    We both knew I was lying, but what else could I say?
    My brother tilted his face toward the top of the light pole at the end of the aisle. The fluorescent glow increased its brightness, flooding the parking lot with fake light, stronger and stronger.
    “Stop it,” I said.
    “Why? What difference will it make? What difference will I make? Isn’t that the whole point? For me to make a difference?”
    “There’s a reason,” I said, lying again.
    But by then Maggie had arrived, and he gave up and drove us all home.

M om was in the kitchen, busy with speech therapist paperwork (she always seemed to be working these days) when we trooped in the door. Also, talking on her cell.
    “Your father won’t be here for your birthday,” she said, glancing up. “He’s staying in Austin.” She waved the phone at me like a baton.
    “Happy birthday, sweetheart,” my father singsonged in my ear.
    “It’s tomorrow, Dad.”
    “So I’m the first one to tell you.”
    That was one way of looking at it.
    “Lot going on here,” he said when I stayed quiet.
    I almost laughed. A lot going on here, too, Dad. I wondered what he meant. Our father was a reporter who split his time between the
Houston Chronicle
and the
Austin American-Statesman
, sportswriting mostly, but he’d branched out to politics, among other things. He’d recently published a piece in the
Sunday Statesman
about this group of peoplewho wanted Texas to secede from the Union. Texas had been its own country once, so this was not as odd as it seemed.
    “Crazies plotting to overthrow the government again?” I asked him.
    My father grunted. “That’s not what it’s about, Jenna.”
    “Then what’s keeping you from coming home?”
    This stumped him enough that we said our goodbyes, and he promised—ha!—he would try for the following weekend.
    Here is what neither of us said but understood completely: odds were, he would have left us years ago, anyway. Even if Mom’s boss, Dr. Renfroe, hadn’t given him a megadose of memory-losing drugs because Dad started investigating Renfroe’s nefarious activities. (Nefarious is not a favorite word of mine, but it is on the SAT list, and it means evil and conniving. Like a person who’d keep drugging ailing oldsters and justify it in the name of scientific research.) Because what father would admit to his children that their life together actually had never been enough? Sometimes your family is falling apart even before the cracks are evident.
    “You sleeping over?” Mom asked Maggie while Dad was telling me he loved me.
    “If that’s okay,” Maggie said, even though of course it was.
    “It’s Jenna’s birthday in a few hours,” Mom told her. “She gets to have whatever she wants.”
    This was more optimistic than even I could manage.
    “How was the game?” Mom directed this to Casey. What she probably wanted to say but didn’t: Why don’t you go back to playing football now that you look so great and you’ve quit one of your jobs since I’m working again and not comatose? Followed by the part where she might ask why that nice Lanie Phelps wasn’t coming around anymore like she had been a few months back.
    “We won,” my brother said.
    “Jenna’s outfit was a hit,” Maggie observed.
    Mom’s