“Do you?”
After a moment he said, “Not really. Not anymore. A little pot now and then. Not much. But Jacks younger.”
“You think it's a problem,” Julia said.
Steven didn't answer.
“I suppose you don't want to say,” Julia said.
She remembered the afternoon, a few months ago, when she'd come home to the apartment to find Jack in the living room. For some reason she'd felt oddly alarmed at the sight of him; for some reason he'd looked like a stranger.
He'd arrived unannounced, and that too was disturbing, though she couldn't say why. Didn't he often come home without telling her? Or not? She couldn't remember, but this seemed different. And he looked so filthy, his hair so greasy and unkempt, as though for days he hadn't even run his hands through it. He seemed dirty in some alarming way, as though his body no longer mattered. Or was she overreacting? Most of her students were grubby and unkempt. But this seemed different, more serious.
He was wearing blue jeans worn to a colorless gray, an old zippered sweatshirt over a white T-shirt. He turned toward her when she came in, and she was shocked by his face. His eyes were empty.
“Jack!” she said. “How nice to see you!”
She'd tried to act casual and motherly, but her words had frozen. There was a terrifying absence about him. Was he swaying slightly, standing there? Convention held her on its rails (what should she have done?) and she offered him coffee, a beer. No, he'd said to everything, no, thanks.
Finally she'd asked if anything were the matter. No, he'd said. Nothing was the matter.
He shook his greasy head, and Julia suddenly remembered him as a child, sitting in the bathtub, small and naked, pearly white, his legs stretched sturdily out in front of him.
Julia, fixing coffee anyway, talked as she moved about the kitchen. They sat down, and Julia slid a mug over to Jack. He slouched bonelessly against his chair. He looked at her, then away. His silence was blank and monumental, she felt it pressing on her.
His skin was pale, nearly translucent. His eyes seemed glazed and hooded, the lids heavy. Below them were dark rings, faintly glistening with oil or sweat. He looked down at his mug, his gaze interior. His fingers grasped it loosely; his fingernails were filthy. The zipper on his sweatshirt was broken, the fabric thin and worn. Why did he look like this? Where were his other clothes?
Jack sat still, then looked up, his gaze moving about the kitchen. There was something in him that excluded her. Finally he stood, shoving his hair from his face.
“Okay, I'm taking off,” Jack said.
“Can I give you something?” she asked. She was frightened by his stillness and distance. “A little hay for your horse?” A family joke: it was what Katharine always said when they came to see her. Katharine would tuck a rolled-up bill into her daughter's hand, to pay for gas. It was a love token.
Jack shrugged again, not moving. It was as though he were waiting for a sound his mother could not hear. His eyes were dull.
“Let me give you something.” Julia rummaged through her purse and found a twenty, two of them. “Here. Take a cab home.”
Jack took it without looking at it. “Thanks.”
There was a field of silence around him. She followed him to the door. In the hall he turned to close the door, and she saw his face, now shadowed, beyond her territory. It seemed feral, the dark eyes watchful. There was something wrong with them, his eyes.
“’Bye, Ma,” he said. “Thanks for the hay.”
He'd been like a stranger, terrible. Why had he come? There was something, too, that clicked in her memory, about the visit, some forgotten unease. What was it?
Now, on the porch, Julia put her arm around her bare knees, hugging herself.
“What do you think we should do?” she asked Steven.
Steven leaned back in his chair, his hands knitted together over his flat stomach. He didn't answer.
It was certainly drugs, Steven thought now, suddenly, allowing himself to know, it was certainly serious. The knowledge crowded in on him and, now it was clear, had been there all along. The stinking hall, the awful apartment, Jack's blank dead stare. The weird eyes, the wrong smile. The blood on his shirt cuff. The familiar request. Steven had given him money, as always. He felt sickened by all this: his brother's sinister affect, his mother's cautious questions. Her request for loyalty, the insidious “we.”
“Steven?”
“I don't know what you should do.”
Steven refused to be we. He didn't know what his parents should do. He only knew of cures—rehabs—from friends who'd gone through them. He didn't know about the other side, how the parents had done it. He knew kids who'd been handed plane tickets and taken, that minute, to the airport, muscled into seclusion like involuntary monks. He'd had friends who'd asked their parents to get them into programs. He'd heard of those creepy couples who burst into bedrooms in the middle of the night, taking some poor kid off to one of those sinister boarding-school boot camps. He didn't know about making the arrangements. He wasn't going to be part of some organized plan to hunt Jack down.
Julia sipped her coffee, aware of his distance.
“You know,” she said tentatively, “I wish you'd help me. I'd like to know if you think it's serious, and if we should do something, or if you think it's just a phase he's going through, and if we should wait for it to pass. I'd appreciate your advice.”
Julia had always believed that parents should not ask children for help, they should be capable of dealing with their own problems. But now she needed Steven: he knew more about this than she did.
After a moment, Steven answered. Saying nothing was also taking a position.
“Okay,” he said reluctantly. “Okay. I think he's in trouble. I think it's bad.”
The words echoed oddly in her head.
“What do you mean, bad?” Julia did not look at him. The air had taken on some kind of charge.
“I think he's on serious drugs.”
“What kind?” Her chest felt constricted.
“Heroin,” Steven said.
There was the word. He'd loosed it like a snake, quick, black, lethal, whiplashing fast and horribly into their world. But it wasn't his fault, was it? The word had already entered his brother's world, the long black shape sliding into the crevices of his brother's life, vanishing into the shadows, where it was coiling and expanding, gathering strength. Taking up more and more space, crowding out the life that had been there.
Heroin.
The word was too large for her to absorb; she felt its sickening impact. It had a dark, absorbent presence, lethal and endless. It became suddenly so large in her mind that she could not think exactly what it was. Was it from poppies, or was that opium? Were they the same?
“You inject heroin, right?” She was groping for balance, trying to keep herself upright with facts. Injection, addiction. She wanted something hard and substantial.
Steven nodded. “Or sniff it. Most addicts shoot it up.”
Julia tried to focus. Nodding off, that was heroin, wasn't it? Wasn't it what you dissolved in a spoon? Or was that crack cocaine? The rubber hose tugged tight around the arm, the glinting needle, wasn't that heroin? She'd seen it in movies, but what she knew had turned incoherent and confused. None of it could