Charles had been fresh out of journalism school when Jake hired Charles three years ago. His dad had gotten Charles the interview without asking if he wanted it – Finn, a colleague at the investment firm, had a wife who was high up at Fischer, and if Charles wanted a job as an editor, he could have one. At first, Charles blurted that it didn’t sound like the type of job he was looking for – it seemed an awful lot like advertising. His dad’s face had clouded. ‘Finn didn’t have to talk to his wife, you know,’ he said. ‘Not every job can be The New York Times.’
And then Charles backpedaled, realizing his mistake and thanking his dad for thinking of him. The night before the interview he had dinner with his parents and his father actually asked him about when the interview was and spoke about how it was a decent company, how Charles would probably get farther working for a company like Fischer than slaving as a beat reporter at a fledgling local newspaper. ‘You and your dad could meet up for lunch!’ his mother added wistfully, because Charles’s office would be only four blocks from his father’s. Charles had nodded along, simply trying to keep the peace. Scott sat at the table, too, snickering. No one asked him what was so damn funny. All their father did was glance benignly at Scott, a hopeful smile on his face, desperate to amend whatever he’d done wrong – or maybe he hadn’t done anything wrong, maybe Scott had begun to snub him simply because he had the liberty to do so. Eventually, Scott laid down his fork and scraped back his chair and left the table, as if he’d suddenly realized they all thought he was willingly participating in a family event.
After the interview, Charles drove back to his parents’ house and triumphantly told them that he got the job. His father looked at him blankly, and then guffawed. ‘Well of course you got it. Finn promised me you would. That interview was just a formality.’ And then he went back to his newspaper.
That was three years ago. Charles always thought he’d be at a different point in his career at this age. Traveling the world, reporting on famines and bombings and assassinations. Sneaking into trials, interviewing the wrongfully accused. Possibly ghostwriting a book about a senator with secrets. His mother had told him that by the time his great-grandfather was thirty-one, he’d had a private meeting with Nelson Rockefeller, whereas the most influential person Charles had ever met was a hostess of a television quiz show – her program was being converted into a game that a certain cell phone provider’s customers could play on their BlackBerries. And though Jake promised that Charles would get a lot of opportunities to write, usually he passed Charles over for assignments, giving them instead to his freelancer friends.
Every so often Charles would glance through the paper for entry-level newspaper jobs, but they didn’t seem to exist. Newspapers were disappearing across the country. With all the bloggers and Twitterers and iReporters, journalists were becoming extinct, too. Starting over with another career seemed exhausting, though – and anyway, he had to stand on his own two feet. It was bad enough that he’d had to draw from his trust for the house’s down-payment. His mother always told him not to feel bad about using money from the trust – it was his. There was no use feeling ashamed. But Charles couldn’t help it – everything made him feel ashamed. Every choice seemed incorrect. What would his life have been like if he’d gone to law school? Where would he be now if he’d taken that job at the newspaper in that little town in Montana, the one for which he’d applied on a whim and had been hired sight unseen?
And there were other choices, too, that quietly dogged him. Where would he be now if he and Scott wouldn’t have gotten into that fight the day of his graduation? What would be happening now if he hadn’t said what he had said? Would Charles still be with his high school girlfriend, Bronwyn? Would she still be speaking to him, at least? And would this nonsense with Scott and the wrestlers have even happened?
Or maybe it was foolish to think like that – one episode couldn’t have altered Scott’s entire trajectory. Scott was who he was before Charles said what he said. The past was the past. The best thing Charles could do was put it out of his mind.
By the time the meeting ended, the editorial team had decided the story lineup for the Back to the Land promotional magazine. There would be a short piece about the land the organization had annexed in central Pennsylvania for the community, a valley rife with deer and rabbits for shooting, streams for drinking, and hearty trees for log cabins. Charles had no idea how a plot of land in the middle of Pennsylvania could be desolate and remote enough to trick people into thinking they were truly alone. Sure, parts of the state were quieter than others, but evidence of modern civilization was everywhere. It was in a McDonald’s wrapper that blew northward from the turnpike. It was in the smell of a factory, the roar of a truck, the itchy tag on the back of a t-shirt. Or would the people of Back to the Land make their own t-shirts? And would they mix up their own medication, resort to Native American-style poultices and inhalants?
And yet, people thrived living this way, even chronically sick people with cancer and diabetes and autoimmune diseases. That was another story for the lineup – an interview with a doctor who had treated several people before they moved to Back to the Land, and then tested them again once they’d been living there for a year. Their improvements were amazing – allegedly, the lifestyle’s simplicity and lack of commercial pollutants had remarkable healing powers. But it had to be a placebo effect, Charles thought. They got better because they wanted to get better.
After the meeting, Charles went outside to get some air. He took the elevator eleven flights down and walked through the marble lobby and exited onto Market Street. There was a traffic jam outside the building, the cars wedged at odd angles, honking. Suburban Station loomed across the avenue, a phalanx of hot dog and pretzel carts on the sidewalk. Two cleaning women in pink smocks and white athletic shoes paused at the corner, talking animatedly with their hands.
The meeting had been especially difficult to sit through, and not just because the concept was ridiculous. His mind couldn’t stay focused on work. He kept returning to what was happening, what might be happening, what his brother might have done. Pressure was everywhere. Hazing was everywhere. It was so easy to turn frustration into misguided rage. Charles also knew Scott wouldn’t just roll over and play dead. It was unclear whether Scott even understood the magnitude of the situation – that, with a few bad decisions, so much could be ruined. Reputation meant nothing to Scott. Neither did history nor tradition or, well, family. Charles recalled how, long ago, he’d been ordered to look after Scott at one of his parents’ Fourth of July parties. Scott, then about six, grabbed a pack of matches teetering on the side of the grill and struck one. He waved it near the old trellises, threatening to set them on fire. ‘You can’t do that to the house,’ Charles hissed, appalled. It was the equivalent of harming an old relative.
Scott struck the match anyway, a cruel smile on his face. The trellises’ rotted, brittle timber was just waiting for an excuse to burn. Their father blamed Charles for not watching his brother more carefully, and Charles, frustrated and confused, said, ‘I tried to stop him, but he didn’t listen.’ And then, after a moment, ‘It’s because he’s adopted, right? Because he’s not one of us?’
His father flinched. Charles could still conjure up his dad’s red, looming face in his mind even today, at thirty-one years old. ‘Don’t you ever say that again,’ his father growled.
And, almost certainly because of the conversation he’d had with his mother last night, Charles’s old girlfriend Bronwyn was on his mind, too. Various vignettes of her had flashed through his mind all morning – Bronwyn on the living room couch, outlining the type of cummerbund Charles must wear with his tux so it would match her prom dress. Bronwyn standing on the patio next to the grill, trying to make small talk with Scott when his brother had unwittingly arrived home from somewhere when