Everything Changes

in my borrowed boxers and T-shirt, tiptoeing downstairs to get a drink of water. In the living room, I sip at my glass while flipping through old photo albums, from the days before Norm left. He’d been the photographer, always determined to capture our essences for posterity. Afterward, Lela was never big on pictures, possibly due to negative associations with cameras from the time she’d snapped Norm and Anna in her bed. As I look through photos of my siblings and me, a pattern emerges: Matt’s always facing the camera full-on, smiling or being a ham, while I always seem to be corralling Pete, directing him to look at the camera, and thus, am never fully smiling myself. The effect is one disjointed picture after another, three boys out of sync, as if cut and pasted from separate photos altogether. The only pictures that seem composed at all are the ones with Norm in them, taken by Lela, his anchoring presence somehow fusing us, bringing us into focus together.
    The stairs creak under my bare feet as I wander back upstairs to stand at the doorway to Matt and Pete’s room. Matt’s sleeping in his clothes, curled up in a fetal position on top of his comforter, his face less than an inch from the wall. Pete is flat on his back under the covers, snoring loudly, his mouth, even at rest, in a slight, smiling crescent. The articulated desk lamp is extended to its fullest height on the desk between them, watching over them like a sentry, the effect completed by the Elton John wig Matt’s placed over it for safekeeping. On the desk is a picture of a three-year-old me holding an infant Pete, my eyes wide as I look down at him.
    “What are you doing, Zack?” Pete whispers to me from his bed.
    “Nothing,” I say. “I can’t sleep.”
    “You want to bunk with us?”
    “Sure.”
    He climbs out of bed, still half-asleep, and expertly pulls out and raises the high-riser from beneath his bed, carefully arranging it so that the two beds are perfectly lined up, and throws one of his two pillows on it. “Get in,” he says. There’s no extra blanket in his room, but he moves to the edge of his bed to share his with me. “You’re not going to marry Hope, huh?”
    “It doesn’t look good,” I say.
    “You going to marry Tamara?”
    “I don’t think I’m getting married anytime soon, Pete.”
    He lies back in his bed thoughtfully. “Women,” he says. “You can’t live with them, you can’t live without them.”
    “Amen to that, buddy.”
    He laughs. “I like it when you sleep here.”
    “I know,” I say. “I should do it more often.”
    He rolls onto his side, yawning. “I love you, Zack.”
    “I love you too, Pete.”
    I lie awake between my sleeping brothers, and I can feel the consciousness slowly bleed out of me as the soft, rhythmic sounds of their slumber lull me into a black, dreamless sleep.

Chapter 36
    Sunday is dead on arrival. I spend most of it slipping in and out of a sweaty, strenuous sleep, suffering through lurid, dizzying dreams in which I’m invariably running too slow from something or sliding too fast toward something, unable to stop myself. In the rare moments that I do wake up, either bolting from a nightmare or just to urinate, I’m listless and hungover, my eyes throbbing, my breath hot and rancid. It’s past three in the afternoon when I finally drag myself to the shower, and only then, as lucidity claims me for the first time in almost twenty hours, do I feel the gaping hole in my belly where Hope used to be.
    No one is home. I stand looking out the living room picture window, dressed in my suit pants and the T-shirt I slept in, with nowhere to go, feeling a dull resentment at my family for abandoning me like this in my hour of need, and even though I know at least some of them will be home soon, I can’t face the suffocating emptiness of the house. There are no cars in the driveway, so I throw on my suit jacket and start walking. It’s a bright, blustery day, warm enough in the sun, but the wind is laced with ice, and it blows right through my suit jacket, freezing me beneath my T-shirt. Still, I’m too lazy to go back to the house to rummage for an old coat. I fold my hands over my chest and turn my face into the sun, trying not to think about where it is that I know I’m headed.
    Riverdale Avenue is alive with the buzz of late-afternoon traffic, drivers swerving around double-parked cars, waiting for parking spots, honking impatiently at crosswalks. The neighborhood