This Is Where I Leave You

eleven, Paul twelve, and Phillip is two years old. Paul and I are throwing him to each other, playing catch with our little brother in this very living room, twenty something years ago. Phillip loved that, would laugh hysterically, his eyes wide with excitement as we launched him airborne at each other. Pay catch, Yudd. Pay catch, Pole. We are all smiling in the picture, three brothers having a grand old time just playing around in the living room, no agendas, no buried resentments or permanent scars. Even under the best of circumstances, there’s just something so damn tragic about growing up.
    “Look here,” Phillip says, pointing to the corner of the photo. “In the breakfront.”
    The breakfront has two sets of glass doors, behind which Mom keeps her crystal glasses and the good china.
    “I don’t see anything.”
    “Look at the glass on the last door.”
    I stare at the picture and then, just as I’m about to give up, I see it, a reflection in the glass, a face and arms. Dad, watching us from off camera, smiling widely as Phillip flies between us. The breakfront still stands against the living room wall, and I look into the glass doors a moment. When I look back down Phillip is smiling at me.
    “I did the same thing.”
    “He’s like a ghost,” I say.
    “Last night I woke up and thought I saw him walking out of the 222study,” Phillip says. When Phillip was little, he would put on his toy tool belt and stand beside Dad as he fixed things in the house. “The compressor is shot,” he would repeat solemnly, brimming with self-importance. He was a very cute kid, and I can remember how much we all adored him, how even then, I hated the fact that he had to grow older. The baby is still crying her little lungs out upstairs. I lean forward to tousle Phillip’s hair. “I’m going to go check on that baby.”
    “They’re letting her cry,” Mom says.
    “That doesn’t make it right.”
    Phillip watches me as I stand back up and head for the stairs.
    “Judd.”
    “Yeah.”
    He grins. “You smell like pussy.”

    11:40 p.m.
    Serena stops crying the instant I pick her up. Her head is bald like an old man’s, with just a ring of dark hair around the perimeter. She feels almost weightless against my chest in her little pink pajamas. “It’s okay,”
    I say softly, and make other idiotic sounds like you do when you’re holding a baby. Her tiny fingers find my chin and she latches on with a surprisingly strong grip, like my chin will save her life, like my chin is exactly what she was crying out for. I sit down on the bed, cradling her little head against my shoulder, inhaling her sweet baby scent. Someday she’ll get older, and the world will start having its way with her. She’ll throw temper tantrums, she’ll need speech therapy, she’ll grow breasts and have pimples, she’ll fight with her parents, she’ll worry about her weight, she’ll put out, she’ll have her heart broken, she’ll be happy, she’ll be lonely, she’ll be complicated, she’ll be confused, she’ll be depressed, she’ll fall in love and get married, and she’ll have a baby of her own. But right now she is pure and undiminished and beautiful. I lie back on the bed as she sleeps on my chest, listening to her tiny little snores, admiring the soft nub of her unformed nose, the sucking blister on her upturned lip. After a few minutes, when her breathing becomes almost imperceptible, I gently lay her down in the crib and head back downstairs. I crawl under my covers and drift off to sleep, still feeling the warm spot where she lay on my chest.

Chapter 32
    Sunday
    5:20 a.m.
    Dad is bent over me, fixing my wooden leg with a socket wrench. I’m on a chair and he’s on his knees in front of me, turning the wrench and humming Simon and Garfunkel. I’d rather be a hammer than a nail. Yes I would. I can see through his curly, gray hair to where it’s thinning at his pink scalp, can smell the grease on him, can smell the detergent coming off his favorite blue work shirt. The socket wrench clicks noisily as it spins, and I can see the long muscles in his forearms flex and move as he turns it. He has spent his life working with tools, and they fit naturally into his hands. I’m staring down at him, knowing that I can’t tell him that he’s dead, that if I do he’ll disappear. I want him to look up at me, want to see his face, but he is focused on the leg and he doesn’t look up. “Almost there,” he says. Then he puts