Page 47 of Cut Off from Sky and Earth
My twenty-third birthday fell right after the start of the spring semester. I’d taken a gap year between high school and college, bummed around Europe, then worked for a while at a ski resort in South America. The year had been good for me. It helped me figure out who I was as a person.
And by 2017, during the second semester of my senior year, the person I was had no interest in partying. So, I waved off my housemates’ cajoling requests to join them at The Coop and settled in for the night with the research materials for my genetics and genomics capstone project. I was reviewing a dense longitudinal study when the doorbell rang.
I ignored it. I was busy, and I wasn’t expecting anyone. But whoever was on the porch hit the bell again and leaned steadily on it for several seconds before pulling back and jabbing at it repeatedly.
I swore and slammed my book shut. As I yanked the door open, I prepared to give whichever of my housemates had left without their key all kinds of crap.
But the man standing on my porch was not a housemate. Not a friend. Not even a missionary in a short-sleeved dress shirt looking to save my soul. Any of these would have been preferable.
“Hey, little man,” he said.
I squared up, planting my feet in a defensive stance in case he took a swing and stared at my brother.
“Aren’t you gonna invite me in?”
“No.”
I moved to swing the door shut.
He reached out his hand and caught it. “Don’t be a dick.”
“What do you want?”
I kept my hand on the door. If I had to, I could force it closed. I’d crush his fingers in the process, but I was okay with that outcome.
“I want to talk to you.”
“Say what you need to say, then get off my porch.”
He eyed me, and I could see what he was thinking. I wasn’t sixteen anymore, and I’d put a lot of muscle on my lean runner’s body in the seven years since he’d kicked my ass. If things got physical tonight, I’d hold my own a hell of a lot better than I had as a high school sophomore.
“Just wanted to wish you a happy birthday.”
“Message received. Thanks. Bye.” I started to close the door again.
“Come on, let me in. It’s cold as balls out here.” He looked around the deserted street.
I tracked his gaze. The house sat at one end of a residential side street—an alley, really. All the houses on the block were rental properties. Most were rented to undergrads. Many were in various states of benign neglect, and a few were in outright disrepair.
I wasn’t worried about what the neighbors might think, but it was January in Kansas and I was letting the wintery air in. So, even though every fiber in my being was screaming at me to make him leave, I gritted my teeth and pulled the door open.
“The foyer, no further,” I told him and slammed the door against the cold.
He looked around the unremarkable house. And as I watched him take in the place, I wondered, for the first time, what his living situation was. And then I wondered what it said about me that through the years I’d had zero curiosity about his circumstances and not a shred of empathy for him.
I’d spent the previous summer on a team doing inmate interviews at the state penitentiary for my sociology professor, and I knew that the worst thing I could do was hurry to fill the silence. People don’t like silence, at least not normal people in social situations. Letting it drag on was an effective way to get someone to talk.
So I crossed my arms and stared at him. He looked less haggard than he had when I’d seen him in Arizona. His cheeks were filled out. He was cleaner.
He clocked me clocking him. “I don’t do seasonal work anymore. I have a steady job. In Ohio.”
“Don’t care.”
He kept talking as if I hadn’t interrupted. “It’s a nice little town. Reminds me a bit of home. Not that small, but smaller than the places where you’ve been living.”
The casual way he said it made me wonder how closely he’d kept track of me.
He must have read the question in my face because he laughed. “Oh, I didn’t have the kind of money to follow you around during your year of playtime, but I’ve kept tabs from a distance. Anyway, since you’re graduating, you should think about coming to Ohio.”
