We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler Read Free Book Online Page A

was your brother
     Travers. He wanted to wait for you, but I told him he couldn’t even imagine the hissy
     fit you’d throw if I let some friend or family member stay in your place when you
     weren’t there.”
    I was torn between my disbelief that the visitor had really been my brother, a happy
     amazement that he’d come for me at last, and a steaming disappointment that Ezra had
     sent him off, probably never to return. These were complicated things to be feeling
     simultaneously. My heart flopped in my chest like a hooked fish.
    Although my parents continued to get the occasional postcard, the last word I’d personally
     had from my brother came when I graduated high school.
It’s a big world,
he’d written on the back of a picture of Angkor Wat.
Get big.
The postmark was London, which meant he could have been anywhere but there. The fact
     that my brother’s name was not Travers was the most persuasive detail in Ezra’s account.
     My brother would never have used his real name.
    “Did he say he’d come back?” I asked.
    “Maybe. Maybe he said in a couple of days.”
    “A couple like two days or a couple like a few days? Did he say a couple or did he
     say a few?”
    But Ezra had had enough. Ezra believed in dispensing information only on a need-to-know
     basis. He sucked on his teeth and said he couldn’t remember for sure. He’d been busy.
     He had an apartment building to run.
    When we were kids, my brother was my favorite person in the whole world. He could
     be, and often was, awful, but there were other times. He’d spent hours teaching me
     to play catch and also cards. Casino and I doubt it, gin rummy, go fish, hearts, and
     spades. He was a good poker player, but under his tutelage, I was better, if only
     because I was so little no one expected me to be. We made some serious book off his
     friends. They paid him in cash, but I took my winnings in the more universal currency
     of Garbage Pail Kids cards. I used to have hundreds of those. Buggy Betty, the little
     green-fly girl, was my favorite. She had such a nice smile.
    One day, Steven Claymore threw a snowball at me with a rock inside, because I’d said
     he was ineluctable, which he didn’t like the sound of but proved true. I came home
     with a spongy lump on my forehead and some gravel in my knee. The next day my brother
     showed up at school where he held Steven’s arm behind his back until Steven apologized
     and then my brother took me to Dairy Queen and bought me a chocolate-dipped cone with
     his own money. There was trouble about this later, both the arm-twisting and the two
     of us leaving our respective schools without telling anyone, but the family rules
     of conduct had gotten all vague and convoluted where my brother was concerned and
     there were no real consequences for either of us.
    •   •   •
    S O I ’D HAD several reasons for choosing to come to UC Davis.
    First, it was far enough from home that no one would know anything about me.
    Second, my mother and father had said okay. We’d visited the campus together and they’d
     found the town practically midwestern. They were particularly besotted with the spacious
     bike lanes.
    But third, and really, I’d come because of my brother, and my parents must have known
     and had their own hopes. Ordinarily, my father kept his wallet nailed shut and all
     the bike lanes in all the midwestern-type towns in the world wouldn’t have had him
     forking over a year of out-of-state tuition when there were perfectly good universities
     right there in Indiana, one of them merely blocks away.
    But the FBI had told us that my brother had been in Davis in the spring of ’87, about
     a year after he took off, and the government can’t be wrong about everything; even
     a stopped clock, etc. They’d never said anywhere else they thought he’d been, only
     Davis.
    And I just didn’t think I could do it anymore, this business of being my parents’
     only child. In my