At home, Jonah doted on his brother, read to him, played with him, even let Lester climb on his back for rides around the house, all fairly verboten in the old days, when Jonah’s interest in Lester had only ever been theoretical. Lester was thrilled by it all. He suddenly had a new friend, the older brother he worshipped, who used to ignore him. Life was good. But to Martin it felt like a calculated display. With this performance of tenderness toward his brother, Jonah seemed to be saying, “Look, this is what you no longer get. See? It’s over for you. Go fuck yourself.”

Martin took it too personally, he knew. Maybe because it was personal.

One night, when Jonah hadn’t touched his dinner, they were asking him if he would like something else to eat, and, because he wasn’t answering, and really had not been answering for some weeks now, other than in one-word responses, curt and formal, Martin and Rachel abandoned their usual rules, the guideposts of parenting they’d clung to, and moved through a list of bribes. They dangled the promise of ice cream, and then those monstrosities passing for Popsicles, shaped like animals with chocolate faces or hats, which used to turn Jonah craven and desperate. When Jonah remained silent and sort of washed-out looking, Martin offered his son candy. He could have some right now. If only he’d fucking say something.

“It’s just that you’re all in his face,” Rachel said to him later. “How’s he supposed to breathe?”

“You think my desire for him to speak is making him silent?”

“It’s probably not helping.”

“Whereas your approach is so amazing.”

“My approach? You mean being his mother? Loving him for who he is? Keeping him safe? Yeah, it is pretty amazing.”

He turned over to sleep while Rachel clipped on her book light.

They’d ride this one out in silence, apparently.

Yes, well. They’d written their own vows, promising to be “intensely honest” with each other. They had not specifically said that they would hold up each other’s flaws to the most rigorous scrutiny, calling out each other’s smallest mistakes, like fact checkers, believing, perhaps, that the marriage would thrive only if all personal errors and misdeeds were rooted out of it. This mission had gone unstated.

In the morning, when Martin got up, Jonah sat reading while Lester played soldiers on the rug. Lester was fully dressed, his backpack near the door. There was no possible way that Lester had done this on his own. Obviously, Jonah had dressed his brother, emptied the boy’s backpack of yesterday’s crap art from the first-grade praise farm he attended, and readied it for a new day. Months ago, they’d asked Jonah to perform this role in the morning, to dress and prepare his brother, so that they could sleep in, and Jonah had complied a few times, but halfheartedly, with a certain mysterious cost to little Lester, who was often speechless and tear-streaked by the time they found him. The chore had quickly lapsed, and usually Martin awoke to a hungry, half-naked Lester, waiting for his help.

Today, Lester seemed happy. There was no sign of crying.

“Good morning, Daddy,” he said.

“Hello there, Les, my friend. Sleep O.K.?”

“Jonah made me breakfast. I had juice and Cheerios. I brought in my own dishes.”

“Way to go! Thank you.”

Martin figured he’d just play it casual, not draw too much attention to anything.

“Good morning, champ,” he said to Jonah. “What are you reading?”

Martin braced himself for silence, for stillness, for a child who hadn’t heard or who didn’t want to answer. But Jonah looked at him.

“It’s a book called ‘The Short.’ It’s a novel,” he said, and then he resumed reading.

A fat bolt of lightning filled the cover. A boy ran beneath it. The title lettering was achieved graphically with one long wire, a plug trailing off the cover.

“Oh, yeah?” Martin said. “What’s it about? Tell me about it.”

There was a long pause this time. Martin went into the kitchen to get his coffee started. He popped back out to the living room and snapped his fingers.

“Jonah, hello. Your book. What’s it about?”

Jonah spoke quietly. His little flannel shirt was buttoned up to the collar, as if he were headed out into a blizzard. Martin almost heard a kind of apology in his voice.

“Since I have to leave for school in fifteen minutes, and since I was hoping to get to page 100 this morning, would it be O.K. if I didn’t describe it to you? You can look it up on Amazon.”

He told Rachel about this later in the morning, the boy’s unsettling calm, his odd response.

“Yeah, I don’t know,” she said. “I mean, good for him, right? He just wanted to read, and he told you that. So what?”

“Huh,” Martin said.

Rachel was busy cleaning. She hadn’t looked at him. Their argument last night had either been forgotten or stored for later activation. He’d find out. She seemed engrossed by a panicked effort at tidying, as if guests were arriving any second, as if their house were going to be inspected by the fucking U.N. Martin followed her around while they talked, because if he didn’t she’d roam out of earshot and the conversation would expire.

“He just seems like a stranger to me,” Martin said, trying to add a lightness to his voice so she wouldn’t hear it as a complaint.

Rachel stopped cleaning. “Yeah.”

For a moment, it seemed that she might agree with him and they’d see this thing similarly.

“But he’s not a stranger. I don’t know. He’s growing up. You should be happy that he’s reading. At least he wasn’t begging to be on the stupid iPad, and it seems like he’s talking again. He wanted to read, and you’re freaking out. Honestly.”

Yes, well. You had these creatures in your house. You fed them. You cleaned them. And here was the person you’d made them with. She was beautiful, probably. She was smart, probably. It was impossible to know anymore. He looked at her through an unclean filter, for sure. He could indulge a great anger toward her that would suddenly vanish if she touched his hand. What was wrong? He’d done something or he hadn’t done something. Figure it the fuck out, Martin thought. Root out the resentment. Apologize so hard it leaks from her body. Then drink the liquid. Or use it in a soup. Whatever.

Jonah came and went, such a weird bird of a boy, so serious. Martin tried to tread lightly. He tried not to tread at all. Better to float overhead, to allow the cold remoteness of his elder son to freeze their home. He studied Rachel’s caution, her distance-giving, her respect, the confidence she possessed that he clearly lacked, even as he saw the toll it took on her, what had become of this person who needed to touch her young son and just couldn’t.

Then, one afternoon, he forgot himself. He came home with groceries and saw Jonah down on the rug with Lester, setting up his Lego figures for him, such an impossibly small person, dressed so carefully by his own hand, his son—it still seemed ridiculous and a miracle to Martin that there’d be such a thing as a son, that a little creature in this world would be his to protect and befriend. Without thinking about it, he sat down next to Jonah and took the whole of the boy in his arms. He didn’t want to scare him, and he didn’t want to hurt him, but he needed this boy to feel what it was like to be held, to really be swallowed up in a father’s arms. Maybe he could squeeze all the aloofness out of the boy, just choke it out until it was gone.

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Jonah gave nothing back. He went limp, and the hug didn’t work the way Martin had hoped. You couldn’t do it alone. The person being hugged had to do something, to be something. The person being hugged had to fucking exist. And whoever this was, whoever he was holding, felt like nothing.