Exene

Kate Broad

My family must have read some theory, or made it up themselves, that having a pet could help lower suicide risk. An animal was something to believe in, to hold close—a reason to get up each day. And so when my brother, David, found a stray cat rustling in the bushes below his kitchen window and decided to keep her, my parents took it as a sign that he was interested in living. He brought her to the vet, which meant leaving his house. He got her food and toys and everything she needed. He named her Exene, a name we thought meant permanence. A word that seemed to announce: I will stay.

David maintained a complicated, ever-changing list of which family members he was speaking to at any given time, but things were simpler between him and me: he barely spoke to me at all. When I was sixteen and he was twenty, he asked me how old I was, not as an overture but to prove he didn’t know the answer. By the time he got Exene, he wasn’t speaking to our parents either, but the aunt most often on his “good” list filled us in, describing an orange tabby with pure white paws, as though the cat had walked in paint or snow. I was happy with the news in that I wanted my parents to be happy, and their son’s well-being was a prerequisite for that. But finding out that he was capable of such love— that he could care for something after all—stitched a knot in my chest that I was immediately ashamed of.

The call came on a Sunday. April 12. It was a beautiful day, early spring pulsing through the city, and my husband and I had gone for a long walk. We’d been married for four years by then, and he’d never met mybrother. We didn’t have a real wedding, just our parents and his brother at City Hall, dinner afterward, and then waffles and champagne in our apartment the next day with a small group of friends. But it was still something, and I didn’t invite my only sibling. My father asked me to and I refused. He asked me again and I wrote an email in which I said no, and also fuck you. But nicely, achingly nicely, without saying that at all.

David didn’t have Exene at the time. The narrative in my family hadn’t yet turned to how well he was doing, or at least better, or at least moving in a good direction, because look at the cat. Look at all the love he had to give. I told my father that no one had done much of anything about how David treated me when we were younger, so it was too late to intervene in our relationship now. I was old enough to make those kinds of choices. I wrote: I’m not looking to hold a grudge. But I’m also not going to participate in the games he plays with our family. I wrote: All of this is really hard for me to say.

When I was five or six, and David nine or ten, my mother tried to make him say that he loved me. Even then I knew you can’t make a person mean what they don’t. We had holes in our walls from where he’d kicked the plaster and thrown the kitchen chairs across the room. As a kid he refused to do so much as brush his teeth, although refusal hardly conveys the size and scope of every no he gave us. I can still hear his voice, smell his scuzzy breath. I can picture him in the living room climbing the back of the sofa with a child’s raw impatience. “I hate her,” he said. Not you. Not I hate you, which would have meant acknowledging that I was in the room.

Maybe I was just too sensitive. I needed to grow up, grow a thicker skin, learn to stand up for myself. This was what older brothers were like, I was told: ignoring their sisters on most days, calling them stupid the rest of the time.

But I never knew anyone who treated their family this way. Even when I was no longer little, even when he moved out and I thought things might finally change. The way he called the house and breathed into the phone and hung up and called again. The way he showed up at 2 a.m. yelling at our parents fuck you and guess I’ll go jump off a bridge now and all you ever do to me is lie. It was him going missing, it was the police at our door, it was the splintered table, the broken vase. It was the noise he made as he lunged for me before I slammed the bedroom door and shoved my desk chair below the handle, not sure if that was the kind of trick that worked in real life or only in the movies.

When my mother called that morning, April 12, I silenced the call, thinking I’d call her back later. Then my phone rang again and I knew.

I’d thought—of course I had—about how it might feel to lose my brother. If he didn’t just threaten to kill himself, or attempt to kill himself, or check himself into the hospital before he could find a way to kill himself. If a cat, no matter how beloved, wasn’t enough to keep him here. I thought I’d already said goodbye to him, this brother who was never mine to begin with. But it turns out there’s no such thing as getting your grief out in advance. There’s no skipping the part where it hurts.

You still have to feel your stomach cramp, saliva pooling in your mouth. You have to hang up the phone and stand from the bench and get on the train and wait and wait and get off the train and walk up the hill and enter your building and unlock your front door and kick off your shoes and sit on the couch, just sit there, while your husband touches your knee and says I have to make some calls because he’ll need to get out of work for some time, he’ll need to be there for you, even as you promise that you’re fine, you are going to be fine, and almost believe that you mean it.

All that week I’d been thinking about David and his cat, his life, wondering and trying not to wonder what he was up to. He always inhabited certain corners of my mind, but this latest curiosity was different. It had started in late March, when my father sent me an email with the subject line: Stuff.

I had brunch with David yesterday and it was actually very pleasant. Mom is joining us next time. We don’t know what made him decide to do this but it’s a nice change.

My brother hadn’t spoken to my parents in almost a decade, since they’d last suggested another hospitalization, and he agreed, and then never forgave them. I didn’t know what to think of him reaching out again. I didn’t know how to allow my heart such hope. I wrote back: That is…surprising! Hard to know what it means, but an upswing would be good.

We emailed about winter gloves, a play my aunt was in—she was fantastic and funny. The thread continued: the roasted artichokes my husband and I made for our anniversary, a mortgage payment. Twelve days later, the phone call from my mother came.

The world split between before and after, between when banalities made sense and when they just became dumb. I still don’t understand how I could have spent so many years waiting for this to happen and then have been so shocked when it finally did.

After the brunch with my father, David had made plans to meet both of my parents for another meal. I wasn’t invited. I was never invited. He found his way to say goodbye to us, I would overhear my mother saying later, and this became a thing that was true because it was true to her.

But he never said goodbye to me. When a friend of his came by my parents’ house to pay her respects, my father said, David probably didn’t even tell you he had a sister. I looked away, and she didn’t answer.

I wondered what he might have told her, if he’d chosen to say anything at all. Could he have named any of the cities I’d lived in, or what I studied in graduate school? Even when we were kids, he’d known so little about me. That I’d sucked my thumb until fourth grade and liked the summer camp he said was for babies. That I once pulled a loose tooth from my mouth and left the bloodied spike on his kitchen chair, the chair he forbade me from sitting in, until my parents said Katie, could you please just not sit there? And so I didn’t sit there, but I could still find ways to shock him, annoy him, make him see I wasn’t going anywhere.

Maybe he told his friend how he’d steal things from my room: candy, money. That when I was seventeen I had a party when our parents were away, and after that party, he tried to hit me and I ran. Maybe he told her he felt bad about it. Maybe he told her it was all my fault. We can’t control what people say about us, what they think about us. We can’t control what they do. We can have every advantage—the resources for doctors, therapists, medication, hospital stays, summer camps, music lessons, art classes, private school. We can be wanted and loved beyond measure, without pressure, without conditions. And yet.

David didn’t show up to that second lunch he’d planned. My parents waited. They called him. He didn’t call back.

They ordered and ate. They called him again. They came home and called another time. After that, they agreed to give him space. They didn’t want to crowd him, to rush him, to push him. They didn’t want to ask for too much.

A week passed without word from him. They logged into their Verizon account to check if he was using his phone. David wouldn’t see or speak to our parents, but he was on their family cellphone plan. He was, after all, still family. The last call he’d made was days prior, to the friend who may or may not have known I existed, one of the few friends he had. Too much time had passed since then. No one goes that long without using their phone.

They showed up at his house the next morning, April 12, with a police officer and a locksmith. My mother stayed outside. My father still won’t tell us what he saw when they broke open that door.

The cat must have been howling. Exene. He’d left her extra food and extra water, but those aren’t the only forms of care a life needs. It fell to my father to trap her in a carrier and drive her to my parents’ house. My father and the police officer, perhaps.

My parents already had a cat, and it turned out he had strong feelings about not sharing. They put Exene in the basement, or Exene ran into the basement, I can’t remember. Either way, it became hers down there with the laundry detergent and tools, the room only partially finished, the rest of it an animal’s domain.

My brother had lived in that basement for most of my senior year of high school. That was the year I began driving for hours, from our house in the Boston suburbs up to New Hampshire and back, just to avoid going home. He’d been hospitalized for the first time, done an inpatient program for weeks, and then he moved into our parents’ house, to a cot by the washing machine so he didn’t have to feel like he actually lived there. I’d hear his boots clomping down the basement stairs, smell him smoking in the backyard below my bedroom window. I can’t remember us speaking for all the months he was there, except for the time our parents were away and I had friends over because I was seventeen, and there was vodka on the kitchen counter because I was seventeen, and I threw up from the vodka because I was seventeen, and my brother threatened to hit me because when my friend who’d spent the night on the couch asked if my brother would be angry, David must have heard me say, right there beside the basement door, that I didn’t fucking care.

Exene was skittish, frightened of the new place and the new people after however long she’d been left alone in my brother’s house with whatever she might have witnessed, what we wished she could have explained. She’d become, overnight, our closest connection to him, this living being who must have lain on his chest and nuzzled his shins and pounced in the bags he had delivered from the grocery store.

I thought my parents might have kept the cat for this reason alone, but my mother said no. It was too much, this piece of her son. I thought I could be the one to take Exene, to bring her home and make her love me the way I felt I’d deserved to be loved from the very beginning, the way David had never loved me for, I felt, no fault of my own.

But my husband was allergic, our apartment too small. It was a private wish, this fantasy in which Exene was mine, in which I stepped up and did something my family needed and would be grateful for. Kate’s keeping the cat, they could have said. I wanted to sink my fingers into her thick orange fur and feel a connection to the person, my brother, whom I had barely known.

She wouldn’t let me pet her, though. She kept running away. There was no way to get her into the carrier again. My father asked if I’d help, and I was glad to be of use. I’d been having nightmares in which I watched my brother drown in a dark lake and didn’t save him. Not couldn’t, but wouldn’t—I refused to dive in. In another dream, he appeared at the kitchen table saying he’d grown tired of being dead, and in the dream my parents were so happy. I woke up before I could tell them none of it was real.

In the morning, my father and I crept into the basement. It was early, before more family would come over, and friends and neighbors. We were lucky to have so many people there for us, bringing so much food we had to store the excess in our neighbor’s fridge. But we were exhausted, too.

That morning it was just us, the house quiet, my mother sleeping, my husband in the kitchen making tea. We took the stairs slowly so they wouldn’t creak. We had our other cat’s treats from when we’d needed to coax him to accept an injection, because we can do that kind of thing with our pets, step in and ease their pain.

In the basement I shuffled along in my socks, making kissing noises, calling for Exene. She came out slowly. How lost she was, how afraid. Or maybe I was just ascribing that to her, making her needy the way I was needy. She couldn’t have known what was happening or why she was there. None of us knew what was happening or why we were there.

I crouched down and extended the treat in my palm, calling for her. Exene. I wanted her to trust me. I wanted her to give me what no human could. She sniffed her way forward, inching out from under the storage boxes and the basement’s trove of life jackets, oars, ski boots, stacks of plastic bins. She crouched down. One step. Another. My father tiptoed behind her. He was so quiet. Silence. Silence. Exene. I whispered to cover his footsteps. She came to me, to my outstretched hand, the treat in my palm. Just as she extended her nose to my hand, my father threw a blanket over her from behind and pushed her to the floor.

She flattened, stunned, then reared against him, fur and claws and instinct to survive. But he didn’t let go. And the howl she made. The look in her eyes as the blanket pinned her down. What can be more certain than the knowledge deep in the belly of your soft, animal gut that you have been betrayed?

My father wrestled her into the carrier. He drove her to her next home, a friend of a friend who would love her. I made myself believe it. I’m sorry, I kept saying to the cat, to myself, to the brother who was gone and always had been and always would be. I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I was sobbing by then. I couldn’t stop—I’d been crying all week, ever since the Sunday morning that my mother called and then called again. But now I cried for Exene and what I’d done. It was the cat and her howl and the look in her eyes. It was our betrayal. It was how wrong we’d all been.

You can take care of someone and still hurt them. You can take care of yourself, which can be its own form of pain. You can say, I’m trying to help you, but that help can look like being smothered in a basement. It can look like no one is helping you at all.

“What kind of name is that, anyway?” I asked my father the next morning as we shared a pot of coffee, up early again and uncertain how to fill the time. I wanted to know about the cat, which is to say I wanted to know about my brother, but that’s a different question I still don’t know how to ask.

My father thought it was from a band my brother had liked. I didn’t know the band. I didn’t know anything about what kind of music David listened to; I didn’t know he’d liked music at all. When we were kids he’d complain in the car when I’d hum along to whatever my father was playing. He’d hated Peter, Paul and Mary, and the song that I liked, about the lemon trees. If I hadn’t hummed along, would he have hated it so much?

I didn’t know how to spell the musician’s name or what it meant. I only knew it was a shape in my mouth that was easier to hold than the brother I’d lost. I looked up Eksine and got nowhere. I looked up Exine and learned about pollen structure: the exine is the outer layer of a pollen grain, made up of sporopollenin, a highly resistant polymer composed of several other things I couldn’t pronounce. I was excited by the metaphor. Was he thinking of protection? Resistance to decay? Then I looked up Exine musician and realized there was no greater meaning; I’d simply spelled the name wrong.

Exene Cervenka is the lead singer for the punk band X. Pictures online show her with blunt bangs, a round face, hair dyed the color of the inside of a plum. She has relapsing-remitting MS, although the first of her three husbands called it a misdiagnosis. I watched a YouTube video of X performing on Letterman the year I was born. She screamed, the guitars screamed, and I discovered how hard it was to imagine my brother loving anything enough to attach its name to his cat.

Maybe that’s not fair. He read Russian literature and taught himself calculus and was, for a time, interested in film and photography. I can still recall a black-and-white picture of an elderly woman draped in cloth that he’d taken in Ireland or Poland or somewhere he’d been and I hadn’t. He did care about things, once. His joy slipped away from him the way the cliché goes: slowly and then all at once. He stopped taking pictures, stopped paying attention to film. I don’t know what he read or watched or thought about, if he still listened to X, what other bands he might have liked. If he hummed along, if it was quiet in his house, if it was ever quiet in his head. My aunt, the one he still spoke to, had placed sticky notes on her nightstand, her desk, the edge of the computer monitor, for when she was on the phone with David and needed reminders for how to say, It worries me when you talk like that, and, We’d all miss you very much if you weren’t here. I should feel terrible for the stress she went through, but sometimes I’m left with such envy of the times she got to hear his voice, knowing he was calling just for her.

I wonder if Exene the cat has passed away by now, and then realize maybe not—she wouldn’t be so old. The vet had only guessed her age when David took her in, and then a few short years later, he left her. He took her in and cared for her and loved her, and still he let her go. He made us let him go, too. He never had to hear the way we howled when he died. He never knew what it was like to live without him. I replay what I could have done differently, what I should have done differently, but I don’t know what to change. I have only the ways that he left us, over and over, until he was finally gone.