Reborn To Repent

David, Before The Fall

Their mother's birthday fell on a Sunday that year, and Marcus almost didn't go.

He had a reason ready, the kind he'd used for a decade in his old life — a desk that needed him, a market that didn't sleep on weekends even when it should have. It wasn't even a lie yet, three months into the job, except that it was, because Whitfield's fixed income desk did not, in fact, need a first-year analyst on a Sunday, and Marcus knew that better than anyone in the building.

He went anyway. He told himself it was because he wanted to see his mother young again, which was true and also not the whole of it. The whole of it was David.

Their parents' house in Fort Lee hadn't changed and had changed completely, the way everything in this life kept doing — same brick, same crooked mailbox post, but the maple in front was a third of the size he remembered, and there was a basketball hoop over the garage that had come down sometime in the two thousands and was still, now, defiantly up. David's car was in the driveway. A sedan, unremarkable, nothing like the money he'd eventually make and lose. David was twenty-four here. Two years, Marcus had told himself back in the diner, weeks ago now. Two years before the company. He hadn't done anything with that number yet except carry it.

David answered the door before Marcus knocked, which was either coincidence or the kind of thing brothers did when they were still, at this point in the timeline, close enough to hear each other's cars in the driveway.

"There he is. Wall Street." David said it the way he'd always said it — half a jab, half genuine, the specific tone of a younger sibling who'd decided a long time ago that admiration and resentment could just live in the same sentence and nobody had to sort out which was which. He looked good. Healthy in a way Marcus's memory of him, post-bankruptcy, hadn't quite preserved — the David of fifty-two had carried the failure of the company in his shoulders for the rest of his life, a permanent slight stoop, like he was still bracing for the call that told him it was over. This David stood straight.

"Don't start," Marcus said, and meant it as warmth, and it landed as warmth, which surprised him a little. He'd forgotten they used to be easy with each other. He'd spent so many years remembering the wreckage that he'd let the years before it get thin in his memory, like a photograph left in the sun.

Inside, their mother was exactly as he remembered her and also nothing like the frail woman he'd last actually spoken to, in the old life, in a hospital room, three weeks before she died and eleven years before Marcus would let himself think about her again in any sustained way. She hugged him too long, the way mothers do on birthdays, and asked if he was eating, and Marcus said yes, and meant it, and felt something in his chest that he didn't examine too closely because examining it felt like it might not survive the examination.

Dinner was loud in the way family dinners were loud when nobody yet knew what was coming. Their father held forth about something at his own job that Marcus didn't remember caring about the first time either. David talked about the company — not yet a company, still an idea, still four guys and a whiteboard in a coworking space in Newark, logistics software for regional trucking fleets, dispatch and routing, unglamorous and, Marcus knew with a certainty that made him uncomfortable to sit with, genuinely good. It had been good. That was the part nobody outside the family ever understood about what Marcus did to it — it wasn't a bad business that deserved to fail. It was a decent business that failed because somebody who loved its founder decided, quietly, that it shouldn't get to succeed.

"You should come see it sometime," David said, midway through dessert, to Marcus specifically, in a voice that had a little more hope in it than he probably meant to show. "The office. It's not much yet. But it's ours."

"I'd like that," Marcus said, and this time it wasn't performance, and he heard the difference in his own voice before he was sure David could.

Their father made a comment then — not unkind, exactly, but not kind either, the kind of remark fathers make without registering the weight of it — about how nice it must be that Marcus had "landed on his feet" at a real firm, and David's face did something small and fast that Marcus had seen a hundred times in his old life and never once, not a single time, stopped to actually look at. A flinch, quickly covered. Their father had a way of saying "the smart one" without saying it, a way of praising Marcus that was also, structurally, a comment on David, and David had spent his whole life absorbing that without complaint, and Marcus had spent his letting it happen, because it had never once cost him anything to let it happen.

It was going to cost David everything, eventually. Marcus was the only person at the table who knew that.

He almost said something. He got as far as opening his mouth — some correction, some redirect, you should hear what David's building, it's better than anything I do — and then didn't, because it would have sounded strange, over-eager, and because some old habit in him still flinched from spending his own currency on somebody else's behalf, even when the currency in question was a single sentence at a dinner table.

He said it later instead, in the driveway, when David walked him to his car.

"Dad's an i***t," Marcus said. "What you're building is the real thing. I mean that."

David looked at him for a second like he was checking for sarcasm and didn't find any, because there wasn't any to find. "You've never said that before."

"I'm saying it now."

"Weird year for you," David said, not quite a question, and Marcus laughed, once, short, because if David only knew.

"Yeah," Marcus said. "Weird year."

He drove back into the city with the radio off, thinking about the shape of what he owed his brother — not money, not yet, David didn't need money yet, wouldn't for two more years, and by then Marcus intended, in whatever half-formed way a man intends anything three months into a resurrection he didn't ask for, to be nowhere near the position to hurt him even if the old reflex came back. He thought about what it would take instead. Something smaller and harder than money. Showing up. Meaning the things he said instead of calibrating them for effect. Being, for once, an audience instead of a performer, in a room where his brother was the one doing something worth watching.

He didn't know yet if he could sustain it for two years. He didn't know if he could sustain it for two weeks. But he'd said the sentence out loud, in a driveway, to a man who wasn't expecting it, and it had cost him something to say — not money, but the old armor, the studied indifference he'd worn around David for four decades — and paying it had felt different than the coffee shop, different than Petrov's folder.

It had felt like something instead of nothing. He held on to that on the drive home, because he wasn't sure yet whether it would happen again.