The Boy

My father, Harlan Brandt, was a structural engineer who believed that buildings should stand for reasons a person could explain, and that the same was true of people. He was a quiet man. He kept his grief in a shed behind the house, in the form of tools he oiled and never used, and he loved his children the way he loved his work: thoroughly, without comment, and with an expectation of permanence.

My mother, Ada, was the opposite. She talked. She sang off-key in the kitchen. She kept the house in a state of cheerful disorder and said grace over dinner with her eyes open, watching us, as if the prayer were a letter she was composing to everyone at once. I was thirteen when she was diagnosed, and seventeen when she died, and the four years between are the only years of my life I remember in full.

Marina came to us when she was nine. Her parents had died within a year of each other — her father in a boating accident on the Columbia, her mother afterward, of grief and pneumonia, in that order — and my mother, who was her mother's cousin and her only remaining relative who would have her, took her in. Marina was a small, grave child. She did not cry at the funeral, which made the adults uncomfortable, and she did not cry when she came to live with us either; she stood in the doorway of my room with a duffel bag and a book about horses and said, “Which bed is mine?” My mother put her in the room next to mine, and by the end of the first summer she was as much a Brandt as I was, which is to say she was quieter than us, smarter than us, and absolutely sure of herself in a way none of the rest of us had ever managed.

Leo was born the year Marina came. That was my mother's last and hardest pregnancy, and I have often thought — I thought it even then — that it was the beginning of her dying. Leo was a loud, sunny, fearless child who followed Marina everywhere and loved me with the uncomplicated devotion of a boy who has not yet learned to doubt anyone. I have a photograph of the three of us on the dock at the summer place: Marina holding Leo on her hip, me standing behind them with my hands in my pockets, all of us squinting into the sun. It is the last photograph in which my mother appears, because after that the camera was too much for her, and the summer place itself — the cabin on the coast, the dock, the woods behind it — is where my mother stopped going.

She died at home, in March, with the windows open because she said the house smelled like sickness and she wanted to smell the rain. My father held her hand. Marina held Leo, who was six and did not understand, and I stood at the foot of the bed and did not cry, because I had decided, at sixteen, that crying was a tax I would not pay.

She called me to her the night before she died. “Come here,” she said. “Sit where I can see you.” I sat. She looked at me for a long time, the way she had always looked at us over dinner, with her eyes open and her attention complete, and she said: “You will be a great man. I won't see it, but you will. And a great man needs a steady person beside him, or he will make himself into something nobody can live with. Marry Marina.”

“Mother —”

“I know. She's your sister, in a way. She isn't. She's the girl I chose for you. I've watched you both since she came. You think about her when you think you're thinking about other things. Promise me.”

“I promise,” I said.

“Good.” She closed her eyes. “Now go and tell Leo I love him. He'll remember the message if it comes from you.”

I went. Leo was in the kitchen with Marina, eating bread and honey with his fingers, and I told him Mother said she loved him, and he nodded as if he had known it all along, and asked if she was coming down to dinner. Marina looked at me over his head and said nothing, and I have never since been able to decide whether what I felt then was love or the weight of the promise. I think it was both. I think that was the point.

She died the next morning. My father said she went the way she had lived, with her eyes open. I did not cry at the funeral either. I was seventeen. I had made a promise, and I had a direction, and I had decided that the only acceptable answer to a grief like that was to become the man she had predicted, so that the prediction could not be a lie.

That summer, I read everything I could find about the origin of life. I did it in the public library, in the evenings, because the library was air-conditioned and my father's grief filled the house the way weather fills a valley. I read about the first cells and the long chain of guesses that led from a spark to a bacterium, and the much shorter chain that led from a bacterium to us, and I understood, with the certainty of a seventeen-year-old who has just found his life's work, that the interesting part was not at either end of the chain but in the middle: the part where dead matter crosses over into something that wants to stay alive.

I applied to the Halpern Institute in Eugene on the strength of a paper I wrote that summer about self-organizing systems, and I was accepted, and I told my father I was going to study the origin of life, and he said, “That's a big subject for a small boy,” and then, because he was Harlan Brandt and could not leave a structural flaw uncorrected, he said, “What will you do with it?”

“Make something,” I said.

He looked at me for a long time. “Make something,” he repeated. “Or make a name.”

I did not know then that those were the same thing. I know now. I left for Eugene in September, with a duffel bag and a book about horses that had belonged to Marina, which she had pressed on me at the station, saying she had outgrown it and it would be company for me. It was the only thing I ever kept of hers that I did not intend to keep, and the only thing that survived the whole story. I have it still, in the duffel, in the bottom of the skiff. The pages are water-swollen and the cover has come away from the binding, and when the medic asked me what it was, I said a book about horses.

It is, and it isn't. It is the book Marina gave me the day I left for Eugene, and it is the only object I carried into the Institute, and the only object I carried out, and if you want to know what a man's life is, look at what he keeps.