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Francis Whitman is six the first time his mother leaves.
Peter is still in the cradle. It’s the maid who tells him in the morning, a hand on his shoulder, saying she’ll be gone only for a few days. Dad is at work, or in a meeting, or making deals. Francis has school, and he knows how to slap together a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for himself while the maid tidies up his mess of a room.
She doesn’t come back for a month.
His baby brother has always been quiet. Sometimes, Francis sits in the nursery and just watches Peter roll around and take in his surroundings. Peter doesn’t coo, or babble, or even acknowledge Francis directly, but that’s fine. He knows Francis is there, and that’s enough.
Dad wears a monogrammed belt. Francis likes to rub his thumb over the leather, the embossed initials. They all have the same middle name, he and Dad and Francis. So did Dad’s dad, who died before Francis can remember. Dad’s mom lives in a fancy home with lots of other old folks, and she always squeezes Francis’ hand a little too hard.
When he isn’t in class, Francis sits near a window and waits for the chauffeur to pull up as he always does, and for Mom to step out. He would know her in an instant, always.
Instead, Dad hires a new nanny, to stay with Francis and Peter while he works. He isn’t home often, and Francis wonders when he finds the time to sleep. He doesn’t think he’s ever seen his dad stop moving. A force of nature.
Mom comes home, in the blistering summer heat, when the concrete jungle of New York City swelters. Francis is in the bath, letting the nanny clean behind his ears even though he can do it himself, and when they go down to the kitchen afterwards for a snack, there she is, standing at the counter on the phone as though no time has passed. When she sees Francis, she does not run to kiss him. She just gives him a small smile and holds her hand over the receiver for a moment to tell the nanny he needs a haircut.
It isn’t the last time she goes away, but every time she comes back, it is all normal. She tucks Francis into bed and brings him to school and makes his peanut butter and jelly sandwiches just the way he likes. The big penthouse feels a little less empty with her home.
Peter says his first word while Mom is asleep on the couch. He’s playing with blocks, trying to smash them together, while Francis watches cartoons, and the first time he says it, Francis misses it. But Peter says louder, with more confidence, Mama, looking Francis straight in the eye, and it makes Francis feel all funny. Not good funny, not bad funny, but somewhere in between.
Later on, though, he lets Mom think the next time Peter says Mama that it’s the first time, that it’s for her.
She leaves again, always in the dead of night. Francis asks Dad where she goes, and he just shrugs his broad shoulders and says it’s her business.
Dad always thinks of things like that. Mine or yours, hers or his. I mind my own, he tells Francis as he ties his tie in the mirror before a work event. On the periphery, you know what others are doing, but don’t get distracted. It’s a dog-eat-dog world out there, Frank. His eyes are brown and serious in the reflection, and Francis swallows and nods. Dad is the only one who ever calls him Frank. Mom hates the nickname, wrinkling her nose every time he says it, and Francis doesn’t really like it either, but these moments are precious with his father.
It’s hard to tell when she’ll come back. Sometimes it’s a few days, sometimes it’s several weeks. When she’s back, the nannies and maids sink back into the wallpaper, but Francis can feel their eyes observing everywhere.
The boys at school tease Francis for his hair and his clothes. They say he looks like a girl, his blond hair curling around his ears, his clothes look weird. When he tells them his clothes are custom made by his dad’s tailor, they laugh in his face. These kids are rich too, sons and daughters of bureaucrats and politicians and CEOs, but for some reason he is set apart. He sticks to himself, more by fate than choice.
Peter is a surly kid. At once attached to Francis’ hip and seemingly deeply resentful of this fact, he only lets Francis bathe him or put him to bed, not the nannies. He won’t fall asleep unless Francis is there, sitting on the floor next to the bed, watching the nightlight flicker in the darkness.
Dad teaches him to throw a football. He has more time off work lately, and he smiles more. Francis spends a lot of time looking at his face, trying to pick out what features he got from him. Except, he doesn’t look like either of them, nor Peter, with their dark hair and eyes. It makes him feel lonely, like he’s on an island all by himself.
When he’s nine, Francis is chosen for a public speaking competition at his school. Mom puts the information page up on the fridge and talks about it for weeks, kissing his cheeks and calling him Francie. It’s partially because of her that he stays up so late, practicing in the mirror so he doesn’t stumble over the words. He chose a paragraph about moms, because he thought it would make her smile.
Except, the day of, her chair in the front row stays empty. Francis stumbles over the first sentence, his voice quivering, and even though he recovers, it isn’t enough. The nanny comes to pick him up at the end of the day and makes spaghetti, his favourite, for dinner. It is just him and Peter at the table, and he wants to shrink into a little ball right there and then.
Somebody asks him what he wants to be when he grows up. My dad, he tells them proudly. He still isn’t entirely sure what his dad does, exactly, but he knows that’s his calling.
When Mom is home, everything feels a little easier. At night, when Dad isn’t home, he’ll creep out of bed and climb into hers, and she’ll let him talk for hours if he needs. She doesn’t always say a lot back, but she listens. Francis tells her everything.
She’ll go to his parent-teacher interviews, but she won’t last for the reinforcement, when she hears that Francis is “bright but not applying himself,” or that he “doesn’t seem to engage much with others in the class.” He does, but they don’t engage back. Francis isn’t exactly Mr. Popularity, but part of it feels unfair, like they’re not speaking the same language at all.
He goes with Dad to work one day and staring down the office with businessmen holding meetings and clerks on the phone and the chatter of business and efficiency in the air, he thinks: this is it. It makes sense to him, this world, much more than the one of school. Here, efforts are quantified; either you get the deal or you don’t, and people communicate based on what they need instead of what they want. At the end of the day, Dad adjusts Francis’ tie and tells him he’s a natural, and Francis glows with pride.
Peter gets into a fight at school, with a boy bigger than him, and when Francis goes to the office to get him, Peter’s eye is bruised and he’s scowling. Francis tells the secretary their mother’s at work and to call the chauffeur to take them home.
In the car, as Francis watches the buildings blur past, Peter asks where she is. Matter-of-factly, not surprised.
I don’t know, Francis responds, and it’s the truth.
Already, Peter notices. When Mom leans in to kiss his forehead, there is a split second where Peter flinches. As soon as he catches Francis watching, though, he glares and sulks off. Still, Francis is the one he goes to for help with his schoolwork late at night, not Mom, not Dad. They work through it together at the dinner table, and always Peter thaws a little in that time, enough to coax out a smile.
A girl kisses Francis at his eighth grade dance, and her lips taste like coconut. She runs off before he can say something to her, but he’s not even sure what he would say. He goes to the bathroom and wipes off the gloss smudged on his lips.
It gives him a little street credit, but not much. The other boys in his grade stop threatening to shove him into lockers, they just eye him in the hallways. Francis doesn’t mind that much compared to the alternative.
One night, he wakes up in a cold sweat, shaking, hands clenched in the damp sheets. It takes him a while until his body begins to loosen, leaving him wrung out and exhausted. His heart settles in his chest finally, but he can’t fall asleep, terrified it’ll actually leap out of his chest this time. The next night, when he crawls into Mom’s bed, he doesn’t tell her about that episode. It happens again, every so often.
He’s fifteen when Jack is born, in the middle of the night. He and Peter go together to the hospital, and they hesitate outside the room for a moment, watching the scene before them: Mom and Dad both bent over the tiny bundle in Mom’s arms. Francis looks over at Peter, sees his jaw tighten, and he wants to say something but Peter goes in before he has the chance.
Jack has ten tiny fingers and toes, and already has curls of dark hair on his head. Francis stares into his eyes and feels something heavy drop into his shoulders again, weighing him down. Two twin boulders, named Peter and Jack.
And so, when Mom leaves, Francis is the one who rouses Peter awake before the nanny comes in (because she always gets the timing wrong and makes them late), who sets out Jack’s baby food on the high chair (because he knows which ones Jack likes and which ones he’ll spit out all over the table), he helps Peter with math homework at night and leaves his own to the last minute. Instead of going out with friends on the weekends, he reads books on business and teaches Jack to talk. He researches universities close to home so he can visit on the weekends, so he can make sure they’re doing okay.
The boys in Francis’ grade are getting girlfriends, and a few girls twirl their hair and giggle at him in class. As time goes on, he’s slowly moving up the chain, enough for this kind of attention. He doesn’t want it, though. Guys talk about how horny they are around him, and he just doesn’t get it. It makes him feel weird, in his chest, to think about kissing a girl, about having sex with her. With anyone, really. It ranks so low on his list of priorities that it might as well not even be there.
Mom gets into obsessions sometimes when she comes back. One year, she gets Dad to buy her a horse for her birthday. They go to a family friend’s ranch for two weeks so she can ride, but the next year the horse is forgotten.
This time, it’s Christianity. She comes home with a Bible tucked under her arm and a cross around her neck. Francis is sixteen, and he’s been to church a few times, mostly on Christmas because it’s tradition, but now Mom hands him the Bible and tells him to read it, like it holds the answers to everything. She starts every meal with a prayer, and she goes to church on Sundays, sometimes managing to drag the boys along with her. Every time they sit in the pews, Francis feels Peter’s eyes on him, boring holes into his skull.
“I named you all after saints,” she tells them on the car ride home. “St. Francis is the patron of animals and the environment.” She strokes Francis’ cheek. “St. Peter is the patron of fishermen and locksmiths.” Peter, sitting across from her, just stares. “And Little Jack, just like your father, St. James. Patron of pilgrims and soldiers.” She leans down to kiss the top of Jack’s head, in his car seat.
Peter’s anger seems to grow as he gets older. He keeps it in until it explodes, useless fights like cats and dogs. Francis has more than one scratch and bite from Peter on his body. He won’t fight with Mom, though, he just goes quiet. Francis is the only one who unlocks that side of him. Needless to say, they don’t exactly get along most of the time as teenagers.
What they do agree on is Jack, because everybody loves Jack. But Jack loves Francis. He looks at Francis like he hung the moon. His first steps are to Francis, not Mom. There is no pretending this time: Jack is Francis’.
Jack likes to read. He’s ahead of the milestones on that, able to read sentences way before his peers. Dad buys him so many books, and what was once the nursery becomes a sort of library with a bed squeezed in between the bookshelves. When Jack asks him to read books to him at night, Francis does. Jack likes the more romantic stories, with happy endings. Francis prefers mystery novels, with the formulaic twists and turns. Peter doesn’t read, a fact his English teachers frown upon. Francis is the one who signs his report cards and tries to get Peter to improve his marks, but he doesn’t tell Mom. What could she do that he can’t?
Francis gets into Columbia University, probably because of Dad’s connections. When he writes a check for the tuition, Dad looks at him straight down the nose and tells him to step his game up, because he’s got a future waiting for him at the company. It is the best thing he has ever heard.
He lives at home, taking the subway to classes every day, coming home to Peter and Jack and sometimes Mom. It’s around then that he feels the chill settle in the hallways when Mom and Dad pass each other. Peter asks Francis if they’re getting a divorce, and Francis just shrugs.
Some nights, he’ll follow a group of guys from his class to a nightclub, and he’ll drink and talk to girls and pretend to be normal. Sometimes boys hit on him too and he still doesn’t know what to do. He develops a love of whiskey, and a hatred of loud, booming music, and maybe also an existential crisis.
Peter has a girlfriend. Well, girl friend, with the space. Francis doesn’t bother to learn her name because she won’t last long, which is true. She is cute though, but Peter’s face gets all twisty when she acts sweet, and later on when she’s gone, Francis asks about her and it’s as though Peter has nothing to say. He spends almost as much time as Francis does with Jack, on top of his school and social life. Peter actually smiles around Jack, in a way he doesn’t around Francis. Teenage hormones have done little to ease Peter’s surliness.
Francis reads the Bible. He’s not sure why, or why now, but it’s while Mom is gone that he cracks it open and reads. He knows hymns and such from church, but this feels different. He can’t tell why Mom is so drawn to it, more to it than them, her children. It makes him feel unpleasant to think about, so he puts the Bible back in her bedside drawer and pretends he never read it.
Dad gets him an internship at the company as he finishes his Bachelor’s. The charcoal gray suit hanging in his closet is a surprise when he gets home, and Francis imagines himself looking just like Dad in the mirror, of being somebody worth paying attention to.
And the job is fine. No longer does it hold the same joy as it once did, this kind of future. But Dad claps him on the shoulder and tells him he did well, and so that’s how it has to be.
He gets a master’s in business administration around the time Peter goes away for college, somewhere on the West Coast. He helps pack up Peter’s things while Jack watches, confused and sad. Peter won’t look him in the eye before he leaves, giving him a one-armed hug before he goes towards the terminal. Mom isn’t there to see him go; she calls a day later, confused when Francis tells her Peter isn’t there.
The house is quieter without Peter. Francis can feel his absence acutely, and it is distressing. Jack’s teachers think Francis is his dad when he drops Jack off. He simply laughs it off but something lodges in his heart, like a splinter.
Mom and Dad divorce finally. Mom moves out and becomes a ghost. Sometimes, Francis thinks he hears her in the study, but he’ll push the door open and find no one. She’s hard to track down, always moving from one place to another. Without a place, without a family to tether her to, she drifts, aimless.
Part of him wants to protect Jack from her, the same way he wanted to protect Peter, but he knows they know. Still, he tries. When Mom isn’t at a milestone, he is there. He is always there.
What else does he have besides his brothers, besides his work? Living in the same penthouse he grew up in, alone, staring down the barrel of many long years to come. Jack asks why he doesn’t have a girlfriend, and Francis doesn’t know how to answer him. Why doesn’t he? Broken, he thinks miserably in the mirror. I am broken.
He rises in the ranks at work, now a proper employee. Dad says he’ll inherit the company if he wants it. Francis is tired. The episodes only grow more frequent, leaving him gasping and sweating for no reason. His hands start to shake, so he gets a prescription for anxiety pills from some sort of shrink and takes two a day, hiding the bottle from anyone who might see. He sleeps in the same bedroom as he did when he was a child, and when he rolls over in bed, the other side is always cold. Jack doesn’t need him as much anymore, but he’s still sensitive in a way that Francis can protect. Peter only calls infrequently, and he doesn’t say much. Francis misses him: without Peter, the scale is unbalanced.
When Jack comes home late, with tear-stained cheeks, and walks straight into Francis’ outstretched arms, his chest hurts. His baby brother, heartbroken, and yet Francis doesn’t know how to help him. Can’t help him, not with this, not with lived experience.
So, he studies love, with the ferocity of one who is on the outside. All of those romance stories that Jack loves make him feel worse, even more confused. For Jack, though, he’ll do it.
And he feels sort of loveless. Still reaching for his mother, his father, his brothers, and nothing to show for it. Nobody else, he has reached for nobody else. And by now, Francis is in his thirties and he’s alone, and that’s just how it is.
Peter doesn’t invite him to his graduation. Instead, he flies to England and spends a year there, and Francis doesn’t learn about it until afterwards, when Peter comes home. He’s taller than Francis remembers, and his hair is cut differently, but it’s him. Francis nearly crushes him into his chest during the hug, and Peter has to push him off to breathe. When they go out to dinner, and Francis orders for them, Peter scowls and looks at Jack, but neither of them says anything. They just communicate silently and Francis is left on the outside.
He gets an apartment, walking distance from the penthouse, and an assistant at work, Brendan. He’s bald, that’s the first thing Francis notices about him, but he’s efficient. Dad doesn’t slow down, and part of Francis thinks that James Whitman will live forever.
It gets hard to wake up in the mornings, like his bones are made of lead. Francis lays there for what feels like hours, staring up at the ceiling, and nothing changes.
Peter goes back to England a few times, and then he brings home a girl. Alice, Francis learns, and she’s sweet but practical. Peter grimaces less when she kisses his cheek. She talks about moving to New York to be with Peter, and Francis thinks about Mom, vanished in the wind. That night, he pours himself several glasses of whiskey and stares into the darkness for hours.
He gets the feeling Jack and Peter don’t trust him anymore. They move differently around him now, leave him out of conversations, and maybe they like each other more. Maybe it’s because they’re actual brothers, not like Francis and Peter, strangers raised together, or Francis and Jack, mother and son. Francis doesn’t have anybody else. His apartment is empty without them. He misses them more than anything in the world, except maybe Mom.
Francis calls her one night, trying every number he can trace back to her when she picks up. It’s her breathing on the line, but when he asks, “Mom?” she doesn’t respond right away. And then, she does, and Francis talks. He tells her as close to everything as he can muster, and she listens. She always listens, like when he was a little boy
“Francie, you know you’re a problem, right?”
He pauses, like a bell being rung. She’s the only one who can strike him to his very core, the only one who knows all his strings and buttons. Nobody else knows him so well.
She goes on, casually, as though this is normal, as though everything has always been normal, “You’ve always had issues, since you were young. I can’t help you with them. It’s best you don’t call here again.”
The line goes dead.
From then on, for upwards of five years, Francis only communicates with his mother through his assistant.
Not that he wants that, but that she won’t take his calls unless it’s through Brendan. Of course, that means telling Brendan, which is a whole thing he’d rather avoid. Brendan is discreet, though, at least. She won’t say where she is, and her messages are always short. Francis ignores the look Brendan gives him, something like pity, because he doesn’t understand. That’s just how she is.
He doesn’t tell Jack or Peter. He doesn’t tell Jack and Peter a lot of things these days. The pills on the kitchen counter, the half-empty bottle of whiskey by the bed, the phone calls that go unanswered. He buys himself loafers worth $3000 and pretends it makes him feel better. He orders himself a belt with his initials, FLW, just like Dad’s, and he tries not to think about the fact that Dad already had two kids and a successful company by the time he was 35. Francis has none of that, just following aimlessly in his father’s footsteps like a little kid again, except this time he doesn’t have his ducklings behind him. He has no one.
Peter gets engaged and then married. Mom arrives late, halfway through the ceremony. As Francis adjusts Peter’s crooked tie, trying to meet his eye, he asks the question that has been laying like a rock in his stomach: do you want me to walk you down the aisle?
No, Peter says. Dad will do it.
And so, Francis is the one who sees Mom enter late, at the end of the row of groomsmen, Jack distracted by the ceremony beside him. And she sees him too, and she smiles like everything is normal, like he is six years old and she has never left, she has never left him.
At dinner, Jack nudges his arm. “Did you know she was coming?” His big dark eyes scan Francis’.
Francis swallows down his chicken and nods. “Of course I did.”
Jack pulls back slightly, scrutinizing his face, and finally nods, satisfied with whatever answer he got. Later, when Mom leans in to kiss his cheek, Jack looks at Francis again, as though looking for permission.
Jack publishes a collection of short stories. Francis buys a copy first thing in the morning and finishes it by noon. He is written across all of these pages, undeniably, the golden-haired older brother, always there, and it makes his chest ache. That little boy, buried under tomes of books in the penthouse, now a published author. His Jack.
Dad dies on a clear, sunny day. Francis knows because Peter calls him, in the office, breathing heavily over the line, and Francis knows. He knows not to hesitate, to grab his coat and run down the twelve flights of stairs, knows where to find them, the taxi stopped and dented, Peter kneeling in the middle of the street, shaking their father’s limp shoulders and sobbing, like the little boy who broke his nose when he was eight and the only one who was there to hold him was Francis, not Mom or Dad. Francis.
We were supposed to get lunch; he tells Francis nonsensically as the paramedics cover up their father’s face. Peter’s hands are covered in blood, and when Francis folds him into a hug, it’s clear he doesn’t know what to do with them. Put them on my shoulders, Francis wants to tell him. He was my father too. You are my brother. I do not mind a little blood.
The three of them sit silently in Jack’s apartment. Peter has not changed out of his ruined suit. Jack lets Francis put his arm around his shoulders, like he used to when they were young. Peter stares out into the distance, face blank, not touching either of them. Off on his own couch, off on another island, and he shouldn’t be there. He belongs here, with Francis and Jack, on an island of their very own.
“Somebody has to tell Mom,” Jack tells Francis, and he sounds still so young, so expectant. Of course, Francis will tell Mom. Of course, it’s Francis.
“I will.” Francis responds and makes a mental note through the fog of his brain to call Brendan.
How do Whitmans process grief? Francis spends a week cleaning up the penthouse, putting everything of their fathers in piles across the hallways. Later on, they will divvy up the spoils amongst the three of them, fair and equal. Of course, he can’t find some things, like Dad’s razor, or the last of the suitcases. Again, he finds Mom’s Bible, still in her bedside drawer, and he keeps it.
She doesn’t come to the funeral. Alice tells him, over the phone, and if he looks behind his shoulder, he can see his brothers trying to start the car, and it all wells up like acid in his throat. It will not be the first time she isn’t there, and it will not be the last. But he remembers Peter’s grief-stricken face, the way Jack leaned into him, and he makes a decision: I can still protect them.
When they put James Laurence Whitman in the ground, Francis is thinking about death. How big his dad loomed in his mind. Francis wanted to impress him. Francis wanted to be him. Francis wanted more time with him. Francis always just wanted too much.
He decides to kill himself a month after the funeral. When the sleepless nights that come every couple of months start recurring every month, then every few weeks, then almost every night. Jack is gone, somewhere in Europe, sending postcards with his messy scrawl, and Peter has retreated back to Alice, back to normal life. Francis is stuck, somewhere in between, and he feels so useless and miserable that the thought occurs to him, not for the first time, but real this time. The solution.
So, he buys himself a motorcycle, learns how to ride it, and crashes it into the first hill he sees.
At six years old, Francis Laurence Whitman convinces himself he is unlovable. His father isn’t home, his mother is gone, and Peter hates him about as much as he loves him. The only thing he ever really had was them, was Peter and Jack. He knows their favourite foods, what toys they like playing with, how they brush their teeth, the way they sleep, the sound of their cries and laughter, all of it. He knows them, down to the very core, but that doesn’t matter when all he’s left with is nothing of them now.
He wants Peter and Jack there in the room when he wakes up, because the darkness behind his eyelids isn’t death. He survives, he survives, and it hurts so terribly but he wants to open his eyes and see them there, leaning over him with the same sort of concern he has for them, every day of their lives.
But the hospital room is empty. Nobody comes except for the nurses, who tell him he likely did die for a few moments. His injuries are severe, and the scars will last. Francis doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t ask if they called Peter or Jack or Mom. He knows they didn’t, and it doesn’t matter. They wouldn’t have come.
Stuck in that bed, his face probably hideously scarred and fucked up, high off his ass on morphine for the pain, Francis closes his eyes and prays for the first time in his life. For what exactly, he doesn’t know.
When he can function again, he hires a private investigator. “Do you really need one?” Brendan asks at his bedside, typing away on his laptop, and Francis doesn’t answer him.
A nun at a convent in India. His mother at the kitchen counter, on the phone, that coy little smile. Maybe they won’t want to see her, but Francis does. He needs to. He needs to find her in that desert and fall to his knees and tell her: Mom, you were right. I am a problem, but I need you.
Last chance, he tells himself in the mirror, after the nurses have cleaned his bandages. Now, he tries to find Jack and Peter in his face but fails. He isn’t anything like them, especially not anymore. Really, Francis has always been on his own. He doesn’t want to be, though. He just wants his brothers.
Broken, battered, and bruised, Francis Whitman books a flight to India and picks up the phone for the first time in almost a year, hoping someone on the other line will finally pick up.