My mother always said she never took Dad’s temper “amiss.” You should always forgive men’s anger, she told me once, because they “don’t know any other way. It’s part of how they love.” When they’re boys, they pull your pigtails. When they’re men they yell and break things. But then they calm themselves, feel stupid, and life goes back to normal. My father’s occasional temper tantrums were, she said, his way of staying “healthy.” Although it had always seemed to me his heart attack at forty-nine stood in opposition to this theory.

I thought about my father’s anger that night as I lay awake in bed, trying to intellectualize why Trevor’s anger in the kitchen had disturbed me so much. Trying to come up with a reason for my unease that was anything but the most obvious reason of all, I think now. I told myself it had to do with my father. It had reminded me of him, had tweaked a deeply submerged and perhaps upsetting childhood memory of shouts in a nearby room. This was perhaps my way of telling myself that everything would be ok. Because things were always ok after my father got mad. But, of course, Trevor’s anger had been nothing like my father’s. His anger wasn’t of the wholesome, shouty variety, where the experience is akin to an emotional orgasm and the shouter feels flushed and almost pleasant afterwards, having dislodged something from deep within himself. No, Trevor’s anger had been flat and steady, and to me he seemed in perfect control of it, which, according to my mother, my father never was. It didn’t feel like Trevor’s anger had surprised or blindsided him, or had been building to a climax. It felt like it had been there all along beneath the surface, like buried cables, humming with information.

· · ·

First thing the next morning, I tried Jessica, but there was no answer. It was too early to be calling, clearly. That was why she didn’t pick up. Jessica was probably mad at me, yes. Undoubtedly. But I didn’t think she’d just avoid my calls. I was pretty sure she wouldn’t. She had been entirely within her rights to turn on her heel and abandon me in the driveway the moment I slapped her. To never talk to me again. But she hadn’t. She’d stayed and grounded herself and tried to reel me back to earth with her steady eye contact and low-voiced Karens. Hey, I’m sane now, I wanted to tell her. Sorry about all that. I wanted to explain that I’d been caught up in having a secret brother these last few days, how it had felt like a last grasp at Irene — I understood this now. I had been crazy in the way of grief-maddened people, devoting themselves and their every last dollar to charlatan psychics who claim to bring messages back from the grave. I had been hoping for the same thing, perhaps. A final message. A benediction. I thought Trevor would be the one to give it to me. But something had gone wrong and things had taken a strange and ugly turn and what I really wanted now was Jessica. My need for Jessica to forgive me was almost physical, like a hunger. I didn’t think I could go on without it. I felt monstrous, the way a werewolf must feel after a night of rampaging, waking up bewildered and horrified, blood under his fingernails, human shreds between his teeth.