The Version We Got

Danny got to the house on Ferris Street first, which he had planned, because he wanted a few minutes alone in it before his brothers arrived and filled it up with themselves. He stood in the front room among the cardboard and thought, deliberately, this is the last time I will stand in this room, and then he wondered whether thinking a thing on purpose so that you could feel it counted as really feeling it, or whether it was just a performance staged for an audience of one. He had thoughts like this constantly. He had never decided whether they made him perceptive or unbearable, and part of him suspected that the not-deciding was itself the most unbearable thing about him.

In the kitchen Theo was doing their mother's lasagna, which had become Theo's the way a number of things had quietly become Theo's after she died, not through any decision but through the plain physics of Theo being the one who stayed. Danny watched him crimp the foil over the pan and felt a small hot flare that he identified, after a second, as love wearing the costume of irritation, or possibly the reverse; he could never get the two of them to hold still long enough to tell them apart.

"You cover it too early," Danny said. "It steams."

"It crisps fine. Sit down."

He sat. He noticed that he sat the way he always sat in this kitchen, one foot folded under him, a posture he was fairly sure he had physically outgrown and only performed here, for these two, as if the room issued the version of him it wanted and he had never learned how to refuse it. Marcus came in 20 minutes later with a bottle of wine that had, Danny understood before Marcus had opened his mouth, a story attached to it. Everything Marcus owned came with a story now. Danny had a theory that objects only became fully real to his brother once they could be narrated to somebody with less money, and he was ashamed of the theory, and he believed it.

They ate for a while without mentioning the thing in the room. This was a skill the 3 of them had the way other families could sing in parts. The closing was in 3 days, and by the weekend the house would belong to people none of them had met. Rather than name it they circled it, waiting for something small enough to hold the weight, some proxy they could pour the whole evening into. Danny felt almost grateful when the proxy turned out to be a movie, because a movie was safe, a movie was theirs, a movie was a language the 3 of them still spoke without an accent.

"People have decided to hate the one that got made," Marcus was saying, "so they can love the one that doesn't exist. It's a fantasy. The other version was never even finished. It's a pitch and some concept art and a script that leaked."

Danny felt the old argument rise in him, automatic and warm, and he let it come, because being inside the argument was preferable to being inside the silence the argument was covering. He said the thing he always said: that the scrapped version had been real, a whole plan, a whole arc, and that they had gotten frightened and made the safe one instead, the one that dragged the old villain back from the dead because nobody had the nerve to do anything else. He listened to himself say it and observed, from somewhere just behind his own head, that he believed every word and that he had also said it so many times the words had gone smooth as a coin worn faceless, so that he could no longer feel the thing stamped underneath.

"Because reality ruins everything," he said. "That's your theory."

"Reality compromises everything," Marcus said. "That's different. It's called being an adult."

It was, Danny thought, the single most Marcus sentence Marcus had ever assembled, and he said as much, and Marcus said thank you, and Danny said it hadn't been a compliment, and across the table Theo laughed, one short sound that seemed to escape before he could stop it, the first noise he had made in 10 minutes.

Danny knew that laugh, and he knew what it meant, which was that Theo had a take and had been sitting on it the entire meal. He could tell because Theo was cutting his food into smaller and smaller squares, a thing Theo did only when he was holding something back, a tell he had owned since he was 9, and which Danny found, tonight, almost impossible to look at directly. He pushed for it anyway. He wanted the take. Wanting the take was simpler than the thing underneath the take, whatever that was, and Danny had spent his whole life becoming an expert in the substitution of the simpler want for the true one.

"You want it?" Theo said.

"I want it."

"I think you're both talking about Dad."

Danny felt the sentence go in below his ribs, into the place where he stored the feelings he had privately agreed not to have tonight. He watched Theo lay it out with a terrible evenness that Danny loved the version that had never happened, the ending they were supposed to get and hadn't, the one where the person who was supposed to be there stayed and did it right and did not leave; that Marcus defended the version they'd actually gotten because if the real, finished, existing thing was a disappointment, then what had the last 20 years been? Danny had the specific experience of being described accurately by someone who loved him, which was, he decided, a little like being undressed by a doctor: clinical, and gentle, and impossible to resent, and humiliating all the same.

"It's not about the movie," Theo said. "It was never about the movie. It's 3 days before we hand over the keys and none of us has said one true thing all night, so we're saying it about Star Wars, because it's the only language we've got left."

And Danny, who had rehearsed in the car a version of himself that could get through this dinner as the funny one, the light one, heard that version step out of the room, and heard his own voice arrive smaller and harder than he had meant it to.

"He didn't leave."

Everyone went still.

"Everybody says he left. He didn't leave, he got sick, there's a difference." Danny was aware, distantly, the way you are aware of weather in another country, that he was holding his fork like a man on a ledge holds the ledge, and that his voice was doing the thing he hated, and he kept going. "The version I love is the one where he got to be here. For all of it. To see Marcus rich. To see Theo make Mom's lasagna wrong. To see me, whatever I turned out to be. That version was real. It got taken. And I don't want to be an adult about it. I want the other one. I'll want it for the rest of my life, and I'm allowed."

He had never said it that plainly, to anyone, and hearing it out loud he understood the whole shape of the last 15 years at once: that he had defended a canceled movie because a canceled movie was a socially acceptable place to set down a grief he could not otherwise put anywhere, and that Theo had known this for years and had waited, with an awful patience, for Danny to arrive at it on his own rather than be handed it.

Marcus was turning his glass by the stem. When he spoke, the story had drained out of his voice, and Danny had the disorienting sense of watching his oldest brother appear, suddenly and fully, as a real person and not the collection of gestures Danny had filed him under.

"I defend the one we got," Marcus said, "because it's the only one we're in. That's the whole reason. Not because it's better. If I love the version where he stayed, I can't get out of bed in the morning. So I love this one. The broken one. The one that closed the door too fast and made everybody angry. Because in this one I got 19 years, and the recipe still exists, and you two are still at this table." He looked at Danny. "I don't know how to want you here and want a different ending at the same time. I never learned how to do both."

For a moment no one spoke, and Danny thought that this was precisely the scene his invented version of the evening had been engineered to avoid, and that it was better than anything he had invented, and also worse, and that in his family those had always turned out to be the same thing.

Then Theo, who did not have words for this and never had, reached across and put more lasagna on both their plates. In the grammar of the three of them, it was a complete sentence.

"You cover it too early," Danny said, and his voice broke in the middle of it, and for once he let it break. "It steams."

"It crisps fine."

"It steams, Theo. Mom did the foil at the end. The last 10 minutes. You've been doing it wrong for two years and none of us told you."

"You let me do it wrong for two years?"

"We thought," Danny said, "that if we corrected you, you'd stop making it."

And there, laid out over a casserole dish, was the entire architecture of them: each brother standing guard over the others' flawed, actually-existing version of the thing, because the flawed version was the one in which they still got to sit at the same table.

Later, when the plates were stacked and the pan was soaking and the house had gone quiet in the specific way of a house that has already stopped being yours, they stood in the front room and watched a car's headlights swing across the ceiling, across the brown water stain shaped like nothing, which Danny had decided as a child was a map.

"They'll paint over it," he said.

"Yeah."

"I used to think it was a map."

"To what?" Marcus said.

Danny looked at it. He had never known to what. He had only ever loved that it appeared to lead somewhere, which was, he thought now, the entire trouble with him, and possibly the single good thing about him, and he still could not get anyone in the world to rule on which.

"It was a good map," he said.

"It didn't go anywhere," said Marcus.

"They never do," said Theo, and turned off the light, and the 3 of them went out to the cars, arguing gently about the foil, into the version they got.