Ask Him Why

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

Joseph was not trying to save himself. He had accepted his fate. Whatever it was.

The thing I’ll always remember best about that time is not how quickly our family fell apart. The memorable bit was when I first looked back at how we’d convinced ourselves we’d ever been together in the first place.

if I have to print accusations like this and then say I contacted your brother and he had no comment, that’s not going to look so good. He needs to get ahead of a thing like this, or it can get real ugly real fast.”

“You tell your brother he definitely wants to take this opportunity to tell his side of the story.”

That was the beginning, right in that moment, of the chronic heartburn and other digestive problems that would plague me for years.

it must have been Joseph going out. It would be the last I saw of my brother for longer than I could possibly have imagined at the time.

“But you just have to, though,” I said, “because when you know something is that bad, it’s torture to have to wait.”

“No. I’m just leaving.” And I did. I walked down the hall without looking back. Down two flights of stairs and out into a cold and bright morning that felt unfairly unchanged.

At the very bottom of human experience comes a set of certain privileges, a special zone where the rules apply to everyone else except you. It was good of the world to build itself that way, and include

that tiny consolation prize for those who have nothing else to recommend their lives in that moment.

Anything that lifts responsibility for our actions is addictive, I’ve found.

Your father would have a coronary if he thought you were in touch with your brother. He’s no longer part of this family.”

I had wildly mixed feelings about what I was reading. On the one hand, the rush to hold someone sickeningly responsible came through loud and

clear. But now this new revelation seemed to take a tiny bit of the heat off my brother and direct it toward the army itself, for the crime of letting him join. And yet that was its own mortal insult: the idea that my brother Joseph was so deeply defective that they should have known better than to even consider letting him serve.

Now, any fool knows you never read the comments on an Internet article.

I sat reading for a few minutes with my mouth open, each new well-aimed statement a knife stabbing into my already bleeding gut.

But I won’t repeat them word for word, because they were ugly, and I feel like I’d only be helping to keep them alive.

He had killed us all. He had emboldened the enemy, showing the weak underbelly of America, which wouldn’t be weak in the first place without the Josephs of America, thus signing all of our death warrants.

“You must’ve made a mistake,” I said. “If Joseph had some guy who was like another father to him, don’t you think we’d know it?”

“Don’t read the comments,” I said. He actually smiled, but it was a tragic-looking thing. “Too late,” he said, and then he quietly let himself out.

Now it’s beginning to come out that Stellkellner told some of his fellow soldiers that he spent every summer, starting at age twelve, with Hamish

MacCallum, the man who had this article written about him last year.

Stellkellner reportedly told his former friends in Baghdad that MacCallum was “more of a father to him than his own late biological father or his adopted father.”

As was usually the case in our family, no one bothered to offer us a pat on the back, a cheerful thought, a boxed lunch, or an instruction manual. We were just thrown out into the harshest corners of the world to figure things out for ourselves.

That’s heady stuff, to be your hero’s hero. That’s the stuff of dreams right there.

You can only save face for just so long before you wake up and realize you have nothing left worth saving.

Her office was decorated with seven aquariums.

I decided I would be strong, not because I had to be, not because they had used up all the weakness, but because strong was what I wanted for myself.

I started to feel like he couldn’t know Joseph the way everyone said he did, or he would have known that nobody, and I mean nobody, called him Joe.

And then after they eat, they always tell me nothing has changed, but everything has changed. The whole world is the same, and they can still see it clearly, but now, all of a sudden, it doesn’t feel like more than they can bear anymore.

“Because you can’t go through life treating everybody like a stranger. ‘Joseph’ is what you call somebody you don’t know. It’s their whole, full name. It’s formal. Nicknames are about more than just making a name shorter, you know. Think about me calling you Ruthie. It adds a syllable. It’s not about the syllables. It’s about the familiarity. It makes a name more familiar, and that makes the person more familiar. It’s something you grow into as a way to show you know somebody. It’s how you open the door and let him in.

“The point is that it’s you being destroyed by your hate. Not him. This

is what the Buddha called picking up a hot coal to hurl at your enemy.”

People can bear almost any amount of pain if they think there’s an end to it. So suddenly something happens that they never could have imagined: a daft old man invites them in for a nice hearty meal. It’s not the man or the meal that convinces them. It’s that they forgot how at any moment something can always happen that you never expected.

Something better. Once they remember that, it’s a whole new ball game.”

And besides, all the bad things in the world start with people trying to see the world as simpler than it is.

We had tried something and failed, which was hard on me for a split second, because I wanted to think of Hamish MacCallum as someone who didn’t fail.

“If you think you’re getting out o’ here without a hug, Ruthie, you’re more daft than I had you pegged.”

was different from other hugs in my life. I’m having trouble finding a better way to say it than that.

“So there’s no excuse to be a stranger anymore. And I’ll write down my phone number for you. You can give my address and phone number to Aubrey, too. Tell him there’s no obligation and no pressure. It’s just in case he changes his mind.”

Sooner or later the reporters will get bored and wander away. Let’s talk then, when I don’t have to be your little secret.

I didn’t dare ask. I didn’t dare say a word. I’d pushed my parents further than I’d ever pushed them before.

There’s a limit to how much your car can be worth and still keep it in a bankruptcy.”

I read the message. I know you wanted to hurt him, Aubrey. You accomplished that. But I think you won’t find what you’re looking

for in this impulsive act.

Then I realized these were not normal times. I was down behind enemy lines. And I’d forgotten to humor my captors.

Still. It’s one thing to be told there’s a whole new house. A whole new city. It’s another thing to be told there’s a whole new you. And in both cases, nobody bothered to get your thoughts before deciding.

That’s really all I have to say about that summer of my life. Hell, that next nine years of my life.

Disrupt and discard. Now that you could grow to resent.

Then our dad left our mom, and us, for a younger woman. But even so. Let’s face it. All those details—even the last one—made us anything but unique.