Ask Him Why

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

“I know. But I thought I had a few weeks. It’s not that, though. I feel like Ruth blindsided me. I feel like she’s playing head games.”

“I realize this is a radical thought,” she said, “but you could always return her call.”

“Really? Aubrey, you’re an educated man. You’re a scientist. You’re in graduate school studying astronomy, and you just asked me a question a grade-school student could answer. What do you do if he contacts you? Well, it’s not complicated. If he writes to you, you write back or don’t. If he comes to the door, you let him in or don’t. If he calls you, you hang up or don’t. That can’t be what you’re

asking. You have to be asking how you’ll live through it emotionally if it happens. So again, I ask: What are you afraid of?”

“Besides, if he didn’t care about you, he wouldn’t try to contact you. Then there’s the more likely scenario. The one where you find out you were wrong about him. That he’s not a monster, and he does care about you. And that you hurt somebody who didn’t deserve it as much as you thought he did.”

It said, Pls pack what’s mine. Leave in living room. I’ll pick up while you’re at work 2night. Without pulling over, I texted back, Why? Answer: Know how obsessed u r with him when he’s in. Don’t want to know what u r like when he’s out.

“Good to get the truth out into the air,” Ham said. “Everything grows best in oxygen

and sunlight except secrets and guilt and regrets. They like the dank spaces. Drag them out into the light and they fail to thrive.”

I thought about what Joseph said, wondering how he would live without Ham. How even if Ham lived to be a hundred, that would only be five more years. I wondered what I would do without him, too.

“Ruthie. If there’s one thing you’re never to doubt, my love, it’s how much Joe is devoted to you and your brother. It’s a kind of love the likes o’ which I rarely see. That’s why I value Joe as much as I do. Not everybody has that kind of love in him. I don’t know what he’s been doing with it all these years, since

he couldn’t give it to either one o’ you directly. But mark my words, Ruthie. It’s not gone.”

“There’s another question about Aubrey I think you should be asking yourself. You haven’t even touched on the subject of whether you want to contact him, under the circumstances.

He’s been needlessly hurtful to you in the past, and I guarantee you he will be again if you give him the opportunity. You know how Aubrey is.”

“What’s missing, Ruth,” he said, “is Joseph’s side of the story. Why. Aren’t you curious as to why he did what he did?”

My point is not that I know. My point is that we don’t know. So you ask. When you don’t know something, you ask. You don’t just assume cowardice. That’s what the media did.

“If I could get the time off work, I’d love it. The famous Joseph. I’m just dying to meet him.”

“Or maybe your reality is your reality, and Joseph’s is his.”

You can’t deny your own mother her last wish. And she knows it.”

“And you’re Hamish MacCallum.” It was obvious, really. How many ancient Scottish men were likely to turn up in Ruth’s kitchen?

His eyes locked up with mine. I went dead inside. I felt around for a reaction. Anything. But all the lines were down.

I’d blurted it out did I realize I’d just spoken to my brother.

“I haven’t eaten this big a meal in years. It has an effect on you, doesn’t it? Kind of calms everything down.”

“Joe’s learned to make this meal at least as well as I make it myself and almost as well as my wife, God rest her soul,

“How can anybody not like Hammy?”

She was trying to tell me it was Brad who threw me out of the house, out of the family. Not her.

know? I guess you can go one of two ways with that. You can reflect it right back out at everybody else, or you can drop out of the whole blame paradigm. I guess I chose not to play the game anymore.”

“How long I had to wait. I kept waiting. I kept marking time until somebody asked me that question. It seemed like such an obvious question.

Fear just came with the territory. Naturally I was afraid. But that’s not why I didn’t go.”

But then the more of them we kill, the more we fuel the insurgency. And then more of us die, so we have to kill more of them. It never ends.

“I couldn’t go out gunning for a bunch of young men who were more or less the Iraqi equivalent of my own little brother.”

“God, I wish I knew,” he said. “I mean, I was there. I remember every single thing that happened that night. But I just couldn’t feel the moment when it crossed that line.

“What happened to Tim?” I asked, not sure how much I agreed or disagreed with Joseph’s assessment of his own guilt. “Bad conduct discharge.”

There would be a group of us who would question the whole way we did those raids, and maybe it would change the way things were being done. We thought it was like a principled stand, but it was incredibly naïve.

“Hammy says you can’t unroll a snowball. Just like you can’t un-ring a bell. He wasn’t blaming me or trying to make me feel guilty or anything. It’s just the way it is. We’re responsible for what we do.”

The thing I kept sticking on was this: If what Joseph had just told me was true, then what I’d done that August morning in front of Aunt Sheila’s house was no longer a brave and justified act. It was one of the greatest tragedies imaginable.

“Joseph told me some things,” I said. “And I don’t know whether to believe him or not.”

“Oh my God. What did I do?” I asked out loud. Then, much to my humiliation, I cried.

“I’ll tell you what you did, Aubrey boy. You made a mistake. Joe made mistakes with you, too.

I thought about Luanne saying he was my brother, even back when I didn’t want him to be.

Now I had to go back and reframe all those years when I thought he was gone.

Ruth said, “Ham told me once that the problem with people is that we forget that something unexpected can happen at any time.”

Then he said, “Maybe that the things we tend to criticize in other people are actually pretty easy mistakes to make.

be judgmental. Maybe everybody’s just trying to protect themselves.

And I’d judge whether I was ready to forgive him.”

“Plus, I pretty much figured I wouldn’t. Forgive him.

And then it hit me that it should really have been about whether he could forgive me.”

“Didn’t seem like he’d ever particularly held it against me to begin with. Which is weird.”

“It hurt him, though,” I said. “Hamish told me so.” I was surprised by her reaction. I guess I’d expected it would kick her, too.

“It was a very purposeful, premeditated action to try to hurt him,” she said. “That’s what made it a radical act.

“In other words, you were an impulsive boy, and now you’re a man who’s able to look back and see things more clearly than he saw them then. Better late than never.”