"You'd better go away, Ian," I said. "Mama will be mad."
"Don't be silly. I'm your older brother. Let me see," he said. "I'd like to compare you to this picture I brought up on my computer."
He showed it to me. It did look like my chest. I lowered my arms and he studied me.
"Holy schmoly," he muttered. "That's not baby fat. I assume you have pubic hair as well."
I nodded. That's what Mama had called it the night in the bathroom.
"Don't tell Mama I let you see my chest," I said.
"Of course I won't," he said, looking insulted that I would even suggest such a thing. "My research and observations are not something anyone else should know about, not even Father or Mother for that matter, much less Grandmother Emma. It will be something kept solely between you and me. Let's both swear to that. Put your right hand over your heart. Go on."
I did so and so did he.
"Do you swear never to reveal my research and involvement concerning your condition of precocious puberty?"
It sounded very official. "yes," I said.
"So do I and that's that," he said with his characteristic firmness.
He turned and left my bathroom.
How amazing, I thought. I had another special secret, this time with Ian, sealed with an official oath. I had never shared anything as important with him as this.
I didn't know if I should be sad or happy anymore.
I looked at myself in the mirror again. Ian had been very impressed with my buds. I slowly brought my right finer to my nipple. It wasn't the way Dr. Dell'Acqua had touched me, but it gave me a strange, new feeling, which both frightened and interested me. I had never thought to do that before and I had never felt like this before. My face even reddened.
I was staring at myself so long and so intently. I didn't hear my mother come into the bathroom and had no idea how long she was standing there.
"Oh. God," she said. She whimpered like a puppy and I immediately stopped touching myself, but it was too late because she began to cry again.
I started to cry, too.
She quickly embraced me. "It's all right, Jordan. It's not wrong for you to be curious about yourself. I was as well when I was growing up. I just can't fathom...can't get myself to accept it so quickly in relation to you. But don't worry. Dr. Dell'Acqua will help us."
"Okay," I said.
She didn't know it, but if Dr. Dell'Acqua was unable to help us. Ian surely would.
5 Whispers on the Stairs
. Mama rushed me along to get dressed. She seemed to have a need to be as busy as she could. Maybe it kept her from crying. Even though she had stopped at Ian's room to knock on his door and tell him to come down to dinner, he was late again. Grandmother Emma was furious, not only because of Ian, but because Daddy had not come home for dinner either and it was the third night this week,
"Why isn't he coming home this time?" she asked Mama.
"You'll have to ask him. I'm tired of making excuses for him."
"Excuses for him? When a man doesn't come home for dinner as often as Christopher doesn't," she told my mother, "something is sick in his marriage."
Mama stared at her. I could set something very explosive building in her fact. Her cheeks had turned the shade of crimson like cheeks turn when someone is in a very hot room. Her eyes tightened and it looked like she had stopped breathing. I glanced at
Grandmother Emma and saw that even she was a little frightened by my mother's reaction. She had no idea how much flammable tension and sorrow was swirling about in my mother's heart, otherwise she might not have been so quick to snap a spark in her fact. Mama's shoulders rose slowly, as if her whole body was being pumped with air like a party balloon.
'Did it ever, ever occur to you, even for a moment. Emma, that Christopher might be finding something sick in this house and not in his marriage?'" she began, speaking in a rather controlled, calm voice, which surprised me.
Suddenly, she brought her fist down on the table and the plates and glasses jumped like animations that had just been brought to life.