The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  In his small, windowless office decorated with cheerful and inane posters, such as one on the ceiling of a kitten hanging on a tree branch captioned Hang in there! It gets better!, Steve encouraged me to nurture and parent my inner child.

  One afternoon, I canceled my appointment, leaving a message on Steve’s answering machine saying that I’d call back to reschedule, and then I never returned.

  Gabe struggled as well, but he converted Dad’s three-car garage into his personal party headquarters and found his solace in drugs and alcohol and friends. Inside the garage was a tan-felt pool table and Dad’s Porsche, and Gabe added a white wicker couch and a minifridge that he got from a garage sale. Dad bought an old white BMW for us to share, and we kept it parked at the curb, and then Dad bought Gabe a truck, which he also parked at the curb.

  I didn’t like Gabe’s friends and avoided them when possible. At the center of his group were Kevin Stewart and another Crystal—not Chrystal Lemmings, she was long gone, but Crystal Douglas.

  She claimed to be his girlfriend, but he said that she was “just a girl I see sometimes.” She wore distressed jeans, the expensive kind made to look old with expertly placed holes, and she spoke with a practiced, high-pitched, doll-like voice.

  I’ve always been self-conscious about my SoCal suburban accent—hollow and flat—making it a point to enunciate, careful not to overuse the word “like,” and to avoid common slang.

  Crystal Douglas was the opposite. She took pride in her hyper-regional speech: “Like, ya-know, I rilly think that’s rad.”

  Kevin Stewart was big and brutish and popular, handsome, good at sports, and he always had drugs.

  I’ll never forget how I met him. Lying on the couch reading The Stranger by Camus, no one at Dad’s house but me, I heard a loud banging on the front door. We didn’t keep it locked and I waited for the solicitor or whoever it was to go away. But then I heard the door squeaking open, and in walked Kevin Stewart, wearing mirrored aviator sunglasses and a baseball cap, Bermuda shorts, and no shirt or shoes, reminding me of Hunter S. Thompson (I’d recently read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas).

  He seemed annoyed to see me. “Hola,” he said. He spoke Anglo-accented Spanish, obviously thinking it clever. “Dónde está mi amigo Gabriel?”

  “Not here,” I said.

  I had the impression that he was peering at me through his mirrored sunglasses. Almost a full year older than Gabe, thick-muscled, with a shit-eating grin. To my irritation, he walked right past me, through the living room, to get to the kitchen.

  “Smells good,” he said. “Is that coffee?”

  Dad made coffee every morning, and then let whatever he didn’t drink stew all day in its glass pot until he dumped it out at night.

  Kevin smacked around in the cupboards until he found a mug, and then he poured himself a cup.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  He sat at the table. “Lighten up, amigo,” he said, spreading his legs. Tan, with a diamond of hair at the center of his chest, on his left shoulder he sported a large, rudimentary tattoo of a four-leaf clover with a leprechaun peeking from behind it.

  “Gabe isn’t here,” I said. “He’s at some skateboarding thing. You can try his cell.”

  “Is there anything to eat?” he said.

  I didn’t answer, but he stood and moved toward the refrigerator. He pulled out a carton of eggs, a package of shredded cheese, butter, and a few tomatoes and started making himself something to eat.

  I couldn’t stand being in the house alone with him and left for Mike’s. Mike and his family are Christians, but not in the preaching, let-me-convert-you-or-you’re-going-to-hell way. More like they’re good people and want to bring something to life rather than just take. They sought meaning and found it through their faith. Both his parents taught elementary school in Newport. Mike wanted and needed a scholarship to USC, thus his involvement in sports. He had three younger sisters, and his home was a bustling, happy environment.

  Popular in high school without trying, he could have his pick of a best friend but nevertheless chose me. We enjoyed each other because of our differences, not in spite of them. He liked hearing my stories; his reactions were sincere—astonishment, compassion, pity, disappointment—and he didn’t play games with people. It was nearly impossible for me to be cynical around him.

  For about a month after I canceled my counseling appointment with Steve, I became a stoner, much to Mike’s consternation. I got high at school every morning, before classes, during lunches, and after school every afternoon. My grades dropped. I gave up on college plans. I gave up on myself. I don’t even like pot that much. It makes me paranoid and sweaty and dumb. I hear things, imagine things. It’s like having the flu on purpose. But I was a pothead, maybe from some misguided sense of self-punishment. I carried a bottle of Visine with me in my back pocket at all times.

  Late one afternoon, after I’d gotten high with a group of stoners in the high school parking lot, I sat in the bleachers and watched Mike’s baseball game. Mike saw me and waved.

  The crowd cheered during the game, but I just stared at the cracks and chipping red paint on the planks of the bleachers, my mouth and head cottony.

  When the game ended, Mike trotted over to me.

  “Who won?” I asked.

  He gave me a disapproving look.

  I stared back at him, knowing that my eyes were bloodshot and watery. He held his baseball cap. It had left a sweaty dent in the hair around his head.

  “Listen,” he said. “I don’t like you like this.” He started to speak but seemed to think better of it and shook his head. Then he said, “I mean, I know you’re hurting, it’s obvious. Your family’s messed up. There’s no doubt. But at least they love you. You love them.”

  He put his hat back on and wiped his hands on his baseball pants. “I can’t deal with you like this,” he said. “This is not you.”

  His frankness alarmed me, as usual. My head went down.

  “Get help, man,” he said quietly.

  I looked at him and said nothing.

  “I gotta go,” he said. He put his hand on my shoulder for a few seconds. After he left, it felt like his hand was still there.

  The following afternoon I ditched school with two other stoners: the son of a man who owned a well-known clothing line, and the son of the Bank of Newport’s vice-president. Huge partiers, back-slappers, and high-fivers with fake IDs, they took pride in their bad reputations and spoke a few decibels too loud, calling themselves “playahs.” They got in trouble for things like forgetting to take the empty kegs they purchased for a party back to the liquor store, cheating with answers to tests inked on their calves and forearms, and trying to pass off fake prescriptions by using names like Taco Bella and Colonel Sanders.

  We got drunk and stoned at the beach.

  Huddled near the rocks, alternately passing a joint and a Corona, we heard a noise—a cop on his regular patrol coming toward us. Tired-looking with a bushy mustache, probably in his forties, the cop walked toward us slowly, watching us shuffle to hide the blunt and bottle, burying them in the sand.

  When he reached us, he said, “What do we have here?”

  “Nothing, officer, sir,” said Ace. (They called themselves Ace and Ice. Don’t ask—not worth explaining.)

  The cop knelt, dug in the sand, and within a few seconds found our paraphernalia. “Let’s go, boys,” he said, standing. His black belt bolstered a baton and a gun, and his name tag read B. LESTER. “Let’s take a little walk to my car.”

  After a few uncomfortable minutes or so of being searched, we were lined up in a row and sitting on the sidewalk in front of B. Lester’s cruiser in the sparkling daylight, our heads hung in shame, when it occurred to me to mention my connection to Daniel Hyde, and Dad’s to Sheriff Krone.

  So I did, waiting until my co-conspirators were engaged in a fervent whispered conversation so that they wouldn’t notice. Looked B. Lester right in the eyes. Told him about my d
ad and Krone. The only thing I didn’t tell him was that I shared my dad’s name, but I imagined saying it: “I, too, am Dan Hyde.”

  After I spoke he regarded me for a moment, and then he said, “Is that right?”

  I gave him a confirming nod.

  He coughed into his fist. “Excuse me,” he said, looking at me, and he lodged himself inside the police cruiser with the door cracked. We heard static and intermittent voices on his police radio, and then his mouthpiece chirped and he spoke into it with his head turned for privacy, his tone serious, making sure we couldn’t hear. He hung the hand piece back on his dashboard.

  For five minutes or more, he didn’t speak or move. He sat and stared off toward the horizon, letting out a few lackluster sighs.

  His police radio lit up and shot out noises and he answered it. I could barely see his profile; his mouth was set in a firm line. This time he let us hear him say “Yes, sir,” nodding, “Yes, sir,” and one final “Yes, sir,” and then he hung up the hand piece again.

  Without a word, he stood before us, the sun silhouetting him, his shadow crossing my legs. He seemed to be contemplating us. He ran a hand through his hair, sighed.

  “Well, boys,” he said, “today is your lucky day, because I’ve decided to cut you a break and let this go with a verbal warning.”

  To my embarrassment, Ace and Ice slammed their hands together in a high five, saying “Yes!” as if at a football game.

  But B. Lester didn’t look at them, and he didn’t seem to care, his gaze firmly on me. A direct, pitiless stare, and along with relief, something like shame wrenched deep in my chest.

  6.

  THE FOLLOWING SATURDAY at Mom’s in Cucamonga, I stayed up late with her watching Caddyshack, one of her favorite movies. She wore a nightgown and a robe. I sat back on the couch and looked at her pink feet propped on the coffee table next to her mug of white wine, the calluses on her heels and toes from her walking group and the faint veins beneath the skin on her ankles. “We used to be a team, your dad and me,” she said, apropos of nothing. “We shared this small apartment in Fullerton for three hundred a month. I worked, he worked. I cooked spaghetti on Tuesdays, his favorite. Forget about portfolios and investments and lawyers: We didn’t even have a credit card!”

  “Mom,” I said, “I can’t hear the movie.”

  “Sorry,” she said. But she kept right on talking. “He used to tell me,” she said, reaching for the remote, “that I couldn’t shake my middle-class practicality. What does that mean? If I’d been able to get a personal trainer, some plastic surgery, a bunch of clothes, some fancy car that I didn’t need, that would’ve been better?”

  “Mom,” I said. “Please.”

  She paused the movie and repositioned herself on the couch so that she faced me. After she took a deep breath, she said, “I want to apologize,” and then added, “I need to apologize.” Her pastor, she explained, had begun a program to help church members inventory their lives. She hadn’t been the best mother, she said, in ways fundamental to the development of children. “You need to build up your kids,” she said, “not tear them down,” and I could hear her pastor saying those exact words to her.

  The pit of my stomach whirled, remembering how she used to call me Dr. Strangelove. One night she reprimanded me for taking the skin off my chicken at dinner—“That’s the best part!”—alerting me to its existence. I must’ve been around six. After that I couldn’t eat anything that had once had skin. So I became Dr. Strangelove.

  “Not a big deal, Mom,” I said. I didn’t really want to think about it, much less talk about it.

  Her quizzical gaze sought atonement.

  “Okay,” I said. “It’s okay. I forgive you.”

  “Good,” she said. She reached for the remote and unpaused the movie.

  After a few minutes, she went to her bedroom and returned with a hairy-looking afghan. She sat next to me on the couch and spread the afghan over our legs. Her hand reached for mine. I held her hand until our palms got sweaty, and then I broke free. Something in the way she kept glancing from the TV screen to me made me feel like a kid again.

  Gabe wasn’t home yet from hanging out with Kevin and some others, and so she began to worry. Every fifteen minutes or so, she’d try his cell phone again. Her leg kept jiggling under the afghan. She looked old. Up close, I saw that her eyelids sagged.

  “Well,” she said, “this has been so hard. All of it. It’s been hard on everyone, but especially Gabe.”

  After the movie ended, I went to bed, kissing her good night on the cheek. “Get some sleep,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  In those days, despite my occasional bouts of insomnia, I could sleep fourteen hours easy, and I liked sleeping in my childhood bed—the shadows, smells, everything known and familiar in a deep sense.

  I woke at around two in the morning to Mom shaking me lightly by the shoulders, whispering, “Even. Even, wake up.”

  Gabe wasn’t back yet, and she was upset.

  I made her turn around—I wore only boxers because she kept it so hot in the house, and yet still I sweated—and I put on my jeans and shirt.

  “Wait here,” I told her. “I’ll find him.”

  Earlier I’d heard Gabe talking on his cell phone about meeting at the playground, and I planned to look there first. He kept his cell in his front pocket, and I tried to call him a few times before I left, imagining the phone vibrating and ringing in his jeans, but it just went to his voice mail.

  I took my ten-speed bicycle from the garage and started pedaling around my old neighborhood. It felt good to be outside in the cool air.

  I circled the playground—in the dark it had a menacing feel, the deserted swings and merry-go-round creaking slightly in the breeze—and then I stopped near the swings, kickstanding my bike. Gabe and I used to play here. Gabe claimed to have saved my life on this playground, and I suppose he had.

  One afternoon when we were kids, I had climbed to the peak of the jungle gym and fell. Gabe, on the partition below, grabbed my arm and slowed my fall, perhaps preventing a snapped neck or concussion. He went down with me because he didn’t let go.

  While I have no memory of the incident, we both have visible scars, mine on my hairline from where I hit my head, his on his arm from where he scraped against a protruding rivet on his way down. Because of the fall, the city installed a rubber cushion as flooring and sanded the rivets.

  I listened to the breeze shaking the tree leaves. A car drove past, its headlights lighting up the jungle gym, creating elongated shadows, and then shrinking back to dark.

  Before leaving, I pulled my cell phone from my pocket and speed-dialed Gabe.

  To my surprise, I heard his ringtone in the distance, the thumping, tinny-sounding beginnings of “Area Codes” by Ludacris. “I’ve got hoes. I’ve got hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes. Hoes, hoes, in different area codes, area, area codes, codes.” The song had been popular the year before, but Gabe still loved it.

  He didn’t answer and the phone went to voice mail. I called once more, following the music to the base of the jungle gym, to a cave-like opening for the largest of the slides, which was in the shape of a huge green snake—as kids it had frightened us, the opening of its mouth. The ringtone echoed inside, and when I looked, I saw the ridged soles of Gabe’s Nikes.

  I crawled through, leaning forward and pulling him by his calves, sliding him out. He snored and his breath reeked of pot and tequila.

  “Gabe,” I said, smacking him on the cheek. “Gabe, wake up.”

  He twisted, woke with a start, and sat up. “Faaack,” he said.

  I gave him room to regain his composure. It took him a few head-shaking and throat-clearing minutes. Then he squinted at me and said, “Even, what’re you doing here?”

  “Finding you,” I said. “Mom’s worried.”

  He shook his head, a hand on his forehead.

  “They left you?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  �
��Not cool,” I said. With a rush of gratitude, I thought about Mike. “What kind of friends do that?”

  “Do what?” he said, holding his head.

  “Leave you passed out in a playground, shoved inside a slide?”

  He didn’t answer.

  We rode double on my ten-speed, Gabe sitting on the bike seat, me standing and pedaling. He put his hands on my waist to steady himself. We took a long detour to a gas station, buying mint gum to camouflage Gabe’s breath.

  But by the time we got home, Mom had taken a couple of Xanax—the bottle was on the coffee table—and she was sleeping on the couch, her hands folded on her stomach, the afghan slipped to the floor.

  7.

  THE NEXT WEEK, Gabe called. “Is Dad there?” he asked. “He’s not answering at his office.” His tone alarmed me. But more than that, we’ve always had a shorthand receptivity, whereby we both can tell when the other is in trouble.

  I sat in one of the dining room chairs near the kitchen. I had just woken to the phone ringing, wearing my boxers and an undershirt, at about eleven thirty on a Tuesday morning.

  The night before, I had pretended to be sick—coughing, complaining about a stomachache, spending noticeable extended amounts of time in the bathroom, where I both masturbated and read books—and Dad, a school fanatic, probably because he’d been a high school dropout, let me sleep late and stay home.

  “Not sure,” I said.

  “Find out!”

  “He’s not,” I said, fingering the note he’d left on the dining room table: Golf with K. Home later. “He’s golfing with Krone and his buddies. I just found his note.”

  Gabe groaned and then breathed into the phone. We both knew that Dad turned his cell phone off when he golfed. It was the only time he did so, saying that it was his “church time.” Church time could last multiple hours, depending on whether he played eighteen holes.