The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  LATER THAT AFTERNOON, Dad rattled the ice in his cocktail while we told him about the meeting, and Gabe showed him the signature on his slip.

  “Good,” Dad said, reclining on a chaise near the pool. He took a sip from his glass, his hair toweled into a spindly Mohawk from his swim. He wore his terry-cloth bathrobe; in his hip pocket were the TV remote and his cell phone.

  Gabe and I sat in deck chairs.

  “I don’t want to go back,” Gabe said, leaning forward in his chair.

  “It’s not that bad,” I said, musing out loud. “It’s interesting, especially in a sociological way.” I remembered Sara hooking my arm and her vanilla smell. “Except for all that God stuff and praying.”

  Gabe gave me a contemptuous look. “And the holding hands,” he reminded me.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Awful.”

  “Why can’t I just make up signatures for the secretaries?” Gabe asked. “I’ve got the directory. I can add all the details and then have my friends sign. They probably don’t check.”

  “Not smart,” Dad said.

  “Yeah, I know,” Gabe said.

  Dad rattled his drink some more, staring at us. A patio umbrella cut the sun in half and shadowed his upper torso, leaving his hips and legs in the light.

  “Listen,” he said, looking at us fiercely, “I’m not going to spell it out. You need to go to the meetings.” He waved his hand, shooing us away.

  We went into the kitchen and Gabe paced a bit. Then he stopped and looked at me, his face lighting up with a revelation.

  “I’ve got it,” he said. He put his hands on my shoulders and went on to elaborate a plan whereby he’d pay me to go to the meetings and pretend to be him, until I got ten signatures.

  I agreed, not because I necessarily cared about the meetings or the money, but because I wanted to see Sara again, and I believed that I’d find her, since she’d told the paper-signer that she’d be back.

  We negotiated. Twenty-five dollars a meeting times nine. Not a bad deal. Dad must’ve known, though he didn’t say anything.

  I ended up going to more than nine meetings, filling in the back of the slip with the extras. (I started going with Sara.) But Gabe refused to pay me for those, since it hadn’t been part of our agreement, even though I insisted it would impress the judge.

  Ironically, by the time of his court date, Gabe didn’t need proof of the AA meetings. Dad’s lawyer used Gabe’s head injury as evidence, claiming Gabe hadn’t been properly treated at the police station—besides a towel from a cop to halt the bleeding—and that he should have been taken to the hospital, since his cut had ended up requiring three stitches. Dad’s lawyer submitted paperwork from two doctors attesting to the severity of the injury and the risk of concussion. All bluster: Gabe hadn’t suffered a bit, but the lawyer claimed he’d convalesced for days after, and had experienced dizziness. Rather than risk the threat of a lawsuit, the judge decided that it would be in everyone’s best interest to dismiss the charges.

  Gabe, in celebration, struck a match to light the edge of the paper listing all my meetings. We watched the spark curl the slip into a blue and yellow flame, until it blackened into ash in Dad’s abalone ashtray.

  9.

  SARA SAT IN front of me, wearing that same choker with the shells and a different tank top.

  I stared at the back of her neck—her hair was in a sloppy bun like she’d tied it in a knot—until I got the courage to tap her arm and say hello.

  She turned halfway. “Oh,” she said, “it’s you.” Drunk—I could tell by the way she spoke, her words heavy in her mouth. She patted the space on the church pew next to her. “C’mon,” she said. “Sit with me.”

  She slumped in the pew during the meeting and rested her head on my shoulder.

  The speaker, Tom L., a retired policeman, spoke in a deliberate voice. Large but not fat, with a weary demeanor, he wore a rumpled, dark blue suit with a striped tie.

  I wish I could remember exactly what he said that night, and why it impressed me so much.

  But what I remember is that at one point he said, “Now that I’m retired, I can help people who come to me with troubles, whether it be with the law or something else. So if someone needs my help, you can reach me easy. I get letters and things forwarded to me from the police department, care of Tom L. I’m retired, sure, but they let me keep a postbox. Or just come find me and talk to me. Like this guy”—he gestured to a man in the front pew—“was going through it, and he came to me and he said, ‘Jesus, Tom, I don’t know what to do,’ and I said to him, ‘Well, first off, tell me what you did.’ So he did, and we figured it out together. He served, what was it?”

  The man called out, “Three days.”

  “That’s right. Three days of incarceration for a clear conscience and peace of mind. Was it worth it?”

  The man nodded vigorously.

  After the meeting, I waited while Sara smoked a cigarette underneath a streetlight that gave off a dirty orange glow. The other smokers congregated near the parking lot, using a couple of dirt-filled coffee cans as ashtrays.

  “Aren’t you cold?” I asked, since she was wearing cutoffs and a tank top, and the temperature was dropping.

  She gave a little shiver in answer.

  After she smoked the cigarette about halfway down, she said something I couldn’t hear.

  “What?” I asked, moving closer.

  “I said,” she said, “can I borrow some money?”

  “How much?”

  She looked to the sky as if calculating. “Five hundred,” she concluded. I must’ve looked shocked, because she said, “Kidding. How about a twenty?”

  “I only have a ten,” I said.

  She sighed. “Fine,” she said. “I’ll take it.”

  I pulled my wallet from my back pocket and gave it to her. She took the ten out, handed the wallet back to me, and to my surprise, she politely thanked me and said that she would pay me back.

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  “No,” she said. “I will.”

  She dropped her cigarette and ground it out with her flip-flop, and then she began to fumble inside her purse, looking for something. She started walking away from me, still rooting in her purse, and then she found it: her keys. They jangled in her hand.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She stopped but didn’t turn.

  “I’ll drive,” I suggested, even though I didn’t have my driver’s permit on me. I didn’t want her to drive drunk, but I knew it wouldn’t work to call her on it.

  With her back to me, she extended her arm; the keys dangled from her hand. I came forward and took them from her—a brass heart keychain. We started walking toward the parking lot.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  I told her.

  “You’re shitting me,” she said. “What kind of name’s that?” And then she added, “That’s not the name on that paper you get signed.”

  “It’s my brother’s,” I said. It came out before I thought to lie.

  We came to an old, faded blue Toyota Tercel with a dented back bumper, and she said, “It’s not locked.” The driver door creaked open and I sat. She got in on the passenger side. It smelled like cigarettes and vanilla.

  After adjusting the seat and mirrors, I tried to act like I knew what I was doing, turning the key in the ignition and revving the engine, relieved it wasn’t a stick shift. Gabe and Dad had taken me driving in parking lots and the streets around Dad’s house, but I was still nervous.

  She stared at me. The car jerked into reverse, and she said, “Whoa!”

  “Sorry,” I said, smoothing into drive.

  I drove slowly, hunched forward in my seat, peering at the road.

  “You look like a grandpa!” she said, and then she patted me on the shoulder and said, “Hi, Grandpa!”

  We stopped at a Del Taco drive-thru, and she ordered a couple of tacos, fries, and a burrito.

  “We’ll share,” she said, removing my
ten from her wallet and handing it to me to pay the cashier. “My treat, Even.”

  We pulled out of the parking lot. “Turn right at the signal,” she said, sorting through the bag of food, not looking at the road, “then left at the next signal.”

  I followed her directions to her apartment complex in Costa Mesa—THE KON-TIKI, the sign said. While I drove, she ate. “Sorry,” she said, between chews, “I can’t wait. I’m so hungry.”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “Park here,” she said, the parking lot one straight strip with no place to turn around, and I pulled into her carport.

  We stared at each other in the dark, and she said, “How’re you going to get home?”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “You might as well come inside and eat,” she said, and then she told me that I could sleep on her couch if I wanted. Immediately, I took this as a proposition and felt a stiffening inside my jeans.

  We walked through the complex: At its center was a gated pool with a strong chlorine smell, lit up and aqua-colored, wavering with shadows.

  Once we were inside her apartment, she switched on a standing lamp and offered me a 7-Up. She set our bag of food on the coffee table and then went to the kitchen for our sodas. I sat on the couch and waited for her.

  The apartment was made up of a kitchen and living room combination and a bedroom and bathroom, with pale, blank walls, minimal furniture, and an old TV. Lonely and bare.

  “I just moved,” she said. “Haven’t decorated much.”

  She sat next to me on her couch and we ate and drank our sodas, the lamplight yellowish and warm. After we finished eating, she didn’t speak and took sips from her can. She crossed one leg over the other, and I started imagining scenarios: her brushing against me, then leaning farther into me, and my seizing the opportunity, our age difference obliterated by my skills as a lover. Handling her with expertise and executing our pathway to her bedroom.

  I stifled a burp from the carbonation and set my soda on the table.

  With all my nerve, I hazarded a full look at her. I’d thought she had brown eyes, but now I saw the green in them, and the little V of a divot on her upper lip just about killed me.

  Oblivious, she lit a cigarette, not more than a foot away. I could barely hear the thumping bass from a neighbor’s stereo filtering through the walls: Missy Elliott’s “Get Ur Freak On.”

  “Sara?” I said.

  She glanced at me, distracted.

  “Can I sleep in the bed with you?”

  I expected her to be surprised or upset, but her expression hardly changed. She shifted and faced me. “How old are you, Even?”

  “I’m almost sixteen.” A lie—I had a ways to go until my birthday.

  She was silent for a moment. Then she said, “I’m nineteen, Even. I know I look younger, but I’m not.”

  Though she’d just lit it, she stubbed her cigarette into a half-eaten taco in its paper wrapper. “I may be a drunk,” she said, “but I’m not a slut.”

  “I would never think that,” I said. “That’s not what I meant.”

  “Is that right?” she said.

  I stared at her and didn’t say anything.

  “So,” she said, her gaze steady and intense, “all you want to do is fuck me?”

  “Oh, no,” I said, my face heating, sweat in my armpits, “you have the wrong idea. I really like you. I think you’re so pretty”—and then I shut up.

  I was trying to decide how to leave discreetly when, to my surprise, she leaned her head back on the couch and laughed.

  “Good for you,” she said, looking up at the ceiling, “good effort.”

  “I should leave,” I said.

  “Nah,” she said, stretching her arms. She yawned, rubbed her eyes. “Don’t go.”

  She rose and motioned with her hands at me. “Up, up,” she said encouragingly. Once I stood, she flipped the sofa cushions off. “Help me,” she said, and we yanked at the couch. It creaked open, we stepped back, and it clanked down to become a bed.

  I called my dad from my cell phone—just in case he might worry—and left a message, letting him know that I was spending the night at a friend’s.

  One might assume that my forwardness with Sara would have stunted the possibility of a friendship between us. But oddly, Sara appreciated me for it, as if we’d cleared up any misperceptions and defused the awkwardness of my being sexually attracted to her.

  After that night, she spoke to me openly, and we went to meetings together. We got to be close friends.

  She worked at an insurance company. Her day life was boring, routine-filled, and efficient. Mexican mother, Irish and German father, no siblings. A horrific home life. She’d left at sixteen, had been on her own since. Independent, tough, and practical.

  I could go on and on about Sara. She’s really beautiful and strong. She got sober eventually, and she’s the one who helped me, for good and for bad, to do what I had to do.

  PART TWO

  10.

  JULY 3, 2003

  THOUGH I’VE BEEN able to recount what happened so far, the events over the Fourth of July weekend are difficult for me to narrate. Nearly impossible. A jumble of images.

  Tove Kagan, a girl I knew from Cucamonga, arrived at our dad’s house with Crystal Douglas and another girl, Melissa Stroh, at around four in the afternoon on July 3. Tove pretended not to know me. I wasn’t that surprised. She ignored me, since I’d left for Newport without saying good-bye to her. In grade school, we’d been good friends. We had history, Tove and I. Gabe didn’t know; the others didn’t know. Only Tove and I knew, and that was how we kept it. Both of us were sophomores now, sixteen and driving, her little red Dodge Dart parked at our curb. Her eyes brushed right past me, and then she walked to the other side of the pool to a cooler of beer hidden behind a large planter.

  In retrospect we didn’t know what to say or how to cross that divide from our past into the present: The startling immediacy was too much. So we did what we had to do, and I’ll regret it for the rest of my life.

  “I’m a Pisces,” Melissa said to me. Blond hair and tan body, red bathing suit, bikini ties visible under her white top. The kind of girl who used to be indifferent to me when I lived in Cucamonga. Half-reclined next to me on a chaise beside the pool. More like shouting over the rap music—“I’m a Pisces. Like, we’re the type of girls who support our men. We don’t need attention. Like, we’re vulnerable and kind, but strong. I guess I just, like, understand myself because of astrology. I have a strong sense of myself. It really makes sense if you study it. It’s true! Don’t laugh! It really works.”

  She was paying attention to me because of my dad’s money. Trying to hit on me. I’d overheard her earlier joking—“Maybe one of us will get pregnant by a Hyde and then we’ll be rich. I wouldn’t, like, mind living in this house.”

  Tove arrived in her brown work shirt and black slacks, and I heard her explaining that she hostessed at the Marie Callender’s restaurant in Cucamonga, “mostly guiding sweet old people with canes and walkers to their tables.” She looked the same, except that she’d highlighted her long brown hair with gold streaks, and she had a woman’s body now, not the beginnings of a woman’s body, like the last time I’d seen her, in the seventh grade. Holding a beer, talking with Gabe and Crystal, she favored one leg.

  “Tove’s a good liar,” Melissa said, noticing me watching her, trying to keep my attention. “She’s a Gemini, and they’re the worst. That’s, like, the worst sign for a girl, because it means she’s manipulative and rude and stuck up.”

  The Tove I knew had not been any of those things. But I didn’t want to argue about astrological signs, so I encouraged Melissa to return to the first subject—“Why do you say that she’s a good liar?” I held my hand up to pause her answer, shifted in my chaise, and shouted to Gabe, “Turn it down!”

  His head lifted in acknowledgment, and I watched him walk through the open sliding glas
s doors to the stereo inside the living room and turn the volume down.

  I resettled myself on the chaise and nodded for Melissa to proceed.

  “She, like, pretends to be her mom on the phone”—she switched to an authoritative voice—“Hello, Mrs. Stroh, this is Tove’s mother. Hum, she, like, has my permission to sleep over tonight.”

  She paused, waiting for my encouragement.

  I gave her a smile and a laugh, wanting to hear more.

  “I can’t even do it,” she said. “But Tove, she’s, like, really scary-good at impersonating voices and stuff like that, like handwriting. She’s really good at making notes and signing parent signatures.” She paused and watched Tove and the others for a moment.

  The sun inched out from behind the patio umbrella, and I squinted at Melissa while readjusting myself on my chaise. Fully shaded again, I took a sip from my Budweiser.

  “She lies all the time,” she said, still watching them, pensive. “This one time, she said she knew Eminem. Said they were good friends, told everyone. Lie! And this other time she said that she’s a model. Said that her parents told her not to tell anyone, but that her photographs are all over Europe and China. Lie!”

  She looked at me, her eyes widening as if in confidential warning. “If I were you, I’d stay away from her.”

  “Why?” I asked. “It’s not that big of a deal.”

  She shook her head. “It’s more than that,” she said. “She’s, like, really smart”—she reached for her Diet Coke can. She and Crystal weren’t drinking alcohol. Earlier, I’d heard them telling Gabe that they were on a diet that prohibited it. “Gets straight A’s and doesn’t even study! It’s not fair. But she’s smart and she’s crazy.”

  She took a sip, her eyes watching me over her can.

  “What do you mean?”

  She sighed and set her Diet Coke on the cement. “She parties and drinks and, like, screws all the time. Don’t look at me like that! I’m not kidding. She’s a slut! You don’t know, because you live here, but, like, everyone in Cucamonga knows.”

  “Aren’t you supposed to be her friend?” I asked.