The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  Dad looked at me, and for a fraction of a second he seemed not to know what to say or do. Then he said, “Don’t talk like that in front of my son.”

  Krone smiled at me with sheer dislike.

  “Ándale,” said Jimenez, stubbing out his cigarette in the ashtray. “I don’t want to be late.”

  Sunlight streamed through the window above the sink and the kitchen felt hot and stuffy. My throat dry, I got another glass of water.

  As I drank, my dad let me know that he’d be back in the afternoon, after a short round of golf.

  He ruffled my hair with his hand, and I got that warm sensation under my sternum.

  “You okay?” he said, leaning to speak in my ear so that the others wouldn’t hear.

  I moved my head so that he couldn’t see the tears welling, and I wanted to kiss him. “Yeah,” I said, “I’m fine.”

  “All right, Son,” he said.

  The back door closed, and it got quiet again. Dad’s cigarette smoldered in the ashtray next to Jimenez’s extinguished one.

  I poured water into the ashtray and watched the cigarette wither and die in a soggy, cloudy mixture of tobacco and ash. Then I rinsed everything in the sink, using the garbage disposal, appreciating its aggressive noise as it ate up the ashtray debris.

  My stomach grumbled and I realized that I hadn’t eaten in a long time. While making myself a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, I remembered the speaker Tom L. from the AA meeting. How he said that people came to him with their troubles, and he helped sort them out.

  In a cold sweat, I ate my sandwich and decided what I would do.

  With yellow kitchen gloves, I took the Windex Dad had left out and some paper towels and cleaned the video camera of fingerprints.

  I wanted to get one of the boxes in the garage, but I didn’t want to go in there. What I’d seen on the camera took place in the garage. It took me at least five minutes to get the courage. But I did it. As soon as I opened the door to go inside, a sensation of great loss and sadness came over me, almost like a physical pain, so that I groaned. It didn’t seem quite as real to me—as if before, the event had existed in some phantom reality—until I saw the pool table, the wicker couch, and the pool cue.

  I found a box and got out as quickly as possible, my heart thumping.

  I set the video camera inside the box and taped it shut. After typing my note—for Tom L.—I printed it and taped it to the top of the box.

  Then I drove to the police station in an alert hyperdread, still wearing my kitchen gloves.

  Tom L. had worked for Krone and retired, and he’d know what to do. I thought of his soothing voice at the meeting, his calm and spiritual demeanor.

  They all worked for Krone, but Tom seemed like the best option.

  I’d gone to Gabe’s AA meetings for him—a slippery slope that I refused to extend—and now it made me angry that Dad had allowed it.

  A sense of incensed justice also compelled me to turn the camera over, but that faded rather quickly.

  It occurred to me, as I parked the car, that video cameras surrounded the police station, spying on people. I didn’t want to be recognized.

  So I covered myself with the pink towel, like a cape over my head and body, and took off my shoes. I rushed to the police station with the box in my arms.

  From where I’d parked down the street (after putting a quarter in the parking meter, giving me fifteen minutes), the walk to the police station felt long, as I was hunched beneath the pink towel.

  A car whooshed past me and honked.

  Tired, scared, sweating, my head still hurting, I breathed heavily, wanting to be rid of the camera more than anything.

  About halfway there, I panicked. But my feet kept drawing me forward, until I finally set the box by the police station doors, my hands shaking.

  No one stopped me or asked me questions, and I rushed back to my car, hidden beneath the towel.

  When I got inside my car, I flung the towel aside, removed the kitchen gloves, and for a few moments I took deep breaths, everything spinning in my vision, until the world settled, and I got my bearings again.

  Then I went to the Del Taco drive-thru and ordered food. I parked in the lot and wolfed down three bean-and-cheese burritos. Nervous still, yes, but it felt like a great boulder had been lifted from my shoulders.

  When I got home, I turned off my cell phone—Mike had left a message—and sat in front of the big-screen TV in a daze, watching one stupid show after another (Baywatch reruns, Celebrity Boxing, The Jerry Springer Show), my head throbbing, until Dad came home late in the afternoon.

  His sparse hair windblown into a cliff-like wedge, he had a flush of sunburn across his nose, and he wore his clown-like golf attire: a white-and-peach-striped shirt and pastel plaid pants.

  He seemed pleased to see me, and I got that warm feeling underneath my sternum again.

  “This isn’t like you,” he said, “to waste your day. You’re no couch potato.”

  He asked if I wanted to go for a walk with him, and when I didn’t respond, he said, “It’s a beautiful afternoon, Even, let’s go. Up, up. Get up. Time to move.”

  The sun, low in the sky, extended our shadows on the sidewalk.

  We walked for a long time without speaking, all the way to the boardwalk overlooking the beach, where we could smell the fire pits mingling with the ocean air and hear the people, intermixed with the noises of the waves crashing and swooshing in retreat. A crowded Sunday, people prolonging their Fourth of July weekend as long as possible, the beach crammed with towels and umbrellas, and families camped in the parking lot on the islands of grass, grilling and barbecuing.

  I watched some kids running in the wet part of the sand left by the outgoing tide, seagulls pausing above them in the wind, flapping their wings but getting nowhere, screeching into the air.

  “Jesus,” said Dad, “look at the circus.”

  The walking had helped, but my head still hurt, and it felt strange to be with my dad, as if everything hadn’t really happened and wasn’t happening now. At any moment, I might wake and realize that the video camera—all of it, the walk now with my dad—didn’t really exist.

  Dad stopped near a bench where an old couple was sitting, looked me in the eyes, and said, “Is it a girl? Is that what’s bothering you?”

  My face burned with shame. It just about killed me that he wanted to help, and that he’d guess something so innocent, so I looked out at the horizon and shook my head.

  He seemed to understand that I didn’t want his attention, and he focused on the horizon as well. “Look,” he said, pointing to the left.

  Seven pelicans in a triangle formation—three on each side and one in front—swooped and glided with the breeze, until they skimmed the ocean.

  “Isn’t that something?” Dad said. He faced me. “Even,” he said, “I know something’s bothering you.” He paused, gave a short cough into his fist, then continued, “I know I’m not the most attentive father. I may not be that good of a parent, but I care about you and your brother. I want you to know that I’m always here for you. If you need anything, I’m here. I didn’t have that. As you know, I didn’t really have a father to look out for me. That’s why it’s so important to me. I want it to be different for you.”

  “Dad,” I said, “can we talk about this another time?” Every once in a while, he got in one of his earnest moods. I just wasn’t up for it.

  A long silence, and then he said, “Sure, of course. If that’s what you want.”

  “When you think something’s right,” I said, “but you might have to hurt some people in order to do it, what do you do?”

  He looked at me, considering. Then he said, “That’s a tough question, Even. A real dilemma. I suppose it depends on the situation.”

  AT DINNER THAT night with Dad and Gabe, I didn’t do anything stupid or say anything I shouldn’t. But I talked and ate way too much in compensation, trying to appear lighthearted.

  Nancy had made
the lamb roast and potatoes the month before, and Dad thawed it from the freezer and warmed it in the microwave. A freezer-burn taste lingered, but I ate and ate.

  We sat at the dining room table instead of in front of the TV, a rarity. Dad even lit a couple of long candles. Gabe pushed his plate in front of me without my asking, and I ate in Pavlovian response, finishing his meal as well.

  Much of my chattering centered on sports and TV shows and real estate and business, things that I didn’t really care about. I told a few stupid jokes.

  Entertainer Even, my brother called me that night, and he and Dad watched me with a bemused interest.

  By the time I went to bed, I felt delirious from smiling and talking and eating and being someone else. I lay down on my bed without changing into my pajamas. As I flipped my shoes off without untying them, listening to them thud against the floor, a few tears trickled down my face.

  I lay on my side, my stomach bloated, and stared at an oblong slice of moonlight on my wall for a long time. Then I closed my eyes and went to sleep.

  17.

  JULY 7

  WHEN I WOKE late the next morning, I knew that the police would arrest Gabe that day, knew it deep inside me—only a matter of time now—my fault for turning over the video camera. I sat in bed, watching the minutes flip-change on my alarm clock, and listened to the wind rustling the trees outside my window, not wanting to get out of bed to face Gabe or our dad or what would happen because of what I’d done.

  I’d had a terrible dream just before waking, abstractly involving the severing of a dog’s head. All from a headline I’d read in the newspaper weeks before, concerning a man who had chosen to prove his love to his beloved by beheading her canine companion.

  But the dream dissolved when I woke, leaving me with the reality of what I’d done and how I’d wronged my kin. One of the side effects of removing the video camera from my life had been relief, but there was another far less satisfying one: With the camera gone, it was no longer so much about what I’d seen as about what I’d done.

  A deep melancholy settled over me like a heavy blanket that I couldn’t remove, one that would stick to me like another layer of skin. I didn’t know this at the time—thank god, or I might have taken irrevocable measures—but it would not lift for years.

  Most teenagers have a sense of immortality—something about the immaturity and plasticity of our brains at that age, I’d read—but not me. I’ve always been one to ponder death, to feel its nearness and my own fragility, freaking out at the feel of my own blood pulsing in my temples, and at the contemplation of my organs working in their orchestral complexity to keep my organism functioning.

  One little flaw in the system, I knew, and the whole enchilada can end, just like that. Death, death, death, all around me, and in my life, always the constancy of death. Life, I’d come to believe, was about hiding awareness of this beneath the veneer of acceptability, functionality, imperviousness, and now I didn’t think I could do it anymore.

  One time, at around age nine or ten, not a teenager yet, I’d told my dad about my death awareness, and he’d said, “You’ve got the soul of an artist, Even. It’s normal for someone like you. Of course you think about death and stuff like that,” which made me feel better.

  I thought about Gabe now. Would he have done the same thing to me that I’d done to him? I doubt it. But would I ever have done what Gabe had done? God, no.

  What made me different from Gabe?

  One time, when I was three, Gabe dared me to shove a marble up my nose to see how far it would go, and I did. We had to go to the hospital for the doctor to pull it out, and Gabe cried the entire time. “Why’d you listen to me?” he asked afterward. “Don’t ever listen to me.”

  I called Sara that morning, knowing that she’d already be at work. “Even,” she said, and I was so glad to hear her sweet, whispering voice that I felt like crying.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “When my alarm went off this morning,” she said, “I didn’t know where I was, what day it was, or why I had to wake up.”

  I told her what I’d done with the camera.

  “Good,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Why?” she said, as if amazed that she had to answer this question for me. She paused. “Because,” she said, her tone softer and slower, “Even, we both saw what they did to that girl. They can’t do that. It’s wrong.”

  I started to tear up a little, relieved that she couldn’t see me, and I said, “I’m just like him.”

  “No,” she said.

  “He’s like another me—except he’s mean to people sometimes. Maybe he just gets mean when he’s drunk. I don’t know.”

  “Something must’ve happened,” she said, “to make him like that. Trust me: You’re not like him.”

  We agreed to talk later.

  “I haven’t told anyone,” she said.

  “Me, neither. I want to tell Mike.”

  “Is that a good idea?” she asked.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I wonder who that poor girl is?” she said.

  I almost said, She’s my friend, the first girl I kissed, and a weirdo like me, but decided to keep quiet: It was not something I wanted to acknowledge.

  It took all my courage to rise from my bed that morning and brush my teeth in the bathroom, avoiding my foaming-toothpaste mouth in the mirror.

  But I caught a glimpse, leaning over to spit in the sink. Judas, traitor, jackass, rat, backstabber, double-crosser, tattletale, squealer, snitch.

  I don’t know what I expected. I suppose I hadn’t thought my actions through to what they would generate. But there I stood, my heart thumping in my chest like someone was pounding a fist inside me at the thought of having to leave my bedroom and encounter the repercussions of what I’d done and the people I’d wronged. My disloyalty. Even worse, the hypocrisy that I would have to participate in to hide this awareness.

  So in my new role as lying hypocrite, I made my way to the living room, where Dad, dressed in his bathrobe, sat reclined in his chair, watching a golf tournament that he’d taped at a volume far too loud.

  “Aren’t you going to work?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “Maybe later,” he said, not turning his head from the screen, smoking a cigarette, a Bloody Mary on the table beside him. “Woke with a sore throat.” The screen glowed a leprechaun green with the grass course, and the commentators spoke in hushed and reverent tones, as if they were discussing the supernatural.

  “Where’s Gabe?” I asked.

  “Gone,” he said. “Left this morning, back to Gina’s.”

  Gabe didn’t get arrested that day. The hours passed and I waited and nothing happened.

  Maybe, possibly, maybe, I thought, just maybe Tom L. found it in his heart to find another solution, one that I couldn’t fathom, and all would be okay.

  In the afternoon, our home phone rang. Still in his bathrobe, remote peeking from his pocket, and with cigarette in hand, Dad picked up the cordless phone in the kitchen, walking into the living room, where he muted the television, and where I sat on the couch eating a nectarine.

  Standing, he gave monotone monosyllabic answers in his gruff voice (“Yes.” “No.” “Negative.” “Wrong.”), all the while staring at me while he spoke, and then he said, “You’re wrong about that, sir. Gabe wouldn’t do that.”

  I set my half-eaten nectarine in its paper towel on the table, fear climbing the back of my neck.

  “I don’t know what you’re expecting me to do,” he continued, “but it sounds to me like you’ve got enough to worry about with your daughter.”

  As Dad paused to listen, I tried to calm my panic, understanding that most likely it was Ben Kagan speaking to him on the phone.

  “No disrespect”—Dad paused to inhale on his cigarette—“but,” he exhaled his smoke, “let’s think about this for a moment. She came here, to our house, and lied to you about it, and
you’re telling me she’s lied to you many times before, and now she’s claiming that she slept with my son, and you’re telling me to keep him away from her?” He paused, as if to let this sink in, and then he said, “How do you know she’s not lying about this? Perhaps you need to keep her away from him.”

  With that, their conversation ended. Dad hung up the phone and then he leaned over to smash out his cigarette in the ashtray on the coffee table.

  “Do you know much about this girl, Tove Kagan?” he said, reaching into his robe pocket for his pack of Newports.

  “No,” I said, keeping my voice calm. “I had some classes with her in grade school. Why?”

  “That was her dad.” He lit another cigarette with a Bic lighter. Exhaling, he stared thoughtfully at it. Then he looked at me and said, “Haven’t I told you and Gabe to always wear protection?”

  In fact, we’d not had that conversation, but I was so shocked that I nodded.

  “What’s Gabe thinking, messing around with this girl? Sounds to me like she has a bad reputation. Lies to her parents.”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “The dad says that he knows you. Said he has respect for you.”

  I felt a rush of claustrophobia, along with a sensation that the walls were closing in on me. “I barely know them,” I said, my face hot. “I had classes with her, and her parents volunteered a lot. That’s all.”

  He grimaced. “Kagan,” he said. “Sounds Jewish.”

  “Don’t know,” I lied.

  He nodded. “Sounds like they can’t keep a lid on that girl. A wild child.”

  “What’d he want?” I asked.

  He’d just taken a hit from his cigarette, and I waited for him to respond. “You’ve got to be careful,” he said at last. “You and Gabe. We need to have a talk.”