The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  Cavari asked if it was true that her favorite rap song was “Put It in Your Mouth,” and whether she liked anal sex, giving blow jobs, or doggy-style sex the best.

  “Objection!” shouted the prosecutor.

  Halfhearted groans came from the spectators.

  Cavari asked Tove about the video of her having consensual sex with Kent Nixon a week before the alleged gang rape. “Why didn’t you mind being filmed?” he asked.

  She said that she did mind. She told Kent to stop filming as soon as she saw the camera.

  “Hmm,” Cavari said, nodding. “I’d like to show that film, to prove that at no time did Tove Kagan ask Kent Nixon to stop filming.”

  Another objection.

  Cavari convinced the judge that watching the film would prove that Tove had lied, because she never said a word to Kent during the sex.

  The bailiff dimmed the courtroom lights, the videotape started, and—even though we were supposed to listen for Tove telling Kent to stop filming—Cavari repeatedly paused the huge plasma screen monitor, so that Tove’s naked image froze for us and, more important, for her to see.

  “Were you on top?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  Seconds passed, and then he paused the tape again, pointed to the screen, and asked Tove to identify herself.

  He started the video, only to pause it again seconds later, asking, head tilted, as if we were all just connoisseurs, whether she noticed that the intercourse had been filmed from a slightly different angle.

  Kent had set the camera on a tripod and used a remote control by the bed to direct his shots.

  Cavari rewound the tape at least twelve times, asking her questions, each getting a loud objection, including “Who is that on all fours on the bed?”

  “Did you notice the penis fell out of the vagina?”

  “Is that your hand that puts the penis back in your vagina?”

  “What did you think about when you rode on top of a man?”

  “Did the sex feel good?”

  “Have you demanded anal sex?”

  “Have you ever orally copulated with a guy after intercourse?”

  After a close-up of Kent’s penis entering Tove’s vagina, Cavari asked the audiovisual specialist, “Is there any way you can show this in slow motion?” Then he asked Tove, “Can you see his testicles?”

  Tove began to cry. The bailiff turned on the courtroom lights, and Cavari gripped the podium. “Did you hear yourself talking to Kent Nixon? Did you hear yourself tell him to stop?”

  “No,” said Tove, wiping her tears with the palm of her hand. The judge reached beneath his bench and handed her some tissues. She thanked him and blew her nose. I noticed that the Ks looked at her in triumph, and Gabe’s head was down. But then she said in a steely voice, “That comes later. You only showed the very beginning.”

  Cavari brushed aside her explanation and set up another screening.

  He insisted that Tove leave the witness stand, walk across the room to Dad’s plasma screen, and look at another image. This one showed Tove at the beginning of the gang rape video, a tape that she hadn’t seen yet.

  “Is that you?” Cavari asked.

  Tears streamed down her face. “I’m not saying that it isn’t,” she said.

  The judge called for a recess so that Tove could collect herself. I left the courtroom and never returned.

  31.

  I REMEMBER WHEN GABE and I were preteens, flying home from a family trip to Washington, DC. Our parents sat in the seats in front of us, and Dad let us each take a sip of his Jack and Coke when Mom left for the bathroom.

  Toward the end of the flight, Gabe and I watched a movie. We had a choice of five films, and we chose The Iron Giant, since it was animated, and we wanted a kids’ cartoon.

  With our headsets on, we tilted our seats back and watched the little screens embedded in the backs of our parents’ seats.

  Before long, we glanced at each other, understanding that we’d accidentally picked a weighty movie, even if it was a cartoon, but we continued to watch.

  Something about being on an airplane—the condensed, recycled air and the actuality of being in a container zipping through the sky—can heighten feelings. That must have been what happened, because I’ve subsequently watched the movie, and it doesn’t strike me as that emotional.

  But by the end of the plane flight, we were both in tears. A giant sorrow unloosened inside of us, having to do with the impending dissolution of our family and its history, and a sense that now, with the sanction and excuse of a movie, we could release our feelings. But once we did, it became a problem: We couldn’t stop.

  I looked at Gabe and he looked at me, and then we were laughing through our tears, embarrassed and confused and a bit shocked. I made a gasping noise, trying to catch my breath.

  Dad turned from his seat and saw us. He shook his head and said, “What the hell’s wrong with you two? Pull it together.”

  We tried. We really did. But we couldn’t.

  For the entire car ride from the airport to our home, we avoided looking at each other, knowing that it might make us cry again.

  It felt like that during the trial, after the day that I went to court for Gabe. Gabe couldn’t look at me, and I wouldn’t look at him, as if there might be an explosion of emotions if we did.

  Days passed, weeks, and, surprisingly, I was able to disconnect from the trial in a self-imposed exile, ignoring the media coverage and any discussion of it. Though somehow I knew it was turning in Gabe’s favor—a flow in the air, a wave of intuition, and simply by the way our dad said hello to me on the phone, his voice less hollow.

  But Gabe and I continued to avoid each other, until the second day of the jury’s deliberations, when Gabe called me in the afternoon on my cell phone and said, “Even, I’m dying.”

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, waving at Mike to be quiet. We’d been throwing a Nerf football around in his backyard, and Mike held the football with a one-handed grip and waited.

  “Listen to me,” Gabe said, his voice frightened. “I think it’s a brain aneurysm or something. Maybe a heart attack. I can’t feel the left side of my body.”

  “Do you want me to call 911?” I asked, thinking that he might have overdosed.

  “Just come over.”

  He lay on the couch in Dad’s living room, a wet paper towel across his forehead.

  “I feel really bad,” he said when he saw me, sitting up and holding the paper towel in place. “The left side of my body is all numb and I can’t breathe right.” He gave a few raspy breaths as proof.

  “Take it easy,” I said.

  “I’m trying,” he said, tossing the paper towel to the floor. He wore long board shorts and nothing else. His hair had fanned in the back and his eyes were red and shiny.

  “My pulse,” he said, “it’s beating in my head: boom. Boom. Boom.”

  I put my hand on his shoulder; his skin was warm.

  “Take deep breaths,” I said.

  He looked at me. In a mournful voice, he asked: “What the fuck’s wrong with me?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “Should we go to the hospital?”

  “Where’s Dad?”

  “Don’t call him,” he said, putting his face in his hands, Dad’s Rolex sliding down his arm.

  “Gabe,” I said. “Where’s Dad? He needs to know.”

  “Please, Even,” he said into his hands. “I can’t take it. Don’t call Dad. He’s with Krone. Don’t tell him.”

  “What pills did you take?”

  A silence, and then he said, “Maybe too much Xanax.”

  “All right,” I said. “How many is too many? Did you take anything else?”

  He looked at me with a sudden belligerence. “What do you think?” he said. “Of course I did.”

  So I decided to take him to the hospital.

  He put the car seat all the way back while I drove him to the ER at Hoag. In the distance, I
saw a fleet of sailboats with tilted masts and sails to the side, and the sky was a pale blue.

  I watched with a sideways glance as he lit up a joint and took small, neglectful tokes, a thin whiff of smoke drifting out the cracked passenger-side window.

  “It helps,” he said.

  I said nothing.

  He shut his eyes and rested his spliff-knuckled hand on his stomach.

  By the time I parked in the garage, he didn’t want to go into the hospital. “I’m better,” he said, lifting his seat to the regular position. But he looked bad, sweating and pale.

  We listened to the echoing beep of a car alarm until it stopped. He pinched the butt of the joint dead and flicked it out the car window. Glancing at the large watch face on the inside of his wrist and pretending to be concerned about the time, he said, “We should get back. Really, I’m okay now.”

  So we drove home, the sky purplish and the sailboats gone.

  When we got inside, Dad still wasn’t home. In a burst of energy, Gabe did push-ups and sit-ups, and then he did chin-ups, pulling himself up on a steel pole mounted in the doorway. Dad had had it installed to “help with stress.”

  “Remember,” Gabe said between pulls, “as kids, the way that we used to skateboard all over the place in Cucamonga? How we talked Mom into letting us skateboard to school?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  He let himself down, and then he spread out on the floor. “I loved that,” he said, gazing up at the ceiling. Then he closed his eyes. “Up past the Klingers’ house,” he said, “turn left at that cracked sidewalk.”

  It was like he was talking to himself, mapping out his favorite route. His words came slow. “Keep going northwest,” he said, “then left, then right, past the Starbucks and the McDonald’s; keep going, got the earbuds in, listening to music; that’s right, that’s right; over there, a heron? No, man, that’s not a heron; it’s too small, probably a blue jay; that right there is the blue bird of happiness. The blue bird of peace. It’s a bird, but I don’t know what kind. Turn up the volume, ride past that flower shop, over the manhole near the gas station. Look at the leaves and the way the sunlight shines on them. So beautiful, so beautiful.”

  By the time Krone and Dad arrived home later that afternoon, Gabe was sleeping on the couch while I watched the news on TV.

  Krone, in a Hawaiian-print shirt, had a bottle of aged Scotch, and he poured me some in a Dixie cup, using real glasses for himself and Dad.

  He and Dad spoke in a dark corner near the Jacuzzi for a few minutes, Krone’s hands on Dad’s shoulders, both their heads lowered. He left soon after.

  Dad set a blanket over Gabe and then gazed down at him, watching him sleep. He ran his fingers through Gabe’s hair and said, “This’ll be over, soon, Son,” as if Gabe were listening.

  My cell phone vibrated and buzzed in my pocket, and I took it out and flipped it open, not recognizing the phone number.

  “That’s okay,” Dad said, “take it,” and he turned to go to the kitchen.

  “Even?” a male voice said when I answered. “This is R. Sam Michaels.”

  “How’d you get my number?” I asked. My heart banged so hard I felt it in my earlobes.

  “A source,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  He said that he needed to meet with me ASAP, and that he had crucial information about my brother’s case. “I’m not sure,” he said cryptically, “whether or not I’m going to use it.”

  He gave me the address of an apartment in Costa Mesa. “Hurry,” he said.

  “Why do you need me?”

  “It all depends,” he said, “on what you have to say.”

  32.

  I FOUND THE APARTMENT and parked, noticing the faint outline of a ghostly moon, the day’s light draining from the sky. When I got out of my car, I heard the whish-whish of the sprinklers whipping across a lawn.

  Michaels answered the door before I knocked. I followed him inside—a clean place, nothing out of the ordinary, and I got a better look at him. Cropped brown beard, thin lips, and a receptive and brooding gaze. I remembered Dad shooting him with his hand in the courtroom and the look he’d given me.

  Sitting across from me in a chair in the living room, he said, “Even, I know you turned over the video camera.”

  I had believed this might be coming (why else would he want to see me?), nevertheless, terror sliced through me.

  He smiled at me, as if savoring the dramatic pause, allowing my astonishment to bloom.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I tried.

  “Oh, okay,” he said, looking at his hands folded in his lap and nodding, still smiling.

  A long horrible silence, the initial shock over, as I squirmed and shifted and worried about Sara, about the story that he’d write, and then I said, “How’d you find out?”

  He shrugged. Another smile, and he reached for a file on the coffee table, opening it and handing me a photograph of me under Sara’s towel: a still from the police surveillance video, and not a very good one.

  I stared at it, recognizing my foot and the lower part of my leg. The shape of my head and shoulders.

  “I know about Sara’s involvement,” he said.

  “What do you want?”

  He cupped his chin with the fingers of one hand, as if in thought. “It’s probably gonna be a mistrial,” he said. “Just so you know. One holdout, thankfully. A female juror. But I’m sure your daddy already told you all this.”

  He straightened his posture and brightened. “You know what would make me feel better?” he said, as if he were just coming up with the idea. “To write a story about how Gabe’s own brother turned over the camera, because he’s guilty, and Daddy couldn’t pay enough money to make it go away.”

  “Can I have a glass of water?” I asked.

  He left for the kitchen and I heard him moving around, opening and closing cupboards, as if he didn’t know where he kept the glasses, and then I heard the sound of the faucet. Maybe it wasn’t his apartment. It looked generic. No photographs and rudimentary decorations, like an apartment in a TV commercial.

  He came back with a glass of water and set it on the coffee table.

  But I didn’t drink it.

  Then I said, “So write it.”

  He glanced at me sideways. “I’d be stupid not to,” he said.

  I didn’t say anything, recognizing a coldness in his tone and manner. In that moment, he reminded me of Dad, a comparison that would no doubt have bothered both Michaels and my dad a great deal.

  “It’s a juicy story,” he said.

  I had no desire to argue, which is what he seemed to want from me.

  “I need to go,” I said, lifting myself from the couch.

  “Hold on,” he said, raising a hand.

  I let my backside fall back onto the couch.

  “Relax,” he said. “I’m not going to write about it.”

  “Why?”

  He gave me a pained look. “Because,” he said angrily, “I promised my source that I wouldn’t.”

  I digested this information in silence.

  “I want to know why,” he said.

  “Why what?”

  “Why you did it.”

  My vision blacked out for a second and a buzzing noise reverberated in my head. “I need to go,” I said, and this time I stood and walked to the door.

  He followed close behind me. “Your dad’s gonna find out,” he said, “that is, if he hasn’t already. He’s probably getting the phone call right about now.”

  I opened the door, but before I got outside he said, “The Kagans.”

  I glanced back; the expression on his face was impossible to read.

  “You should know the source,” he said. “They’re protecting you. God knows why. I just want to understand, figure some shit out, hear you say it. But I can’t write about it. I promised Tove. I’m her reporter, so that’s how it goes.”

  The Kagan’s PI, he went on to e
xplain, had found out that I’d gone to AA meetings for Gabe, met Sara, and probably heard Tom L. speak at the church.

  “Tove doesn’t want to hurt you,” he said, “and her parents agree. But they disagree about letting your dad know.”

  Before I could respond, he shut the door between us.

  That was the last time I saw him. Though he kept his word and never wrote about me or Sara, I still avoid reading his articles.

  33.

  I DROVE BACK TO Dad’s for dinner as I’d promised, and the sky was darker now, with a bright, lopsided moon. As I walked up the front walkway, I smelled honeysuckle.

  I would tell Dad and Gabe, I decided, before the Kagans’ PI or someone else did. I felt an urgency to get it over with, and a desire to capitalize on that urgency.

  I didn’t trust Michaels or necessarily believe him about the Kagans at first. But it didn’t take much longer for me to understand that the Kagans had indeed hired a private investigator to counteract my family, and that he’d been a good one.

  I now believe that Tove was the one who didn’t want to tell my dad, but that her parents wanted to hurt my family by letting them know.

  I saw our neighbor mowing the lawn, and he nodded and raised a hand to me, so I waved back.

  As soon as I stepped inside, I knew something bad was happening—the air had a static, menacing feel—just like I’d known on July 5 when I’d come home to Gabe and Kevin in the living room.

  But this time I found Dad and Gabe.

  Gabe was sitting in Dad’s recliner and Dad stood in front of him with his hands outstretched. I wouldn’t have been able to see them too well in the dark, except that a flickering light came from the muted TV.

  “What’s going on?” I asked, coming toward them, a panic fluttering in my chest, and then I saw Dad’s pistol in Gabe’s lap, a Glock 19 purchased legally with a weapons permit, another benefit of his relationship to Krone. I’d known Dad owned the gun but hadn’t known where he kept it. It made sense that Gabe had found the gun before me, just as he’d found Dad’s pharmaceuticals stash.

  Gabe glanced at me for a second. “Goway, goway, goway,” he slurred. “Allufyougoway.” He sounded very drunk. I saw that he had the gun gripped in his hand, his finger on the trigger.