The Little Brother

by Victoria Patterson

  “Even,” Dad said, remarkably composed, or at least faking it. He had a cigarette fingered in one of his outstretched hands, and though he was talking to me, his gaze didn’t leave Gabe. “Perhaps you can help. I’m trying to explain to Gabe why he should hand me back my gun.”

  Gabe continued to shake his head, mumbling to himself. I noticed Dad’s Rolex on the coffee table next to an ashtray.

  I took a few steps toward Gabe. Dad said, “Easy, Gabe. Easy now,” reaching his hand out.

  But before he could take the pistol, Gabe jerked in his chair, bringing the muzzle toward his temple, and he shouted, “Goway!”

  We both stepped back, Dad’s hands in the air. “Okay, Gabe,” he said. He leaned forward and ground his cigarette into the ashtray, saying equably: “Gabe, I understand that you think we’ll be better off without you; I understand that’s the way you feel. But it doesn’t work like that.”

  “No,” Gabe said, his tear-streaked face clenched in anguish. He wiped the hair from his forehead with his forearm, the gun unsteady.

  “It’s almost certain,” Dad said, “to be a mistrial. No jail, Gabe.”

  Gabe shook his head.

  “Gabe,” Dad said, “this is good news.”

  “You hate me?” Gabe asked.

  I waited for Dad to console him, and then I realized with an earth-swaying shock that he had been speaking to me.

  “No,” I said, the gun and Gabe and everything blurring in my tear-blocked vision, “no, Gabe. I love you.”

  “You’re my little brother,” he said, his eyes shining. A small, appeased, shy smile.

  “Yes,” I said. “I’m your little brother”—the tears coming hot—“I love you, Gabe. Everything’s going to be okay.”

  He shook his head, his face anguished again. “No,” he said. “No, it’s not,” and he raised his gun hand.

  Dad and I closed in on him.

  Everything happened so fast. I remember glancing at the TV and the feel of the metal on the side of my hand as the gun fired, and a Budweiser commercial, a close-up of the water-beaded bottle swirling in an icy blue light.

  The smell of smoke and metal and flesh—somehow I knew that the flesh belonged to me even before I acknowledged that I’d been shot—conscious of a burning in my left foot and leg, and I turned to see Dad holding Gabe’s arm and hand in the air, and the gun pointed upward.

  Dad wrenched the gun free while Gabe stared at me in horror, and then they were both staring at me.

  I couldn’t understand what had happened, and then I looked down to where it felt like fire on me and I saw both the blood pooling up from my sock and a brown-edged burn streak on my jeans, the blood beginning to darken around it. “Oh, shit,” I said. “I think I’ve been shot.”

  Dad, holding the gun by the handle like a soiled piece of toilet paper, walked to the kitchen and set it down somewhere, flipping on the living room light on his way back.

  My forearm went to my eyes to shield the burst of light that made my wounds hurt more and brought an undeniable attention and reality to our situation.

  I crouched to the floor. With my back against the couch, I peeked through the space beneath my elbow.

  Gabe’s head went back against the recliner, his eyes horrified. Blood had speckled his shoe, and he looked as pale as I’d ever seen him.

  Dad came and knelt beside me.

  I let my arm down and squinted against the light.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed them on his shirt. “Even,” he said, “listen. We don’t have a lot of time. The neighbors might have heard the gun go off.”

  “I’ve been shot,” I said.

  “I know,” he said, his head bowing for a second. “I know, Son.”

  “I feel like I might faint,” I said.

  “Hold on,” he said, putting his glasses back on. “Don’t do that.”

  Gabe looked at me in terror. “Did I do that?” he asked. “Did I shoot you?”

  Dad stood and said, “No, Gabe. We all went for the gun and it shot off a round. It was an accident.”

  I put my forearm to my eyes again. Despite the pain, a sense of calmness came over me, and I heard myself say: “You need to leave now. Give me the gun and leave.”

  I heard nothing, so I moved my arm. Gabe had his head in his hands and Dad stared at me. An acknowledgment passed between us, and he said, “Okay, Even.”

  I placed my forearm back over my eyes and kept them covered, listening to Dad moving into the kitchen and Gabe crying. Then I felt a weight on my lap, and I set my hand on the warm metal of the gun.

  “Are you sure about this?” Dad asked.

  I nodded, my eyes covered.

  Before they left, I asked our dad to turn off the light.

  I pulled out my cell phone and dialed 911. “I accidentally shot myself,” I told the female dispatcher, and as soon as the words came from my mouth, I understood that it had to be true.

  I’d shot myself while fiddling with the gun. A stupid accident.

  The dispatcher wanted to stay on the line with me while we waited for help, but I hung up.

  In my head, I went over what I would say to the paramedics and officers when they arrived, and I covered the gun with my fingerprints to hide any others.

  Something like relief blossomed inside me, interspersed with my physical pain. A sensation not entirely unpleasant, like a heightened, aching hurt and an equilibrium and acceptance.

  I lay on the floor in the blessed dark with the gun at my side and waited for the sirens.

  34.

  THE BULLET HAD skimmed my shin, burning my jeans and leaving a shallow wound. It pierced through my left foot: The entrance wound was at the top and the exit wound was at the bottom near my ankle.

  I underwent an open irrigation and debridement to remove any retained bullet fragments.

  Fortunately the bullet had made a clean exit, the residue lodging within my soft tissue, missing the metatarsal bones.

  I have two circular scars. Both turn pink in extreme weather.

  Within a week of the gunshot, I could walk without the aid of a crutch with a wary heel-to-toe gait in my bare feet.

  Although there’s no neurovascular impairment, whenever I use my foot for an occasion requiring physical endurance, such as a long walk or more than a half hour of heavy lifting, or if I’m under physical stress, I experience hot, shooting pains: ghost memories of the actual gunshot.

  But I’m told this is purely psychological.

  Dad brought me the newspaper clipping from the Orange County Register in the late morning following the shooting. I lay in the hospital bed with my left foot wrapped and read:

  An unidentified Newport Beach teen accidentally shot himself in the foot Monday night while trying to unload a Glock 19.

  The teen also suffered a minor injury to his shin when the weapon unintentionally discharged, deputies said in a press release.

  The teen was taken to Hoag Hospital and is expected to make a full recovery.

  No one was present during the accidental shooting. The sheriff’s department declined to provide the teenager’s name or any other identifying information, beyond what was detailed in the press release.

  Dad pulled a foldout chair close to my bed, opened it, and sat. He looked like he didn’t know what to do with his hands, like he needed a cigarette. Gabe, he let me know, had been admitted to a Laguna Beach hospital for depression and chemical dependency. No verdict yet, but any moment now.

  The usual hospital noises rang out—beeps and clanks and buzzers going off—and it smelled like lonely, antiseptic death.

  I set the article aside and used the remote to prop up my hospital bed into a more upright position. Dad picked up the article, folded it, and then placed it in the front pocket of his shirt.

  His cheeks were sunken, he looked sullen and depressed, and the hair on the top of his head had molded into a frizzy wave.

  “I need to tell you something,” I said.

  “I know,
” he said.

  There followed a long, unpleasant silence.

  “How do you know?” I asked, feeling curiously empty and light-headed.

  He took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and forefinger. Without looking at me he said, “All right. Tell me.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I want you to tell me,” he said.

  A buzzing noise echoed in my head, but still I managed to say, “I did it, Dad. I’m the one who turned in Gabe’s camera.”

  There was an awful silence. This, I decided, is when he rejects me, disowns me, discards me from his life.

  But he just stared at his hands.

  Unable to stand it, I said, “Dad. Dad, say something.”

  “There’s nothing to say,” he said.

  He put his glasses on and gave me a frank, defeated look, forcing me to say, “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  He scratched the sparse tangle of hair on his head, coughed, and said, “Me, too. Me, too. I’m sorry, too.”

  He half lifted from his chair and pulled out a folded piece of paper from his pants pocket. “Here,” he said.

  Dad, a believer in lists, had brainstormed options for my future on the yellow-ruled paper that he used for business, while adding what he couldn’t say to me directly.

  This is what I read:

  1.Finish your senior year of high school elsewhere. Your aunt Sheila’s in Oregon or your uncle Ted’s in Washington.

  2.This is a long shot. Take a year off and travel to Paris. Isn’t that where the artists go, and you’ve always said that’s important? The point is: Get out of town. Leave. You can finish high school early or later with tests. Gabe did it. It’s not that difficult.

  3.Finish high school in Newport but continue to live with the Woods family.

  I don’t want you to be around the house if there’s another trial.

  I love you and always will, just like I told Gabe I’ll always love him. You’re my son.

  This doesn’t change my love for you. But I don’t want you at home. It doesn’t feel right.

  “How long have you known?” I asked. “Did you get a phone call?”

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “Does Mom know? Is that why she’s not here?”

  He shook his head but he said, “Probably.” A pause and then, “It’s not something that we’ll discuss.”

  “That’s why Gabe had the gun,” I said. “You found out before I came home.”

  No answer.

  “I don’t want Gabe to hate me,” I said.

  “You underestimate him,” he said, in a calm, quiet voice.

  I began to cry.

  “Before I forget,” he said, fumbling to pull his Rolex from his pocket, “Gabe wants me to give this to you.”

  I didn’t take it, so he set it on my hospital tray.

  “I’m afraid,” he said, looking at me with a heavy sadness, “that this is good-bye.” Then he lifted himself from his chair and left.

  But not before bending over me and whispering, “I do love you, my second-born son,” and his lips pressed wet on my face in an open-mouthed, anguished kiss.

  His back was hunched as he walked through the door, leaving it ajar.

  I stared in despair at the slice of hospital hallway beyond my room. I felt a jolt as Dad crossed the area a moment later. Slump-shouldered, hands deep in his pockets, and head down—tears streaming down his face and steaming his glasses, gasping for breath in air-gulping sobs—hurrying past without turning to see me.

  He must’ve gone the wrong way in his grief and confusion, since he crossed my doorway once more.

  That was the last time I saw my dad, and only the second time I’d seen him cry.

  The first, of course, had been when he’d held Gabe, and then me, close to his shoulder, promising both of us that he’d take care of everything.

  35.

  I’D LIKE TO tell you that I’m free of Dad’s influence and money. But I’m not. I’ve been wandering and traveling and trying to find my way ever since that summer.

  I’ve attended four colleges and had multiple menial jobs, and I’ve lived in five different states, all along the East Coast, far from California, finally settling, at least for now, in New York City. In these last ten years, I’ve managed to get a BA in English literature, and I’m a thesis short (“The Reality of Suffering: A Socio-Psychological Exploration of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Characters”) of my master’s degree. My every step and breath has been subsidized by a trust fund.

  Ron Inouye, Dad’s accountant and a financial wizard, who was a prisoner in his youth at the Manzanar Japanese internment camp in California, is my only connection to my family. He knows more about us than anyone.

  When we speak, it’s about financial matters, though he has let me know more than once that my dad would welcome a phone call. But I have no idea what I would say.

  If I hint at wanting information about my family, Inouye plays dumb. I have the impression that though he’s a man of few words, Inouye reports back to my dad about me.

  After the mistrial, Tove refused to settle, and the Hyde Three were tried again the following year, in 2005. I was on a rattling bus deep in Morocco close to the time the second verdict came in. I remember because I had a bout of severe diarrhea, and barely made it to the hole of a toilet in the ground, the sympathetic bus driver stopping the bus with a gear-shifting, dust-breaking jolt and waiting for me, despite the angry protests of my fellow passengers.

  They were found guilty on two felony counts of sexual penetration by intoxication (one count with a foreign object). The judge ignored the Ks’ and Gabe’s late apologies and appeals for probation. He could’ve sentenced them to more than nine years but chose milder punishments, considering that they were minors at the time of the crime. All had three-year sentences, but none served longer than fifteen months.

  After our gun incident, Gabe made one last thwarted suicide attempt, trying to hang himself with a sheet in his jail cell. But the guards stopped him.

  Sometimes I look at his sexual offender photograph on the Internet. It’s Gabe, but it’s a different Gabe. With a faint mustache and stubble along his chin, he looks like a broken man, and I see the old Gabe—sensitive and sad and wounded—and something else now. A surprised vulnerability in his eyes, and I might as well say it, whether you believe me or not: a visible kindness.

  For a few years, the side of his body and face appeared in a picture on a website for a quaint cottage-style restaurant in Laguna Beach, owned and operated by a husband-and-wife team. Smiling, in his traditional server garb of black pants and white shirt with black bow tie and vest, hip apron, and a towel draped across his forearm, he is leaning forward to serve what looks to be a plate of Cornish game hen to an elderly lady with a gray bun.

  But on the same website, an anonymous source revealed his identity—which is how I found it on the Internet—and hundreds of commenters both local and not pitched in with their disgust, calling for, among other punishments besides his job termination, his castration. The husband and wife held out for a good long while, expressing their belief in Gabe, even with their knowledge of his past, but then one night his photograph disappeared.

  SARA KEPT ME posted through emails and letters during the second trial, which she attended, no longer intimidated by her role in the case. The media never did find out about our involvement, and R. Sam Michaels kept his word.

  Joe came back and Sara married him. She’s a nurse in the ICU at Hoag. Joe had an organic produce business, but it went bust and I’m not sure what he does now. They have one kid (Samuel) and another on the way.

  I’m Sam’s godfather.

  THE KS, AS far as I know, now work for Kent’s uncle’s flooring company in Palm Desert, and they no longer have contact with Gabe, blaming their downfall and conviction on our dad’s aggressive defense campaign. Had they settled, they would’ve gotten shorter sentences in juvenile hall and parole, rather than years fighting the crimina
l system detailed in the media, only to land in prison as adults. There’ve been a couple of DUIs for both Ks, but otherwise they’ve stayed out of trouble, or, just as likely, they haven’t been caught.

  Kevin Stewart lost an appeal in 2008 to overturn his conviction and the requirement that he register as a lifelong sex offender. At the time, Sara wrote me in an email:

  I’ve learned something. We love it when people express huge public displays of remorse. But it’s bullshit. We don’t know what’s going on inside a person. At the sentencing, Kevin cried and seemed earnest when apologizing to Tove and her parents, more so than Gabe and Kent. Everyone in that courtroom choked up. My money was on Kevin for sincerity.

  But here we are, and now he’s doing an interview, saying that he shouldn’t have to register as a sex offender because it’s “emasculating.” He’s wearing those mirrored sunglasses—someone should’ve at least told him that he looks like a douche with those on—talking about how he went from being written up in the papers for being a varsity football star to being in a rape case. Poor Kevin! He says he resents having to wear a GPS device until he gets off parole. It messes with his surfing! “Have you ever tried to go in the ocean with one of those on?” he says.

  Then, I swear, he’s asked whether or not he feels that what he did that night was wrong, and he says, “Had it been any other girl, maybe.” What an asshole! To think that he was the one at the sentencing that seemed the most sorry. He hasn’t changed at all. That same old arrogance and entitlement and stupidity.

  AT AGES TWENTY-SIX and twenty-seven respectively, Melissa Stroh and Crystal Douglas are both on their second marriages, still living and working in Cucamonga, and Melissa has a toddler daughter, and Crystal has a newborn son. Old MySpace pages and current Facebook profiles provide the ubiquitous midparty photos, tongues extended and hands wagging in “peace” or “hang loose” or hard-rock devil-horn signs, alcohol and drug paraphernalia visible in the background.

  But one can hope that now that they have offspring of their own, they’re settling down to become the good girls that they portrayed themselves to be during both trials while at the same time so viciously attacking and betraying Tove.