When You Were Older (retail)

by Catherine Ryan Hyde

  ‘I haven’t slept in days. I mean, barely. Ever since the trouble with my father. Tonight I broke down and took a sleeping pill. Stay with me until I fall asleep, OK?’

  ‘Sure. Should I talk?’

  ‘I don’t know. Do you want to talk? What would you do if I were there?’

  ‘Probably just listen to your breathing.’

  ‘OK. We’ll just listen to each other’s breathing.’

  I have no idea who fell asleep first.

  I just know I woke to a noisy thump against the living room door. Then the doorbell rang one long blast. I stared down at the phone on the bed beside me. I checked to see if the line was still open. But sometime in the night the call had been dropped.

  I heard tires squealing on the street out front as a car spun away.

  I turned on the light, squinted, and checked the clock. It was after two thirty.

  I made my way to the front door.

  When I opened it, Ben fell into the living room. I looked down at him, sprawled on the carpet, and honestly thought he was dead. Then his eyes flickered open, and he looked up at me.

  ‘Hey, Buddy,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God. Ben. You’re drunk.’

  ‘I had a bad dream,’ he said.

  I got him into a cold shower. I didn’t ask him about his dream.

  I should have asked him about his dream.

  23 November 2001

  I WOKE UP again at a few minutes after six. Woke up from a nap that had probably lasted all of forty-five minutes.

  I sat up, and listened for Ben in the kitchen.

  Then I got up and climbed into my jeans.

  I found Ben still in bed.

  ‘Buddy. You’re going to be late to work.’

  ‘I threw up,’ he said.

  ‘Oh. In the bed?’

  ‘No. In the toilet.’

  ‘Oh. Good.’

  ‘I had a bad dream.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘No. The same one. Before I got home. That one.’

  ‘When were you even asleep before you got home?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘You sure you weren’t just drunk?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘I’m going to kill Chris. Would you excuse me for a minute?’

  I stomped back into my mom’s bedroom and grabbed up my cell phone. It would be a great pleasure to wake the son of a bitch at six in the morning to tell him I was going to kill him.

  I got his voicemail.

  I froze briefly, then hung up without leaving a message. I hadn’t seen this guy since high school. If I left a message saying I was going to kill him, he might think I was going to kill him. He might call the police and tell them his days were numbered. That he needed protection.

  I made my way into the kitchen, but Ben still wasn’t up. I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised. I don’t know why I hadn’t seen that coming.

  I found him still in bed.

  ‘I think I’m going to throw up again,’ he said. I stepped out of his way. But nothing happened. ‘You have to go tell Mr McCaskill I’m sick and I can’t come in.’

  ‘Yeah. I guess. But I’m going to kill Chris.’

  I stomped back into the bedroom. Picked up my cell phone again. Redialed Chris. This time I was going to leave a message saying how sick Ben was. How he was missing a day of work over this. How in the course of the evening he’d somehow had a nightmare that might have involved more drunkenness than actual sleep.

  I hung up again.

  Why was I trying to change this guy when I could just make sure Ben never got anywhere near him again? Why bother telling someone he’s an asshole? He’s not likely to hear you, take your advice to heart, and improve his character immediately.

  I stuck my head into Ben’s room one more time.

  ‘You OK while I’m gone?’

  ‘I guess. Can I tell you my dream?’

  ‘Can I pick you up something? Ginger ale or something?’

  ‘No, I’d just throw it up. It was a very bad dream. I dreamed there was a fire.’

  ‘What kind of fire?’

  ‘A big one. Real fast.’

  ‘Fast?’

  ‘Yeah. Like there was just this tiny little bit of fire in my hand, and then it was really fast. Everything burned really fast.’

  ‘Our house?’

  ‘No, not our house.’

  ‘Was it like a forest fire?’

  ‘No. It wasn’t in the forest. It was in the bakery.’

  ‘Oh, God. Don’t even say that, Buddy. Don’t even tell me any more about it. That’s too weird.’

  ‘Told you it was bad.’

  ‘I’ll be back in a few minutes.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘You’ll be OK?’

  ‘No. But I can throw up even if you’re not here.’

  * * *

  I warmed up the car for a long time. It was a cold morning.

  I thought about Anat. Would I stop on the way back and see her? Get a donut? Talk? Or would I feel I had to get straight back to Ben?

  This would be the first time I’d seen her since she told me her ‘There he is’ story. I drove down the street toward the bakery, looking forward to just getting a look at her through the bakery window. Maybe she would look different to me, now that I knew what I knew.

  But there was no bakery window.

  There was no bakery.

  Just a pile of black. Blackened beams, buckled. Only one corner of the building standing as high as a single story. Two firefighters still training the arc of their hoses on the rubble, which steamed in the morning air.

  I slammed on the brakes, and looked all around, desperately, somehow trying to believe I was looking at the wrong corner.

  I put the car in park, right in the middle of the street, and stepped out.

  It’s hard to sum up what was going on inside me, because it was disjointed, overlapping, and out of my reach. The clearest message I can pull out was this: a new desire to kill someone. I wanted to pull God down from wherever God lives, if God lives, and tear him limb from limb with my bare hands. I wanted to force him to stop hitting me. To stop taking things away. I wanted to strong-arm him into submission. This was simply getting out of hand.

  And that was all before I remembered that Anat had been in the building all night. Next thing I knew, I was holding a firefighter by his waterproof coveralls. He was trying to tell me I couldn’t park in the middle of the street. I was trying to tell him there had been a woman sleeping in the room above the store. He knew, he said. ‘She got out,’ he said.

  ‘She’s OK? Tell me she’s OK!’ I kept asking that, screaming it, over and over. I screamed it both before and after he said she was ‘stable’. I screamed it the whole time he kept trying to tell me I had to be family. That he wasn’t supposed to give me more information on her condition if I wasn’t family.

  Then I was holding him more tightly, and our faces were very close together, and I remember him telling me I needed to pull myself together.

  I think I said I was her fiancé. I know for a fact that I asked him if he’d ever been in love.

  He sighed. He sighed when I asked him that. So I don’t know who he was, that firefighter, but I know he’d been in love.

  He called to another fireman, by name. Ricky. He said, ‘Ricky, you were there when the girl came out, right? How was she?’

  ‘Third degree,’ Ricky called. Holding his palms straight out toward us. As if we would want to see them. ‘Hands and knees. Nothing life-threatening.’

  Then I remember I breathed. Maybe I breathed before that, but I don’t remember. Then again, maybe not.

  ‘You better move your car,’ the fireman who was not Ricky said.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘County General.’

  So, yeah. I would move my car. I would damn well move my car all the way to County General. And not slowly.

  I jumped into the car, shifted into drive, and squealed my
tires taking off.

  I drove less than one block, and stopped. My foot hit the brake by itself, as if it had an independent brain system. I pulled over and shifted into park.

  Ben dreamed that the bakery burned.

  What did that mean?

  I won’t say my brain was working well, or even that it was working. But I could think of two reasonable inferences.

  One, my brother Ben is an oracle. He knows what’s going to happen before it even manifests. He fell asleep in the car on the way home last night, and had a prophetic dream.

  Two, my brother Ben was there when the bakery caught fire. And, in his unfamiliarity with drunkenness, interpreted what he saw as something other than reality. Like a bad dream.

  My brain, my intentions, tried to go two directions at once. They raced to the hospital, and back to Ben, shearing painfully.

  I had no idea what to do first.

  Then I decided that the firemen were on top of fighting the fire and the hospital was good at treating burns, but the police likely had nothing to go on so far. I needed to ask Ben who did this. Suddenly nothing was more important than that. Not even getting to see Anat fifteen minutes sooner.

  I swung a wide U, during which I was nearly T-boned by a pickup truck I hadn’t bothered to see coming. And I got myself back to the house.

  And not slowly.

  ‘Tell me about your dream!’ I screamed. ‘Everything! Every detail!’

  I had him by the collar of his pajamas.

  ‘Ow!’ he said. ‘Ow! Let go! You’re scaring me! Why are you yelling at me?’

  ‘Tell me everything you can remember!’

  ‘I did! I told you everything!’

  ‘Who was there with you? Tell me who else was there! Was Mark there?’

  ‘Mark was there, yeah.’

  I thought briefly about letting go of Ben, marching next door, and dragging Mark out of his house. Only problem was, I might kill him. Literally. Kill him.

  ‘Who else? Was anyone else there? Was Chris there?’

  ‘Maybe,’ he said.

  ‘Maybe? What the hell does maybe mean?’

  ‘It means you’re scaring me! Let me go! I need to throw up!’

  He pulled away from me and stumbled for the bathroom. I stood, shaking uncontrollably, as if it were below zero in Ben’s room, and listened to the horrible sound of his retching. It seemed as though he never planned to stop.

  Then I walked to the kitchen phone, called directory assistance, and was connected to the Norville Police Department.

  Michelevsky picked up, and identified himself.

  ‘Russell Ammiano. Remember me?’

  ‘I do. I was just about to call you. Your friends are having a bad morning.’

  I brushed over why he’d been about to call me. It made no sense. Or I had no time for it. Or, more likely, both.

  ‘I have some information for you. About the fire. You need to talk to Mark Jespers. And Chris Kerricker.’

  ‘Oh, we’re all over Mark Jespers,’ he said. ‘We just happen to have him in custody. Picked him up in the middle of the night staggering down the middle of Conner Avenue. Seems he’d smashed his car into a lamp pole about a block and a half from the bakery and set off on foot. Left an empty gas can on the seat. Drunk criminals are bad criminals, I always like to say. So we’re all over talking to him. Now we need to talk to Ben. You need to bring Ben down here.’

  ‘And Chris Kerricker.’

  ‘We’ll get to him. You need to bring Ben in.’

  ‘Sure. I will. I just need to get to the hospital …’

  ‘No. I mean now. Or we’ll come over and get him.’

  ‘I have to go see Anat. I have to see how she is.’

  ‘We’ve been in to see her. We took a statement from her. She’s hurting, but she’ll be OK. Maybe not good as new, but OK. She can wait a while to see you. She’s not going anywhere. But we can’t wait to see Ben. You need to get him in here pronto.’

  I held still, forcing myself to breathe. It sounded like an order. In fact, it sounded like an order repeated several times, with exponentially increasing gravity.

  And, maybe he was right. Anat was getting good care. And the investigation was important. And Ben was a witness. He could help.

  ‘Right. Fine. I’ll pour him into the car and we’ll get right down there.’

  ‘Good,’ he said. ‘No detours. No visits. No changing your mind. No nothing. I’m holding you responsible.’

  I stared at the phone for a moment. Trying to read a subtext that might just as well have been written in an alien language.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘Bye.’

  Sometimes we have no immediate option but to ignore what we can’t yet understand.

  I found Ben wandering unsteadily out of the bathroom. He looked pale and miserable. I’ve never understood why people do that to themselves on purpose.

  ‘How much did you have to drink?’

  ‘Just one beer. Two.’

  ‘That’s all? Two beers?’

  ‘And something that was sweet, but I don’t know what it was.’

  ‘We’re going to the police station.’

  His eyes bulged. Opened wide, like an exaggerated painting of a street waif.

  ‘I don’t want to go.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. You have to go.’

  ‘Why?’ He made the one syllable stretch into the length of maybe twelve.

  ‘Because, Ben,’ I said, probably too harshly. ‘It wasn’t a dream. The bakery really did burn down.’

  My brother Ben has never reminded me more of a deer on the highway, frozen in my car headlights. Eyes wide, knowing it’s about to be hit, caring very much, yet unable to change the course of events. And the scary thing is, he’s often reminded me of a deer on the highway. Usually, in fact. But never more than this.

  He turned suddenly, lunged for the toilet again, and dry-heaved for a painful length of time.

  I waited.

  Ben said nothing on the way down to the police station. Nothing. Not one thing.

  I’d been prepared for almost anything he might have said. I was only unprepared for nothing.

  I looked over at him several times on the drive. His face was ghostly white, and he hunkered over his own knees, hugging them, rocking softly.

  I didn’t go by the bakery. I took the long way around. I didn’t tell him Anat had been sleeping over the shop. Sooner or later I would have to tell him. Right now he was scaring me. Even without the added information.

  Once, about six blocks from the station, he made a noise that sounded like something trying to come up. So I pulled over. Reached over him and pushed his door open. Then I looked the other way until he was done.

  Michelevsky asked if I wanted my brother to have an attorney present during questioning.

  I said no.

  I said, ‘Ben has nothing to hide. He’s just going to tell you what he saw. But be patient with him. Please. Because he gets confused and has trouble remembering. And the more he thinks you’re mad at him, the more confused he gets. I might be able to help with that.’

  ‘You’ll be waiting out here,’ he said.

  He didn’t elaborate. And I didn’t ask any questions. Sometimes I wonder if I should have asked questions. Made demands. But none of it seemed terribly important. At the time.

  They’d take Ben into a room. Ask a lot of questions to establish that he’d really been there. He’d implicate Mark and Chris. He’d come out of the room. We’d go to the hospital and see Anat. We’d survive this day. We would. Life would go on. Maybe not smoothly, certainly not as if nothing had ever happened. But life would know enough to go on.

  This day would be over.

  I had to keep talking to myself like that. I had to keep telling myself those simple, comforting lies. It was survival one minute at a time.

  I’ll never forget the look on Ben’s face as they led him into that room. Never. He looked over his shoulder at me the whole time. They had to more or less
drag him. Lead him along by one arm.

  Meanwhile Ben looked at me the way your dog looks at you when you give him over to the vet assistant for surgery. That awful moment when they have to drag him by the collar, his legs spread for traction. Looking to you for salvation. No capacity for words, but his eyes clearly saying, ‘Don’t let them take me. I want to be with you.’ And you can’t even explain that part about how it’s all for the best.

  ‘Go with them,’ I said. ‘It’s going to be OK.’

  It didn’t sound like the kind of statement that would come back to haunt me. So I guess you never know.

  I looked at my watch. Ben had been in that room with three cops – did Norville really have three cops? – for half an hour.

  Now what had I been doing wrong? All I ever got was two sentences of information at a time out of Ben. The third usually being, ‘I told you already.’

  I paced. I needed to get to the hospital. I needed to ask somebody if I could just go. Just go to the hospital. Pick Ben up later. But there was nobody in the outer office. There was nobody to ask. So I had to stay. And pace.

  At forty minutes, Michelevsky emerged, walked straight to a water cooler, and poured himself – or somebody – a paper cup of water.

  ‘Are we done?’ I asked. ‘Can we go?’

  ‘You can,’ he said. ‘You can go any time you want. Your brother will not be accompanying you. Your brother is in custody.’

  I sat down on a wooden bench, sorting through all the things I could potentially think, say, feel. All of some merit. But sometimes you just have to weed things down. Not everything makes the cut.

  I didn’t panic, though. It was a mistake, and we’d get to the bottom of it. My best guess was that Mark had lied and put the whole thing off on Ben. But it would never stick. How could the crime have been masterminded by a guy who couldn’t learn to walk two blocks to work from the bus stop?

  ‘What did Mark say about him?’

  I was calm. I was proud of myself for that. Why bait the cops? Be the voice of reason. Work with them. Be somebody they can talk to. That’s best for Ben in the long run.

  ‘It’s not what Mark said. It’s what Ben said. Your brother confessed to throwing the match.’

  I opened my mouth to argue. To tell him how ridiculous that was. How he must have confused Ben, or not understood him. How easy it is to put words into his mouth. How he’ll say anything when he’s scared.