The Toy Thief

by DW Gillespie

  “Move,” I said from over his shoulder, but he pushed me away with a single strong arm. He was shaking the door now, pulling it like a wild monkey trying to break out of a cage.

  “Stop.”

  He didn’t hear me. He didn’t hear anything. All at once, he gave up on the handle altogether and began punching the wooden planks with his bare knuckles, each blow echoing through the neighborhood.

  “Jesus, Andy, stop it!”

  His knuckles were red, cracking, bleeding, and with each new punch, he left a bloody print. In seconds, there were three knuckle-prints, then six, then eight, all as I grabbed at his shoulder, pulling him, trying and failing to draw him away from the edge of madness, to drag him back to me.

  “Dammit, stop, please, just stop!”

  Before I knew it, I had hit him on the back of the head, reaching up and swinging my fist down like a hammer. It shot a bolt of pain up my elbow, but it at least got his attention. He turned, his bloodshot eyes locking on mine, and he swung. The world went spotty as I heard the crunch in my jaw. There was the ground, the gravel, the dirt, rising up to meet me. I hit hard, but I didn’t feel anything other than the slight humming throb in my ears. For some strange reason, I remember seeing an anthill just in front of my eyes, and in my swirling, woozy confusion, I worried that they might try to crawl into my mouth. There was a voice, distant, like it was speaking through a pillow, saying the same panicked thing over and over again.

  “No, no, no, no, no…”

  On and on. I didn’t care though. The world was too vague a thing to care about. I must have rolled onto my back at some point, because I remember the blue sky dotted with black clouds. Not clouds. Just black dots that danced around the edges of my vision, bubbling, growing, and eventually consuming the blue altogether.

  The cold of the frozen bag of peas was what finally woke me up. I don’t know how long they had been resting on my cheek, but from the numbness, I would have guessed several minutes. I was on the couch in the living room, and when I sat up, a pain raced through the front of my head. I stumbled into the bathroom, both eager and fearful to see what I looked like. My face in the mirror wasn’t nearly as bad as it felt. It was swollen, sure, but not so bad that I couldn’t make up a good lie. A neat, bloody outline of knuckles lined my cheek, and on my forehead, I had a bit of gravel still half stuck, half buried in my skin. The sight of myself made everything instantly hurt more than it had just seconds before, and I spent a few minutes washing the dirt and blood away. Once everything was clean, I realized I had a handful of scrapes across my brow. Still, not too bad considering. But certainly enough to have to explain when the time came.

  Before I left for good, I checked behind the shower curtain once more. The smell of smoke was still hanging in the air, but the bits of ash and skin had been washed away, and a sharp smell of disinfectant permeated the space. How long had I been out?

  I met Andy in the kitchen just as he walked in through the back door, soapy bucket and a rag in one hand. He took a deep breath before walking over to me. I could see in his eyes that he was back to himself once more, but I cringed all the same when he moved closer.

  “No,” he said, stopping short and touching my shoulder, awkward and unsure, like we were on a first date. “You don’t…I don’t…I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

  I let him babble like that for a minute, mainly because I was pretty certain that talking would make my jaw hurt like hell. I knew what had happened to him, knew what had been done to him, but was still unsure how deep my brother’s change really went.

  “Stop,” I said finally through my half-open lips. “Just stop.”

  “B-but…”

  “No,” I replied. “I know. You didn’t do that. You wouldn’t. I know that.”

  “Yes,” he said in a relieved tone. Years later, when I learned more about the world, I would think of that moment often – the way he apologized, the sharp guilt in his eyes, the way it burned him to realize he had done something so awful. I’ve known drunks, alcoholics, junkies, cheaters, just about everything you can imagine, and I’ve seen that look on all of their faces. Their regret is so real, so powerful that it nearly consumes them whenever they go too far. And yet they seem completely unable to stop.

  “The body?” I said, my jaw too sore to ask the entire question.

  “In the basement,” he said, his tone like that of a dog, so eager to please, to fix what he had broken. “I washed the blood off the door. And I cleaned the bathroom. And the peas,” he said, looking around for them.

  “In the living room,” I answered.

  “Yeah, yeah. I got those for you too. I thought it would help…you know. With the swelling.”

  He was right. The peas had helped. And he had done a good job of fixing everything else. Now if only he could stop breaking things.

  “Anyone see you?”

  “No,” he said, his tone suddenly less confident. “I mean, no one that I know of.”

  I checked the clock on the front of the microwave. It had been nearly an hour since we stepped out the back door together. If anyone had seen a teenage boy beat the shit out of his sister, we’d know by now. So I sighed, breathing somewhat easy despite the pain I was in. Our plan, despite the roadblocks, had worked up to this point. Now all we had to do was get him to the quarry tonight. I imagined the dozens of ways that could go wrong.

  “What happened out there?” I asked.

  “I dunno. I just lost it when I couldn’t get the door open. And then one thing led to another, and—”

  “No,” I said. “Not that. I saw that. How did I get back in here?”

  I knew the answer, or at least part of it, but I wanted to hear it from him. I wanted to know what was happening inside his head.

  “I came back,” he said as he stared at the ground.

  “Back?”

  “Yeah. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was like I knew what I was doing, but I wasn’t really the one doing it. I knew it was wrong, is what I mean. But…” he glanced back up, “I didn’t want to stop. That door. It was like it was alive. I felt like it was laughing at me.”

  “That’s ridiculous.”

  “I know that!” he said in a sudden rush of anger. “I’m not stupid. That’s just what it felt like.”

  “So what made you stop?”

  Again he stared at the tops of his feet, an embarrassed look in his eyes.

  “You,” he said finally. “I saw you. What I had done. And it brought me back.”

  My head felt suddenly heavy as a dull throb grew behind my eyes. “You got this?” I asked.

  “Yeah. We’re good.”

  “Good. I’m going to lie down. Wake me up by four,” I said. “We need to think what we’ll tell Dad about…all this.” I motioned to my cheek.

  “Okay. I’m sorry. I hope you know that.”

  My head was hurting too bad for me to really know anything. “Sure. Four. Got it?”

  He nodded and I slipped away. Despite everything that had happened in my room, I still felt safe once I was under my sheets. It wasn’t the room, or even the bed. It was because I was alone. Andy was out there, and a thin, hollow door separated the two of us. That alone was enough to put me at ease, and I slipped quietly into sleep, leaving the pain safely behind.

  Chapter Thirteen

  They let Andy out about five years back. He told them how sorry he was for everything he’d done, about how it was all a mistake, even the stuff with me, which couldn’t have been an accident. They knew all about his troubles at school, the outbreaks of violence before and after his arrest. There was quite a list. Still, he’d been a boy when it happened, and he was in jail for a long, long time. I don’t know that anyone in charge actually believed he was what you would call rehabilitated, but it didn’t matter. He’d served his time, so he walked out.

  They sta
rted him out in a halfway house, a little shithole with four tiny rooms, each home to a pair of work-release guys. There were drug addicts, DUIs, wife beaters, the whole deal, but only Andy had nearly killed anyone. That made him sort of a twisted little celebrity, at least that’s how he told it. I was there when they let him out, and I drove him to the house. He asked, in a roundabout way, if he could live with me.

  “I mean, I have to spend six months here,” he said. “I’m dreading it, but I’ve done worse. Lord knows that. When my six is up, I’m not sure where I’ll go…”

  Just fishing really. Too afraid or proud to ask, and me not sure if I trusted him, even after everything. I dodged the question, and on the way over, I stopped at the cemetery.

  “Where you going?”

  “To see Dad.”

  “No,” he said with a blank face.

  “I thought you’d just—”

  “No. Just no.”

  We drove on, and he got out of the car at the halfway house without another word. He called me a few times, letting me know how things were going. It didn’t sound too bad, considering all he’d been through. They set him up with a job working a fryer at some chicken joint within walking distance. He said it was nasty work, that the fryers had burned all the hair off his forearms.

  “Beggars can’t be choosers,” he added.

  “I suppose not.”

  Most of our calls were a mixture of general chitchat – the whos, whats, wheres, and so forth – combined with awkward silence. Neither of us knew what to say. We were strangers, and that’s just how it was. About five months in, he told me he had a place lined up to stay.

  “Her name’s Kirstie. She works with me. She’s sweet. I guess you could say we’re dating.”

  I could hear the excitement in his voice, and I realized that he’d never had a girlfriend. He’d been thirteen when they locked him up, and he’d probably never even kissed anybody. The idea made me equally bitter and sad.

  “Good,” I told him. “I’m glad to hear that. I’d like to meet her.”

  I tried to imagine the kind of girl who would want to move in with a convict whose only career prospects included working his way up to the cash register. That thought made my fingers itch, and I realized my own love life wasn’t much to be jealous of.

  “Yeah,” he said, the smile clear through the phone line. “I told her ’bout you. She’d love to meet you.”

  We never did get together. I still don’t know all the details, but I do know that Kirstie had problems of her own – drugs, to be specific. Meth, I believe. She was a mess from top to bottom, and the two of them never really had a chance to make anything work. The next time I heard from Andy, he was out on his own, living in a little apartment. He didn’t mention her, and I didn’t ask, and that’s how it went, for a while at least.

  Then Andy found out he was a father.

  * * *

  I dreamed again. A real dream this time, not a vision or a message from beyond. It was a simple one. Just me, sitting in the bathtub with all my clothes on. I smelled like a campfire. I glanced down at my hands, expecting them to be charred and burned, but they were the same hands I looked at every day when I sketched in a notepad or scribbled down my homework minutes before class started. I don’t know why I was so afraid, but I kept waiting for something to happen, waiting for a moment that never came. The moment seemed to linger, stretching out like taffy, far beyond when it should have ended. No blood, no monsters, no writhing pool of blackness, just me in a bathtub, the smell of smoke in the air, staring at my hands without blinking.

  Andy didn’t wake me up until nearly five, barely long enough to get a fresh bag of peas on my cheek before Dad got home. The swelling was noticeable, but not so bad as to be overly concerned about. If I played it right, he might not even see it.

  “What if he does?” Andy asked. We were both standing just inside the bathroom as I turned my head this way and that, trying to assess the damage.

  “I slipped getting out of the shower,” I said. “Bumped it here,” I added with a slap on the bathroom counter.

  “Will he buy it?” He sounded more concerned than he had all that day, and I realized how guilty he felt about the whole thing.

  “He will.”

  And he did. He came in, same as he always did, and though he seemed a bit more attentive than normal, checking on both of us multiple times to make sure all was well, he didn’t quite notice the obvious things that mattered. Not my swollen jaw. Not Andy’s red, blurred eyes. Certainly not the strangely clean bathroom. Looking back, I don’t blame Dad. He was, just as much as the two of us, trying to keep it together. There was no doubt that he noticed some things, but I’m sure he thought there was more time. Why wouldn’t he? He didn’t want to push too hard on me or Andy, because he didn’t want to make things any worse. I don’t think it would have made any difference even if he had known. We were too far gone by then, by the night when everything finally went down.

  I think I knew it was coming, at least in one way or another. The dreams. That feeling of something large and unstoppable rolling toward me. That hopeless feeling in the pit of my belly. All of it only grew, changed, becoming deeper and more powerful as I waited for the sun to finally drop. I wouldn’t sleep. I honestly didn’t know if I would ever sleep again, at least not while the sun was down. We ate a quick bite in the living room, pizza coming around in the rotation once more.

  “Everyone have a good day?” Dad asked.

  Andy couldn’t even muster so much as a sentence, and I jumped in to save him.

  “Yep,” I said cheerfully.

  “Did you do anything?”

  I scanned the question, scrubbing it for any hint of distrust, but I found it clean. “Not much. Watched TV. Andy played games mostly.”

  “That right?”

  “Yep. How’s work?”

  He glanced from Andy to me, watching us with cocked eyebrows. Then he fell right in. “Pretty good. Got a lot of work to get done before the end of the month…”

  So the moment passed without another word from us, and within a few hours, the house fell silent once again. I waited until Dad drifted away, back to his room, and I found Andy. He was in his own room, the TV off as he sat at the edge of his bed. He was staring at the floor, and he didn’t seem to notice me when I walked in.

  “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

  He raised his eyes. “Oh. You.”

  “Yeah. Me.”

  I plopped down on the bed next to him, not waiting to be asked. We sat there, my legs dangling, his feet brushing across the carpeted floor. The Nintendo sat across from us, and I briefly considered turning it on and playing something. I never got to play much when he was around because he stayed on it 24/7. I don’t think he would have stopped me.

  “What are you thinking?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Everything.”

  “You worried?” When he didn’t answer, I answered for him. “I am. I keep having dreams. They keep getting worse, and they seem so real, I don’t think they’re dreams at all.”

  When I finished, I realized he was looking at me.

  “I dream awake,” he said. “Does that sound crazy?” I didn’t answer. “Maybe that’s how you know it’s not really a dream at all. He’s still in here, you know. He’s part of me. I can’t…find myself in there. Does that make any sense?”

  I wasn’t sure what he was asking. “I don’t know.”

  He pressed a hand to his head hard enough to turn his knuckles white. I could see veins in his forehead, tears in the edges of his eyes, and the wild, darting back and forth that never seemed to end.

  “I need you to tell me what to do,” he said, raising his eyes back to mine. “The voices keep getting clearer, and I hear something under my skin, telling me what to do. How to think. The things I need to do to feel good. The people I need to hurt.�
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  He was leaning into me now, pressing closer to my face.

  “He wants me to hurt people. The people closest to me.”

  I was standing at a crossroads. I could feel it, like my entire life hinged on how I responded in that single moment. Everything that came after would depend on how I reacted to this news. An idea flashed: me running from the room, grabbing Dad, calling the cops, doing whatever it took to keep me, and by extension Andy, safe. This was what my brain was thinking when my heart took control of my body and placed my hand on top of his.

  “No,” I told him. “You’re not going to do that.”

  His eyes were watering, and I could see him fighting back the urge to strike out at me, to hurt me, to choke the life out of me.

  “You’re my brother, and you’re not going to hurt me.”

  “I…I…”

  “Say it,” I demanded. “Say it now.”

  “I don’t know what—”

  “I want to hear you say it.” I wasn’t asking anymore, and his wild eyes met mine.

  “I’m your brother,” he whispered, the voice of a child. “And I’m not going to hurt you.”

  “I believe you,” I whispered back, and I meant it. “Let’s give it another hour or so. Make sure Dad is really asleep. We’ll carry it down to the quarry, and that will be the end of it. For good.”

  He was nodding along with the words, but his eyes were staring off at something else, something I couldn’t see.

  “Andy,” I said in a sharp tone, “be ready.”

  He nodded, and without another word, I walked out of his room, leaving him to sit quietly on the bed. I went straight to my own room and locked the door behind me before slipping between the sheets and pulling them up to my chin. I watched the shadows on the wall, the leaves filtered through the blinds, fluttering in the wind, moving like something alive. They looked like they wanted inside, with me. I listened to the wind, to the house popping, for the sounds of footsteps that might be creeping down the hall. More than once, I held my breath, wondering if the awful thing that jumped from body to body would ever even have to lift a finger to kill me. Why put any effort forth when my brother could do it for him? At some point, I began to drift – not quite asleep, but close enough to wander, glide above my conscious mind, see things, hear things, feel things that were both real and in my mind.