The Toy Thief

by DW Gillespie

  “I…I’ve got to go,” he said as he reached down and began to gather the clothes.

  “No,” I said, already crying. “You can’t.”

  “I have to,” he replied, and I knew it was the truth.

  “We could…make something up. I can do it, I can fix it,” I said, blubbering.

  “No,” he said honestly. “You can’t.”

  We were just kids, and no story we could make up would save my brother. He had sliced off two of my fingers. That was the only truth that mattered. Any evidence that might have saved him had shriveled up and disappeared, and a wad of old, dingy clothes wouldn’t change anyone’s mind.

  “Andy,” I begged. “Please.”

  He shook his head. “I might not see you again. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never.”

  I nodded, because there was simply nothing else to be done. This was the end of the lives we knew, and there was no fighting it.

  “I’m sorry,” he added, gathering up the musty black clothes and holding them against his chest. “Sorry I wasn’t myself. Sorry I wasn’t what you needed.”

  “You did your best,” I said. “That was pretty good.”

  “No, it wasn’t,” he added, but there was no fight in his voice. “But I’m glad you said it.”

  “Just go,” I said through my teeth. “Go while I’m still awake.”

  “Goodbye then,” he said weakly before kissing me gently on the cheek. Then he was gone, leaving nothing behind but a blood-soaked carpet and a warm spot on my cheek. I heard the steps down the hall, heard the door slam shut, and listened to my own labored breath coming in harsh wheezes. Andy was gone, his last bit of work still ahead of him, and now it was my turn.

  I drew myself up, stumbled into the hallway, and walked to the door to Dad’s room. I never went in there, but on this occasion, I let myself right in. It was always darker than the rest of the house. I flipped on the light and saw him there, looking small and strange curled up in his bed. He stayed on the left side, keeping the right side more or less untouched. He was on his feet in less than two seconds, the skill of a longtime parent. Then he stood there, blinking, seeing me but not really seeing anything.

  “Jack,” he murmured. “Whatissit?”

  I knew the lie, knew what I had to say, but I faltered.

  “Daddy,” I cried, holding my hand in front of my face, and finally, he saw.

  “Oh God,” he said, grabbing my wrist carefully. The t-shirt was red now, lighter on the outer edges and dark crimson in the center. One look and anyone could see that it wasn’t doing much to stop the bleeding. I’d never before or since seen Dad so speechless.

  “What did you do?”

  I?

  The question confused me, but after a few seconds, I understood. This was an accident. It had to be. Daughters could scrape knees, burn themselves with hot cocoa, get beat up or knocked up. They could do these things and a million other things that fathers might fear, but they didn’t get attacked in the night in their own house. That was unimaginable.

  “It wasn’t me,” I said, the guilt rising like bile in my throat as I anticipated the moment that had to come.

  “What?” he said. “What is it, baby? Tell me.”

  I shook my spinning head and blinked my welling eyes.

  “It was Andy.”

  Chapter Fifteen

  I woke up in the hospital, surrounded by beeps and the smell of piss and antiseptic. I remembered everything almost at once, and I raised my bandaged hand in confirmation. For the longest time, all I could do was stare at it.

  “Easy,” the nurse said as I inspected the almost spherical ball of white. “Don’t move it. Everything’s patched up, but it will take a good while to heal.”

  I was still woozy, feeling drunk from the morphine that had kept me sedated while they patched me up.

  “Id idges…idges.”

  I held my free hand up and pretended to scratch my mangled paw.

  “Oh,” she said. “Itches?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes, that’s a common thing. They call it phantom pain. You’ll probably be able to feel those fingers for a long time. Years even.” I rolled my head to one side and stared at the wall, disgusted.

  Most of the other facts are out there. The news picked it up. The papers printed it. A writer in town even wrote a book about it. True crime, she called it. I looked it up one time and found out that she’d only sold about seventy copies. That made me smile.

  According to the news, Andy tied up and attacked his sister. That’s me. There were dozens of theories as to why, the most popular being that media had had some sort of effect on his mind. Metal music, videogames, horror movies. The unholy trinity. It could have been a dabbling with satanism. After all, he had tied me up and sliced off two of my fingers. It sounded positively sacrificial. After the deed was done, he stole my father’s truck and tore out across the neighborhood before, thankfully, wrecking it a few miles away. The old truck was found in a ditch next to an abandoned stretch of field, the tailgate dropped, the radiator smoking. It only took the cops a few minutes to find it after Dad called them, but it took the better part of an hour for Andy to come marching out from the woods beyond the field, finally giving himself up. And that was that.

  They missed plenty though. They missed the fact that he cut me free after cutting off my fingers. They missed that he helped to bind my hand, and probably saved my life in the process. And most important and unsurprising, they missed why he took the truck in the first place. He didn’t know how to drive, at least not very well. But it was a long walk to the Trails and the quarry beyond. Andy, for all his efforts, succeeded at three things.

  He saved my life.

  He got rid of the evidence.

  And he got himself sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

  The almost ritualistic brutality of the crime ensured that he was tried as an adult. The prosecutor made a big, splashy show of the whole thing, questioning what it could have been that drove this child to commit such an evil act. Dad made me go to the sentencing, even after he let me stay away from the entire trial. I objected, but he swore it would be for my own good.

  “You need to see him,” he told me as I scratched at my nonexistent fingers. He was right of course. I did need to see Andy. I needed to thank him. I needed to tell him I was sorry for the way everything went. I needed to give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, to tell him I loved him. But I didn’t get to do any of that, not on that day at least. I sat there, quietly watching, pretending to ignore the eyes that gazed back at me with dark curiosity, wondering if anyone knew the truth of what happened.

  I didn’t even get to speak to him that day, or any other day. Not for a long time. I was sixteen when I finally did go see him for the first time, and by then, whatever warm brother-and-sister love we’d shared had cooled, hardened into odd awkwardness. I wasn’t the same tomboyish little sister he had saved, and he wasn’t the gangly, handsome boy who had saved me. He was taller by then, over six feet if he stood up straight, which he never did. His complexion had gone sallow and dull, and his eyes seemed to sink into his cheeks, receding from the light. He was only twenty, but I swear, his hair was beginning to thin.

  No, I didn’t tell him how much I loved him then, because you don’t say things like that to strangers, talking to each other through a sheet of wired glass. We talked small talk, and he told me it was good to see me. That shifty, bird-eyed look would come over him here and there, but it wasn’t a steady thing, not like it had been before.

  “You look good,” he said without ever looking me in the eye.

  I slid my shirtsleeve down over my hand. “Thanks. You do too,” I lied.

  Maybe we thought we were being recorded, or maybe we just didn’t want to say anything out loud to each other, not yet anyway. Either way, we never spoke a word about what happene
d, and that’s just how it went. We warmed up a bit over the years, and after a decade or so, we even learned to laugh here and there. It was a long, tough road that none of us ever wanted to be on, but we walked it as best we could.

  Who knows how long things would have gone on like that if he hadn’t gotten paroled? I’ve already told you about Kirstie and Andrew, the next generation in a long, unbroken line of fuckups. I had hoped that his son would be the thing that set Andy right. Made him whole. Fixed what that awful thing had broken. At first, when the pair moved in with me, I thought it might just do the trick.

  They say having a kid does strange things to a person – that for some people, it brings out the worst in them. They see that little version of themselves, still perfect, still scar-free, and they lose their minds a bit. All of their own wasted potential becomes an open book in front of them, and instead of facing it, instead of sitting down and reading it line by line, they slam it shut and walk away. There’s still time left for me, they tell themselves as they leave and never look back.

  Andy seemed, at least at first, to be cut from different cloth. Some folks see their children, and they realize that there is only one true path to immortality. That crying, shitting ball of skin they cradle in their arms is a link in a chain that connects them back through the ages, and in that chubby body, they see the lives of their most ancient relatives. All the lives they lived, all those paths converging, all those random chances, realized in your own child. In that moment, their life’s work becomes clear. Protect them. Guide them. Teach them to not make the same mistakes that you did.

  That was Andy in the early days. Me, him, and Andrew, making a strange house in the same town we grew up in. We might have made it, and I thought, or maybe just hoped, that we would. But it didn’t take long to realize it was just a dream, something whispered in my ear when I was half-asleep.

  It wasn’t Andrew. He was a baby then, little more than a mouth to stick a bottle in, or a body to cuddle up with under the covers. And it wasn’t me. I was half-curdled, sure, but I always had been, and that boy, that little thing I never asked for – well, he made me feel something I hadn’t known for a long time. Dad had needed me. Andy, in his way, had needed me. But for years, no one else in the world did. That little Andrew though, he needed me like he needed oxygen. He needed me to feed him, to warm up that bottle to stick in his mouth, to rock him whenever he woke in the middle of the night. I did these things, and a thousand others, grudgingly, or so it might look from the outside. But I was always good at keeping secrets. The truth was, I loved it.

  No, it wasn’t me who unraveled. It was Andy. He just wasn’t there. He was hollowed out, like a pumpkin scooped out and filled with nothing more than air and candlelight. It was the Toy Thief of course. I imagined what it might do to a person, to have someone else inside them. Did it leave a hole? Was there an empty spot where they pushed part of you aside to make room for themselves? Or was it even worse than all that?

  Maybe it wasn’t an empty spot. Maybe it was, quite simply, a dead spot. That everything that horrid, low darkness touched had gone terminal and just crumbled into dust. That when Andy cut it out of me, it wasn’t just that creature that was dying in the open air, flailing like a fish out of water. It was Andy as well. The best part of him, disappearing like so much smoke. God, it makes me cringe just to write it.

  It was there though, clear, bright, easy to read. It was in the way he would scrunch his face up whenever Andrew wouldn’t stop crying, as if his body were incapable of patience and understanding. It was in the way he would hold the boy, his boy, and stare out into the yard, watching birds like a catatonic old mutt, never noticing when Andrew was awake, was crying, was threatening to roll out of his lap and onto the floor. It was in the way he would sneak into the boy’s bedroom at night and stand there, staring at his crib. I’d watch on a monitor, breathless and exhausted, wondering when, dear God when would he finally go to sleep? He wasn’t safe around his own son, and as much as it killed me, I couldn’t deny it. I told him as much. I always was the first to talk, never one to keep my mouth shut, even when I should.

  Why?

  Why am I like that?

  Why have I always been like that?

  “You’re going to hurt him,” I said.

  I can still remember the day. Andy was sitting in a rocking chair, staring at the TV, not watching it, just gazing right through it. Wheel of Fortune was on. I think it was the wheel that had caught his attention. The way it spun and spun, clicking like some kind of…

  Like some kind of toy.

  He was giving Andrew a bottle, and the boy was finished. He kept pushing it away, his fat fingers struggling to get air, and I stood there, watching, letting it go further than I should, because I needed to see. I had to see. The milk was running down his cheeks, over his chin, and then, without warning, up his nose. He was coughing, choking, unable to even cry, and I reached for him, snatched him away.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

  I stormed out of the room and left Andy sitting there, his eyes watching me, half-glazed.

  I didn’t see him again for a few hours. Andrew was sleeping, and when I realized how long it had been since I laid eyes on Andy, I went looking for him. He was still sitting in the rocking chair, but the TV was off. So he just stared out the window, dead to the world as far as I could tell. A man might make it through prison like that, might even make it through a simple, dead-end job day after day. But a father can’t be dead inside, not without someone getting hurt.

  “I know you’re there,” he said, proving me wrong.

  I walked in and sat down across from him. “What is it?” I said bluntly. “What is…all this?”

  “Whenever I hold him,” he said, “something’s…off.”

  I shook my head in frustration. “Everyone says it’s hard at first. I mean, it takes time to learn how to be a dad.”

  “No,” he said softly. “I love him. I know that. But something isn’t right.”

  I shifted in my seat, wondering why he refused to look at me, to actually see my eyes.

  “What is it?”

  “My hands,” he said, holding them plaintively before him. “They can’t...they don’t work right. I touch him. I feel his skin. But I can’t…”

  “Can’t what?”

  He turned toward me now, grief and fear blooming in his eyes. “I can’t hurt him. I’m supposed to hurt him. My hands,” he said, pleading. “They can’t do what they’re supposed to do. I’m not supposed to be…this.” He motioned to his chest, staring at his skin. He quivered and rocked, scratching at his skin the same way you might scratch at a wool sweater, rubbing his knuckles like his bones were uncomfortable, like they wanted out. It was a painful, awful, and miserably pitiful thing to see.

  “Fix me,” he said, reaching for me. “Please, you have to fix me. It’s gone. The dark. I know it is. I felt it die that day.”

  My fingers itched, and I nodded. “I know it is too, Andy. I felt it too. So all of this,” I said, touching his chest, “it’s all you. You can beat this thing. I know you can.”

  The tears on his cheek were the first real signs of emotion I had seen from him since he moved, and somehow, they made everything worse. I could have dealt with the anger, the blind fury that had made him smash the globe so long ago. Anger was something that made sense to me. But this. This pathetic thing in front of me was too much.

  “He needs you,” I said. “Out of everything else on this planet, he needs you.”

  “No,” he replied, his voice rising and hitching. “He needs Andy. Andy would be a good father. Andy would know what to say. And Andy wouldn’t expect to feel anything more than skin when he touched his son.”

  “That’s you,” I said. “It’s all you.”

  “I don’t know what I am. I don’t quite think I’m a man. But I don’t think I’m a monster either. I d
on’t know what I am.”

  He let his eyes drift back down to his lap. Then he said the last words I ever heard him speak.

  “All I know is, Andy’s dead.”

  I tried to talk to him after that, but he wouldn’t say another word. I watched him the rest of that night, keeping as close an eye on him as I could while still taking care of Andrew. But I was only one person, just a girl. Girls get tired.

  When Andy got into his car and drove several miles away before killing himself, I like to think he did it for us. He wouldn’t have wanted me to find him like that, his eyes glazed, a pair of empty bottles on the floorboard, whiskey and pills. They’d given him the prescription when he got out. Said it would help him sleep.

  Once, in the early days after he got out of jail, he told me that he had never left that cave, and he was right of course. All those years later, he was still in there, still locked in that cage. Then again, another part of me thinks he was already dead on his feet long ago. The moment my mom left, she took a good part of him with her. The pictures showed that. The Thief took a bit more, and jail a bit more. The sleeping pills just finished the job.

  That was about three years ago now. It scared the hell out of me at first, the idea of taking care of Andrew all by myself. Then I remembered the few months we had already spent together, the two of us like awkward roommates, me single-handedly taking care of the baby, and I knew it would all work out. He’s a sweet kid, running around now, rough and rambunctious, but with a quiet streak that surprises you. I’ve never told him to call me Mom, because I never wanted to be anyone’s mom, and it just felt wrong to try and make him do something like that. The questions are coming though. I can feel it.

  He doesn’t ask about his dad, but you can see him working it all out now and then. I showed him some pictures, hoping to put him at ease, to make him feel just like everyone else at daycare – the mom, dad, grandparents, all of it. One of those quiet spells came over him then, and before I knew it, he had sneaked off and I couldn’t find him for a half-hour or so. I finally found him under the cabinet in one of the bathrooms, tucked back in there like an animal or something. Just like a cat.