by Cote Smith
Chris yanked up his shorts and turned around. “You? What? Not you.”
My brother pulled up his trunks and tried to run, but Chris caught him by the neck. “Whoa!” he said, wrestling my brother’s desperate, flailing arms. “Come on now.” He finally got hold of one arm and used it to fling my brother against the silo wall. He pressed his hand into my brother’s chest and with a fierce look commanded him to stay. “Jesus,” Chris said, catching his breath. “What the hell? Just hold on a second, OK? Let’s think this one through.” My brother clawed at Chris’s arms, his chest and wrist. Chris grabbed him by the shoulders and shook him into the silo wall, flexing his arms and shoulders with a strength I hadn’t seen before. “What is wrong with you?” Chris said. “Cut it out!” He shook him one last time, then held him still. “Calm yourself. Are you calm?” I took another step but Chris warned me to stay back, that he’d deal with me in a second. Still, I could see my brother’s face, reddened with hate, his mouth white with anger. It was what I must’ve looked like all those times my brother pinned me down with his knees, spit on me, or made me make promises I swore in my heart I would never keep.
“Promise me you’ll calm down,” Chris said. “You won’t do that again.”
My brother’s eyes flashed at me. His jaw stuck out, in rage, in disbelief.
“Don’t look at him,” Chris said, and grabbed my brother’s cheeks. “Look at me. Do you promise?”
My brother looked at Chris, his friend, our teacher. He nodded. He said he promised. He said, “Let me go.”
Chris sized him up with one last look. He let him go. My brother’s body relaxed, but he did not move from the wall. When Chris was satisfied that my brother wasn’t a flight risk, he turned to me. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
I ignored him. I tried to ignore everything about Chris, his loose trunks, his sick, milky limbs. I did my best to convince myself he was not here.
“Hey,” Chris said. “I’m talking to you. You shouldn’t be here.”
“Dad got a tip,” I said. “He’s close to catching him.”
Chris blinked his eyes quickly, batting away his confusion. He turned to my brother for answers. “What the hell is he talking about?”
I stepped away from Chris, so he was out of the scene and it was just me and my brother. I just needed a chance.
“Everything’s fine,” I said. “Everything will be OK.”
Chris tried to touch my brother, and my brother slid away. My brother put his head down, hiding his face. I could tell by the shaking of his shoulders that he had started to cry. I reached out to my brother, to comfort him, but he shrank into a crouch, into the fetal position. He hid his head in his arms, in the cave between his knees.
“We don’t have time for this,” Chris said. He pushed me out of the way and bent down to my brother, brushed my brother’s hair with the back of his hand. “It’s OK. We can figure this out.”
More winds rolled in, swirling the silo in a thudding rush. I looked at the circle of sky above me, at the puffy clouds moving in, dropping to the treetops. Chris caressed my brother’s cheek, but shifted his stare to me.
“You realize you’re coming too,” Chris said. “I mean, you know I can’t let you go back.”
A drop of rain. I heard his words and immediately tried to unhear them. My brother lifted his face. He wiped his nose with his arm and through a sob told Chris no. “He shouldn’t have to. Don’t make him.”
Chris walked over to the tree and broke off a piece of its bark.
“He doesn’t know anything,” my brother said. “I never told him.”
Chris flipped the broken bark in his hands, tossed it against the wall, and watched it shatter. “He knows,” Chris said. “Not a lot, but enough.”
My brother backed into me, raised his arms, to keep Chris out. Chris said please. He looked at his hands, sticky with sap, and reminded us that although he wasn’t much to look at, he was faster. He was stronger. He took a step toward us.
“Chris…,” my brother said, but there were no words to finish his thought.
“Stop calling me that,” Chris said. “That’s not my name.”
My brother’s arms drifted backward, closed around me. I peeked around his shoulder, at this man I didn’t know.
“It really is you,” I said. “You’re the Stranger.”
Chris cocked his head. “Stranger? C’mon, little man, you know me. So does your brother. I’m no stranger.” He stuck out his hand, which still showed dots of what he’d done to the tree. “Now we’re going to put this behind us. And you’re gonna come with me, trust and all.”
He drew nearer and I buried my face in my brother’s back. No, I mouthed into my brother’s skin. We can’t.
“Isn’t that what you want?” Chris said. “What we’ve all wanted all along?”
I felt his hand land on my brother’s shoulder, his fingers crawl like spider legs into my hair. I felt his nails scratch at my scalp, digging their way in.
“No!” my brother shouted, and with a quick shove knocked Chris to the ground. He grabbed my wrist and we started to run. But Chris was faster, as he promised, and beat us to the silo’s gap. He blocked it with his body.
“I’m sorry. At this point, I really am. But we’re too far. We’re farther than I’ve ever been and I can’t go back now. It might not be what you want, but the world has led you here. This must be what the world wants.”
Then, as if the world had heard Chris, it answered. From the gray sky there came a low groan. A murmur at first, a rumble in my chest. But the sound grew greater and filled everything around us. Chris looked into the sky and frowned. It was our city’s siren.
The rain picked up. Heavy drops splatted the big tree’s leaves, made constellations on the ground. We saw this all, but heard none of it. The siren wailed around us, screaming an unthinkable volume. Chris covered his ears. He stepped away from the gap and I had every urge to run. We would have to move fast, bolt while Chris wasn’t looking, but if we were lucky, maybe we could make it.
My brother pushed me away from Chris. He took me under the tree and stared. One more face I couldn’t recognize. What was it saying to me now? He had a plan. Yes. A squint of his eye told me that. But there was more. There was a hardness in his cheeks, a tension I couldn’t translate.
The siren sailed away, momentarily screaming its warning to someone else. Chris asked what we were doing. My brother ignored him. He pressed me into the tree the way Chris had pressed him. He took my head into his hands. He put his forehead to mine and started talking. Whispering things only I could hear. I told myself to keep my head up, my eyes in his. To not look at the scratch marks around his waist, where Chris had desperately dug. On the other side of the silo Chris rose on his toes, trying to spy on our conversation. But he couldn’t hear what we were saying. He couldn’t understand our secret words. Only the long-lost brothers could.
My brother’s plan was this: When the siren sounded again he would run past Chris and into the woods. Chris would chase him. When he did, I would run. I would find my way home, lock the door, and call our dad.
“Got it?” my brother said.
I didn’t nod or shake my head. “I don’t know the way. Where will you run?”
This close, his blue eyes were the size of planets. They didn’t blink.
“I told you. The woods.”
“No,” I said. “Where will you hide?”
He dropped one of his hands and gave me his pity face. My mind had been trying to picture his plan. I saw him bursting past Chris, jumping into the woods again, half naked, desperate, like some sort of caveman. It didn’t make sense. Chris knew the woods better than he did. And he was faster.
Then I realized my brother wasn’t going to hide. That’s what his face was saying. Hiding wasn’t part of the plan. He squeezed me on the shoulder, and more water dripped down his face. He wasn’t meant to escape.
The siren started to return.
“I can come wi
th you,” I said.
“No, you can’t.”
“Why?” I said. “Why can’t I?”
My brother took his hand off my shoulder and turned to Chris. But before the siren was completely back, he turned again and looked at me. He was wearing that smile, that classic brother smile that shot a sinking feeling into my stomach, and I knew exactly what he would say next. It was like the script was already written.
“You’d never make it,” he said. “Out there is no place for a baby.”
He turned and walked away. And I let him go.
Chris was leaning against the silo wall, next to the gap. His arms were crossed and his rain-soaked shirt clung to his skin.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’ve tried being patient. Being the good guy. But we have to go.”
Chris put his arm around my brother. He rubbed my brother’s ear with his thumb, kissed his temple.
“Now call your brother,” Chris said. “Tell him he can’t hide forever. Tell him the world won’t wait.”
thirteen
MY ESCAPE BEGAN with a blur. One moment Chris was embracing my brother, waving me out from under the tree, telling me to hurry up. The train was leaving the station. The next my brother was slipping out of his grasp. He was throwing his bag in Chris’s face and fleeing through the gap, disappearing into the woods. Chris never looked in my direction. He didn’t say, You stay put or else, like I feared he would. Because I didn’t matter. I wasn’t the real prize.
Chris left my brother’s bag and ran into the woods, forgetting all about me.
Alone, a strange calm settled over the silo. The siren left again and I could hear the crackle of branches breaking, twigs snapping in the deep woods as Chris chased my brother. When I couldn’t hear them any longer, I made myself turn and run. I told myself, Don’t think about what you want to think about—run as fast as you can.
I had no idea where I was running. I only knew that when I was following my brother here, the sun was behind me, so now I did my best to put it in front. This was mostly a guess. A family of clouds had moved in, deep gray and heavy with the weight of rain. The clouds swallowed the sun, only let it shine for a second before covering it once more. If I had stopped to think about it, the darkened sky would have worried me. But my mind only let me use the hovering storm as motivation. Hurry, my brain said, before more bad happens.
A break in the trees. A chain-link fence. The sight of the pool, a small miracle. I had run for seconds and I had run for hours. I had run for hours and I had run for days.
I was at the pea-green door. At our apartment. I was inside, the door locked behind me, my heart beating my entire body.
I grabbed the phone, took it to the sliding-glass door, and dialed my dad’s number. As the dial played in my ear, I stared outside at the tops of the trees, waiting for an answer. I tried not to think about sharp branches clawing my brother’s body, mud-covered rocks waiting like land mines. He has nothing, I thought. He’s out there with nothing.
The phone continued to ring. My dad never bothered to get a new answering machine after my mother took the old one, and I imagined the phone hanging on his kitchen wall, repeating its ring throughout the duplex with no one there to pick up. I tossed the phone at the couch. The cushions. The cushion my brother elbow-dropped with excitement when we first learned we could go to the pool.
The pool. Chris. The Gainer.
Then, another blur. My hand was unlocking our apartment door. My eyes were ignoring the smoking lady. My ears were filtering out her words, turning her question into the haunted whisper of a lonely ghost. What … do … my … boy? My legs were carrying me downstairs, outside. The siren was still going, and now I was running around the building, through the back field and to the edge of the woods. Now I stopped. I wiped the tears from my eyes and the world around me unblurred. The burning feeling returned, that lapping feeling that started in my stomach and swarmed my chest. The one that made me feel there was no hope, that made me want to run—to and away from everything.
The siren did nothing to help, and the burning grew larger, but I didn’t run into the woods to extinguish it. I was too afraid. I was scared I would sprint like a madman far into the woods before realizing I had no idea where I had run to, no clue where I was. Then there would be two boys lost in the woods. Two brothers. Tomorrow’s local paper would say we ran away together. One writer would speculate it was because we couldn’t take this place any longer. This city with no good jobs, where the streets were as cracked as the sidewalks, where everyone either ended up directly in prison, as the prisoner or the guard, or became tied to a prison in a hazy way, some way no one talked about or could put a finger on, which made it even worse.
I ran back inside. I called my dad again. I called the golf course. No one answered anywhere. There was only me again. There was the kitchen, its empty pantry. There was my mother’s room, her swimsuit slung over the chair, dry and forgotten. There was our room. Missing toys, missing trunks. But there was the old wiffle-ball bat, long and bright yellow, and unused since that first weekend after the pool. I picked it up. I looked at it like I expected it to tell me something. I told it to give me an answer. What was it doing in here? Why wasn’t it out there, with my brother? It could have helped him. It could have hit Chris. The bat laughed, said it wasn’t talking. I started beating the bed with it. I hit the railing as hard as I could. The bat twanged each time, vibrated in my hands and up my arms. I didn’t care. I wouldn’t stop. Who could stop me? No one. No one could.
Someone grabbed me from behind. They wrapped their arms around my waist. I knew who it was right away. I knew her arms by heart, but I still tried to swing the bat. Easy, she said. Baby boy, easy. It’s just a test. She let me go. What are you doing? she said. What’s wrong? I didn’t turn around. She waited a second. She said, Where is your brother?
I faced her. She was on her knees, on my level, with her big blond hair, her worn-down eyes.
“Where is he?” she said. “Is he in the laundry room?” I looked at her shoes. She put her hand to my chest. “You can tell me. You don’t have to protect him.”
I kept my head down. I thought this might make things easier, but my eyes still became blurry.
“Hey,” she said. The siren stopped. “Hey.”
The scream dissolved into one long low note, like someone dying in slow motion.
“Look at me,” my mother said. “One last time. Where is your brother?”
I turned toward our window, toward the woods. I bit my thumb and thought of the silo. “He’s gone,” I said. “He took him.”
fourteen
I STAYED IN MY ROOM, the door shut and the lights off, but I could hear everything. The warble in my mother’s voice when my dad picked up and she said his name. The ticking of our clock as she steadied herself and told him what happened. I heard the sobs that followed. I heard all these things in part because our apartment was quiet. There were no neighbors knocking around, no working A/C units sputtering on and off. But also because I had my eyes closed, which I knew for sure made me hear better.
When I opened my eyes, the room’s dark was different. I had fallen asleep. I didn’t know for how long. I had not dreamt.
There was someone sitting at the end of my bed, facing away from me. A slender, fit body. At first I thought it was my brother, returned to me once again. Maybe he had escaped after all. Maybe he knew a secret spot in the woods, more secret than the silo. Maybe he had gone there, waited until the coast was clear, and simply strolled home.
“Hi, son,” my dad said.
I sat up and leaned on his shoulder. He put his arm around me, like we were back at his place watching a bad movie. I put my head against his chest and felt the cold metal of his badge. He was in uniform.
“This will be hard,” he said. “But I need you to help me. I need you to tell me everything about the man who took your brother.” His gun, holstered on his side, dug into my hip. Why aren’t you out there right now? I thought. You
should be out there, looking for him. We both should be.
“I’ve got officers in the woods,” he said, as if he knew exactly what I was thinking. “But you know how big those woods are. And soon it’ll be dark.”
He was right. I could see that through the window. The clouds had moved on, and the sun was still high in the sky, but so was the moon. Pink was peeking through the blue.
“Come on,” he said, “let’s go sit at the table. You can tell us all about it.”
He took my hand and walked me to the kitchen, where my mother was sitting at the square table, her head in her hands.
“Aggie,” my dad said.
My mother raised her head, showed me her red face. She pulled out a chair. “I made you some cereal,” she said, sniffling.
I sat down and spooned the cereal. All the best bits were soggy; they had drowned waiting for me. My dad sat on the other side and opened his notepad.
“Tell us everything,” he said. “Everything you ever saw. Everything that was ever said.”
I could hear the desperation in his voice, the same panic that was on my mother’s face, and that laced the air around us.
“Son,” my dad said, “please. You have to help me.”
* * *
I started at the beginning. I put in every detail I could think of. The tattoo. The trunks. The Gainer. I said his name was Chris, but then it wasn’t. I took my time and chose my words carefully. I imagined I was my brother and tried to tell the story as if I were him. When I was done, my mother looked at me like I had fired acorns at every squirrel in our complex, until they all fell dead at the feet of their trees. My dad shook his head and said mercy. Mercy, he said. Over and over. He thanked me and told me to go to my room so he and my mother could talk. I nodded and left the kitchen, but didn’t go into my room. I shut the door to fool them, and snuck back and spied from the hallway. I needed to hear them list what all I had done wrong. How I should have told them about Chris when my dad asked. How I should have stayed out of the woods. How I never should have left my brother alone.