Since that night the whole inside of him felt black and crusty like the inside of a lightning tree. Mostly, Dylan stayed in the burnt-out hole and didn’t think or feel. He didn’t know what to be or how to be anymore. No one else seemed to know what he was either. Or what to do with him. Doctors, lawyers, cops asked questions. A newspaper guy got in, and flashed, and questioned until the cops chased him out.
Dylan hadn’t been able to answer the questions, so he’d coiled up in the black and hid. Until he saw his brother. The pain of loving Rich felt almost good; it made him feel like a person. He didn’t look away as the wheelchair rolled down the aisle toward him but steeled himself to take the hit. Maybe it would kill him, but he doubted it. Nothing he wanted to happen had happened for a while now.
Then Rich was opposite him on the other side of the wooden railing. He held up his hand, and the nurse stopped the chair. Dylan felt like crying, his brother was so cool. He’d made the nurse do what he wanted without saying a word, like a cop stopping traffic. Bracing against the armrests, Rich struggled to get up. The nurse, all done up for the trial in her crisp uniform and hat, put her hands on his shoulders to make him stay down, but he shrugged them off.
Dylan stood too. If Rich wanted to hit him, he could. For a weird jag of time, Dylan experienced his brother’s fists hammering him, his feet smashing into his ribs and belly, and he welcomed it. He craved being beaten to death like he craved air when he’d been under the water too long.
Getting up must have hurt Rich. His face lost color, and he swayed like he was going to pass out. Holding onto the railing to keep himself up, he made it the two steps to where Dylan stood waiting.
The muttering in the courthouse dried up. Nobody was even breathing. Time stopped, and the people were hanging on the second hand, wondering if the clock was going to work ever again. Dylan wasn’t breathing either. He was waiting to die. Not the good kind where everything is over, but to be killed inside.
Rich balanced himself against the rail so he could stand on his bad leg, reached out both arms, and said, “Brother.”
The sere, cinder-lined core of Dylan filled with warm liquid. He was melting from the inside out. Time flowed backward. He hurtled from eleven, to eight, to six. A little boy threw his arms around his big brother’s neck and bawled like a baby. Rich didn’t have to be so good to him.
Rich was crying too.
People in the courthouse didn’t know what kind of noise to make. Their murmuring fattened up with awe and pity, then morphed into white-hot fury. Dylan smeared the tears and snot from his face into the crook of his arm as the sound grew into the feral growl of a mob working up to a lynching. Except he was eleven. So they couldn’t even enjoy being mad at him. He was a little kid. They had to pretend to be sad at the same time.
Rich fell back into his wheelchair. Mrs. Eisenhart, Dylan’s court-appointed attorney, pulled him from the rail. The judge was pounding his gavel for quiet.
They were all mad for Rich, because he wouldn’t be mad for himself. They hated Dylan. They needn’t have bothered; he hated himself more than they ever could.
He sat down. Mrs. Eisenhart had brought him the suit and tie his mom got for Lena ’s baptism. He’d been nine then, and the suit was too small. He squirmed trying to get the crotch to stop crawling up his butt.
Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him under the table. Rich was being sworn in; Dylan forgot about wedgies.
The other lawyer, the one against Dylan, began asking questions. Rich didn’t want to answer, but he’d sworn on the Bible and had to. He hadn’t seen Dylan do anything. He insisted on that. He’d been next door necking with Vondra Werner. When Rich said that, he looked at Dylan and kind of shrugged.
Dylan turned around with a great big, sheepish grin plastered on his face, looking to see what his mom and dad thought of that. Men in the courthouse were smiling; when they saw his face the smiles whispered out, leaving only the scratching sound of dead leaves in the air. His big old grin brought the undergrowl back into the ambient noise.
The parched silence, the sudden remembering that his parents weren’t there, froze Dylan’s smile in a creepy kind of way. Like a supervillain had zapped him with an ice ray. Flash bulbs popped. “Butcher Boy,” one of the newspaper reporters whispered, and a bunch of them scribbled in their notepads.
Mrs. Eisenhart closed a sharp-nailed hand on his shoulder and turned him back toward the judge.
Rich told the jury, the judge, and the lawyers that he’d come home and found Dylan drenched in blood. He’d tried to get the axe away from him, and Dylan had nearly hacked his leg off. Thinking Dylan was possessed, or might hurt himself, or was sick, Rich, even though he was bleeding to death, got the axe away from him and bonked him on the head. Then Rich had passed out and didn’t remember anything until he woke up at the Mayo. That was it-the whole story.
The prosecutor made Rich tell it different ways. He tried to make him add to it, say he saw things he didn’t, but Rich wouldn’t do it. Everybody was listening so hard Dylan could feel his brother’s words being sucked past his ears into the gallery.
No one listened harder than he did. Mrs. Eisenhart had told him the story when she’d rehearsed him for the trial-it wasn’t at all like on television; the lawyers were supposed to tell each other what they were going to say and do and not surprise the other guy; but it was totally different hearing it from his brother. When Rich said it, Dylan finally believed. Until then he thought he didn’t remember it because it didn’t happen.
It happened. This hit him like the axe had-a slam into his head that scrambled his brain. Mrs. Eisenhart kicked him again. She didn’t like him any more than anybody else did.
It had happened. He’d gotten hold of his dad’s axe, and it had happened.
He stared down at the table he and his lawyer were sitting behind. It started to spin and tip like the deck of a boat in a windstorm. Dylan grabbed one edge to keep from smashing his face against the tossing wood surface. With his other hand he took hold of the seat of his chair lest he be pitched onto the floor.
“I tried to kill my brother with Daddy’s axe,” he whispered. This time Mrs. Eisenhart’s kick hurt. He guessed he hadn’t spoken loud enough for anyone else to hear because nobody was looking at him. The words hadn’t been a confession; he’d said them to see if it would make him remember. Because he didn’t. He didn’t remember a thing. Not one thing after his mother had put him to bed.
He’d told them that over and over, but even his own lawyer didn’t believe him. When she got to talk, she argued that people suffering head injuries from accidents often couldn’t remember events that happened immediately before the trauma, that the blow had given Dylan a severe concussion, that he’d been in intensive care, and that, since the incident, he suffered severe headaches.
Nobody felt sorry for him; Dylan didn’t even feel sorry for himself. He’d tried to kill his brother.
Rich was on the stand for over an hour. Talking so long cost him. Lines of pain aged his face. During the whole thing, even when the prosecutor pushed, Rich refused to say anything bad about Dylan. Looking straight at the jury the way Mrs. Eisenhart told Dylan he should if she decided to put him on the stand, Rich told them that Dylan never hurt anybody, didn’t hit or pinch or call other kids names, minded his mother and father, was kind and protective of Lena, their thirty-month-old sister, and brought home injured animals to take care of. The more good he told them, the less the jury believed it. It didn’t even sound like Rich believed it himself.