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 with 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.