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.
“I have to go,” my dad said. “I’ve got Tony and Alan in the woods, but that’s all I got.”
My mother said my dad’s name. “You have to find him,” she said. “He can’t be out there like that. With that man.”
I peeked around the hall wall, just enough to see my dad put his hand to my mother’s hair. “I will bring him back,” he said.
My mother nodded. She said she wanted to go with my dad. She said all the things victims said in those bad movies we’d seen, the words that before never meant a thing.
My dad went to the door but stopped in the dark hall. “Aggie,” he said. “I’m sorry.”