She had just walked into her parents’ house when Marco called. “Can you come back? There’s something I need to show you.”
She headed out to Denny’s house. She paused on the step, realizing she was in nicer clothes this time. Hopefully she wouldn’t be there long.
“Hey,” she said when Marco answered the door. Even though she braced for the odor, it hit her hard.
He waved her in, talking as he navigated the narrow path he’d cleared up the stairs. “I thought I’d work on Denny’s bedroom today, and, well…”
He held out an arm in the universal gesture of “go ahead,” so she entered. The room had precarious ceiling-high stacks on every surface, including the floor and bed, piles everywhere except a path to an open walk-in closet. She stepped forward.
“What is that?”
“The word I came up with was ‘shrine,’ but I don’t think that’s right.”
It was the sparest space in the house. She’d expected a dowel crammed end to end with clothes, straining under the weight, but the closet was empty except for—“shrine” was indeed the wrong word. This wasn’t worship.
The most eye-catching piece, the thing she saw first, was a hand-painted Uncle Bob doll propped in the back corner. It looked like it had been someone else first—Vincent Price, maybe. Next to it stood a bobblehead and an action figure, both mutated from other characters, and one made of clay and plant matter, seemingly from scratch. Beside those, a black leather notebook, a pile of VHS tapes, and a single DVD. Tacked to the wall behind them, portraits of Uncle Bob in paint, in colored pencil, macaroni, photo collage, in, oh god, was that cat hair? And beside those, stills from the show printed on copier paper: Uncle Bob telling a story; Uncle Bob staring straight into the camera, an assortment of children. Her own still was toward the bottom right. Marco wasn’t in any of them.
“That’s the thing that guts me.”
Stella turned, expecting to see Marco pointing to the art or the dolls, but she’d been too busy looking at those to notice the filthy pillow and blanket in the opposite corner. “He slept here?”
“It’s the only place he could have.” Marco’s voice was strangled, like he was trying not to cry.
She didn’t know what to say to make him feel better about his brother having lived liked this. She picked up the notebook and paged through it. Each page had a name block-printed on top, then a dense scrawl in black, then, in a different pen, something else. Not impossible to read, but difficult, writing crammed into every available inch, no space between words even. She remembered this notebook; it was the one teenage Denny always had on him.
“Take it,” Marco said. “Take whatever you want. I can’t do this anymore. I’m going home.”
She took the notebook and the DVD, and squeezed Marco’s arm, unsure whether he would want or accept a hug.
Her parents were out when she got back to their house, so she slipped the DVD into their machine. It didn’t work. She took it upstairs and tried it in her mother’s old desktop computer instead. The computer made a sound like a jet plane taking off, and opened a menu with one episode listed: March 13, 1980.
It started the same way all the other episodes had started. The kids, Uncle Bob. Denny was in this one; Stella had an easier time spotting him now that she knew who to look for. He went for the train set again, laying out wooden tracks alongside a kid Stella didn’t recognize.
Uncle Bob started a story. “Once upon a time, there was a boy who grew very big very quickly. He felt like a giant when he stood next to his classmates. People stopped him in hallways and told him he was going to the wrong grade’s room. His mother complained that she had to buy him new clothes constantly, and even though she did it with affection, he was too young to realize she didn’t blame him. He felt terrible about it. Tried to hide that his shoes squeezed his toes or his pants were too short again.
“His parents’ friends said, ‘Somebody’s going to be quite an athlete,’ but he didn’t feel like an athlete. More than that, he felt like he had grown so fast his head had been pushed out of his body, so he was constantly watching it from someplace just above. Messages he sent to his arms and legs took ages to get there. Everything felt small and breakable in his hands, so that when his best friend’s dog had puppies he refused to hold them, though he loved when they climbed all over him.
“The boy had a little brother. His brother was everything he wasn’t. Small, lithe, fearless. His mother told him to protect his brother, and he took that responsibility seriously. That was something that didn’t take finesse. He could do that.
“Both boys got older, but their roles didn’t change. The older brother watched his younger brother. When the smaller boy was bullied, his brother pummeled the bullies. When the younger brother made the high school varsity basketball team as a point guard his freshman year, his older brother made the team as center, even though he hated sports.
“Time passed. The older brother realized something strange. Every time he thought he had something of his own, it turned out it was his brother’s. He blinked one day and lost two entire years. How was he the older brother, the one who got new clothes, who reached new grades first, and yet still always following? Even his own story had spun out to describe him in relation to his sibling.
“And then, one day, the boy realized he had nothing at all. He was his brother’s giant shadow. He was a forward echo, a void. Nothing was his. All he could do was watch the world try to catch up with him, but he was always looking backward at it. All he could do—”
“No,” said Denny.
Stella had forgotten the kids were there, even though they were on camera the entire time. Denny had stood and walked over to where Uncle Bob was telling the story. With Uncle Bob sitting, Denny was tall enough to look him in the eye.
For the first time, Uncle Bob turned away from the camera. He assessed Denny with an unsettling smile.
“No,” Denny said again.
Now Uncle Bob glanced around as if he was no longer amused, as if someone needed to pull this child off his set. It wasn’t a tantrum, though. Denny wasn’t misbehaving, unless interrupting a story violated the rules.
Uncle Bob turned back to him. “How would you tell it?”
Denny looked less sure now.
“I didn’t think so,” said the host. “But maybe that’s enough of that story. Unless you want to tell me how you think it ends?” Denny shook his head.
“But you know?”
Denny didn’t move.
“Maybe that’s enough. We’ll see. In any case, I have other stories to tell. We haven’t checked in on my hill today.”
Uncle Bob began to catch his audience up on the continuing adventure of the boy who’d been dug out of the hillside. The other children kept playing, and Denny? Denny looked straight into the camera, then walked off the set. He never came back. Stella didn’t have any proof, but she was pretty sure this must have been the last episode Denny took part in. He looked like a kid who was done. His expression was remarkably similar to the one she’d just seen on Marco’s face.
And what was that story? Unlike Dan Heller’s driving story, unlike the one she’d started thinking of as her own, this one wasn’t close to true. Sure, Denny had been a big kid, but neither he nor Marco played basketball. He never protected Marco from bullies. “Nothing was his” hardly fit the man whose house she’d cleaned.
Except that night, falling asleep, Stella couldn’t help but think that when she compared what she knew of Denny with that story, it seemed like Denny had set out to prove the story untrue. What would a person do if told as a child that nothing was his? Collect all the things. Leave his little brother to fend for himself. Fight it on every level possible.