Andrew Gross - Eyes Wide Open

We both fell against the wall-his arms wrapped around my throat, me just trying to fend him off. “I told you to stop all this, Jay. I told you to go home!”

A canvas painted by his mother came crashing down.

“I didn’t kill my son.” He glared savagely into my eyes. His hands squeezed around my throat. “ I didn’t! ”

He reared his fist back at me, an animal intensity blazing in his eyes. I knew what was fueling it-that mixture of anger, grief, and guilt.

“I know you didn’t, Charlie.” I looked back at him. “ I know! ”

“Evan didn’t have anything to do with that. You hear? I want you to get out of here, Jay. I want you to go back home.”

“I saw him, Charlie!” A warm ooze trickled down my chin, blood from somewhere. “I know he’s behind what happened to Evan. He and Susan Pollack. I saw a letter she wrote to him in jail. It was her way of telling him it had begun. What’s begun, Charlie? Five people have died.” My eyes locked onto his. “ Evan died…”

My brother’s eyes filled up with tears and he cocked his fist again. I was certain he was about to let it go and hit me.

And I would have let him-if that’s what it took to bring to the surface what it was he needed to say.

Gabriella ran over-“ Charlie, Charlie…”-and grabbed his drawn-back arm. He fought against her for a second. “ It’s Jay, Charlie,” she screamed, “it’s your brother! He’s only trying to help us, Charlie. What are you doing?”

I recalled the image of Evan squeezing the life out of my son. I also saw our father’s own unforgivable temper massed too.

Charlie glared, his eyes filled with ire. Whoever it was aimed at, I knew it wasn’t me.

Gabby’s frantic protestations finally seemed to get to him, and he blinked himself back to consciousness and put down his arm. He took a series of shuddering breaths and bowed his head, and rolled off me onto his back.

We both lay next to each other for a few seconds, breathing heavily.

“I’m sorry,” he said. His eyes were glistening and his cheeks moist. “I’m so sorry, Jay…”

“It’s okay. It’s okay.” I lay next to him and reached over and put my hand on his chest.

“Look! ” Gabriella shouted, staring around the room. “Look at what you’ve done!”

She pointed to his guitar. It was completely broken. The neck separated from the body, the wood splintered.

He’d had it as long as I could remember. He rolled over and picked it up, the broken neck coming apart in his hands.

All that he had ever done in his life seemed to fade there.

Gabby cried too. “Look at what you’ve done!”

“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t really matter, Gabby.” Charlie turned to me, like an empty weight. “You have to go back home, Jay.” He dropped the broken shaft and it lay on the floor. “There’s nothing to do here anymore. Please. Just let us be.”

I sat up and we stared at each other on the floor. I shook my head. “I can’t, Charlie. It’s too late. Not now.”

G abby and I cleaned up the mess. Afterward she brought me a damp rag, and I dabbed my mouth. There was blood all over it. Charlie was back at the kitchen table, his hair wild and covering his face. He had picked up one of his other instruments, an old blue Fender Stratocaster that hadn’t worked in years, strumming at the silent strings. Just when you say your last good-bye Just when you calm my fears…

“He loves you, Jay,” Gabby said to me. She took the rag and wiped my face, blotting the blood. “But for your brother the past is a locked place. Even I cannot be let in. What’s happened has happened, Jay. Nothing is going to bring Evan back. I have to salvage something here. Maybe he’s right. You tried to help. You always help us, Jay. Now go back to your wife and kids. They need you there. That’s where you belong.”

“What’s happened has happened,” I said in agreement, “but even if I go, Gabby, it’s not going away.”

Charlie continued on the guitar: Just when the dawn is breaking, There’s always one last thing…

“Then let happen whatever will.” Gabby’s blue eyes fixed on me. “That’s what he wants. You can see that now. Now that Evan is gone, what is there for us, anyway?”

I took her hand and squeezed it warmly. But I shook my head. “It’s not just about him anymore, Gabby.”

I listened to my brother’s distant voice. The lyrics to his one recorded song. Oooh, girl, it’s always one last thing…

“I’ve got to go.” I picked up my jacket and gave Gabby a hug, heading toward the door.

I turned a final time to look at Charlie, playing. He didn’t even look up at me. The wind and the rain knocking at my door, Don’t you know, girl, the dawn will be here soon…

I stopped, the words to my brother’s song knocking me back.

The wind and the rain… That refrain. I suddenly realized I’d never heard the whole thing through before, only pieces: The storm’s outside, but in here how do we tell, The morning sun from the dying moon?

The hairs stood up on my arms.

Those were Houvnanian’s words: The wind and the rain… The moon is the sun and the sun the moon.

I’d assumed it was just all gibberish.

But it wasn’t gibberish.

Houvnanian knew.

I brought back his face, that last mocking grin as they led him away. And suddenly it dawned on me that he hadn’t even been talking to me at all in there.

But to Charlie through me.

He’d been pulling the strings all along.

The room suddenly turned cold, and I looked back at my brother as he silently strummed the guitar.

Houvnanian’s ramblings about where God was, it was all from the lyrics to Charlie’s song.

N ow I knew. I knew for sure.

And it left me feeling like I had to vomit. Dread creeping up inside me.

Charlie was a target.

Houvnanian had simply been toying with Sherwood and me all along. Greenway. Zorn. Evan. Whatever my brother had done, whatever role he played in what took place more than thirty years ago, they were massing around him. Torturing him slowly.

Piece by piece, slowly cutting him up.

The wind and the rain were at his door.

Charlie was next.

As soon as I got back to my hotel room, I called Sherwood. “My brother’s in trouble,” I said, my heart pounding off my sides from what I’d just learned.

“Take it easy, doc,” the detective said, trying to calm me. The agitation in my voice was clear. “ How? ”

“Houvnanian. All that gibberish about ‘the wind and the rain’? That he didn’t even remember Charlie? Oh, he remembered him, Sherwood! Those were all lyrics. They were straight out of my brother’s song.”

“What lyrics?”

“From a song he recorded back then. I heard him playing it tonight. What we heard in that prison, it was all basically just a threat! He was warning him. Through me!”

“A threat of what?” The detective snorted skeptically.

“Please, Sherwood,” I begged him, “don’t play the skeptical cop shit with me. Not now. You know! I know you know. Maybe I can’t prove it. Maybe it all sounds crazy when you try and put it together. But Houvnanian made a vow at his sentencing to get back at the people who had harmed him. Who put him and his followers away. And now he’s doing it. One by one. He’s been doing it! Greenway. Cooley. Zorn. Evan. And now they’ve got my brother in their sights.”

“You’ve still never told me how your brother is involved. Why him? ”

“I don’t know why him! ” My brain throbbed. “He won’t come clean with me. I think he’s too scared to admit he had a hand in his son’s death. But that’s what Evan’s death was about. And their cat. And that cigarette butt left on my doorstep. They’re warnings. Warnings that were meant for him! Don’t you see, Sherwood? Charlie’s next!”