D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

I waved a hand at the wall of junk, the old boxes, the mismatched furniture, the bags of clothes too small for us to wear.

“I dunno. Here somewhere.”

“Think,” he demanded as he began poking around himself. “How long ago was it?”

“A year or two. I don’t really know. Why does it matter?”

“The box. You said the box was almost empty. That it had your name on it.”

He waited for me to get it, and when I clearly didn’t, he sighed.

“Why put just a couple of toys into a box and put it out in the garage?”

“Who knows?” I shrugged. “You know how Dad is—”

“No,” he said, cutting me off. “Dad’s not like that, even if you think he is. That’s something an idiot would do. Dad’s not like you. I’m not like you. But neither of us is stupid.”

I readjusted my tone and said, “I didn’t say he was stupid, or that you were stupid. He’s just a little flighty.”

“The reason,” he said, ignoring my logic, “that the box was almost empty is because, at one point in time, it was almost full.”

I tried to do the mental gymnastics to catch up with him, but it was still too early. “I guess,” was all I could eke out.

“This thing… it’s been coming here for who knows how long. Taking what it wants. Leaving little pieces for later. Saving them for… who knows?”

“There wasn’t just one thing in there,” I replied, finally getting it. “There were a few.”

“But it was mostly empty, right?”

I nodded, and we dove in. It only took a couple of minutes to dig the box out, and as soon as he lifted my box from the pile, I already knew. It was too light, as if the box were filled with nothing more than air. Then he tore the top off, and we saw it, filled with nothing more than dust and dead spiders.

“You never came out here?” I asked.

“No. You?”

I just shook my head.

“What about mine?” he asked.

It was a good question, one that we spent the next two hours trying to answer. It wasn’t until we dropped down the ladder to the attic that we finally found what we were looking for. Cardboard box after cardboard box, dozens of them in a neat stack near the back of the stifling attic. They looked, from a distance, as if they had never been touched. The words scrawled on them, in fat, black marker, told a story that made a part of my heart wither.

ANDY/BABY

ANDY/TODDLER

ANDY/2 YR

On and on it went. I had a box. I had a bear.

He had a toy store.

I’d always had a sense of the difference between his early life and mine. The pictures had shown me that. They told one story. This stack of boxes told another one entirely. I felt a few pangs of anger as I gazed at them, fury directed at my father for more or less abandoning me. But that fire burned out in seconds, only to be replaced by a deeper feeling that I had never known before.

When I glanced over at Andy, I saw the look on his face, and I knew he was reliving it. He reached for the first box he came across, ANDY/SUPERHEROES, and he ripped it open. All the usual suspects were in there, but he dug through them, dozens of tiny plastic figures in search of something special. The one that stood out. The one that meant something.

It was the only one not there.

He slammed the box down and shook his head. “I had a Superman,” he said in a pained voice I had never heard from him before. “I took it everywhere. It was… shit. I loved that thing.”

He grabbed another box, and once again he came up short. Again and again he searched, digging through the pile, finding nothing more than junk he could not care less about. As I watched him, silently taking in the pain and desperation on his face, that alien feeling grew deeper. I thought once more of Mom, of how I acted whenever her name was brought up. Every time, I struck back, throwing the issue back at anyone who dared question me.

I was the one who was hurt.

I was the one who never got to know her.

I was the one who really lost.

But now, as his desperation grew into a frenzy, I couldn’t feel anything other than pure, empty guilt. I had killed his mother, and for that, I should feel guilty. The truth at the bottom of it all was that Andy had been hurt a thousand times more than I ever could be.

“Stop,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.

“No,” he whined. “The ones I cared about. The toys she gave me. They’re all gone.”

The still-bitter part of me wanted to ask him why, if he loved them so much, he had let them rot up here, but I think I already knew the answer to that. Dad, as lost and confused without my mother as Andy was, did what he had to do to survive. That meant that life as they knew it, these two, drifting bachelors, had to begin again. Every nook and cranny of the house before I was born had been packed with reminders, and now those reminders were here, stuffed into boxes and labeled in black ink.

I wanted to tell him it would all be okay, but that felt wrong somehow. There was no easy answer here, and giving him a simple solution would probably just make him mad at me. Instead, I took a different tactic.

“We don’t know what this thing is or why it’s doing this. So,” I said, kneeling down eye to eye with him, “the question is, what are we going to do about it?”

“Okay.”

Most of the day was already, inexplicably gone. The two of us had gone round and round about what we knew, what we thought we knew, and what we were still completely clueless about. We were holed up in his room, long enough for me to get accustomed to the stuffy, slightly stinky smell of older brother. I sat on the edge of the bed while he lay flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling. He was shredding an empty bag of chips, ripping the metallic paper into ever-smaller pieces as I sketched away on my notepad.

“Okay. Okay.”

His eyes were darting side to side, his mind clearly racing. The desperation of hours before, when he realized some of his earliest possessions were missing, had faded into something more like dazed panic. The weight of this strange, inexplicable situation was only now hitting him fully, and he didn’t really know what to do. It was easy for me to recognize that feeling because I had been there myself just a week before. In the years since, I also think that being a few years younger helped immensely in this situation. I might have been stepping into something resembling adulthood, but I still had one foot firmly planted in the world of children. Part of me – probably a larger part than I would have admitted – believed completely that monsters were real. The fact that they might steal toys was just a detail at that point.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked when I couldn’t stand to hear the paper rip one more time.

“Okay,” he said, staring up at the ceiling, apparently not hearing a word I said. I leaned over and snatched the bag from his hand and tossed it on the floor.

“Snap out of it,” I demanded.

“What do you want from me?” he said, leaning up on one elbow. “I mean… what the hell are we supposed to do?”

He was scratching at his lower back without even thinking about it, and when he realized what he was doing, he recoiled in disgust.

“What can we do?”

There weren’t many options. We both knew it.

“One thing or the other,” I replied.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“Offense or defense.”

Andy hated football, but it was something that Dad and I watched whenever the mood struck us on lazy Sunday afternoons. Even so, my brother still got the point.

“Defense didn’t work so good last time,” he replied.

I sneered at him, but I couldn’t argue that he was wrong. My planning, such as it was, had been undone by nothing more out of the ordinary than a nap.