D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

“No, no, no, no, no…”

On and on. I didn’t care though. The world was too vague a thing to care about. I must have rolled onto my back at some point, because I remember the blue sky dotted with black clouds. Not clouds. Just black dots that danced around the edges of my vision, bubbling, growing, and eventually consuming the blue altogether.

The cold of the frozen bag of peas was what finally woke me up. I don’t know how long they had been resting on my cheek, but from the numbness, I would have guessed several minutes. I was on the couch in the living room, and when I sat up, a pain raced through the front of my head. I stumbled into the bathroom, both eager and fearful to see what I looked like. My face in the mirror wasn’t nearly as bad as it felt. It was swollen, sure, but not so bad that I couldn’t make up a good lie. A neat, bloody outline of knuckles lined my cheek, and on my forehead, I had a bit of gravel still half stuck, half buried in my skin. The sight of myself made everything instantly hurt more than it had just seconds before, and I spent a few minutes washing the dirt and blood away. Once everything was clean, I realized I had a handful of scrapes across my brow. Still, not too bad considering. But certainly enough to have to explain when the time came.

Before I left for good, I checked behind the shower curtain once more. The smell of smoke was still hanging in the air, but the bits of ash and skin had been washed away, and a sharp smell of disinfectant permeated the space. How long had I been out?

I met Andy in the kitchen just as he walked in through the back door, soapy bucket and a rag in one hand. He took a deep breath before walking over to me. I could see in his eyes that he was back to himself once more, but I cringed all the same when he moved closer.

“No,” he said, stopping short and touching my shoulder, awkward and unsure, like we were on a first date. “You don’t… I don’t… I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

I let him babble like that for a minute, mainly because I was pretty certain that talking would make my jaw hurt like hell. I knew what had happened to him, knew what had been done to him, but was still unsure how deep my brother’s change really went.

“Stop,” I said finally through my half-open lips. “Just stop.”

“B-but…”

“No,” I replied. “I know. You didn’t do that. You wouldn’t. I know that.”

“Yes,” he said in a relieved tone. Years later, when I learned more about the world, I would think of that moment often – the way he apologized, the sharp guilt in his eyes, the way it burned him to realize he had done something so awful. I’ve known drunks, alcoholics, junkies, cheaters, just about everything you can imagine, and I’ve seen that look on all of their faces. Their regret is so real, so powerful that it nearly consumes them whenever they go too far. And yet they seem completely unable to stop.

“The body?” I said, my jaw too sore to ask the entire question.

“In the basement,” he said, his tone like that of a dog, so eager to please, to fix what he had broken. “I washed the blood off the door. And I cleaned the bathroom. And the peas,” he said, looking around for them.

“In the living room,” I answered.

“Yeah, yeah. I got those for you too. I thought it would help… you know. With the swelling.”

He was right. The peas had helped. And he had done a good job of fixing everything else. Now if only he could stop breaking things.

“Anyone see you?”

“No,” he said, his tone suddenly less confident. “I mean, no one that I know of.”

I checked the clock on the front of the microwave. It had been nearly an hour since we stepped out the back door together. If anyone had seen a teenage boy beat the shit out of his sister, we’d know by now. So I sighed, breathing somewhat easy despite the pain I was in. Our plan, despite the roadblocks, had worked up to this point. Now all we had to do was get him to the quarry tonight. I imagined the dozens of ways that could go wrong.

“What happened out there?” I asked.

“I dunno. I just lost it when I couldn’t get the door open. And then one thing led to another, and—”

“No,” I said. “Not that. I saw that. How did I get back in here?”

I knew the answer, or at least part of it, but I wanted to hear it from him. I wanted to know what was happening inside his head.

“I came back,” he said as he stared at the ground.

“Back?”

“Yeah. That’s the only way I can describe it. It was like I knew what I was doing, but I wasn’t really the one doing it. I knew it was wrong, is what I mean. But…” he glanced back up, “I didn’t want to stop. That door. It was like it was alive. I felt like it was laughing at me.”

“That’s ridiculous.”

“I know that!” he said in a sudden rush of anger. “I’m not stupid. That’s just what it felt like.”

“So what made you stop?”

Again he stared at the tops of his feet, an embarrassed look in his eyes.

“You,” he said finally. “I saw you. What I had done. And it brought me back.”

My head felt suddenly heavy as a dull throb grew behind my eyes. “You got this?” I asked.

“Yeah. We’re good.”

“Good. I’m going to lie down. Wake me up by four,” I said. “We need to think what we’ll tell Dad about… all this.” I motioned to my cheek.

“Okay. I’m sorry. I hope you know that.”

My head was hurting too bad for me to really know anything. “Sure. Four. Got it?”

He nodded and I slipped away. Despite everything that had happened in my room, I still felt safe once I was under my sheets. It wasn’t the room, or even the bed. It was because I was alone. Andy was out there, and a thin, hollow door separated the two of us. That alone was enough to put me at ease, and I slipped quietly into sleep, leaving the pain safely behind.

They let Andy out about five years back. He told them how sorry he was for everything he’d done, about how it was all a mistake, even the stuff with me, which couldn’t have been an accident. They knew all about his troubles at school, the outbreaks of violence before and after his arrest. There was quite a list. Still, he’d been a boy when it happened, and he was in jail for a long, long time. I don’t know that anyone in charge actually believed he was what you would call rehabilitated, but it didn’t matter. He’d served his time, so he walked out.

They started him out in a halfway house, a little shithole with four tiny rooms, each home to a pair of work-release guys. There were drug addicts, DUIs, wife beaters, the whole deal, but only Andy had nearly killed anyone. That made him sort of a twisted little celebrity, at least that’s how he told it. I was there when they let him out, and I drove him to the house. He asked, in a roundabout way, if he could live with me.

“I mean, I have to spend six months here,” he said. “I’m dreading it, but I’ve done worse. Lord knows that. When my six is up, I’m not sure where I’ll go…”

Just fishing really. Too afraid or proud to ask, and me not sure if I trusted him, even after everything. I dodged the question, and on the way over, I stopped at the cemetery.

“Where you going?”

“To see Dad.”

“No,” he said with a blank face.

“I thought you’d just—”

“No. Just no.”

We drove on, and he got out of the car at the halfway house without another word. He called me a few times, letting me know how things were going. It didn’t sound too bad, considering all he’d been through. They set him up with a job working a fryer at some chicken joint within walking distance. He said it was nasty work, that the fryers had burned all the hair off his forearms.