D Gillespie - The Toy Thief

They missed plenty though. They missed the fact that he cut me free after cutting off my fingers. They missed that he helped to bind my hand, and probably saved my life in the process. And most important and unsurprising, they missed why he took the truck in the first place. He didn’t know how to drive, at least not very well. But it was a long walk to the Trails and the quarry beyond. Andy, for all his efforts, succeeded at three things.

He saved my life.

He got rid of the evidence.

And he got himself sentenced to fifteen years in prison.

The almost ritualistic brutality of the crime ensured that he was tried as an adult. The prosecutor made a big, splashy show of the whole thing, questioning what it could have been that drove this child to commit such an evil act. Dad made me go to the sentencing, even after he let me stay away from the entire trial. I objected, but he swore it would be for my own good.

“You need to see him,” he told me as I scratched at my nonexistent fingers. He was right of course. I did need to see Andy. I needed to thank him. I needed to tell him I was sorry for the way everything went. I needed to give him a hug and a kiss on the cheek, to tell him I loved him. But I didn’t get to do any of that, not on that day at least. I sat there, quietly watching, pretending to ignore the eyes that gazed back at me with dark curiosity, wondering if anyone knew the truth of what happened.

I didn’t even get to speak to him that day, or any other day. Not for a long time. I was sixteen when I finally did go see him for the first time, and by then, whatever warm brother-and-sister love we’d shared had cooled, hardened into odd awkwardness. I wasn’t the same tomboyish little sister he had saved, and he wasn’t the gangly, handsome boy who had saved me. He was taller by then, over six feet if he stood up straight, which he never did. His complexion had gone sallow and dull, and his eyes seemed to sink into his cheeks, receding from the light. He was only twenty, but I swear, his hair was beginning to thin.

No, I didn’t tell him how much I loved him then, because you don’t say things like that to strangers, talking to each other through a sheet of wired glass. We talked small talk, and he told me it was good to see me. That shifty, bird-eyed look would come over him here and there, but it wasn’t a steady thing, not like it had been before.

“You look good,” he said without ever looking me in the eye.

I slid my shirtsleeve down over my hand. “Thanks. You do too,” I lied.

Maybe we thought we were being recorded, or maybe we just didn’t want to say anything out loud to each other, not yet anyway. Either way, we never spoke a word about what happened, and that’s just how it went. We warmed up a bit over the years, and after a decade or so, we even learned to laugh here and there. It was a long, tough road that none of us ever wanted to be on, but we walked it as best we could.

Who knows how long things would have gone on like that if he hadn’t gotten paroled? I’ve already told you about Kirstie and Andrew, the next generation in a long, unbroken line of fuckups. I had hoped that his son would be the thing that set Andy right. Made him whole. Fixed what that awful thing had broken. At first, when the pair moved in with me, I thought it might just do the trick.

They say having a kid does strange things to a person – that for some people, it brings out the worst in them. They see that little version of themselves, still perfect, still scar-free, and they lose their minds a bit. All of their own wasted potential becomes an open book in front of them, and instead of facing it, instead of sitting down and reading it line by line, they slam it shut and walk away. There’s still time left for me , they tell themselves as they leave and never look back.

Andy seemed, at least at first, to be cut from different cloth. Some folks see their children, and they realize that there is only one true path to immortality. That crying, shitting ball of skin they cradle in their arms is a link in a chain that connects them back through the ages, and in that chubby body, they see the lives of their most ancient relatives. All the lives they lived, all those paths converging, all those random chances, realized in your own child. In that moment, their life’s work becomes clear. Protect them. Guide them. Teach them to not make the same mistakes that you did.

That was Andy in the early days. Me, him, and Andrew, making a strange house in the same town we grew up in. We might have made it, and I thought, or maybe just hoped, that we would. But it didn’t take long to realize it was just a dream, something whispered in my ear when I was half-asleep.

It wasn’t Andrew. He was a baby then, little more than a mouth to stick a bottle in, or a body to cuddle up with under the covers. And it wasn’t me. I was half-curdled, sure, but I always had been, and that boy, that little thing I never asked for – well, he made me feel something I hadn’t known for a long time. Dad had needed me. Andy, in his way, had needed me. But for years, no one else in the world did. That little Andrew though, he needed me like he needed oxygen. He needed me to feed him, to warm up that bottle to stick in his mouth, to rock him whenever he woke in the middle of the night. I did these things, and a thousand others, grudgingly, or so it might look from the outside. But I was always good at keeping secrets. The truth was, I loved it.

No, it wasn’t me who unraveled. It was Andy. He just wasn’t there. He was hollowed out, like a pumpkin scooped out and filled with nothing more than air and candlelight. It was the Toy Thief of course. I imagined what it might do to a person, to have someone else inside them. Did it leave a hole? Was there an empty spot where they pushed part of you aside to make room for themselves? Or was it even worse than all that?

Maybe it wasn’t an empty spot. Maybe it was, quite simply, a dead spot. That everything that horrid, low darkness touched had gone terminal and just crumbled into dust. That when Andy cut it out of me, it wasn’t just that creature that was dying in the open air, flailing like a fish out of water. It was Andy as well. The best part of him, disappearing like so much smoke. God, it makes me cringe just to write it.

It was there though, clear, bright, easy to read. It was in the way he would scrunch his face up whenever Andrew wouldn’t stop crying, as if his body were incapable of patience and understanding. It was in the way he would hold the boy, his boy, and stare out into the yard, watching birds like a catatonic old mutt, never noticing when Andrew was awake, was crying, was threatening to roll out of his lap and onto the floor. It was in the way he would sneak into the boy’s bedroom at night and stand there, staring at his crib. I’d watch on a monitor, breathless and exhausted, wondering when, dear God when would he finally go to sleep? He wasn’t safe around his own son, and as much as it killed me, I couldn’t deny it. I told him as much. I always was the first to talk, never one to keep my mouth shut, even when I should.

Why?

Why am I like that?

Why have I always been like that?

“You’re going to hurt him,” I said.

I can still remember the day. Andy was sitting in a rocking chair, staring at the TV, not watching it, just gazing right through it. Wheel of Fortune was on. I think it was the wheel that had caught his attention. The way it spun and spun, clicking like some kind of…

Like some kind of toy.

He was giving Andrew a bottle, and the boy was finished. He kept pushing it away, his fat fingers struggling to get air, and I stood there, watching, letting it go further than I should, because I needed to see. I had to see. The milk was running down his cheeks, over his chin, and then, without warning, up his nose. He was coughing, choking, unable to even cry, and I reached for him, snatched him away.