Aaron (5 page)

“Aaron,” he said tentatively, like a boy drowning in waves of his own self-hatred. He still smelled faintly of the aftershave he’d worn to impress his date. Before the attack, when he was still able to smile, Aaron might have teased him about it. It all seemed so frivolous. Allen pulled Aaron’s desk chair up next to the bed and sat down. With almost painful slowness, Aaron’s blank stare moved from the bare wall to his younger brother. Tears welled in Allen’s eyes as he looked at his big brother, nearly incapacitated by the drugs the doctors prescribed. Allen waited until Aaron’s eyes finally focused on him before he spoke.

Aaron

 

“I am so sorry, Aaron,” Allen said, the tears beginning to fall. “What I said to you was unforgivable. I didn’t mean it, I was just….” “Embarrassed,” his brother finished for him, his eyes glazed over. “Yes,” Allen replied shamefully, looking down at the navy blue comforter that covered his brother’s bed.

“Now, let me tell you something,” Aaron said, as he fought the hold of the drugs and depression. Allen looked up to meet his brother’s level, glassy stare. “I never climbed into that fucking van. I was dragged into it, screaming and fighting.” The anger in his face, in his voice, was unmistakable, and Allen just nodded, wide-eyed and pale.

“I didn’t…. They never really told us what…,” Allen stammered.

Aaron could see that Allen’s own behavior, his words, sickened him, and he didn’t need to do anything else to drive the point home. None of this was Allen’s fault; it was Aaron’s. He had brought this horror down on his family, merely by surviving.

“As for the lunatic part,well, you’re probably right about that. Between the drugs and the flashbacks, I feel like a madman most of the time.”

Allen took several short, very shallow breaths and looked like he was suffocating, crushed by the weight of his older brother’s disapproval. Before the attack, Aaron knew that Allen had idolized him. He was everything that Allen wanted to be—smart, funny, good-looking. “Aaron, I….”

“If you came in here looking for forgiveness, you needn’t have bothered,” Aaron said, his gaze still unfocused. “You had it before you ever left the house.”

Allen dropped his head, the tears falling in earnest, mumbling something about Aaron being a much better man than he was.

“It scares me,” Aaron went on, not commenting on his brother’s emotional outpouring, a dreamy quality to his voice, maybe because he rarely used it anymore. “What could happen to you, or to Anthony. I’m scared all the time, even with the drugs. When I saw you standing there, you and that girl who looked so much like Juliette, I thought that maybe if I stopped you from going that I could have stopped it all from happening.

It triggered a flashback, and all I could see was Juliette and me. I had to stop you from going, to stop Juliette from dying. I had just woken from a really bad nightmare, and it was all… jumbled in my head. I’m sorry that I embarrassed you.” This was the first time in two years Allen had ever sat and talked alone with Aaron. His parents had told him the basics about what had happened to his brother, but maybe he never really appreciated the extent of the damage until today, when he heard it straight from Aaron.

They both looked up at the sound of yelling—not screaming, as Aaron had become accustomed to in his dreams, but more like an argument. He couldn’t make out the words through the walls and closed door, so he couldn’t understand what was happening. His parents never fought, nor did they raise their voices to him or his brothers. Especially since Aaron’s attack, his family forced themselves to be exceedingly polite to each other.

Making his decision, Aaron glanced at Allen, threw back the blankets, and crept to his bedroom door. He placed a hand on the wood and used it to steady himself as he turned the knob. The small click sounded loud in the confines of his room, but not so loud that it would have been heard over the shouting. Once he swung the door slowly open, the voices became discernible.

“We are not having this discussion, John. I won’t do it.” A soft thump, like the slamming of a drawer, punctuated his mother’s disagreement. Slipping quietly from his room, Aaron crept down the hall with Allen right behind, each step bringing them closer to their parents’ bedroom. Their door was pulled to, but not completely closed. He leaned heavily against the wall. The tranquilizer caused him to feel slow and stupid as he pressed his palm against his forehead to stop the hallway from spinning.

“You saw what happened tonight. It was Allen’s first real shot at something normal. We can’t keep sacrificing them to try to save him. It’s been two years, Michelle, and he’s not getting any better.” His father’s voice sounded heavy with tears that Aaron knew he would never shed, not over him, anyway.

“He has a name, John.” The sharp edge in his mother’s voice did nothing to cut the tension as it leaked from the bedroom into the hallway.

 

Aaron

 

Aaron stood listening in stunned disbelief. He looked back to see Allen’s horrified face staring back at him.

“Maybe we should let the professionals care for Aaron, because I don’t think we’re doing what’s best for him,” John said, and Aaron’s heart ached at the resignation in his voice. His own father had given up on him, written him off to the insanity. The throbbing in his head returned, and Aaron worked hard to keep himself from sliding down the wall.

“I am not sending him to some kind of institution.” Michelle’s voice trembled, and Aaron couldn’t listen anymore. Part of him wanted to stay and see what their decision would be, but his tenuous hold on himself made that impossible. He refused to listen to his parents’ plan to get rid of him like he was an old pair of running shoes—battered, scuffed, and torn. Instead, he ignored his brother and walked silently back to his room. Crawling back to the bed that had cooled in his absence, he slammed his headphones onto his head and turned the music just loud enough so that he couldn’t hear the voices from the hall.

He spent the rest of the night trying to figure out how to make his parents love him again.

 

Chapter Three

 

M
ICHELLE turned and handed Allen a plate stacked with fluffy pancakes before nudging him in the direction of the table where Anthony and Aaron sat eating. The inescapable smell of syrup surrounded Aaron as he took another buttery bite. He watched her back as she made more pancakes and an expert flip almost made him smile. She frowned as she sat down at the table with them, a much shorter stack of pancakes on her plate. A quiet sigh escaped, of sadness or exhaustion, he couldn’t tell. Then, in a desperate attempt to pull her family back together, she told them that they were going out to dinner to celebrate Aaron’s graduation. Allen made a crack about celebrating Aaron barely passing English when he himself would have been grounded for a D in English. The joke came completely out of nowhere, but Michelle shot her middle son a stern look showing that she was not amused, just as the house phone rang. She answered it as Allen lowered his gaze, chastised after the hour-long lecture he’d been given earlier that morning. Aaron had heard most of it as he sat at the top of the stairs, trying to avoid the pitiful looks and imagined judgments he got from his family when they could see him. The expression Allen wore told him that his brother was still disgusted with himself for what he’d said to Aaron, even after all had been forgiven.