The Little Brother (12 page)

“Jesus,” she said, “hurry, hurry,” and she took me to the side of the house, a dark, small space, where something lay wrapped in a pink towel on the ground.

“Hurry,” she said, the tears coming, “hurry, hurry. Fuck, shit, I know they're coming. Hurry, Even. What do I do? What do I do? They'll be back for it,” and she unearthed Gabe's Samsung video camera from beneath the towel, flipped the little screen open, pressed Play, and handed it to me.

While I watched she spoke, frantic and scared, in one long, jumbled explanation, no longer crying, and not looking at the screen with me, instead looking all around her. “They showed up at about two this morning, your brother and this other guy, and they kept talking about what was on their video camera, sort of like bragging about it, but they wouldn't say what was on there. Then Joe and this other guy said, ‘Let's see.' But they wouldn't let them watch. Stupid shits. But then when they left the party, they forgot their camera, stupid fucking asses, dumb shits forgot it. Left it right on the couch. So everyone's asleep, the party's finally over, there's, like, three people passed out on the floor near the couch, but I'm still wired. Did a line, can't sleep, can't tell Joe, he thinks I quit coke, so I open the thing and look at it, and oh my fucking god, what do I do? What is that, Even? Oh my god! What do I do, what do I do?”

What I saw and heard on that small flip screen I still unwillingly see and hear, when I'm lying in bed or at the grocery store, or just taking a walk, whether my eyes are closed or not, because it's imprinted inside me, and it can never go away.

15.

JULY 6

W
HILE
I
WATCHED
the video, Sara watched the street, and then she grabbed my arm and said, “Oh, shit, it's them, they're coming!”

We stood frozen, staring down the street. A car's headlights swooped past us in a left turn, and then the car disappeared.

“What do we do?” she asked, taking the camera from me and turning it off. She wrapped it in the towel like a baby.

“I don't know,” I said. I felt numb, as if I were under anesthesia. “Why'd you call me?” I said, looking at her. My voice sounded whiny.

She stared at me, some indistinct emotion coupled with a fearful awareness intensifying and connecting us, and then she said with a trace of an apology, “What was I supposed to do, Even?”

A long silence, and then we heard the hint of another car in the distance, and she said, “Hide! Go across the street, behind that bush,” and she ran with the camera wrapped in the towel to her beat-up Toyota Tercel, the car engine noise coming closer, its headlights turning down the street.

I did what she said and watched as she set the towel on the backseat, shut her car door, and slipped back inside the house like a ghost.

This time it was Gabe and Kevin in Gabe's truck, and they screeched to an illegal park in the driveway, half-extended into the street. Their car doors slammed, and they ran up to the front door.

My heart banged against my throat, thinking of Sara inside the house and the video camera wrapped in a towel in her car. Was she pretending to be asleep? What would she say?

I could've escaped then, but I stayed and waited, crouched behind the big manicured bush on a neighbor's front lawn. Near the doorway, an American flag shuddered and clanked on a flagpole.

Minutes passed. A few lights came on in the house. Then some more lights, until the entire house was lit up.

It occurred to me that I should take the camera and flee, and I crouch-walked to Sara's car, tried the car door, but she'd locked it, so I crouch-walked my way back behind the bush and waited some more.

I could hear shouting inside the house, but I couldn't make it out, and I didn't recognize the voices. Out of nervousness, I dug inside my pocket, extracting an old receipt and gum wrapper, a couple of pennies and a nickel, and then I inserted the items in the other pocket.

Then all at once the front door opened to Gabe, his hands on his forehead, and Kevin following.

“Shit! Fuck! We're so fucked, we're so fucked, oh shit!” Gabe said, walking along the front pathway, crying and wiping his face.

Joe followed, and a few others, and then Sara, her arms wrapped around her torso, wearing her flimsy dress.

“Are you sure you didn't see it?” Kevin said, pleading.

Joe and the others nodded, and I heard murmurs of “Yeah, yeah, I don't know where it is, don't know where you could've left it.”

A few more minutes passed with Kevin's questions and Joe's answers:

“Are you sure you don't know?”

“Yeah, yes. We told you everything.”

“Now think back. One more time. Do you remember seeing it?”

“Yeah,” Joe said. “I told you. We all did. Gabe had it on the couch. He was sitting there with it. But I don't remember seeing it after you left. I already told you everything. No one knows where it is.”

“Where could it have gone?”

“I don't know. Maybe you took it with you and set it somewhere else. Did you replay your steps? My mom used to make me go through my steps again. She'd say, ‘Now think, Joe, just go back and think.'”

“Yeah, fucker,” Kevin said impatiently, “we did that. That's why we're here.”

To my dismay, Gabe and Kevin started walking around the house, peering in bushes, and moving to the cars parked on the street.

Gabe looked into the passenger window of Sara's car, his hands visor-like at his forehead to help him see.

Then to my utter relief, Gabe moved on to the next car.

At one point, Kevin stood in the middle of the street, and I thought he might cross to where I was hiding, but then he went back to the front yard and stood next to Gabe.

He and Gabe stared at each other for a giant, earth-sucking vacuum of a pause, and then Kevin said, “Asshole,” pushing Gabe in the chest with his palms, so that Gabe floundered, one hand on the ground, in a half fall, “asshole, asshole, why'd you bring it? It's your fault.”

Gabe stood, waited a beat, and then he came at Kevin headfirst in a pummeling body slam. They went down onto the lawn, grasping and fighting, and for a second, on instinct, I stood up, thinking that I needed to help Gabe. It was like watching a lapdog fighting a pit bull.

Joe and some others broke up the fight, separating Gabe and Kevin a good distance, until they both calmed and got their breathing back to normal. Gabe's nose looked bloodied.

I worried that the commotion would wake the people whose yard I was hiding in, but no lights came on. They were probably used to the noise during summer break, or maybe they'd left for another vacation home. No one on the block yelled at us to be quiet or turned on lights or called the police.

Joe pulled a pack of Marlboros from his pocket and shook one out. He coughed, and then set the cigarette in his mouth. Lit it, coughed again, blowing smoke.

“Suppose,” he said, done coughing, “it'll turn up. These things always turn up when you give up looking. Like last week, I couldn't find my car keys, got all crazy”—his hand flared for a
second—“looked everywhere, yelling about it, ‘Fuck, where're my keys!' Remember?”—he turned to Sara, and she affirmed with a nod. A pang went through me, understanding that she couldn't speak out of fear. She didn't want attention. But Joe didn't ask her for more.

“Finally gave up,” he continued, “smoked a bowl, ate some fries, and took a nap.” He paused, took another drag from his cigarette, blew out the smoke. A rush of admiration went through me for how Joe finessed the situation.

“Then,” he said, “I woke from my nap, went to the fridge to grab a beer, and there they were, my keys, waiting for me on the top shelf next to the milk. I'm telling you. That's when it happens. When you give up and let it go.”

Gabe's head went down—sad, resigned.

“Worst-case scenario,” Joe said, “it doesn't turn up. You can just buy another camera. Shit! I'll help pay for it.”

Kevin had been listening from his side of the lawn. I saw him take what looked like a long, deflating, accepting exhale.

Gabe seemed relieved as well, looking up and around, and then moving toward Kevin, no longer worried about getting his ass kicked. I had a flash of Kevin's head in Gabe's lap, and Gabe stroking his hair.

They stood around, discussing the weirdness of losing things and having those things turn up again, until they agreed to go inside and spark up, a peace offering extended from Joe to Gabe and Kevin.

Sara followed them to the front door, the last to go inside the house.

So I waited some more behind the bush, my knees pulled to my chest, feet tucked in and warmed within my sweatshirt, and tried to rest. Listened to the American flag clicking and clacking and flapping at its pole, and waited and waited some more.

The sun began to rise—a flare of light in the dark sky—and then Gabe and Kevin walked out the front door and to Gabe's truck without speaking.

Gabe started the engine, and then he pulled out of the driveway and sped down the street. His brake lights went red at the stop sign, and then he made his turn—gone—the street quiet.

I wasn't sure what to do, when Sara came out of the door and walked to her car without looking at me. She unlocked it, opened her door, shuffled around inside, and got a sweatshirt. She pulled it on, shut her car door, and walked back to the house, still without eye contact.

I waited a few more minutes—I counted to 120—and then I did my crouch-walk again, back to her car.

This time the door wasn't locked, and I opened it slowly. On the towel-covered camera was a note in Sara's block-letter writing:

TAKE IT AND DO SOMETHING. GIVE IT TO POLICE? SHE LOOKS DEAD! YOU SAW IT! THEY'RE WATCHING ME INSIDE HOUSE. I SAID I WAS COLD AND NEEDED SWEATSHIRT. SORRY I CAN'T HELP. EVEN, I'M SORRY. I DIDN'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I'M REALLY SCARED!

I stuffed the note in my pocket and jog-walked to my car, three blocks down, carrying the camera wrapped in its towel. The
air seemed static, and the rising sun cast a shimmering, halo-like purple-yellow on the horizon.

Walking beneath a tree, I looked up to see its leaves trembling and glittering above me, their undersides pale. It smelled of salty ocean and grass. Although I moved quickly, everything seemed to be in slow motion, as if in a movie.

In the home to my left, a light came on. Two houses down, a garage door rattled open, and a car engine started.

After that, I had tunnel vision, not looking around me, ignoring noises, focused only on getting to my car.

When I got home, I opened the back door quietly and went straight to my bedroom, setting the camera beneath my bed with the towel over it and my sweatshirt over the towel. A bread loaf–size lump.

No Gabe at home, I knew, since his truck was not parked outside.

Then I sat down on my bed and thought about what I should do. But I had no idea.

My alarm clock showed 6:04
AM
, and I didn't know whether to start my day or try to sleep.

An early riser, my dad usually woke at 6:30
AM
and started brewing his coffee soon after. He would be suspicious if he found me up this early.

I wasn't hungry for breakfast, and I felt a numbed panic. Whatever adrenaline had gotten me through hiding and escaping with the video camera had worn off—or was in the process of wearing off—and sitting on my bed, alone, thinking about what I'd seen on that little screen, and about Sara's involvement, made everything seem hopeless and unbearable and terrifying.

I tried reading Salinger's
The Catcher in the Rye
for distraction, but after five minutes or so of the sentences wobbling, I set the book back down.

The very fact of the video camera, and what it contained, and its presence—right under the bed—really freaked me out, as if I'd had something to do with the content, or as if what I'd seen was alive and happening now, on the morning of July 6, not on the Fourth, just by its existence and my awareness.

Then my cell phone rang, and I figured that it was probably Sara telling me what to do, but when I flipped it open, I read my caller ID:
BRO
.

A burst of fear as I answered, saying, “Hey, what's up?” My voice sounded shaky but he didn't seem to notice.

“You awake?” he said.

“I am now. Where are you?”

An indistinct shuffling noise while he paused, and then he said, “Kevin's.”

“What's up?”

He didn't speak but I could hear him breathing into the phone.

“Gabe,” I said, because I didn't think I could wait, “what's up?”

“I'm just wondering,” he said, “if you've seen my video camera. I can't find it.”

“No,” I said, my heart speeding. “Do you want me to look for it?”

“Yeah,” he said. “That'd be great. Thanks, dude. I don't think I left it there. But can you look?”