The Little Brother (23 page)

I collected myself and looked around the room to remember the safe feeling that I got from it, repeating in my head: Not real, not real, not real.

25.

K
NOWING THAT WHAT
Gabe and the Ks did to Tove was wrong didn't alleviate my guilt and self-hatred for having turned over the video camera. I had two conflicting sensations: My life was over; my life had just begun. I felt that every person could see through me and know that I was a traitor. At the same time, to have taken such an action proved an independence from my family and that I didn't belong to them. I realized now that I'd always wanted that freedom, and that I had it. That I'd told no one (except for Sara and Mike)—to have a secret of that magnitude—made me strong, and gave me a feeling of power.

One way I survived those months before the trial was by obsessing over how not to tell anyone about what I'd done or letting anyone find out, while at the same time fantasizing about coming clean or being found out.

I didn't sleep or I slept too much, barely ate, and drank almost every night and took drugs.

I wanted to be alone. Yet when alone, I became prone to a general neurotic anxiety and self-loathing that I hadn't experienced before.

I sometimes abused the prescription meds that I stole from my dad's medicine cabinet, promising myself that I'd quit once the trial ended. High on Demerol one night, I attacked a rose bush and scratched up my fists and arms.

I shoplifted recklessly, daring security to catch me. I found out how difficult it was for a white, clean-cut teenager to get caught—even mugging for the security cameras. Everything that I stole, I gave away. If I was caught, I imagined that under interrogation and with the sway of authority, I might confess my role in Gabe's case, and the waiting and anticipation would be over.

One afternoon, I walked into Target, took an iPod, dismantled it from its packaging and security bar with a knife from the kitchenwares department, and walked out with it. Then, when stopped at the signal to leave the parking lot, I passed the iPod through my opened car window to a man in a wheelchair with a cardboard sign on his lap that read
DOWN AND OUT PLEASE HELP.

“God bless,” he said, with a big, semitoothless grin, reaching a sun-cracked hand out to me.

For a few days, I trailed Tom L., waiting in the parking lot for him to leave his AA meeting. I'm the man you want, I wanted to tell him. I gave you the video camera. I've never seen anything that disturbing before, either, and I'm not a cop! I'm the brother of the perpetrator and the son of the protector of the perpetrator!

He lumbered to his Buick, sat, shut his door with a whack, and started the engine. Careful to stay a few cars behind, I followed him. He lived in Costa Mesa in a two-story light blue house with white windowsills and a picket fence. The garage door opened and swallowed him up.

But I waited for him the next morning before school, a block down, parked and sipping a Coke. When he pulled out of the garage, I followed him through the fog to the YMCA where Mike went to lift weights, and watched him lumber from the parking lot in his sweat suit with stripes down the legs. A gut, and a wide cowboy-like walk, swinging his arms.

I thought about going back to the AA meetings, just to hear the people talk. But I didn't go.

I spent hours in pointless reflection, turning over my family's history, looking for cracks that I'd missed, trying to understand how everything had happened and what it meant. No matter how much time I deliberated, I couldn't figure anything out, like a dog chasing its tail.

My refuge and comfort had been reading. Now it didn't do much good. I would try but the sentences evaporated after I read them. I couldn't get them to sink into meaning.

But when they did, and when a book resonated, such as Dostoyevsky's
Crime and Punishment,
which I cracked open for a couple of days, it overwhelmed me. I'd read it before and enjoyed the thrill of the fiction, but now it left me shaken with identification, and I had to put it away.

Every cruel and stupid thing I'd done came back to haunt me. How I used to wipe my boogers on my bed frame as a child, collecting them in some sort of gruesome fascination, a trail of dried, bumpy snot along the wood post. Our maid, Juanita, finally cleaned them one afternoon, shooting me a disgusted look. The three times I'd kicked our beloved dog and made him yelp, before he'd been hit and killed by a car. How once I'd gotten Gabe in
trouble by claiming he'd shattered our parents' bathroom mirror. I'd done it with a rock, for no reason. And plenty of other worse humiliations.

By myself a lot those months, I took long walks along the Back Bay and watched the joggers and bikers whir past me.

I went to the movies alone and spent afternoons sneaking into one stupid movie after another, until I'd finally leave six or seven hours later, the sky dark and littered with stars.

It seemed that I hadn't properly noticed life before—everything was more intense and alive and relentless and always, always, always tinged with sadness. The sky was larger and deeper and the sun brighter and the grass greener and the stars more sparkly. How hadn't I noticed before?

I felt strangely liberated and fascinated by the sheer impossibility of just living and breathing and being alive.

Instead of wearing boxers or pajamas, I slept naked. I didn't like the feel of clothes on my skin at night and started wearing an old, tattered robe that I'd bought at a garage sale.

I lost about fifteen pounds and had to poke new holes in my belts. I developed a habit of having to smell foods before I ate them. Things that I used to crave (chocolate, mustard, dill pickles) I couldn't stomach.

I realized that it used to matter to me what people thought about me, but that I no longer cared so much whether they liked me or not. It just didn't matter.

If someone handed me a pill at a party, I no longer asked what it was. I just swallowed it and waited to see what happened.

Mike said that I was isolating myself, and that I should make more of an effort to be around people. I didn't want to be around people.

Sara shared my secret, and I knew now that she understood my situation in a way that I hadn't wanted to acknowledge.

I waited for her to call—like Joe had told me to do—and she never did. I thought about her constantly.

“Should I call her?” I asked Mike.

“I don't know,” he said, so I left her alone.

But then one afternoon, about two months before the trial, Mike brought me an article from the
OC Weekly
by this reporter named R. Sam Michaels. Michaels had hooked into the Hyde Three case with a vicious determination, and no one—not Gabe's PR lady or his lawyers or other reporters—could sway him to take a more neutral position. Dad hated him.

The article claimed that a young woman who lived near the Jane Doe of the Hyde Three gang rape case (“Jane Doe” was a pseudonym for Tove Kagan), and who knew who Jane Doe was—a girl who looked like Jane Doe, especially in the dark night—had been attacked, to the point of needing plastic surgery. Nothing could be proven, no connection made, but only, the woman asserted, when she had yelled that she wasn't Tove (the paper hadn't used Tove's name) did the large man (“a big motherfucker,” I remembered Joe saying) stop his beating and flee.

I set the article down, quiet for a moment, and then I said, “Holy shit.”

Mike said, “Do you think it's true?”

I nodded. The feeling of doing the right thing by turning in the camera had been accumulating slowly—so slowly that I'd hardly noticed it—but now it locked into place.

I'd question many things from here on out, but I never questioned myself about this again.

A certain relief came from my certainty, but alongside it was a deepening loss of respect for my father, mother, and brother, so that for a long time it just felt like a huge, sorrowful defeat.

“Call Sara,” Mike said, but he didn't have to tell me. I'd already reached for my cell in my pocket.

She said that she'd meet me at my room at Mike's later that afternoon.

I dressed, washed my face, and gave the room a harried cleaning: tucking the sheets and bedspread under the futon, restacking my books, arranging my shoes in a line on the floor.

I couldn't stay still; I was wandering around my room, picking at my skin, looking at my books and papers without really seeing them.

As I was giving myself a final look-over in the mirror—slicking my cow-licked hair back with my fingers—I heard a light tapping at the glass door and jumped forward, on edge with anticipation.

I turned and Sara stared through a crack at the curtains at me, her eyes alive with her smile.

Sliding the glass door open, I said, “Oh!” and she said, “Even!” and she stepped inside and we embraced. We stayed that way for quite some time.

When she pulled away, I saw that she'd also lost weight, and her cheeks were sunken. She looked as if she'd just gotten out of
bed, her hair tousled like she hadn't bothered to brush it, and she wore no makeup. Her sweatshirt came down over her wrists, and the hems of her jeans—long and frayed—were tucked under her flip-flops

“This is nice,” she said, looking around my room. “They let you live here?”

“As long as I want,” I said. “I'm lucky to have it.”

We sat on my futon and she put her hands on her knees; her cheeks were flushed. She shivered. She saw that I noticed and she said, “I'm so glad to see you, Even, but it scares me, too.”

I told her what Joe told me to tell her—that I would protect her and that I would keep her safe from my dad and brother, no matter what happened—the words came as Joe had directed, and when I finished, she gave me a blank look and said, “Thanks, Even,” but I couldn't tell if she believed me. She went silent for a moment, and then she said, “Joe told you to say that.”

I didn't say anything. Regardless of what Joe had told me to say, I didn't think it was right for her not to trust me. I felt a genuine desire to protect her. It must have shown in my face because she said, “I know you will, Even. That's why I'm here.”

We talked for a long time, and she said that she hadn't called me, because she felt bad about involving me by getting me to take the video camera. “I know,” she said, “that it's worse for the girl, always will be—for Jane Doe—because I saw what they did to her on that videotape. Nothing compares. But I realize that you've suffered, not as much as her, but that there's something very real and deep and true in your suffering because of what I made you do. She—Jane Doe—at least she has her family to stand by her, and
she has the moral high ground. What I asked you to do, Even, it's shaken all your foundations. You're probably going to have to lose your family over this, and she can keep hers.”

She paused, thought some more. “I just hope,” she said, “I really, really, really hope, long term, we're talking big picture, Even, that you'll end up surviving to become a better man. Do you think it's possible?”

“Jane Doe,” I said, “her real name's Tove Kagan. We used to be friends.”

“Oh, god, Even,” Sara said. “You know her?”

“My first kiss,” I said, the words heavy in my mouth.

She wanted to hear more, so I explained my connection to Tove.

Then Sara told me that she couldn't stop thinking about her—“about Jane Doe, I mean Tove”—and that she'd been reading books. “There's this thing called rape culture,” she said, “and it's everywhere if you notice it. Most girls,” she said, “don't come forward, because when they do, they just get shamed and victimized again.”

“I read,” she said, “that your dad won't settle.”

“He tried to give the Kagans money,” I said, “to not go to trial, but they declined. I don't know how much. But Dad claims he didn't really want a payout anyway, because it'd imply guilt, ‘like what happened to Michael Jackson,' he said, ‘paying off those kids' parents.'”

“Wow,” she said. “That's crazy.”

We went silent for a moment, and then she said, “What's she like?”

“Who?” I asked, though I knew the answer.

“Tove.”

“Dad's defense team underestimates her,” I said. “And her family. They don't understand—too busy calling her names and stuff—that she's strong, independent, and really stubborn. Her parents will keep uniting behind her, and they won't cave. I'm sure of it. All that bullying just makes them more determined.”

“But what's she like?” Sara asked. “What was she like when you knew her?”

I told her that as kids we played Clue and Go Fish and Old Maid in her bedroom. Tove would lie on her stomach on the floor, propping her head in her hands, elbows bent. She taught me how to dance to what she called “crazy music,” a CD of hers, and it
was
crazy: beeps and bops and synthesizers. “Just let your body go,” she said, turning off the lights, “let it do whatever it wants, let it feel,” and in the dark, she took big steps, waving her arms and hands like an octopus.