“It looks good,” I told him.
“Looks good or is good?”
“I think it looks good,” I said.
He stomped past me and peeked out the door himself. He knew I was right, of course, but he just had to check for himself.
“Come on,” he said, picking the bag up. “No stopping. Just move as quick as you can, and if you have to rest, just drop it and I’ll drag it the rest of the way.”
Never in my life had I felt so visible and open, as if there were spotlights on both of us. I’m not sure how long it took us to make the dash from porch to basement, but it couldn’t have been more than ten seconds. But those ten seconds were enough for my imagination to conjure up dozens of scenarios, each worse than the last. Patrolling cops. A concerned dad. A nosy neighbor. Any of them were enough to shut us down.
A small part of me welcomed the idea of being caught. Simply thinking about it was inviting, because it might mean we would finally have some help with this absurd turn of events. We were, despite everything that had happened, still just kids, and I relished the daydream of a grownup stepping in and telling us what to do. But that was just my daylight voice, the energetic, glass-half-full voice that told me all of this would be okay in the end. The other part of my mind, the realist if you will, told me that the more people involved, the worse for everyone. I would have loved Dad’s help, but the second he knew, his life was on the line as well.
“Shit,” Andy said a few feet from the basement door.
“What?” I asked, glancing around for whatever it was he had seen.
“The door!” he barked. “Why didn’t you open the fucking door?”
“You didn’t ask me to.”
About three feet away, Andy dropped the sleeping bag with a thud as he scrambled to get the basement open. It wasn’t locked, mainly because there wasn’t anything in there worth stealing, but it did have a jerry-rigged handle made of wire and a length of wood, just enough to keep the wind from blowing it open. Normally, it was the sort of thing you could flip open with your eyes closed, but now, in this pressure cooker of stress, Andy couldn’t find a way to open it. He was cursing under his breath, his face was turning red, and I realized, almost too late, that the other Andy was about to appear, threatening to burst through the small cracks in my brother’s resolve.
“Move,” I said from over his shoulder, but he pushed me away with a single strong arm. He was shaking the door now, pulling it like a wild monkey trying to break out of a cage.
“Stop.”
He didn’t hear me. He didn’t hear anything. All at once, he gave up on the handle altogether and began punching the wooden planks with his bare knuckles, each blow echoing through the neighborhood.
“Jesus, Andy, stop it!”
His knuckles were red, cracking, bleeding, and with each new punch, he left a bloody print. In seconds, there were three knuckle-prints, then six, then eight, all as I grabbed at his shoulder, pulling him, trying and failing to draw him away from the edge of madness, to drag him back to me.
“Dammit, stop, please, just stop!”
Before I knew it, I had hit him on the back of the head, reaching up and swinging my fist down like a hammer. It shot a bolt of pain up my elbow, but it at least got his attention. He turned, his bloodshot eyes locking on mine, and he swung. The world went spotty as I heard the crunch in my jaw. There was the ground, the gravel, the dirt, rising up to meet me. I hit hard, but I didn’t feel anything other than the slight humming throb in my ears. For some strange reason, I remember seeing an anthill just in front of my eyes, and in my swirling, woozy confusion, I worried that they might try to crawl into my mouth. There was a voice, distant, like it was speaking through a pillow, saying the same panicked thing over and over again.
“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.