We were just kids, and no story we could make up would save my brother. He had sliced off two of my fingers. That was the only truth that mattered. Any evidence that might have saved him had shriveled up and disappeared, and a wad of old, dingy clothes wouldn’t change anyone’s mind.
“Andy,” I begged. “Please.”
He shook his head. “I might not see you again. Maybe not for a long time. Maybe never.”
I nodded, because there was simply nothing else to be done. This was the end of the lives we knew, and there was no fighting it.
“I’m sorry,” he added, gathering up the musty black clothes and holding them against his chest. “Sorry I wasn’t myself. Sorry I wasn’t what you needed.”
“You did your best,” I said. “That was pretty good.”
“No, it wasn’t,” he added, but there was no fight in his voice. “But I’m glad you said it.”
“Just go,” I said through my teeth. “Go while I’m still awake.”
“Goodbye then,” he said weakly before kissing me gently on the cheek. Then he was gone, leaving nothing behind but a blood-soaked carpet and a warm spot on my cheek. I heard the steps down the hall, heard the door slam shut, and listened to my own labored breath coming in harsh wheezes. Andy was gone, his last bit of work still ahead of him, and now it was my turn.
I drew myself up, stumbled into the hallway, and walked to the door to Dad’s room. I never went in there, but on this occasion, I let myself right in. It was always darker than the rest of the house. I flipped on the light and saw him there, looking small and strange curled up in his bed. He stayed on the left side, keeping the right side more or less untouched. He was on his feet in less than two seconds, the skill of a longtime parent. Then he stood there, blinking, seeing me but not really seeing anything.
“Jack,” he murmured. “Whatissit?”
I knew the lie, knew what I had to say, but I faltered.
“Daddy,” I cried, holding my hand in front of my face, and finally, he saw.
“Oh God,” he said, grabbing my wrist carefully. The t-shirt was red now, lighter on the outer edges and dark crimson in the center. One look and anyone could see that it wasn’t doing much to stop the bleeding. I’d never before or since seen Dad so speechless.
“What did you do?”
I?
The question confused me, but after a few seconds, I understood. This was an accident. It had to be. Daughters could scrape knees, burn themselves with hot cocoa, get beat up or knocked up. They could do these things and a million other things that fathers might fear, but they didn’t get attacked in the night in their own house. That was unimaginable.
“It wasn’t me,” I said, the guilt rising like bile in my throat as I anticipated the moment that had to come.
“What?” he said. “What is it, baby? Tell me.”
I shook my spinning head and blinked my welling eyes.
“It was Andy.”
Chapter Fifteen
I woke up in the hospital, surrounded by beeps and the smell of piss and antiseptic. I remembered everything almost at once, and I raised my bandaged hand in confirmation. For the longest time, all I could do was stare at it.
“Easy,” the nurse said as I inspected the almost spherical ball of white. “Don’t move it. Everything’s patched up, but it will take a good while to heal.”
I was still woozy, feeling drunk from the morphine that had kept me sedated while they patched me up.
“Id idges… idges.”
I held my free hand up and pretended to scratch my mangled paw.
“Oh,” she said. “Itches?”
I nodded.
“Yes, that’s a common thing. They call it phantom pain. You’ll probably be able to feel those fingers for a long time. Years even.” I rolled my head to one side and stared at the wall, disgusted.
Most of the other facts are out there. The news picked it up. The papers printed it. A writer in town even wrote a book about it. True crime, she called it. I looked it up one time and found out that she’d only sold about seventy copies. That made me smile.
According to the news, Andy tied up and attacked his sister. That’s me. There were dozens of theories as to why, the most popular being that media had had some sort of effect on his mind. Metal music, videogames, horror movies. The unholy trinity. It could have been a dabbling with satanism. After all, he had tied me up and sliced off two of my fingers. It sounded positively sacrificial. After the deed was done, he stole my father’s truck and tore out across the neighborhood before, thankfully, wrecking it a few miles away. The old truck was found in a ditch next to an abandoned stretch of field, the tailgate dropped, the radiator smoking. It only took the cops a few minutes to find it after Dad called them, but it took the better part of an hour for Andy to come marching out from the woods beyond the field, finally giving himself up. And that was that.
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.