3 AM

 

I hear my name being called out.  It’s distant, like a call over a roar of waves at the beach, or over a thousand talking heads in a crowded street corner.  I can feel myself stir.  It’s called again.  Closer.  It’s a familiar sound, though one’s name usually is. 

“Tom.”

I mumble something, still coming up from a dream.  I can see the surface of the waking world above me, all waves and shimmers.  Up and up and

“Tom.”

My eyes slowly flicker open, taking in the blackness of my bedroom.  I close them again.  I’m groggy and my limbs are just as slow to waking as the rest of me.  Again that whisper of my name sounds.  Like caffeine to the bloodstream my senses are suddenly jolted and I feel another’s presence.  Not the familiar warmth and feel of my wife next to me, it’s something else entirely.

“Hey Tom, are you…awake?”  The voice was soft and hesitant.  And familiar.

It takes me a moment for my waking mind to scroll through all the possibilities.  I open my eyes again and they are a bit more accustomed to the dark.  I see the outline of the figure.  Slight, hunched and staring at me from the foot of my bed.  I reach to my side.  She’s still there, sleeping.  Good.

“Who…”  I let my voice trail off as I pull myself up, leaning forward to get a better view.  “Kyle?” I ask.

I haven’t seen my brother in five years.  He had always been the “free spirit” of the family.  Other families would have labeled him the “black sheep”.  Really though, it was all the same.  He did want he wanted without the fear of the consequences.  He had always lived like a tide.  In and out.  One moment here, the next gone to some other shore, some other world.  It was all well and good, I suppose.  He wasn’t a big “contributor”, as our father would have put it. 

“Hey Big Brother,” he says.  “Hope I didn’t wake you.”

I rub my eyes.  I move to turn on the light at the bedside. 

“No, you’ll wake her,” he says.  “It’s fine.”

“I’m surprised she’s not awake already,” I say as I forgo the light and carefully start to slide out of bed.  “She’s usually such a light sleeper.  The slightest of noises and she’s up.”

I can’t quite see his face, but I can picture a smile.  I guess I can’t honestly say what his smile looks like now, what with five years spanning the last time we’ve spoken or seen one another, but I can picture what it would have looked like back then.  Wide, white and whimsical.  Totally uninhibited and without remorse.  No regrets or worry.  Just an endless sense of wonder.

“I’m sorry to call on you so late,” he says.  “I just figured

“That I would be up at 3 in the morning?  Making some coffee?  Getting ready for work?”  I can feel a bit of heat in my voice.  A bit of edge.

He says nothing.

I’m on my feet now, looking at the blinds shift and sway with the air pushing down from the ceiling.  Every now and then a slit makes room for some light from the lamps out back.  I look at my brother.  He’s wet.  Soaked, in fact.

“Jesus Kyle,” I tell him, making a few steps in his direction.  “You’re soaked.”

As I get closer I can see his face.  Worn and thin, as if his skin was made from sheets of tracing paper and not flesh.  His eyes are sunken and dark, his hair matted to his head from the water.  He’s dripping from his clothes to my carpet.

“What happened to you?” I ask.

He shrugs his shoulders and seems to wince doing so.  “Rain.”  He snorts, halfheartedly.  “Fucking weatherman, am I right?”  His smile is dull.  “You’d think with all the advancements now they’d be able to predict a little downpour or some sun.  You know?”

“Yeah, right.”  My voice is soft, as if what I said hadn’t actually been said.  There had been no rain, at least not in the past several hours.  He and I both knew he hadn’t ben rained on.  I just wasn’t sure what to say though.  Five years is an awful long time and to suddenly have him here, now, in my room, with my wife sleeping soundly and him wet as if he had been borne from the ocean.

He seems to sense my unease and shifts his weight onto his other leg.  He smiles meekly.  It was so bizarre to see him like this.  He suddenly moves past me and fingers the blinds, letting a little more light in.  They rattle at his intrusion.  I look to my wife.  Still sleeping.

“You remember that time with Ringo,” he asks after a moment of silence.

I ignore him, my sleepiness starting to rise up again and with it, annoyance.

“Why are you here?” I ask calmly.  I’m sure he’s here for money.  Or maybe place to crash.  That’s just how it was with him.  Always taking and never giving back.  I try to steel myself down.  I was sure he would ask for something and leave me feeling infinitely guilty if I didn’t. 

“You told me he ran away,” he continues on, as if the question that had left my lips never made it to his ears.  “You said that he must have made for the woods after Dad left the backdoor open.”  His fingers have brushed a blind out of the way and his eyes are fixated somewhere outside.

“Is it money?” I ask.  “Did you get yourself into some trouble Kyle?  Did you do something?”

“I was broken up about it,” he says.  “I loved that dog.  I insisted on looking for him, you remember that?”

I stand still, my eyes on his wet back.  I’m trying hard to contain the annoyance that is quickly evolving into anger.  I want to keep my voice in check, otherwise I’ll wake my wife and then things would just devolve into something worse.  Then he would for sure walk out of here with whatever it was he wanted.

“I asked you to help me.  I didn’t think you would.  You always hated him.  He ate a pair of your shoes, you remember that?”  He turns to look at me.  A sad, forced smile.  “They had been new and you got so, so mad.”  His gaze turns back to the yard, to the lights in the distance.  “I thought you were going to kill him right and then there.”

My fingers started to clench.  “Kyle.  What is this?”

“When I asked you to help me, you said yes.  You said it was what brothers do.  So we went walking out to the woods.  We called for him, you and me.  I thought for sure with you helping me, we’d get him back.”

He pauses.

“I had always looked up to you.”

I roll my eyes.  “Bullshit.  What is this Kyle?  You need money, don’t you.  Five years and some things never change, you know that?”

He doesn’t seem to hear me.  “You were always so sure and set on things.  You had this security.  When I was a kid I always imagined you had this like, forceshield around you that kept everyone around you from harm.  Nothing bad could touch them because they had Tommy around.”

I say nothing.  I’m sure this is just a ploy.  Him playing the same song to the same tune.  It works with everyone else, why not me? 

“We searched for hours and found nothing.  You told me that we could go back and make posters and flyers and that you’d have your friends help put them up over town.  You took a photo I had made copies and put all of it together.  You were like a soldier on some mission.  That’s how intent you were on doing this thing.”

I can feel myself slipping back to that time.  To those days when I was a teenager and he some annoying little brat who hadn’t quite yet come into his own as the “free spirit”.  Back then he had been the hanger on.  The crybaby.  The epitome of all those things little brothers were.  Good and bad.  Me, being a teenager, naturally saw only the bad.  The common thing, I think, is that we were still both young enough to take any problem, no matter how small or infinitesimal and give it the force and scale of a nuclear explosion.  So much so that it overtook our lives and always, always seemed to be the end of the world.  This had been his.  Ringo.  That damed dog who had, he had told the truth about that, eaten a brand new pair of tennis shoes.

With this memory I can suddenly feel myself start to soften.  My fingers unclench. 

“You were my little brother,” I tell him.  I wince.  “Are.”

His shoulders sag as he leans forward and rests his forehead on the window. 

“You did all those things,” he says.  “You did all those things to help look for him.  Why?”

I pause.  Where is this going?  What is his angle with this?  Why now?  So many questions. 

“I knew how much that dog meant to you,” I tell him.  “I didn’t like seeing you so down, you know?”

“You knew he was dead.  Didn’t you?”

“What are you talking about?” I ask, still so unsure about this thing he is doing.

“Mom and Dad told you to do all those things, didn’t they?  You were bent on telling me the truth.  You were excited about the truth.  You wanted me to know, not to know because that’s what had happened, but because you knew it would hurt me.”

My fingers clenched themselves up again.  Any shred of sympathy or concern seemed to evaporate immediately.

“What the fuck are you talking about?” I hiss.  “Why are you here?  To try and make me feel bad for being a good brother?  Is that it?  To try and twist something good that I did for you into something awful so you can find some sort of justification for your shit poor views of me?  Is that it?”

He says nothing and keeps his forehead on the glass.

“When are you going to grow up?  When are you finally going to take some sort of responsibility for your life?”

He brings his head off the glass and looks at me.  His eyes, sunken and sad, tear through me.  For a moment I think I’ve channeled some of my fire into him and that he will launch out and strike me.  For all his whimsical, carefree spiritedness the boy had always had a temper.  He could house so much rage in that slight frame of his.  It was a wonder, I always thought, that it could live side-by-side with such a different emotion.

“They offered you a new pair of shoes,” he tells me, “for your willingness to go along.  To make me think that my dog ran away.”

He sighs.  I sigh.  What’s the use?  I slump back down onto my bed, hunched.

“Why are you bringing this up now?”  I look up at him.  “Can’t this wait?  Can’t we have this…moment or whatever the fuck this is sometime tomorrow?  Call my office and we can schedule a lunch or something.”  As if to sweeten the deal I quickly add: “My treat.  Anywhere you want to go.”

Again he offers me that sad smile.  “I don’t hold it against you, Tom.”  He almost laughs, but not quite.  “Hell, had the roles reversed and I was in your shoes, I probably would have told you to spite you and our parents.”

I can’t deny that.  “Or if you can’t make lunch we can do dinner.   I’m sure Stacy would love to chat with you too.  She always liked you.”

He steps up to me and places a hand on my shoulder.  He squeezes with the faintest of strength.  His fingers are bone.  “Tomorrow then,” he says. 

Relief washes over me.  I can finally get back to sleep.  With any luck he’ll forget all this.  My mind tells me that he’s high one something or other and that he’ll crawl back to whatever hole he’s been hiding in these past five years and stay there.  Or find a new one.  Yeah.  He’ll probably find a new one.  And then I can get back to sleep and get back to my life with my family…

“I promise,” I tell him.  “We can talk about Ringo or anything you want to talk about.  Tomorrow.”

He nods and shuffles to the door, water still dripping from his clothes.  He pauses in the door frame.

“You still did more than what they asked of you.  They just meant for you to walk with me for a bit in the woods.”  He swallows.  “It was Dad who finally told me about Ringo.  After you went off to college.  I can’t even remember now how it came about.”

I watch him, unable to speak.

“Tomorrow then.”  And he says this and walks out.  I hear the front door click softly.  He is gone.

I turn to my wife, still in peaceful repose.  I lie back down, turn to face the blinds and watch them dance in the air pumping down form the ceiling.  I close my eyes and think of tomorrow.

 

The alarm goes off promptly at six.  I stretch.  I am out of bed and into the shower.  I have the faintest notion that I am to do something important today, but I can’t quite recall what. 

I’m dressed and in the kitchen by half-past.  Stacy has brewed coffee.  She steps into the kitchen, smiling and kisses my cheek.

“Sleep well?” she asks.

I nod.  “Yes, though I think I had a strange dream.”

“Oh?”

“I dreamt I had some sort of vistor, some…guy I know.  Or knew.  I’m not quite sure,  it’s all so hazy now.”

She shrugs and pours herself a cup.  It’s our routine.

“It’s so odd,” I say, still trying to recall what had happened.  “It felt so real, but I can’t quite place it all.”

She turns on the television in the adjacent room.  The morning news blares.

“I almost want to say it was my brother.”

Stacy cocks her head to one side.  “Jason?”

"Kyle,” I say.  “Strange, isn’t it?  That I should be dreaming about him after all this time.”

She says nothing, though I know there is something cooking in her head.  She always had liked him.

I step into the living room, coffee in hand, still trying to work over the dream.  The news anchor is speaking.  I’m only half paying attention until I hear the following:

“…pulled from the river earlier this morning.  Police suspect a mugging or drug deal gone wrong.  The victim has yet to be identified.”

I can can suddenly hear my heartbeat.  My breath is caught in my chest.  I almost drop my coffee.  No.  It can’t be.  Impossible, I tell myself.  Just impossible.  And then I hear them, recalled as if it had all been a dream.  Distant.  An echo.  My own voice. 

Tomorrow.

---

Eh.  I’ll maybe come back and flush this out.  Iron out the details.  Put a bit more stuffing into it.  Just had to get the idea out there, I guess.  Funny what sort of things can come to a guy while brushing his teeth.  I still say the best thoughts and ideas strike me while I’m in the bathroom.  I don’t know what that says, if anything, about me.