In the photo we’re in the back yard. Adam is at the top of the plastic blue slide, apprehensive in his orange bathing suit. I’m at the bottom, waiting for him. I’m sure as he came sliding down to me, I splashed him and he screamed, the way children scream when they mean to laugh.
I’m in the midst of Adam’s things now. Ruins.
He’s been dead for three weeks. After the police came and the paramedics came and the body was removed, the stain of him was revealed on the grey cushions of the couch. I had opened all the windows, but the air was humid and wouldn’t carry away the smell–wilt and cumin–so it’s still here with me.
In the other rooms are the clothes and the shoes and baseball caps that went into black plastic bags, a Tom Clancy paperback with an unbroken spine, a used up AA Big Book filled with underlines, some old psychology textbooks from before he dropped out. There’s the furniture to get rid of, mostly old and cheap, though some of the kitchenware–the knives, the cutting board, the plates and bowls–was brand new. He must have thought he was going to cook more, and invite friends over.
Another photo, three of us together on the couch. Adam, Dad, me. The carpet was red, Dad had his shirt off and Adam had his head against Dad’s chest, just above his heart. Looking at Adam’s face, you can see the man he’ll become. You can see how growth and age will push his features out and deepen him. The photo is on top of a pile of photos in a box in his bedroom closet, which had his phone in it. The phone made what he did so decisive. He must have known what he was going to do and known, also, that I would come.
I’d made a deal with Adam four years ago after Dad’s funeral. Dad, who had an embolism, then a fever, then that was it. Dad had seemed so invincible, never small, until the ashes were delivered in a plastic urn.
‘Do we scatter his ashes with Mom?’ I asked. Mom hadn’t come to the service. ‘She used to love him. So did we, I guess.’
‘We still fucking love him,’ Adam said. ‘Yes,’ I admitted quietly.
‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘But she’s not here, so why would we?’
‘It’s fine. It’s okay to have whatever feelings you need to have.’ By this time he’d been sober for a year, so I was used to this sort of flare up. It’d come and go almost instantly, but the feeling would linger in me, like a shot. My therapist said to just witness it as something that was happening in him, not at me. I held my hand out for the urn. I wanted to hold the remains.
‘We need to talk about something,’ Adam said, then. I waited, but he needed to be asked.
‘What?’
‘When I die, promise me you’ll clean out my place.’
‘Oh, planning on dying soon?’ I said, and smiled. He smiled back a little, but then he closed his eyes in a wince. ‘Not Dahlia, not Mom either. Just you.’ I tried to not think about the implications; Adam was my brother.
‘Bury me,’ he said ‘I want my body. But burn my things.’
It was two weeks before I came to find him. Just a little while with no returned calls. You’d think, he’s busy or depressed or went on a trip and didn’t tell any of us. Sometimes when Adam would stop answering his phone, he’d be fighting with Mom or Dahlia, Mom’s girlfriend. He’d emerge a few days later and say something like, ‘There’s enough in life to deal with.’ I knew what he meant.
But this time, none of us had been fighting with him, so I drove to Stroudsburg and pulled the key hidden in the light by the door. I called Saoirse first, before the police. ‘Is our baby okay?’ I asked, frantically, as I saw the foot turned in a strange direction off the couch and then flies racing past my head into the house. They must have desperately wanted to get in, to crawl into his mouth, crusted at the edges with puke; onto his eyes, across him. ‘Is our baby okay?’
‘Yes! Luke, what is it, Luke? What?’ I heard her say as I dropped the phone. Three empty bottles of pills were on the stand next to the couch: two
prescription, one white and red Tylenol bottle. My brother’s body. As I leaned down to pick up the phone, I avoided his face and thought of Saoirse’s belly.
I’d told her not to tell me if it was a girl or a boy because I wanted to be surprised, to not have any preconceived notions. That’s what I’d said.
There came, then, the invading thought. It slid past the narrowest passage of me, like a knife finding its way into masonry. What if it’s a boy?
He knew I’d come. He trusted me.
In the closet, there’s no note with the code for his phone. I’ll smash his phone and take out the card and break that, too. Underneath that, there’s a magazine. It’s on top of other things. I don’t want to lift it.
What if it’s a boy?
A set of eyes look up at me from the cover. It’s a teenage girls’ magazine, a boy who I vaguely remember from a movie; the awkward kid in family dramas. He’s smiling against a magenta background. The cover is rippled with age and use, but the colours are still bright, the boy still young and smiling.
Beneath it, a VHS tape. And now, yes, photos.
A stack of them almost as thick as playing cards, held together with a rubber band. They aren’t of our family. Young boys in bathing suits, their flesh pale or dark with tan. At the playground, turning around each other, in the motion of shouting or laughing. On stage at a school play, the auditorium dark. They must be as young as seven and as old as twelve. ‘Why would you keep these?’ I hear myself say out loud. I know why he had them, but why keep them, why not just use his phone to take photos and then delete them or… I don’t know why I’m trying to help him.
Then I realise that he probably didn’t take any of these: they’re too varied in the kind of picture and the eras they’re taken from. And that doesn’t make me feel better. If someone gave these to him. If he bought these. He’s dead. He’s dead now.
I sort through hurriedly, hoping that none will be naked or– There’s one.
A brown-haired boy sitting on the edge of a bed, laughing. No one else in the photo, and it’s night time. There’s a T-shirt and a pair of little trousers on the unmade bed. It’s an innocent photo. In the bottom right corner, a time stamp in a font that looks like a digital clock.
Under the stack of photos, there’s a folded up piece of notebook paper with
something in it. A small pendant, a small silver disk with a loop for a chain on top. SAINT NICHOLAS it says, the name arching across the top of the medal in embossed letters. There’s a man surrounded by children. He has a beard, and they’re all looking up to him. He has the middle and index finger of his right hand pointing upward. He has a pointed hat and a halo surrounding his head. SAINT NICHOLAS. There’s writing on the paper in pen, across its folds, in blue pen. I know It’s Adam’s handwriting.
Loving Saint Nicholas, May I strive to imitate you.
Give me courage, love and strength. And where I cannot be brave or strong, Please protect the children.
Amen.
I run to the bathroom to vomit, expecting my insides to burn their way out of me, across the sink and across the floor. But nothing happens except me kneeling, coughing and waiting for it.
When I was seven, my room was at the top of the stairs. There was a gate in front of the steps because Adam was still small and could totter down them. Dad and Mom’s room was to the left of the stairs, Adam’s to the right. I’d fallen down those stairs once, but didn’t remember it well; Mom said I was playing chase with the babysitter and I’d tumbled forward. My body remembered, though. I reached for the rail every time I went down those stairs. Still, now, I hold the rail on stairways, and Saoirse calls me ‘old man’ to tease me. Memory finds its way to stay with us, in our bodies, in our behaviours.
The first time with me, Dad was saying goodnight. He put his hand on my chest and told me to take my shirt off. The event is absolutely certain, but the details are dark at the edges. It’s the words I remember vividly, with their thick outlines. He told me he never slept with his shirt on. ‘Let me see you,’ he said, as he pulled the covers slow off my body. ‘Let me see you.’ Then there were the sensations. Not pleasant, not unpleasant, not warm or cold, but like he’d poured water over me that rushed against gravity, from my legs up to my head. It was a feeling that I’d grow to think I wanted. It was something we did together.
Three years, each night, coming into my room. Then he stopped.
Those first weeks, when I was left to fall asleep on my own, I’d fitfully wait for him to arrive, to see his form in the glow of my nightlight with the
bulb shaped like a candle flame. I’d stare at the ceiling, I’d hold the pillow. I’d think, ‘Why did my dad leave me?’
That was the year Adam turned seven. One night, I heard the sound of breathing by the open door. Dad walked past my room and down the hall. Adam’s door opened.
When I leave Adam’s house, Saoirse calls. ‘How was it?’ she asked.
‘How was it? What, like I just went to a movie or something?’
She breathes in to calm herself. She has a temper, but she knows and I know that we’ve both started this conversation the wrong way.
‘I’m sorry,’ I say, though I’m angry that I’m apologising first. Then she apologises too and everything lifts and I start to cry.
‘Was there anything you want to keep of his?’ she asks. I hadn’t even thought about taking anything; I was looking through his things for him, not for me.
‘I don’t think so,’ I say. ‘Nothing? He was your brother.’
I hang up on her. ‘He _is_my brother!’ I shout, and hit the steering wheel. The horn honks, and the sound is stupid enough to relieve me of my anger.
I drive away from Adam’s complex and towards home. The bags and the phone are in the trunk; when I make a turn, there’s a knocking sound from the inside.
There’s a 7-Eleven on the way and a dumpster on the side. I slow but see the cameras there. What if I’m caught throwing these things away: a bag full of pictures of children, whatever is on the VHS tape and the phone? If someone saw me, I’d be arrested. So I keep driving till I get to Conaught’s Hardware and I pull into the back parking lot, go to the trunk and find everything turned over on itself. I bring it to the front. First I drop the phone on the floor and push on it with my foot till it cracks. Then I stomp on it until it starts to chip away, till the little card, huddled inside, is exposed. I tear the photos and the magazines up. I pull the faces in half, the tiny bodies. I pull the shiny black ribbon of VHS tape out of its plastic and tear it in half.
I get out quickly and open the lid of the dumpster and push the bag in between the other garbage bags. It’s not a cremation of his desires, like he asked for, but it’ll be burned soon enough. Or the torn young faces will disintegrate over time, in a landfill, strewn through other people’s things. I close my eyes tight when I walk away. Blot the edges of the thing. Non-existence.
When I get home, I yell at Saoirse. I tell her I love her, and that sometimes I don’t think she knows how to be a normal human being. ‘Please tell me the exact way you think I should grieve,’ I say.
She doesn’t let herself be yelled at. She never does. She shouldn’t.
‘Well, why don’t you tell me the exact way to talk to you, so that I don’t hurt your feelings every time I open my mouth?’
‘A good start would be, "I’m sorry",’ I say. ”Your brother is dead, your brother is fucking dead I am so sorry.’ And then I’m shaking and crying and she puts her arms around me. She leans in so that the baby doesn’t keep us too far apart.
‘I was just thinking, I was… I don’t know, I wasn’t judging you at all. I just worry. I thought, is there something of Adam’s that would help you through?’
‘Through?’ I ask.
That night, as Saoirse gets into bed, I go to the bathroom to brush my teeth. When I’m done I take my shirt off and fold it, and before I take my pants off I empty the pockets. My wallet, my keys. A piece of paper. And a photograph. I unfold the paper, but I don’t need to. I know what I’ll see. Loving Saint
Nicholas… The prayer without the pendant.
And the photo, also folded twice into itself.
The boy on the edge of a bed. When I look at him now, I think, He looks just like us. He isn’t one of us, but he could be our brother. Or a son.
I try to remember when I saved these. In the house? In the car? There’s nothing there. A clipped-out hole in the day when I slid these into my pocket. Now I put them back in my pocket. I have to remember they’re there. I have to remember and not let Saoirse wash my pants. I’ll wear these tomorrow, I’ll throw these things away.
The bedroom is already dark and I put my clothes on the floor, folded squares like the squares in my pocket.
In bed, I say, ‘I’m sorry.’ But she’s asleep already. For a month now, in her pregnancy, she is awake one moment, asleep the next, like a blown-out flame.
I put my arm around her and say the prayer of Saint Nicholas to myself. There is no through, this is it.
We’re already through, and this is what it feels like.
‘Dad,’ Adam would call out at night. ‘Dad.’
The year his teeth started to change, the year he finished first grade. What would have happened if I’d called, too? A chorus of two boys, calling for their father? What was Mom doing? I want to think that the Ativan addiction had
started way back then, that she was all but unconscious, dealing with her own troubles. But wouldn’t that be just as bad–my mother, drugged out while my father went into my room at night, then my little brother’s?
Sometimes my father would poke his head in my door and ask if I was okay, and I would nod, and lie awake and stare at the ceiling and wonder what I’d done wrong.
When I was in my twenties, just before Dad died, I started to talk about it in therapy. My therapist asked where my mother was during all of that, and it was the first time I broke down crying.
‘Sometimes we focus so much on what one parent did that we don’t look at what the other parent didn’t do,’ she said.
When I told the therapist that I had felt abandoned, I was terrified. I felt implicated. But she explained that this was how things normally go. That kids aren’t held down and forcibly violated.
‘Your body responded the way bodies respond. But you were too young to understand what was happening. It’s hard for a child to know how damaging the abuse can be until it stops,’ she said. ‘Then they’re left wondering why the thing that happened with their abuser over a period of time suddenly ceased.’
She was full of perspectives like this that provided a great relief to me. A few sessions later, she asked me if my brother was seeking help, too.
Not as far as I knew. She asked me what I thought of that, and I said I didn’t know.
It felt as if we were still in different rooms. Adam down the hall, me in the darkness. Like someone passing through me to get where he wanted to be now, parting me on the way.
But I didn’t tell her that.
Saoirse is on the phone in the other room; she’s talking about the baby. She’s careful, even when talking to others, to not say the gender. I can hear her wavering as she speaks.
I open my laptop and go to the Megan’s Law page on the state website.
There’s a picture of police helicopters and text telling me that people are safer if this information is online. Under that, there’s a green button I must click to agree I can’t use the information to harass the people listed, or their families. I click it, and a side bar with MOST WANTED OFFENDERS pops up. I type in Adam’s zip code, and a small list of people appears. All men. Their photos. Their addresses. What they’ve done. I click on one; he’s 20.
The page states in capital letters that there’s a tattoo on his leg of a jester. This man is an ‘SVP’ which stands for Sexually Violent Predator. As far as Pennsylvania law is concerned, he falls under an abbreviation.
I click on another, this time a man who has abused a child. He looks young, too.
TATTOO: BACK, MYSTIC SHOOTING STAR.
There are a few pictures, taken across a few years, I guess so the offender becomes recognisable. So that people can keep their neighbourhood safe. It’s not their neighbourhoods they need to keep safe. It’s their own families. It’s whatever they ignored in the middle of the night, just down the hall.
I have a strange fear, scrolling down, scrolling through, that I’ll see my own face. A little square, Luke Edmonton, in row with the others.
I click on another zip code. I’m not there, either. Of course I’m not, I haven’t done anything, of course I don’t see my own face.
There’s a woman in this county, she’s in her 60s, she looks like anyone’s grandmother or aunt or a family friend. I wonder what she’s done? I’m about to open up her file when Saoirse walks by, and I close the laptop, but she catches me. She probably just thinks I’m looking at porn, and doesn’t say anything, smiles as she passes the doorway.
And I realise that I was looking through the site for Adam.
Saoirse’s voice, from down the hall, comes as a jab. ‘Are you done,’ she asks, ‘looking at other women?’ Then she’s in the room. ‘Feel,’ she says. I put my hand on her belly. There’s the knock from the inside, and I remember the sound the bags made in the trunk. She looks down. ‘Just a couple more weeks till you meet Mommy and Daddy,’ she says.
But what if it’s a boy?
‘I was in high school, and we had a group field trip,’ I told the therapist. ‘They also brought some of the middle school boys along. And the high school boys… we relentlessly teased the younger kids, throwing wads of paper at them, stealing their bags. And there was this one kid, he was… I don’t remember his name. He was little, though. Hadn’t even grown into being eleven or twelve yet. And even though I joined in teasing the other boys, I thought, if anyone goes _near_him, I’ll break their nose. And so to protect him, I got up and sat next to him.’
‘Was there any physical contact between you?’ the therapist asked.
‘Listen, I know if I say anything like that, you have to report me, you have
to tell the police’ I said. ‘So I know why you’re asking, but no, nothing, I just sat next to him. I was protecting him. But I felt… something. And I’m not even gay or anything, but there was… a feeling. Nothing happened. I’m not just saying that.’
‘Luke,’ she said, and her saying my name pulled me out of it. ‘You were a child then.’
‘But not like he was,’ I said.
‘No, not like he was. But you were still a child. You know, most abused children do not become abusers?’
‘Why did it happen to my Dad, then?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘There are lots of reasons it could have, but I don’t know.’ She shifted in her seat. ‘There’s a group,’ she said. ‘Would you consider going? It’s a therapy group for survivors.’
She wrote the information down.
The therapist had probably saved my life. But after that, I stopped seeing her. And I didn’t go to the group right away. I should have. But I didn’t until
Adam was gone.
There are twelve of us in metal chairs.
This is the second time in a week that I’m here. I told Saoirse that I was driving around to clear my head.
One of us stands.
‘It was my aunt and uncle,’ she says. ‘I was eight. My mom was a drunk. She’s okay now, I talk to her and she’s sober, and I don’t know why I’m defending her. I just… Anyway. Back then. My mom’s sister… They took me on after Mom was arrested for the second time for a DUI and had to go to jail. So suddenly I was living with them, and the first night, my uncle…’
Gilbert, who runs the group, says, ‘Take a deep breath, and if you can keep going, keep going. But don’t feel you have to.’
‘I can,’ she says. ‘I can, I can. My uncle sat me down on the couch and put his hand on my leg, and my aunt was standing right there, and she said, "Don’t worry, that’s just what we do in this house."’
‘How long were you there?’ a man to my right asks.
‘Five years,’ she said. ‘I didn’t realise it wasn’t normal until I told my friend at school about it.’
There are meetings like this everywhere. There are public service
announcements when you’re a kid. There are books about it. There are sites on the internet devoted to it. There are laws around it. No, it’s not normal, but it’s everywhere, so what is it instead? It’s happening all the time, happening right now. And still we only talk about it, really talk about it, in these little rooms, where it looks like an AA meeting, where we’re confessing, or reviewing it.
‘Does anyone want to add anything?’ Gilbert says. I’m about to stand and ask:
Do any of you feel afraid it will follow you?
Do you feel afraid it will trace its way through you, hunt you down, make you become it?
Did you wonder if it happened to the adults when they were kids?
Do you wonder if that means it will come through you too, like you’re a marionette and you can’t help it; just a current, a bend of history, a tide, an invader?
Do you feel like you’ve escaped? And if not, how can we escape? How can we get out?
My wife is pregnant. My wife is pregnant, I need to know. What if it’s a boy?
But before I can speak, I recognise a face across from me. And that face can answer those questions.
Mystic shooting star.
There was an ad on TV when I was a boy, a PSA. It had a child actor in it, although actually the child actor had a rare genetic disorder or something, something that kept him looking like a kid most of his life. So this adult, who looked like a child, was talking to the viewer; talking to me, talking to Adam. ‘If someone touches you in a way you don’t like, say NO then GO and TELL someone you trust!’ He ran in front of giant plastic letters that spelled NO and
GO and TELL.
And at school the guidance counsellor came into our classes with a puppet shaped like a dolphin and the dolphin on her hand told us that only doctors were allowed to touch us under where we wore our bathing suits, and that that was a ‘good touch’, but otherwise it was a bad touch, and if it was a bad touch, we should tell Mommy and Daddy. The dolphin nodded, and we nodded. Especially if they forced us to be touched. That was the worst, the dolphin said. No one should force you to be touched.
Tell someone we trust, but we trusted Dad. We trusted Mom. Don’t let anyone force you. But we weren’t forced.
‘Dad,’ Adam called from down the hall.
After the meeting, I follow the man with the mystic shooting star tattoo to the parking lot.
‘Hey!’ I say, as he reaches his car, and he gets in and closes the door and opens the window just a crack.
‘What?’ he says.
‘I just…’ I’m not sure how to go on. ‘I just wanted to talk to you. I’m new, this is my second time here. I’m trying to make friends.’
I think he notices my wedding ring, because he says, ‘Are you married?’
‘I used to be,’ I lie, as though my normal life will be too much for him. He rolls down the window all the way, and I think, suddenly, of the bag sitting by the door at home, filled with Saoirse’s things, ready to go as soon as she feels the baby coming. Then I feel him holding my hand.
‘I’m Bryce,’ he says.
I look around. Everyone else is going their separate ways or lingering just past the entrance of the VFW, illuminated by the orange lights inside, being there for one another. When he touches me, it’s like the truth shows in a flash. His name is Jeremy Silver. The mystic star tattoo shoots from shoulder to skull. Not Bryce.
Is he allowed to lie about his name? He has to tell everyone in his neighbourhood that he lives there and that he’s a sex offender. He’s also not supposed to be where children gather. Every move he makes could be a potential crime. I think about him accidentally walking past a playground on his way to a grocery store and someone seeing him, recognising him, calling the police.
‘What’s your name?’ he asks.
‘Luke,’ I say, though again I have this urge to lie, have the urge to say: Adam.
‘I just want to be a father,’ I said to the therapist once. ‘Is there a reason you think you can’t be?’
I wanted to yell at her, but I sat in silence until the feeling either went away or was just driven deeper into me. Who can tell the difference?
‘Not like mine,’ I finally said.
‘What would it mean to be a father?’ she asked, after a time. ‘Are there images?’
‘Holding my kid up in the backyard,’ I said. ‘Against the sun. We’re smiling.’ ‘A boy?’ she asked.
Two days later, I go to a restaurant in the mall with Jeremy Silver. He’s still calling himself Bryce. The restaurant has memorabilia on the walls. Old newspapers above the urinal in the bathroom, a kid’s red wagon hanging from the ceiling. Every booth has a different glass lampshade.
‘I’d like to kill the fucks that do that to kids,’ Bryce, or Jeremy, says. He’s talking about the woman from the other night. Her uncle and aunt. The waiter comes over and leaves a plate of fries for us to share. Jeremy has a drink ordered from the restaurant’s klutzy cocktail menu; it’s a pale orange and has Swedish Fish floating in it, soaking up the alcohol. ‘Her own family,’ he goes on. ‘Maniacs.’
‘What happened to you?’ I ask. ‘You don’t have to tell me. But, if you want to.’
‘What happened to you?’ he counters, quickly. ‘My father,’ I say.
‘I’m sorry.’ He eats a French fry. ‘And my brother.’
‘Your brother? Which side was he on?’
Side?
‘He was like me,’ I say. But maybe one day he wasn’t anymore. Maybe one day he was like my dad.
Jeremy eats the Swedish fish and, chewing, says, ‘There are a hundred ways to hurt kids. Even when we’re born. Circumcision. Genital mutilation. Do you know that sometimes they botch that and cut off the head of the dick? Or the penis… I guess that’s a better word for it when you’re a kid. That should be against the law.’
‘Did that happen to you?’
He gives me a look. ‘What the fuck? No, I have everything intact. My physical body, anyway.’
He turns to look around before he speaks again, and I can see the mystic star shooting just past the collar of his shirt, seized in the mid-air of his flesh. It’s mystic because one of the points has Sanskrit on it. I want to ask him what
the words say, but I don’t want him to know I noticed it. He turns back to me and says, ‘Do you know there’s stuff like, all the time, just going on? That right now, some kids are getting abused?’
‘What do you think is going on with the people who do it?’ I ask. He eats a little more, then says, ‘Satan.’
He doesn’t continue, and I’m not sure what to say, so I sit, stunned, until the silence lingers too long and he elaborates. ‘All that stuff in the 80s, you know? The day-care stuff, butcher knives up the ass, skin hung on trees. People just worshipping something. I don’t know. Power or what.’
‘But my Dad wasn’t like that–‘
‘Sure, sure, there are lots of people that are just fucked up. But like what that woman at the meeting said. Where they just sat her down and said, "this is how it is, you’re going to get raped", or whatever. That’s devil stuff. Child porn. That sort of thing.’
‘Don’t you think it’s because it happened to the person, the abuser, when he was a kid or that it can, you know follow through. Like, It’s an impulse, or…’ ‘How do you think the devil works?’ he says quickly, like it was the stupidest question I could have asked. ‘He jumps from abuser and into the
kid and then the kid grows up, and then that’s it.’
I want to ask if that’s what happened to him. I want to ask if it ever ends, or if there’s always a lingering threat. _Will it happen to your kids?_I want to know. _Would you ever have kids?_I start formulating a question that will reveal something, that will help me understand, but before it comes together, he says something.
‘It’s like the devil walking through high grass. Wsssh, you can hear it. Wsssh, the grass parting, a path opening up, and everything just making way until he gets to the fingertips and touches the boy, or the girl. Wsssh, and suddenly, he’s in the next person, and that sound is inside him. That breath of the devil parting the high grass.’
Adam called me once.
Said he’d been going through it. Could I come by?
‘I don’t know what to do,’ he said, when I arrived. ‘I got fired.’
‘From the church group? We can find you another job. Want me to ask–‘ ‘It’s not about the job,’ he said.
I sat down next to him.
Before he told me the story, he said please, please don’t tell anyone.
He was twenty, I was twenty-three. That summer, he’d gotten a job with a church group, though he wasn’t sure he believed in God. He was aimless, but they liked him. They didn’t care that he didn’t talk much. He told me he sang a lot, and that surprised me: my brother singing revival songs. He was assigned to be a residential director at Youth Fest In Christ, a week-long camp that took place on a college campus, with middle school students staying in the dorms, paired up with roommates they didn’t know. The supervisors wanted him to make sure the kids didn’t drink or smoke or fuck or swear. They were supposed to have fun, but with the Lord in mind.
At night, Adam was to stay up until 11:00 to make sure everyone was asleep or at least quiet enough that they might be. He would walk up and down the halls, and in his own dorm room try to read the Bible and take notes. It was alien to both of us; we hadn’t had any religion beyond a half-hearted trip to the Lutheran church down the street when we were kids. All around us, Catholic kids and Protestant kids, a whole world we weren’t a part of.
Just after 11, there was a knock on his door.
In the doorway, a boy named Micah, smaller than the rest of the boys his age. ‘I asked him what was up,’ Adam said. ‘And then he came in and asked if he could tell me something, and asked me to not say anything to anyone else.’ Micah’s roommate had been using swear words all weekend, had said that he was just there because his parents forced him to come, that the InFaith worksheets were a waste of time, and worst of all, was going up two floors to
the girls’ rooms. Micah had begged Adam not to tell anyone.
Adam paused. ‘The rooms,’ he said, finally, ‘they were… tiny. It was just a desk and then a foot or two between that and the bed. So. We were. He was. Sitting on the edge of the bed next to me when he told me.’
‘What happened?’ I asked, quietly. ‘Nothing,’ Adam said.
The boy was wearing shorts and a T-shirt, and when Adam talked to him, he put his hand on the boy’s thigh.
‘I sort of, I don’t know, I felt something, I–‘ I stood up.
‘Why the fuck are you telling me this?’ I shouted. ‘Why?’ Adam put his face in his hands and started to cry. ‘Adam. What happened?‘
‘Nothing!’ he said through the muffle of his hands. He pulled them away but wouldn’t look up. ‘Nothing, nothing, I just… But… He was gone the next day,
and he’d told the camp director that I made him feel weird. They asked how, they asked if I’d done anything, and he said no, nothing, but that I wouldn’t stop the kid’s roommate from getting drunk, that I wouldn’t help him, and that he didn’t feel like he had anyone to turn to. Or, well, his parents… his parents said that he told them that. I was fired the next day. I’ve just been… waiting for something to happen.’
‘Adam, you need to fucking get help,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was doing when I called you.’
‘Not me,’ I demanded. ‘Someone. It can’t be me, it can’t.’ I walked to the door and when I opened it, I turned and saw my brother, his eyes now puffy with the crying.
‘Who else would listen?’ he said, alone at the table.
When I get home from the restaurant, I sit in my car in the driveway and I call the therapist. I haven’t spoken with her in two years, but she answers after a few rings.
‘It’s Luke Edmonton,’ I say.
‘I know, hi Luke. Is this an emergency?’
‘No, It’s not an emergency, but I have to ask you something, and I have to ask right now.’
‘Go ahead.’
‘If you found out that someone had those… feelings, about kids, what should you do?’
She’s quiet for a second. Then she asks, ‘Is this person a clear danger to children? Is the urge overwhelming?’
‘I don’t know.’ I realise that she might be asking me a different question. ‘There’s this guy,’ I say, quickly. ‘And he was on the sex offender registry and I met him at a group, the survivors group? You told me to go to? And he’s lying about his name, and I just don’t know why he’s there.’
There’s a moment. Then, ‘Is this about someone at the group, or about someone else?’
My brother Adam had magazines in a shoe box in his closet.
My brother Adam used to tell me his whole life he thought about what our father had done and couldn’t forget it at all, like it was a mark on him.
My brother Adam put his hand on a boy’s leg.
My brother Adam had a prayer for children and a pendant to protect them. My brother Adam had a photo of a naked boy.
Each possible statement rolls through my head.
‘I’m sorry about your brother,’ she says, and my thoughts stop so abruptly that my head hurts.
‘My brother Adam… ‘
‘I saw the notice. In the paper.’
I hesitate. I didn’t think she’d remember. Or that if she saw that Adam had died, that she’d make the connection that it was _that_Adam.
‘Listen, you should really make–‘ she says, but a light goes on in the house and I hang up on her.
I go in, and Saoirse is sitting on the edge of the bed.
‘Hi, sorry, I just needed to drive longer tonight. Just to clear my head.’ ‘Luke,’ she says. ‘What is this?’
She’s holding the photo of the boy. It’s divided by a scar of white cross made from the folds.
The first time Adam hurt himself, he was twelve. He sliced the top of his arm open with a pair of scissors, three lines across the top, Holy Spirit, Son and Father. We were in his room and he pulled up the top of his sleeve.
‘Did it hurt?’ I asked, blankly. ‘That’s the point,’ he said.
We were sitting on the edge of his bed, and the lines were still red, and punctuated by scabs.
‘Do you want to do it?’ he asked.
‘I think it would hurt,’ I said. I felt like his little brother instead of his older brother. ‘And I don’t care if that’s the point.’
Adam stabbed the top of my arm with the tip of the scissors.
‘Fuck!’ I shouted. It was like a dog biting in play, an unpleasant surprise from someone you trust.
I got up and left the room. I didn’t know what to do, so, stupidly, I told on him. Mom was at the kitchen table, Dad was looking in the fridge. ‘Adam cut his arm up,’ I said. ‘And look.’ I pulled my sleeve up to where a pearl of blood clung at the puncture.
My dad walked past me and up the stairs.
‘You shouldn’t have said anything,’ my mom said.
It wasn’t until we were older and Mom was sober that I could think of her holding us as babies, cradling us. Even though I’d seen photos of us just out of the hospital, helpless and tucked close to her body, it never seemed like the
woman in the photos could have been her. ‘Do you even care?’ I spat at her.
I went back up the stairs. I saw my father through the open door to Adam’s room. The scissors were on the carpet, and Adam was under Dad’s arm with his head against Dad’s chest. Dad had tears coming from his eyes.
‘Why would you do this?’ he said. He rocked back and forth, holding my brother. ‘Don’t ever do this again, you understand?’
My brother swayed with him, crying too, scarred up the arm.
The rain is falling as I leave the house the next day. The sound of the devil in the grass. I’m going to Jeremy Silver’s apartment, to the address on Pennsylvania’s sex offenders’ website.
I told Saoirse it was a photo of a childhood friend of Adam’s and mine.
I could tell she didn’t totally believe me, maybe because the photo looked more recent than photos of our childhoods should have, but the cross in the folds had ruined the picture just enough.
‘So what’s his name?’ she asked. ‘Bryce,’ I said.
Jeremy’s apartment is in a building called Forest Village. The brick is tan; concrete balconies, beige railings, green awning over the entrance. At some point, a police officer walked through this building with flyers of Jeremy’s face, sliding them under each door. ‘This Notice Is Provided For Advisory Purposes Only’, it would have read. ‘This Is Not A Wanted Person’.
Were his neighbours kind to him? Did they ever talk? Did they look at him with fear as they walked down the hall? What happened if one of his neighbours had kids over? Or had a kid?
What if it’s a boy?
Someone walks up to the door and I get out of the car and walk up quickly behind. She gives me a quizzical look, but doesn’t question me as I walk in behind her.
Jeremy’s front door is brown with a brass knocker. He opens the door in a college sweatshirt and shorts.
‘How did you know where I live?’
I don’t say anything, and I feel then that he must know how. He asks me in. The apartment is clean, nondescript. It looks like Adam’s. There’s a book on the kitchen counter with a baby on the cover. Jeremy pulls two plastic bottles
of water from his fridge and hands me one.
I find myself making sure it makes the sound of the lid cracking as I open it.
I take a drink and look at the book on the counter.
‘Oh,’ Jeremy says, and holds it up. The Circumcision Trauma: Ending An Ancient Atrocity.‘I just can’t believe they would do this to a baby. It’s barbaric, if you think about it. I joined a group a while ago that does protests, online petitions and stuff.’ He offers me the book.
‘No, that’s all right.’ ‘Are you?’ he asks. ‘Am I?’
‘Sometimes they accidentally cut off the glans. You know, the head? For what? So they can keep worshipping some Jewish God?’
I steady myself. ‘It’s not just Jewish kids,’ I say.
‘Oh, I know, of course, but still.’ He tosses the book back on the counter and sits down on the couch. I think about his activism group. How would they feel if they knew what he’d done? They’d probably shun him, no matter what he did. The only way he could make the world better at this point would be to not try to help.
‘Who’s Bryce?’ I ask.
He looks at his hand, holding the water. Outside, someone shouts across the street as the rain picks up.
‘It’s not like you’re not the first person who’s just showed up at my door,’ he says. ‘But look, I’m trying. I’ve been trying.’
‘Trying to what?’
‘Are we friends?’ he asks. I don’t say anything.
‘Hold on,’ he says. He walks out of the room, and I hear him shuffling around.
‘I came to ask you something,’ I say, but he doesn’t respond. My phone vibrates again and again in my pocket and I look at it. Saoirse.
Jeremy comes back into the room. ‘I have to–‘
‘Hold on,’ he says. ‘I have to show you something.’ He’s holding a VHS tape. ‘Just… promise you won’t say anything.’
Jeremy goes up to the TV and kneels in front. ‘Promise,’ he says. But I don’t answer.
The phone vibrates again in my pocket. _It’s happening!_A text reads.
He reaches behind and hooks up the VCR; a relic, a machine from childhood.
He puts the tape in and turns the TV on, presses play and moves to the side.
On it, a little boy is sitting at the edge of a bed. The film is shaky.
A flash comes across the little boy. Photos. The little boy laughs. There’s the sound of breathing near the camera.
‘Do you like this game?’ A man’s voice behind the camera, so close to the mic that it fuzzes in the TV speakers at the edge of each word. It’s not Jeremy’s voice.
‘Yeah,’ the little boy says. My phone vibrates. ‘Jeremy,’ I say.
‘Now jump up and down on the bed!’ the voice says, and more flashes illuminate the room, the arrival of a force of light. The boy gets up and starts jumping and laughs more. A woman’s voice, then. ‘Now we want you to take your shirt off, okay, honey?’
‘I’m dizzy!’ the little boy says. My phone vibrates.
The boy takes his shirt off. His skin looks soft and muted white against the room, almost translucent when the camera flashes cut across him. He looks familiar. He looks like someone I know.
I stand up. ‘I have to call the police,’ I say. ‘Jeremy, I have to–‘ ‘No!’ he shouts. ‘No, you don’t understand!’
The boy is laughing on the TV. The man’s voice comes again, pushing on the boundaries of the speakers. My phone vibrates.
‘Look,’ Jeremy says. ‘Look!‘ I pull my phone out.
Saoirse: Where are you.
Saoirse: You’re supposed to have your phone.
Saoirse: I’m calling an ambulance.
‘Please, put your phone away!’ Jeremy presses pause as the boy is leaning back to lie down and a flash has just started to invade the room again.
‘That’s me.’ Jeremy touches the TV screen. ‘Look, that’s me. The boy… That’s me. Me.’
He’s sitting on the floor in front of the TV, looking up at me. The star is frozen on his skin, paused like a flash, seized in the air.
‘Jeremy, why do you still have this?’
He closes his eyes and starts to cry. I kneel in front of him. My phone is
ringing, but I ignore it. I reach into my other pocket and pull out the tiny sheet of paper.
‘Here,’ I say. He opens it. ‘Read it.’
‘Loving Saint Nicholas,’ he says, ‘May I strive to imitate you.
‘Give me courage, love and strength. ‘And where…’
He takes a deep breath.
‘And where I cannot be brave or strong, please protect the children.’ ‘Amen,’ I say.
‘Amen,’ he says. And like a photo, for a moment, everything is still.
At the hospital, time moves forward, the baby is being born. I rush to the desk, soaked through by the rain. ‘Saoirse Edmonton,’ I say.
‘Finally,’ the receptionist says.
I put on a gown and run down the hallway.
A doctor is about to usher me in, but I pause. I close my eyes. I say a different prayer.
Please Dad.
Please let the devil die.
And I see my brother’s face. A boy, in a backyard pool, the sun falling on him, my father standing behind me, watching.
Please let the devil have died in Adam. Amen.
I walk into the room, where the baby is already in the nurse’s arms, smeared with blood and fluid from my wife’s body. And it’s screaming, screaming itself into life.
Saoirse looks up at me, not in anger or relief, but confusion.
And the doctor turns to me to say, with beaming pride and innocence, ‘It’s a