I once had a little brother, and I loved him.
I suppose I still love him, as much as one can love the dead.
Sure, we used to argue about all kinds of trivial things, the way brothers often do, and yes, I used to pick on him for no good reason at all sometimes, but he was still my brother. He was still my flesh and blood. So, you can see that I never meant for anything to happen to him. I only meant to scare him, and that’s the God’s-honest truth.
It’s difficult, if not impossible, to explain exactly how it happened, but these people want answers, and I figure it’s probably easier to write it down than to explain it face to face. I just don’t think I can handle that right now. The mere thought of telling my story to Doctor Pollermo while he stares at me from behind his big, dorky glasses, judging me, dissecting me, scratching down notes on his clipboard as he calmly walks me through “the night in question”—the mere thought of it makes me nauseous. Besides, the last thing I need right now is some damn shrink telling me what I already know is true: I’m crazy. Oh, not crazy like walking-around-like-a-zombie, drooling-on-myself crazy, but crazy just the same. That’s the bottom line. That’s why I’m in this soft little room, jotting down my own set of notes with my trusty blue Crayola, so that maybe, just maybe, I can convince myself otherwise.
So yes, once upon a time, as they say, I had a little brother and I loved him. We lived with our parents on Carver Road in Hevven, in a nice little raised-ranch in a quiet little neighborhood, and we were a normal, happy family. Then Tommy disappeared, and that changed everything. Soon, everything that was normal and happy about our family got flushed down the shitter.
When I was little, some of us kids from the neighborhood used to go skating out on Gilbert’s pond. Once in a while, we’d get a hockey game going, but mostly we just skated around, and even the kids who didn’t have skates would come out on the ice to slide around in their winter boots, simply because they could. In the middle of December, one of us would usually volunteer to test the ice by walking out a ways and jumping up and down on it until everyone was satisfied that it was safe. By bitter January, you could usually count on the pond being frozen solid, strong as concrete, and we’d grow reckless in our ways, all of us piling onto the ice without even bothering to test it. But come the end of March, and the ice would always betray us, send one or more of us crashing through up to our knees, where the cold water waited like some kind of sleeping monster.