The Explorer was in the driveway, and Dad was standing at the top of a flight steps over a garage, his eyes wild.
There was no time to be afraid. Even though I was shaking and bawling and breathing through my own snot, I pushed fear away and bolted out of the car.
Mom was right behind me, her car door slamming. “Curtis! No! Get down here!”
At the bottom of the steps a girl was screaming. She stepped back to let us pass, probably believing we had control over Dad, as if he was a psych patient on the lam and we had been charged with bringing him back.
When I reached the middle of the stairs, I had a clearer view of Dad, who had stepped inside the apartment. The gun that Sam and I hadn’t been able to find was in his hands. It wasn’t a large thing, but somehow that made it even more terrifying. He held the gun out before him, aiming into the dark, gaping hole of the apartment. For a split second he shifted his gaze down the steps, to where I stood.
I flinched, as if he’d shot me with that look. I wanted to know, to believe deep down, that my dad couldn’t kill anyone. He wouldn’t, I was absolutely sure, kill me.
“Curtis,” Mom called, her voice oddly calm, as if she were negotiating a hostage release. “Why don’t you come down here, so we can talk?”
Dad didn’t say anything, but I’d lived with him long enough to know that his silence was itself an answer. Aiming a gun at the man who killed his son might not have been right, but I could see that it was his only answer at that moment, and he believed it was right.
I wiped my sleeves over my eyes to get rid of the tears. “Dad! Please. You have to come with us now.”
“Get them away from here, Kathleen,” Dad called, gesturing with his free hand.
“What’s going on?” the girl at the bottom of the steps called, her voice strained with panic.
Mom turned. “Call 9-1-1! Right now!”
The girl hesitated, then dashed off in the direction of the house, looking back over her shoulder.
“Curtis,” Mom tried again.
“Dad! Please! Put the gun down!”
Dad looked down at us, like for just a moment he was considering it. And then another man was visible, hooking an arm around Dad’s neck.
In that split second between seeing and reacting, between realizing what was happening and being able to voice a scream, the man dragged Dad into the apartment.
“It’s not loaded!” I screamed, although I wasn’t sure this was true. It had seemed such a simple thing at the time, such a clever solution: switch the bullets for batteries. Attention, America: We have solved the issue of gun control. Now, I knew that Dad could have bought more ammunition, and that a police officer charging up these stairs wouldn’t care if the gun was loaded or not. Sam and I hadn’t solved anything.
Mom was right behind me as we raced up the steps. The screams coming from my own mouth were unintelligible, like speaking in tongues with the spirit inside you. Except that what was inside me was my whole life, spilling out in an animal’s yell. The staircase rocked beneath our feet—death by falling off a wobbly staircase—but I figured that the collapse of the stairs might even be a blessing right then. It was the least of our worries.
I reached the top first, elbowing my mom out of the way, a feat that surprised me as much as it would have surprised my P.E. teacher in my former life. It was dark inside the apartment, and there were heaps of clothes and shoes and food wrappers on the floor. Dad and the man who must have been Robert Saenz had fallen to the ground, where they writhed on the carpet like a two-headed, eight-limbed beast. Dad still had hold of the gun and was ramming it against Robert’s ribs, but it seemed like a shaky hold at best.
“Don’t! Don’t—” I screamed, but Dad pulled the trigger. The gun clicked, but nothing happened.
Robert freed his hands and got them both around Dad’s neck in a choke hold.
“It’s not loaded!” I screamed again, this time at Robert. “Let him go! He was just trying to scare you!” More than anything, I wanted this to be true. I believed it. I lunged for that thick arm, trying to pull it off Dad’s neck. The hold was way too tight, and I couldn’t budge his grip even slightly. Dad’s face was turning a violent reddish color, his eyes bulging. If I didn’t know who he was, I wouldn’t have known him at all.
Mom was on top of Robert’s legs, trying to pin him into place. Her hands were struggling to get the gun from Dad’s grasp, and all of a sudden the gun was pointed directly at her.
I heard myself scream OhmyGodohmyGodohmyGod, screaming and screaming because I could see how this was going to end, with the gun loaded and discharging, the way guns did, and the bullet entering my mother’s chest, splintering through skin and bone to organs, to the spongy insides that make us everything we are.
But as it turned out, that’s not what happened.
Mom wrestled the gun away, and she leaned back on her haunches and aimed at Robert Saenz, who was still choking my dad, and said, “Let him go. Let him go, and we’ll put an end to all of this.”
“Please, please,” I begged, grabbing on to Robert Saenz’s legs, as if I could distract him. He kicked me, his foot connecting with my shoulder, and I tried again. I knew only the barest of facts about Robert Saenz at that point, but I would learn more later, when the newspaper published a giant feature that was fascinating and horrible at the same time, spilling the guts of our family for the entire world to read if they wanted. Robert Saenz, the article would claim, had been the family’s bad seed, the one who always needed bailing out. He had fathered a child, a boy who was about my age, but never visited the kid or paid a cent of child support, so the term father could be used only as a technicality. He had taken drugs for more than half his life, beginning when he was younger than me.
But I didn’t know any of that then.
At that moment, he was the man who had killed my brother, the man who was going to kill my father. Asphyxiation, broken windpipe, broken neck. “Shoot him!” I cried. Would I have said this if I had time to think and plan and be rational?
Maybe.
His hands still on Dad’s neck, Robert Saenz turned to look at Mom.
Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her shaking, the gun in her hands wavering.
I had wasted years of my life being scared of little things when I should have been saving all my energy for this moment. My screams felt like a prayer, like a reckoning with God— Don’t don’t don’t let Dad die.
And then Dad’s head hit the floor with a sickening thud. He didn’t move. I could hear sirens now, and realized I had been hearing them for the past minute, only now they were closer, surrounding us.
Robert Saenz was reaching for the gun when Mom pulled the trigger.
And then the whole world went black.