You can’t do anything right, can you?” Drew says. He said, as we stood together in my father’s workshop.
He pushes past me and gets in our father’s face.
“You’re going to hit me, huh? You piece of shit. That was a mistake, wasn’t it? Wish you could take that back now, don’t you?”
Drew pushes him to the ground. He screams and my brother falls on him. His fingers, not mine, wrap around my father’s neck. He squeezes the life out of him. He does. I didn’t . . .
I blink, and I see the blood. It pools around my father as he convulses on the floor. It seeps up the side of his shirt. I feel a dampness on my forearm again. When I look down, I see his blood staining the paleness of my own skin. The emotions strike like lightning. My teeth grind together and my vision tunnels. My other hand tears at my father’s blood, clawing at it, trying to rend the stain from my skin. But it won’t come off. Ever. No matter what I do. No matter what I have done.
I didn’t . . .
Drew grunts with the effort. My father’s feet kick out. Then they shudder. And the blood keeps coming. The pool getting wider, a darker red against the floor. The smell, tinny and surprisingly sour, touches my nostrils. I cough.
And Drew is standing before me. He is grabbing my shirt. Shaking me. Laughing over the body of our dead father.
THE NEXT MORNING, I wake up and think it is all a dream. I wander through the house. Down to the basement. I creep into my father’s workshop. I find the stool upright. The floor pristine. Even his model on the table, waiting for him to come home.
I move back up the stairs. His keys, with the Ford logo key chain, are gone. Clutching the wall, I look out into the garage. My father’s car is gone. The space it had taken shines stark and empty. He’s at work. He will come home and return to his hobby like nothing ever happened. I smile before reality returns like it always does. I back up, sliding down the wall. My hands cover my head. My body shakes as I remember Drew dragging me into the bathroom. Together, we cleaned our father’s blood away. Afterwards, I sat on the floor, my sleeve up, just staring at the stain that still would not come off my forearm.
Together we rolled him up in the carpet from the foyer, one we would replace the next day at some cheap store by the airport. We lifted him awkwardly up the stairs, into the back of his Explorer. Drove to the access road. I got out and lowered the chain, jumping back in as my brother rolled slowly over it. He sent me to find the rock that would hold the gas pedal down. We stood together, side by side, as the car rattled across the dock, splashing into the water and sinking out of sight far faster than I thought it would.
“I cracked the windows so it would fill up with water,” Drew said, emotionless. “Not enough for him to float out, though. That would have been stupid.” He laughed. “Like something you would do, bro.”
As my father’s lifeless body sank to the bottom of the pond, into the depths of the long-dead swimming hole, my brother moved to my side. I felt his hand atop my shoulder. A loving squeeze. So much like my father did to Drew the day of our mother’s funeral.
“I love you, Liam,” my brother softly said. “It’s just you and me now . . . Just you and me.”
We did everything together that day. Everything except touch my father’s keys. Only Drew did that.