matchbook

’m four.

My brother, Chris, is about two.

We kneel at the foot of the carpeted stairs, stuck inside our waiting.

“What is it?” my little brother asks.

We’ve come to the foot of the stairs—and no further—because of a thing we’ve heard: our mother, screaming. 

She isn’t screaming anymore. It’s quiet. We look to the second-floor landing, which seems full of nothing at all.

“What is it?” my brother asks again.

The answer, I realize, is here for me.

I tell him, “The baby died.”

We wait for our mother to come to us. Instead, the door behind us swings, and large men rush up the stairs.

I’m eight.

I’ve come awake in the dark, heartbeat wild in my throat.

In these nightmares, nothing happens, exactly. It’s more like things stop happening. This is a sign: at vision’s periphery, an orange glow will have appeared.

“The orange light,” I let my parents know.

They want to be understanding, but they’re confused. I’m at a loss to explain what terrifies me in the dream.

Later—years later—I’ll try again.

I’ll be working on fiction, thinking about applying to graduate school. One of my stories will have to do with the dreams, the orange light. Though evocative, it will be bad.

The story of a kid with nightmares isn’t much of a story, it turns out. The story of a kid who’s stalked in his head doesn’t move, doesn’t offer much arc.

I’m fifteen.

I smoke pot with my friend and two older boys in a theater parking lot. We’re going to the midnight movie.

One of the older boys is named B—. In less than a month, he’ll steal his dad’s car, along with several credit cards. He’ll be caught. In jail, he’ll hang himself.

News of this will pass in the halls of our school in undertones.

He had a slight build, this kid. A sweet, live smile. Nothing would have marked him for the thing that was going to happen to him. No one could have told him from us in the dark, the theater seats. 

I’m thirteen.

I deliver the Sunday paper, pulling a wagon in pre-dawn freeze. At this hour, there’s nothing much to hear: the wheels of the wagon scritching in ice, my boot soles squeaking in snow.

When a car takes the corner and doesn’t pass, lights coming up right behind me, I don’t turn. I don’t pause or deliberate. I run. I drop the wagon handle and make for the nearest back yard.

Two years later, another kid with a Sunday route will disappear. In our city, we’ll learn this kid’s name. If I don’t have the thought, It could have been me, that’s because I have never not had it.

I’m forty-six.

My sister calls. She tells me that our brother, Chris, has died.

In words, that information passes quickly. Noun. Verb.

“What,” I say.

I keep saying that—shouting it, I guess. 

In grief, inside of which we are from now on going to be living, we’ll share and confide things. One observation: it was there—in his songs, in his writing. 

In a poem he wrote when he was in school, the speaker’s landlady tells him he is not as smart as he thinks he is. She points at him from behind a screen door—a room where a smoking cigarette once burned down in the hand of a dead man.

I’m twelve.

My Grandpa, my father’s dad, leads me into a department store. He used to be a shoe man. He’s buying me shoes.

Somewhere near the store for homes, he stops walking. He doesn’t move. 

As well as I can, I hold him when his shoulder starts to sag.

Some days later, my Grandpa dies.

I follow my father into the yard of the house his parents have rented. It’s nighttime, dark.

My Dad does something he’s never done, or something I’ve never seen. He gasps, as people do when they are not in control of their bodies. He cries out.

Because I want to be with him, I speed-climb to the top of the tree that shades that yard in daytime. This is dramatic. I worry about that, in the tree. But also, I feel like we are correct. I feel we’re positioned accurately, and everyone else in the world is either lost or sort of faking.