But when I took a quick right at the decaying catacomb, I stopped dead in my tracks.
Someone had thrown a crushed pop can and candy wrapper on top of my brother’s grave. I knew it
was unfair of me to be upset that my brother Bill’s grave had been desecrated—especially when
the rest of the cemetery had never been anything but disrespected—but I had no sense of justice
when it came to my big brother.
I took a few steps to Bill’s tombstone and crouched down to push the garbage away. I grabbed
the bottom of my T-shirt and wiped the soda that had been spewed onto the stone. And I then
stopped, forgetting my purpose, tracing my hand along the engraved lines of his name.
You’re supposed to hold your breath when going past a cemetery, or, as the superstition goes,
you’ll breathe in the spirit of the dead. You’re also supposed to stick your thumbs into your
fists to protect your parents. I did neither and ran through the cemetery almost every day—if
only that was enough to explain why I was so haunted, and why my parents were … the way they
were. I missed Bill—every second of every day.
I had little recollection of my life before things started to go so wrong in my family. Burt and
Isabelle had had an affair when Burt was still married to someone else and Bill was just a baby.
When Burt left Bill’s mother and married my mom, Bill’s mother committed suicide. And I was
born in the middle of all of this, a soap opera that my big brother had tried to shield me from.
Through all of this, in spite of how I came into this world, he was my biggest, my only, ally.
Most of my family memories were of the heated arguments between Burt and my brother. Bill
getting into fights, Bill selling drugs, Bill getting kicked out of eight different private
schools—Bill, the Shame of the Sheppard family. The last argument was on the night that Bill
was brought home in a police cruiser when my parents were having a dinner party, and there were
too many witnesses to the shame. Burt shipped my brother off to Callister to live with his uncle
Victor, who was his birth mother’s brother, and a police officer. A few months later, Victor
called Burt—Bill had run away.
But Bill still came to visit me, secretly. He’d climb into my room in the middle of the night
on my birthday, on Christmas, whenever he felt like it, just to check up on me and make sure
that I was doing whatever he thought I should be doing—going to school, not doing drugs …
according to my brother, what was good for the goose wasn’t good enough for the gander.
Then when I was thirteen, a police officer came to our front door. Bill’s body had been found
in an empty apartment in Callister, the needle still hanging off his arm. There was an autopsy—
Bill had died of a drug overdose. Heroin, I had overheard.
I was awakened from my daze by a loud bang from the thunder roaring above the overhanging trees
of the cemetery. I pressed my hand hard against the cold stone and took one last glance at the
gravesite before being satisfied and speeding off, returning to my purpose. I quickly rounded
the chestnut tree and by the time I reached the clearing into the projects, the sky was pitch-
black and the thunder was now belching steadily.
Unlike the previous few days, the clearing was completely desolate. My shoulders sunk when I saw
he wasn’t there waiting for me at the picnic table, even though, logically, I knew that he
wouldn’t be there and that I shouldn’t be looking for him.
I reluctantly kept running until I heard the bark of the dog named Meatball.
I slowed down to an almost walking pace and looked back. He was there in his gray sweater,
leaning against the fence at the farthest point of where the cemetery and projects met, about
two hundred feet from the entrance to the cemetery that I had just ran through.
Following his leashed dog’s warning, he brought his eyes to me. But he wasn’t alone this time.
There was another man at his side—a man with a shaved head and too many tattoos.
While the boy in the gray sweater was pulling on the leash, struggling to keep Meatball from
running off to greet—attack—me, the other man looked confusedly at his friend and his suddenly
misbehaving dog, and eventually followed his friend’s quick glimpses to me. He glanced from me
to his friend twice more, his confusion seemed to have turned to anger. The boy in the gray
sweater turned his body away from me, toward the tattooed man.