I had no intention of breaking the law when I woke up in the morning. But one lie sparked a small fire and the flame grew into another and another until, well, you've probably guessed the rest.
I was driving back to the house when I noticed Darren's truck parked outside the hardware store on Route 56. The radio was playing something I had never heard before, there was a fiddle and a banjo, and the early afternoon sun made it impossible to drive without the visor down. Phil's smile was plastered on both the driver and passenger doors of the blue truck, a huge sticker with his freshly-whitened teeth.
I couldn't go a mile in Windber without seeing my brother's face. He was on the lawn of almost half the houses around town and there were tiny fliers in the windows of most of the businesses and on the counters. There was even a large billboard on the main road. I wondered if they'd stay like that, a community shrine, or if eventually, a new face would make its way around town.
I pulled into the lot and parked next to the truck. I got out of my car and leaned against it with my eyes closed and face tilted up to the sun. It felt hot on my skin. Ten minutes later Darren emerged from the store with a bag in his hand and an intense look on his face. It must have been his get-shit-done face, all crinkled in the brow and serious. He stopped walking midway to the parking lot when he finally noticed me tanning and then smiled when the shock wore off.
"You got a screwdriver in there?" I asked, pointing behind me to the toolbox in the back of the truck.
"Of course," he said. "Wouldn't be a carpenter without one."
"Let's go on an adventure."
We took my car and Darren's screwdriver to where Route 56 meets the creek. I couldn't tell him where we were going because I knew he wouldn't come or he would try to stop me. But in order to pull it off, I would need his help. I wasn't the handy brother.
"Could you at least give me a hint?" he asked as I drove.
"Wouldn't you rather be surprised?" I looked away from the road and smiled at him, a creepy, wide-eyed, mischievous smile with the corners of my lips all the way up to my ears.
"With you? Never."
There was a faint buzz coming from somewhere in the car and Darren turned down the volume of the radio. "What's that sound?"
"Probably my phone," I said. "In the glovebox."
Darren reached for the glovebox, but I asked him to leave it there. I told him I hadn't touched my phone since leaving New York and I wasn't ready for what was waiting for me; the calls, the texts, the emails, the posts. He respected my request. I turned up the volume and we let the music and our thoughts fill the car.
"Hey, Darren, can I ask you a question?" I said. "Why did you use Phil's face on the advertisements and not yours?"
He looked out the window and then back at me. "It made the most sense. I'm not an actual Baker brother, only in spirit. And Phil loved the attention."
"Not you, though..."
"I'm more of a behind-the-scenes guy."
"The foundation."
"No more construction metaphors, please." We both laughed because we both thought of my brother. I could tell by the way Darren's eyes wandered.
"We're here," I said, as we pulled up to my parents' old house. I parked on the street in front of the for-sale sign.
Darren looked at the sign. "Do you have an appointment?"
I held up the screwdriver and got out of the car. "Even better."
Darren also got out of the car and followed me up the driveway. "Ryan?" And then, when I didn't respond, "What's going on?"
"I just need to get something." I approached the front door. If there was one thing I could count on, it was that people didn't lock their homes in Windber, even empty ones. I wiggled the knob, but it wouldn't open. Shit. Maybe the town had changed, at least a little.
I stepped off the porch and looked around to see if anyone was watching. It was the middle of a weekday, so most people weren't at home and the street was empty except for a few parked cars. Darren followed me to the back of the house. About halfway to the back patio, he stopped me.
"This is not a good idea, Ryan. You're not acting like yourself."
"It's fine. The house is empty. I'm just going to go in, grab something, and then I'll be right back. If you don't want to come in, just wait here."
I wasn't trying to make him nervous. I just needed to do this. There was a shoebox filled with old tape recordings that I had stored under floorboards in my bedroom when I was sixteen and angry with Phil. He had found out I was gay, stopped talking to me and sold the house, all in one fell swoop. I thought the only way to get back at him was to take away something he loved, to bury it in the house that he no longer wanted.
Darren hesitated, but followed me to the back door. It was unlocked. The door opened into the kitchen, which looked nothing like the one I had grown up in. The popcorn ceilings had been smoothed, the linoleum replaced with hardwood floors, and the floral wallpaper removed so the walls could be painted a faint yellow. There were new stainless steel appliances and the layout was rotated clockwise, nothing in the right place. Darren paused in the middle of the room with me, taking it all in, immediately swept up in memories of ravaging the pantry for a snack after school and fighting over homework on the table or gossiping about girls, betting who would have the first girlfriend. Phil, of course. Not because he was better looking, but because he was better at making things happen. Darren liked to wait and watch.
"You know," he said. "This is breaking and entering. It's illegal."
I rolled my eyes and continued past the living room and up the stairs. Darren followed. The house was completely empty of furniture and people. Instead of touring the house, I went directly to my old bedroom. The original floors were still intact and I knew the shoebox would still be there.
"Hurry up," Darren said.
I crouched to my knees in the small closet and felt around, counting the wide floorboards. I knew the false board was three away from the darkest one, but I couldn't remember if it was right or left. I tried both and neither worked. Then I tried three forward or three back. Finally the board in the back jiggled.
"Hand me the screwdriver," I said.
Darren did as I asked without protesting and then paced my childhood bedroom from wall to wall, muttering under his breath. I focused on removing the board by putting the head of the screwdriver in the crack between the loose and the secure one. After a few attempts, I was able to dig between the boards and lift it open. Maybe I didn't need Darren after all.
I couldn't see the shoebox, so I felt around under the floor. I felt cobwebs and dust and something sticky I didn't want to think about. I reached as far as I could in every direction. It wasn't there. I took my hand out of the floor and leaned against the closet wall, defeated. It was all for nothing. In one second of teenage rage, I had stolen something from my brother and his future son.
Darren stopped pacing and sat next to me. "What are you looking for?" he asked.
"Remember when Phil was ten and obsessed with the end of the world? He had decided the only way humanity would survive was if the people of the future knew the history of the world. Not a bad point, now that I think of it. But Phil started with the history of the Baker family. He recruited me to help record anecdotes on cassette tapes. We talked about what we ate and who we were mad at and what Pokemon card we needed to complete a set. Everything. All of our secrets."
"The tapes he thought he lost during the move? You hid them?"
"I was so mad at him! I knew he loved those tapes, that he wanted to have a huge listening party when we were old enough to have children of our own and to add their stories to the tapes. I never even thought about them until the mall." I stopped. I didn't want to talk about the mall. I didn't want Darren to know about my lie. He wouldn't understand. I didn't.
"The mall?"
"Nothing." It felt like my life was a house on fire and I was desperately trying to collect everything that I loved, but I couldn't hold it all, and every time I picked something up, something else fell out of my arms, instigating the fire to burn faster, wider, until all that was left was me and the flames and the lies that got me there.
"Let me look," Darren said.
I moved out of his way and his arm disappeared into the floor. It swallowed him to his shoulder. He rested his cheek on the floor and stuck out his tongue and his arm reached around blindly with the screwdriver. I heard it tap on the wood, tap tap tap, tap tap tap, until he stopped. "Ha!" There was a lighter sound, something softer than wood. A shoebox.
Darren squirmed to put enough pressure on the top of the box with the screwdriver to drag it towards him. After a few attempts, it was close enough to reach with his fingers. He pulled it closer and then out of the floor.
The white box had yellowed, collecting dust and dirt and god knows what else. I was scared to open it. What if we had found it only to discover the tapes were destroyed by water or time? Darren handed me the box.
"You open it," I said, pushing it back to him.
As Darren took the box back, the screwdriver poked him on his cheek. He let out a sudden yelp and dropped both the tool and the box.
"Are you ok?" I asked. He went to touch his cheek, but I moved his hand out of the way. "Let me see."
I touched the spot above his beard on the right side of his face. He flinched and I tried again. He inhaled audibly as I gently pressed into the spot. His skin was starting to redden and there was a lump, but no cut. "I don't think it'll scar," I said.
I hadn't realized, but our faces were about two inches apart. My hand and my eyes lingered and he stared back at me. Then I remembered the box. I dropped my hand and backed away. We both stared at the box for a moment like there was a bomb inside.
He removed the lid and there, almost twenty years later, several cassette tapes and a recorder sat untouched in a shoebox. "Should we listen?" he asked.
I barely nodded my head, tears threatening to escape my eyes, my throat ready to crack. I watched Darren put one of the tapes inside the recorder and press play. Phil's tiny, prepubescent voice filled the closet. He was talking to the Future People, telling them that peanut butter sandwiches were better with the crust cut off. He started to give instructions on how to make the perfect peanut butter sandwich. No jelly.
At the sound of Phil's voice, I was immediately transported back to the house almost twenty years before when it was filled to the brim with furniture and love. I could see his crooked teeth and unruly light hair, parted in the middle, peanut butter on his face and between his fingers. He had tried wiping it on my shirt, which of course sent eight-year-old me into a rage, screaming for mom and stomping when there was no justice. He just tussled my hair with those gangly fingers, peanut butter everywhere, telling me we could jump in the creek to wash it off. We removed our clothes without hesitation, our bodies still unchanged. I could see it, as clear as the creek water in the summer, Phil building a bridge with sticks that would never hold and I wanted to be him, my big brother.
I stopped the tape. We were both too shocked to speak or move as if any sudden changes in the universe and the tapes would disappear. Like we were tricking fate or God or begging not to be noticed in the tiny closet. We sat there and listened to the trees scratch against the back of the house with the breeze and watched the sun rise higher in the sky through the window. I was finally in rhythm with the world, one lie extinguished. And that was enough for now.
Then I said, "Thanks for breaking the law with me today."
Author's Note: Thanks for continuing this journey with me! If you liked this part, I created a companion playlist on Spotify. Vote, comment, share!
What law did you think Ryan was going to break at the beginning of this part?
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6GOl1mv4VKSvY2tmaGAuKT?si=o3a3LctZR5qEqJfSb7GQAg