The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

The phone

I made him a grilled cheese he did not eat. I ran him a bath. I let him pick the show, and he picked the one about the dogs who drive rescue trucks, and he watched it with his thumb near his mouth, which he had not done in a year.

My phone started buzzing a little before eight.

It was my mother first. Then my father, which told me my mother had put the phone in his hand, because my father does not make phone calls. He answers them, briefly, and passes them to her.

Then my mother again. Then Amy, my sister-in-law, who had not called me directly in maybe three years. Then my father again.

I turned the phone face down on the kitchen counter.

I knew what those calls were. I grew up in that house. My mother would say that Kyle felt terrible, which would not be true. My father would say, “Your brother didn’t mean anything by it,” and then, “Don’t make your mother sick over this.” That was how every fight in my family had ended for thirty-three years. Somebody was cruel, somebody else got upset, and the upset one was asked to fix it.

I was not going to fix it this time. I did not know what I was going to do instead. I only knew I was not picking up that phone.

At bedtime Noah stood in the door of his room and looked at his bed.

There is a dent in his pillow where the rabbit goes. I am not being poetic. There is an actual dent, on the left side, from six years of the same eight inches of stuffed rabbit.

“I don’t know how to do it without them,” he said.

“Do what, bud?”

“Go to sleep.”

So I got the quilt off my own bed and I lay down on the floor next to his. I gave him my hand through the rails of the headboard. He held two of my fingers the way he used to hold Clover’s ear, rubbing his thumb back and forth across my knuckle.

It took him two hours. He cried then, finally, quietly, with his face turned to the wall so I would not see. I let him think I didn’t.

When I checked my phone at midnight there were thirty-one missed calls. There was one text from Kyle. It said, “Real mature. You owe Mom an apology for ruining her weekend.”

There was one text from my mother, sent at 11:48. It said, “Please do not throw away that backpack.”

I did not know what that meant. I fell asleep on the floor trying to work it out.