The Toys My Brother Threw In The Fire

I smelled it before I saw it.

It was not hot dogs and it was not cottonwood. It was something sweet and chemical, like a milk jug melting on a stove burner, and it was coming from the fire pit behind my parents’ house.

I was carrying a bowl of my mother’s potato salad across the yard. I remember that because I set it down in the grass, right there in the middle of the lawn, and nobody ever found the lid.

Noah’s blue backpack was lying open beside the fire pit. It was empty.

My son is six. He takes three stuffed animals everywhere he goes, and he has since he could walk. A gray rabbit named Clover with long floppy ears. A brown dog named Radar with one eye rubbed pale. A small bear named Gus that used to play a lullaby when you squeezed his paw, until the battery quit when Noah was two.

He does not play with them much anymore. He just needs to know where they are. They ride in the backpack, and the backpack hangs on the back of whatever chair he is sitting in.

I looked into the fire.

One long gray ear was sticking up out of the coals, curling black at the tip. Next to it there was a shape that had been Gus. The lullaby box was showing through his chest, a little white plastic square going soft at the corners.

My brother Kyle stood over the pit with a can of beer in one hand and the long barbecue tongs in the other. He was using the tongs to push Radar farther into the middle, the way you would nudge a log.

He saw me. He did not stop.

“He needs to toughen up,” Kyle said.

He was smirking. I want to be fair about my brother, because there is more to him than that day, but I also want to be accurate. He was smirking.

“He’s six, Kyle.” That was my mother, from the picnic table. Her voice was thin.

“He’s six and he carries dolls around in a purse,” Kyle said. “Somebody’s got to do it. She sure isn’t going to.”

Nobody else said a word.

There were fourteen of us at that barbecue. My parents, Bob and Sue. Kyle and his wife Amy and their two boys, Tyler and Ben. My aunt Brenda and my uncle Jeff. My cousin Kim, her husband Mark and their teenage daughter. Don from the next place over, who has come to every one of our Labor Day weekends since before I was born. And Noah and me.

Fourteen people, and the only sounds were the fire and the sweet corn pot boiling over on the propane burner.

My father was in his lawn chair with a paper plate on his knee. He was looking at the plate.

I found Noah by the corn pot. He was standing very straight with his arms at his sides.

He was not crying. That was the worst part of the whole day, and I have turned it over a hundred times since. A six-year-old watching his rabbit burn should be howling. Noah was just watching, with his mouth closed, like a boy who had been told that crying was the wrong answer and was trying hard to get it right.