It was a cold, rainy day in early December. I was just 7 years old and seated on the living room rug playing with my new Barbie and her Dream house imagining how my house was just like hers. Sure, I didn’t have the perfect pink walls or dozens of rooms but I did live in a dream, a perfect form of reality.
My dad had left before I was born, but my mom had always been strong, confident. She got a job as the town doctor after med school and was able to support my older brother Max and myself.
Max was five years my senior and all he did was listen to music, skateboard and wonder off for long periods of time with his friends. All he wanted from me was to be left alone, but I always knew he loved me.
On this particular December day he had shuffled off with his friends as usual, but at eight o’clock he had still not returned. My mom had tried to reach him but in vain and now I sat on the rug Barbie in hand, and listened to my mom anxiously scrubbing pots in the kitchen. When she stopped to sigh and tuck her hair behind her ear as she does when she’s nervous, I heard a heavy knock on our front door.
She must have heard it too because she came out of the kitchen and raced to the door, legs flying like the horses at the race track my grandfather took me too each year. She flung open the door to reveal a policeman, his face a mask of sternness. “Good evening mam” he said in sad, melancholy sort of voice. “I have some news about your son.” Before he finished my mom had sent me to my room before quickly guiding the policeman into a chair.
I wandered down the hall to my room and wondered why my brother being gone was such a big deal. I sat on my bed for what seemed like hours before my mom slowly pushed aside the curtain that served as my bedroom door.
Her face was white and her movements shaky as though she was not sure if her feet would simply sink through the floor. She collapsed into my chair, put her head in her hands and started to cry. When I climbed into her lap and began to pry her wet hands from her face she slowly looked down at me and said simply “Your brother’s dead.” I didn’t know how to respond. I couldn’t cry, it was like my eyes thought it not good enough to cry and so they did nothing at all. My mom then at up and asked “Oh, Jane what did you tell Mr. Miller?”
Mr. Miller was the man who lived next door to us and earlier that day he had asked me if my brother had a girlfriend. I had frankly replied, “No. He doesn’t like girls, I heard him tell his friend once. He said he was gay, whatever that means.” He had just stared at me and then brusquely walked into his house, slamming the door in my face. Later I’d seen him walk out his back door, gun in hand, and cross to the small wood behind my house. I’d heard a gunshot, then another and ran inside to hide under the covers of my bed.
When I remembered this I couldn’t bring myself to tell my mother and so instead I asked “Why is he dead?” My mom looked at me blankly for a few seconds and then said,
“Because he is, was gay. Someone killed him, probably that Miller man, went out and killed him all because he was damn gay.” Now she was yelling “And you know what? He didn’t even have the decency to tell the police. God dammit, this world we live in is a living breathing hell.”
Four days later my mom had been arrested for the murder of my brother. The police had come to inspect my house and found my dads old gun in the shed outside our house. Somehow they had tracked it to the bullet in my brother’s heart and now my mom was gone too. I knew that she was not the one at fault, I knew the truth, I has seen Mr. Miller but that gun in the shed but I kept quite. As of that day I had decided never to speak again, because in my mind but telling Mr. Miller what I’d heard, I had killed my brother.
I was sent to foster home and just like that my life had switched, I was stuck in a dream not a good one, but a nightmare.
