No Remorse

When the call came through, I didn’t answer, because I was driving. I was tempted to reach for my phone as it buzzed angrily from the cup holder, but the words of my driving instructor from a year earlier echoed in my head: If you use your phone while behind the wheel, you will die. And so it was not for another eighteen minutes that I checked my voicemail.

I was safely parked in the lot of a grocery store, next to an immense strawberry-red pickup truck. The glowing screen of my phone blared to me that I had a missed call from my mother; as soon as I saw who had called, an unshakable sense of dread spread through my body. My mother never called me unless something was wrong, especially at this time on a Saturday morning – she routinely went for a run every weekend at this hour. The fact that not only was she breaking her routine – which my efficient, business-like mother never did – but that she was also calling me made my hands shake as I hit play to listen to the voicemail.

The entire message was only nine words long. I know because I replayed it eleven times, sitting there in numbness, with the enormous red truck looming beside me and early-morning shoppers passing my car, back and forth on their trips into the grocery store. All around me peoples’ lives moved on: they hurried into the store, came out a few minutes later with armfuls of plastic bags weighed down with milk or bread or whatever groceries they’d run out of on Saturday morning, climbed into their waiting cars and drove away; yet I felt frozen in time, enveloped in a cocoon of nothingness. My radio played in the background, blaring out some old rock ballad, but I didn’t even hear it. All I heard was the nine words of my mother’s voicemail, over and over: “Come to the police station. Now. It’s your brother.”

I walked into the station half an hour later to find my parents already waiting, my mother dressed in jogging clothes – she must have been about to leave for her run when the call from the police came. I shuffled over to them, and without a word the three of us took seats in the lobby together. Officers strode past us, most not even glancing our way; other people, maybe as tense as we were, sat clustered in small groups. Some held hands or whispered quietly, but like our family, most remained quiet and distant, lost in their own thoughts. One woman in her fifties simply stared at the coffee table in front of her, her gaze so focused that she seemed to be attempting to drill through the table itself with her eyes. It was unnerving. I turned away and looked instead towards the wall to the left of the couch on which I was sitting. There was a smudge on the wall that looked exactly like a cat if you squinted hard and really tried to see it – which I did, trying to keep my mind off what was happening.

It was no use; the thoughts crept in anyway. All I knew of the situation so far was what I’d heard two officers discussing as I’d entered: my brother had been arrested for shooting someone, and he was currently being interrogated with very little success. We’d be allowed to see him shortly.

It wasn’t a lot of information to go on, and my head spun with countless unanswered questions. Of course, deep down I supposed I’d known something like this was inevitable. I sighed deeply and closed my eyes, sinking back into the couch as my thoughts weighed heavily on my conscience. I’d known that my older brother would end up here eventually because I knew what he was really like. My poor parents had no clue. They didn’t share a bedroom with him; they didn’t see the countless times he snuck out late at night, or the countless times he snuck back in during the early predawn hours of morning, reeking of smoke or alcohol or both. They didn’t know that he talked in his sleep, that his drowsy murmurings were completely intelligible and had revealed things about Christian to me that even he wasn’t aware I knew – like that he was only passing calculus because he cheated off some kid named Trey Walden for every test, that his coach was threatening to kick him off the swim team because of how many times he’d shown up for early morning practices still intoxicated, that he was starting to try out drugs with his friends. All of these aspects of my brother’s life I knew, and yet all of these things my parents were oblivious to.

In my parents’ eyes, Christian was still the wonderful older son, a great role model for me, his younger brother, as he had been his whole life. They only saw the good grades, not the cheating that earned them; they only knew that he was an all-state swimmer, not that he was in danger of losing his place on the team and his scholarship for college next year; and, of course, they had no clue about the side of Christian that involved drinking, sneaking out, and sampling drugs. I knew that I should have told them earlier – hell, I knew that I should have told them months ago when it started. But I was afraid: afraid of their reaction, afraid of what my brother might do to me if I ratted him out, afraid most of all to admit to myself that my brother had become someone new and unrecognizable to me. And so I never told them, and now here we were.

A block of guilt settled in my chest, sitting stoutly on my heart so that I felt like I couldn’t breathe. Maybe it was my fault that this had happened. Maybe if I hadn’t been such a coward, if I’d told my parents about Christian’s downslide, it might not have gone this far. Self-loathing and guilt weighed me down, felt like a massive pile of bricks on my mind. My poor parents, so in shock that anything like this had occurred. They didn’t know the history leading to this. Would they hate me when they found out that I’d known all along?

I didn’t have any time to ponder the question; right at that moment, I opened my eyes to see an officer standing over me. His uniform was rumpled and dirty, and he had bags under his eyes bigger than any piece of luggage I owned – my guess was he’d been out all night, looking for Friday night troublemakers like my brother. His rusty nametag read WHITCOMB in small capital letters, and as I raised my eyes to meet his, Officer Whitcomb spoke.

“You can go in to see him now,” he said, his voice cracking slightly. “I’m afraid he hasn’t said much to us, but maybe he’ll tell you what happened.” My mother nodded, her eyes still dry – I’d never seen my mother cry in all my seventeen years – and started to stand, my father rising with her. I reached out and grabbed her arm.

“Can I speak to him alone for a minute first?” I murmured. She gave me a long, scrutinizing look, still half-standing and half-sitting, and must have seen something important in my eyes, because after a pause she nodded and lowered herself back down to the couch. I knew that ordinarily she would have refused, been desperate to see Christian and learn the truth; perhaps a mother’s intuition, or some deep emotion in my gaze, had shown her that I needed to talk to my brother in private, talk to him about things that he wouldn’t dare mention with anyone else listening. Giving her a grateful smile, I squeezed her hand briefly and stood up alone.

Whitcomb looked surprised that it was only me coming, but he made no comment on it, leading me down a narrow hallway to Interrogation Room 7. “He’s in there,” he said, jerking his thumb at the door. “There’s an intercom if you need anything.” He started to walk away, but then paused a moment and looked back at me. “Be careful, son.”

I stood there outside the room for a minute, gathering my thoughts, and then quickly pulled the door open and entered before my courage could fail me. I shouldn’t be so scared, I told myself. It’s just Christian; but things were different now, had been for a while, and I was afraid, as I had been for months. Was he even still the brother I knew anymore?

He certainly didn’t look like my brother right then. The boy handcuffed to the metal table was haggard, defeated, broken. He didn’t even raise his head as I walked over and took the seat across from him, although I could tell that he knew who was visiting. Christian’s dark hair, so much like mine, was a rumpled mess, even though he’d always been so careful to keep it short, neat, and perfectly styled. Adults often thought we were twins, not a year apart in age, because of how alike we looked, but right now I prayed that I looked better than he did.

“Hi, Chris,” I started quietly. “It’s me, Benjamin. You okay?”

There was a long silence, and for a moment I worried that I’d been wrong, that he wouldn’t talk to even me. But then he shifted in his seat, cleared his throat, and said, “I guess.”

I struggled with how to continue, discarding several approaches before deciding simply to address the situation directly. “What happened, Christian? You sneak out all the time. What was different about this time? What changed?”

He still didn’t look at me, but I could sense that he was glad I hadn’t danced around the subject. He was aware that I knew more about his life than anyone, and he was grateful that I acknowledged it too. Shifting in his seat again, his dark eyes still cast down at the table, he started to talk.

“I was out with a few of my friends. Nothing unusual. We drank, we smoked, we dropped in on Jackson Briar’s party for an hour or two. We left a little after midnight. I wasn’t even drunk, I swear. None of us were. We actually drank less than usual.” He paused and took a deep breath. “Which is why we decided to do meth.”

A sense of dread settled over me. I knew from his sleep talking that whenever he and his friends experimented with the drugs they’d been trying – meth, heroin, cocaine – it never ended well. Of course, it had never ended in the police station before either.

“I knew it was a bad idea, obviously I did, but I think I’m getting addicted, Ben. We’ve been taking drugs more and more frequently, and I think I’m hooked.” His voice was sad, lost. “And tonight I had more than I ever have before.” I felt like I should comfort him, but I didn’t know how; instead, I stayed silent and let him continue. “So did they. Then we were driving around on the back roads for a while, feeling giddy and happy and high. And oh, Ben, it was the best feeling.” He sighed. “Until we came across Caleb Hawke.”

Caleb Hawke. I knew Caleb Hawke. He was a junior, same as me. We were in the same history class; he played trumpet in the marching band and was vice president of Key Club. I wasn’t close with him, but I liked him. I was afraid I knew what was coming next in my brother’s story, and I felt very sorry for Caleb then.

“He was just walking home from a late night shift at Wendy’s. He hadn’t been at the party; he hadn’t done anything to bother us either. He was just on his way home, tired and ready to sleep. We pulled alongside him and began to tease him. We thought it was all in fun, but he was annoyed, and he kept trying to get us to stop. At some point whoever was driving turned off the engine, and a few us climbed down out of the car and started to shove him around a little. He kept resisting, and then he grew so fed up that he shoved me back. That was a mistake.” His tone was strange, some mix of hard and bitter and, I realized with fear, even a bit of pleasure. Who was this person in front of me? “I was coming down off my high at that point, so I was losing interest in harassing Caleb, but the others weren’t. When he shoved me, they insisted that I punish him for it. Before I knew it, Brett had thrust his dad’s gun – the one he keeps in the trunk – into my hand. There was so much laughter. They all encouraged me to shoot him. Caleb looked so scared.”

The dread I’d felt earlier was growing with each word. I could picture the scene: poor Caleb in his Wendy’s uniform, his eyes tearing up behind his glasses as my brother took hold of the pistol with the rest of the gang egging him on, laughing hysterically while ensnared in the grip of meth.

“So I did it. I couldn’t say no, couldn’t back down with all of them there. And I got caught up in the excitement of the moment; I even felt a thrill when I pulled the trigger. I shot him right in the forehead, Ben. Right in the forehead.” His voice was still unrecognizable, empty and void of emotion. “He fell straight back, dead before he even hit the pavement. And oh, how they cheered. Someone must have heard the gunshot, though, because it was only moments that we heard the police sirens on the way. Brett and the others panicked; they jumped in the car and drove away, leaving me there with the pistol and Caleb’s body. I didn’t bother trying to run. I knew the cops would find me.” He paused for a moment, shifted in his seat. “And that’s what happened.”

I sat silently for a long minute, mulling over his story and considering how to respond. Poor, poor Caleb had just been in the wrong place at the wrong time. What scared me most wasn’t the fact that my brother had shot someone; that could be explained by the peer pressure and the drugs. What scared me most was his apparent lack of emotion for it. How could he speak in such a monotone about ending a life? I’d known that he’d been changing for months, known that he was becoming less my brother and more a monster, but I hadn’t realized just how frightening he’d become. My fault, I thought. I should have told my parents.

“But it was mostly the drugs and peer pressure, right?” I asked carefully, praying that he would answer yes and assuage my fears that he was a monster, that he didn’t feel bad about his murder. “You realize the severity of what you did, don’t you? Maybe you even regretted pulling the trigger as soon as it happened? I mean, it was the meth, right?”

He was shaking his head before I’d finished. “I don’t think so, Ben. I was hoping so at first, but after the past few hours I don’t think so anymore. I think I may be sick, Ben. In the mind. I’m afraid of myself, Ben.” I noticed for the first time that his hands were trembling slightly, even as he tried to clasp them.

My gut clenched up, tied itself in knots; my blood turned to ice at his words. I could hear my heart pounding in my ears. “What are you saying, Chris?” I asked quietly, terrified of the answer.

“I’m saying that’s what scares me the most,” he said, finally raising his eyes to meet mine. I saw immediately that they were not the eyes of the brother I knew, the older brother I’d admired for years; they were deep, dark, and empty, missing something essential, void of feeling. “What scares me the most is that I have no regret. I feel no remorse at all.”