Ansel and Lucy

The warmth ballooned, punched through the thin cotton cloth. The dog fell asleep on me in that general area before. I looked down for a passing moment and stretched, closed my eyes and sat up. To say it throbbed would be like saying fire is hot. It hurt, not like knife wound pain but peeling scabs pain. I ran to the bathroom.

The little half moon scar hiding in the hairline from the time he fell off the roof of our old house, the autumn colored eyes, his straight black hair. Ansel stood there posing, mocking me. Dreams aren’t this vivid. My brother’s body and my brain. The hell am I going to do with this? I went to Ansel’s room. The room was empty and hollow as it had been since, well, since...

My father's voice rose from the bottom of the stairs. I relived myself, sorry, “Slayed the leviathan,” no shit, Ansel. I hurried to the kitchen table and waited for my own image to come waltzing down the stairs. Could he have my body if he left us months ago? I sat there in his skin. I caught my father's eye: suspicion, disappointment, fear, hope. I can’t remember him ever looking at me in that way. I smiled and turned to my mother pouring coffee, “where's Lucy?” I asked, returning to my father's strange eyes.

My father tasted his coffee and sat his chipped, red mug on the table. “Who?”

You know, your daughter, the one you rarely let leave the house without knowing where she's going and how long she will be there and where she's going after that. I wrote an itinerary before heading to my eighth grade trip to the state capitol. I gave it to my mother thinking she'd get my dry humor, but she looked it over a couple times and said, “call when you're on your way back.”

Ansel never told my parents where he went. He came home three hours late one day and my mother offered to pop his dinner plate in the oven. A 16 year old boy treated like an adult while his 14 year old sister had nightmares of being stalked by her mother.

At school I ran into Ric, my brother’s friend since they were in the fifth grade. He caught my eye and shook his head. I wanted to run my fingers through his sandy hair. But what if Ansel is still around somewhere and he comes back? Absolute cringe. What if I’m still out there somewhere? I hadn't figured this whole thing out yet but I’d only been my brother for a couple hours.

I honestly had no idea what my brothers class schedule was. My plan was to walk in one door and out the other. I meandered the hall catching everyone’s eye. Most of the students looked at me like they were stumbling through a dark attic.

Ansel hasn’t been around since the first week of school. He drove to school that morning and parked his car two blocks away in front of the old Swedish bakery like he did every day since he could drive. But no one saw him get out of the car and no one saw him at school that day. Two and a half months have passed since he left. The search party found nothing. The police have no leads and I’m fairly positive they’ve move onto other missing people or harassing drivers with the wrong complexion.

When I reached the end of the hall, steps from the door, a bald man in sweat shorts and a red polo top placed his cold paw on my shoulder and spun me around. “Glad to see you back. Expect you at practice,” Ansel’s basketball coach, Mr. Riordan said.

I stared with my eyes wide for a second too long. “Right what time?”

Mr. Riordan inhaled through his mouth and ran his thumb and index finger up and down the lanyard around his neck. “Sixth period,” he said. He continued up the hall. I waited until he turned a corner and shoved the door open.

I walked passed the old Swedish bakery and tried not to look where my car, my brother’s car was parked that morning. I made it another few blocks and walked into the oldest taco place in town. The classic juke box sat in the corner to my left, the classic arcade games lined the wall to the right. At the counter I ordered two breakfast tacos and a soda pop. I played Mortal Kombat for a good twenty minutes before a cold air hit my back.

“Ansel. Nice to see you, bro,” the pale haired boy said, his smile like a jackals smile. He looked short to be on the school basketball team. His arms were tearing at the seams like bowling balls in book bag. There were three other boys standing behind him against the wood panel wall not looking me in the eye. My insides raked against my skin, my new found man area retracted to my body. Ansel’s body reacted out of memory.

“Yeah bro.” Did I sound as forced as it sounded in my head? I honestly thought most of these guys greeted each other with bicep bumps and grunts.

“We didn’t think you got out. We heard about you missing, we were like fuck we got to do something.”

Got out? Did they think my brother was in prison? I folded my arms like my brother always did and bit my lip like he always did. “Oh, yeah, I’m out now.”

The boy looked back to his stolid friends. “So where you been?”

I hadn’t allowed myself to think about what could have happened to Ansel, not since a couple weeks after he disappeared. Every terrible possibility came rushing at me in large waves: he ran away because he and our father had a fight, he was robbed and killed and they dumped his body in the river, burned it? He is being held hostage somewhere. He did something awful to himself.

“I was in the hospital. I stayed at my aunts house for a little while after that.” I don’t know how I came up with that lie. My brother did have talents.

“I know you’re cool. I mean, you wouldn’t be dumb enough to say anything.” The three boys against the wall lifted their faces with blood shot eyes. I dropped my arms to the side. They knew something about Ansel.

When the police interviewed us they asked if we knew anyone named Robinson. They said Ansel’s friend, Charlie, told them Ansel was spending time with a boy named Robinson. None of us knew him. “Nah, we’re good,” I said. I held the eye of the pale haired boy for a minute before he bounced his chin and turned around, walking out of the restaurant, the three boys trailing him. “Robinson,” I said, to anyone one of them. The second to last boy turned his cleft chin to me and shook his head. At least I had a face to Robinson.

Charlie is on the basketball team. There had to be something he didn’t tell the police. How do I get him to tell me everything Ansel, I, had told him about Robinson? I waited until fifth period and hurried back to school arriving ten minutes before sixth period.

Mr. Riordan shifted his way into the gymnasium with a tablet pressed between his giant left thumb and a blue folder. He bent over and palmed a basketball from the floor, firing it at me. “You’re early. First time for everything, huh?”

I caught the ball and examined it like I were a God spinning his new planet. I wasn’t given athletic talent. Ansel said I needed more confidence, that everyone in our family could play some kind of sport, but it’s kind of hard to have confidence when your parents treat you like a helpless baby sloth. I stepped down from the stands and bounced the ball of my foot. I laughed and looked at coach, he wasn’t laughing.

The gymnasium began filling with one teenage boy after the other, each one staring at me with an incredulous look greater than the boy before him. They greeted me with pats on the back, hand shakes pulling me close to bump chests. “Didn’t think you were still around,” and,” Ansel, bro.” One of the boys, a lithe, red haired boy, stood back from the others scratching his forearm, looking at me and looking away. There was no sign of Charlie. We started practice. I stood there studying every jump shot knowing when my turn came I’d fall on my ass. The boy in front of me was the taller, sweatier, older brother of a boy I had crushed since like the third grade.

My turn came and I held the ball with both hands at my chest and pushed the ball at the hoop without leaving the ground. As you might expect the ball scrapped the net and fell to the floor with a resounding failure. Lucy’s sport isn’t basketball. The other boys started laughing and Mr. Riordan told me to take a seat. “You’re not pulling that shit this season. I don’t care what you’ve been through,” he said.

How do you ask strangers who knew more about your brother’s life than you to tell you everything? I sat silent in the stands pleading with God that if he placed our lives back in proper order I’d be closer to my brother.

I did want to be my brother. There were times where if I could trade places with him life would be much easier. He never had our parents screening every member of the opposite sex who arrived at the house with a group of friends.

The basketballs hit the court like punching bags. The glimmer of the court pulled me in and I lost time for a minute. I raised my eyes to the door to my right and standing there with a gray duffle bag over his back was Charlie. His dark eyes were frozen on me. I turned to look at Mr. Riordan, and Charlie turned to walk out of the gym. I hurried after him.

He walked fast on a left leg that gave a little every time he brought it down. I ran, fast, faster than I could imagine ever getting somewhere. The long, galloping legs of a seventeen year old boy were a perk of this I could learn to love. I pulled up two feet behind him and called his name but he ignored me and walked outside. I finally placed my hand on his shoulder, “Charlie, we have to talk.”

He leapt away from my touch, slamming his lower back against a railing. He trembled like he woke in a grave yard. His eyes saw galaxies crashing. “You shouldn’t,” he stopped himself.

“I shouldn’t what? Put my hands on you? I thought we were friends.” I laughed a gust of air from deep in my throat.

“How did you get out? I went there to look for you after Robinson told me and it was empty.”

A creeping suspicion of every person in my brother’s life. Charlie, Robinson, the pale haired boy, all had the same fear and suspicion in their eyes that my father had for Ansel, only these boys were hiding a secret. “I managed. Look, I don’t remember everything. Tell me exactly what Robinson told you because I swear I’m gonna beat his ass.”

He swung his face to his left and right, looked to the windows above us. “Well, after you went missing I texted him for two days with no answer. I remembered you said he swindles over at Adams park. When I got there he didn’t want to talk. But I told him I knew he was involved in breaking into the fire captain’s house. I thought he was going to kill me.” My brother knew who committed a crime that was in the headlines for weeks and only told his basketball friend. Did all the boys on the team know? Pale hair boy was involved.

“But he told you what happened?” Charlie inhaled and bounced his chin. “Tell me exactly what he told you,”I said.

A couple of Ansel’s teammates were involved in several break-ins last spring. He learned about the crimes but didn’t say anything, But someone was talking. Yuri, the pale hair boy, was interviewed by the police and one of the boys on the team pointed the finger at Ansel.

There was something else but Charlie wouldn’t tell me. He said, “they knew about you, you know. They were going to tell Pastor Dan.” Pastor Dan is the leader of the largest church in town. He’s made national news with his hate speeches. If they robbed the pastor, Ansel would have fallen over laughing.

The difficulty of accepting my brother was either criminal or abetting criminals evaporated the moment Charlie told me where I was buried.

We drove to this farmland outside of town. At the end of the open acreage sat overturned Earth, wooden house frames were erected, and two wooden stakes supported a sign with a future neighborhood pictured above a green banner that read, “Hamilton Lawn.”

Behind one of the wooden frames an uneven plot of Earth, dark, angry, and freshly dug. The dirt looked like it had been dug and filled a dozen times. Charlie stared at me like I were dissolving in front of him. I grabbed a shovel and started digging.

The world faded gray, the sun became black on the gray; darker, colder still was the air crying in my ear. I fainted.

The conscious stirred in the dark. I slept for weeks, months. I finally woke in my bed. Lucy. My auburn hair tied in the yellow scrunchie Ansel called banana chic. The night peaked through the window. I reached for my phone. The time, 8:30, the evening my brother went missing. I leapt out of bed and called Charlie.