Brotherly Love Read Online Free PDF

framed in a pillow at the top
of the stretcher, is as thin as the bones underneath it, and she is
the color of bones too.
    When did she become a ghost?
    He stands in his pajamas and watches the men turn the
corner at the landing with his mother between them, stepping
carefully, the man in front going backwards, feeling for the step
behind him with his feet.
    His father is at the bottom of the stairs, waiting.
There is dried blood in his hair and in his eyebrows, and his eyes
are as dull as they had been in the kitchen.
    His father opens the door for the men when they are
off the stairs, and then follows them outside to the ambulance.
    Peter walks down and stands in the doorway, the cold
wind coming up his pajama legs. The men load his mother into the
back. He steps into the yard.
    The neighbors are at their windows now, one or two
are standing on their porches in housecoats. They do not leave their
homes, though. A dozen times he has seen these same neighbors gather
in each others’ yards, sometimes in bathrobes, touching those who
are crying on the shoulder, at the same time seeing for themselves if
the person on the stretcher is dead. But no one comes to the driveway
to touch his father now.
    Doors close and the ambulance is sealed. Its lights
go on but there is no siren. His father waits on the street until it
is out of sight. Then he turns the other direction, staring at the
house of Victor Kopec. He stares as if there were something to see,
but Peter looks at the house too and there is no light, no sign of
movement inside. Shades are drawn in every window.
    His father walks back to the house, crossing the car
tracks that still divide the yard in half, and stops for a moment
when he sees Peter standing in the cold, wet grass in his bare feet
and pajamas.
    "Get inside," he says quietly.
    Peter turns, without a word, and walks into the
house. He feels his father close behind him, behind him and above,
floating.
    "Is she sick?" he says after his father has
closed the door. His feet hurt and he is shaking in the sudden warmth
of the room.
    His father begins one direction, then changes his
mind. He sits on the davenport and puts his elbows on his knees and
bends forward to run his fingers through his hair. Tiny bits of dried
blood sift onto the coffee table in front of him.
    "What happened to your mother," he says,
"she got scared of things that wasn’t there. First she
wouldn’t go out by herself, then she wouldn’t go out with me with
her, then she got scared to come downstairs in her own house . . ."
    Peter thinks of the night the men came to the house,
and of his mother in her room listening.
    "Finally . . ." his father says, and then
stops. He shrugs and nods in the direction of the front yard, and in
that gesture is the whole world on the other side of the door, the
one his father knows and the boy has glimpsed just once.
    "It scared her so bad she’s afraid to even
move her little finger," his father says. He looks up then and
nods. "She’s afraid that she moves her little finger, it wakes
up and remembers what happened to your sister. She thinks if she just
keeps everything still it don’t hurt."
    He stands up and walks to another chair, as if he is
afraid of the opposite thing.
    "Did she go to the hospital?"
    "It ain’t the kind of hospital you can visit
her," he says.
    And then he moves again,
this time to the window, and stares at the house next door.
    * * *

    H e wakes up alone in the
house.
    He feels the emptiness of the place even before the
sound—a soft thumping—moves from his dreams into the room, and he
opens his eyes, afraid of anything that is not familiar.
    He dresses himself, sneakers and pants and his
jacket, and walks into the room where his mother slept. The bed is
unmade, part of a sheet lies on the floor, a nightgown is tossed
across a chair. The room still smells of her skin.
    He picks up the nightgown and takes it to a hook on
the open closet door. Then, without knowing why, he goes into