Eyes Wide Open Read Online Free PDF Page A

medications.
    “Well, he’d gotten worse. He was off his meds. We no longer knew how to handle him. He would just sit there—on that couch—for twenty-four hours straight. Not a single word—just staring. Into space.
    “Just a few weeks back we heard noises in the middle of the night, and we came down. He was just sitting there, talking”—Gabby pointed to what looked like a wood-burning heater in the corner—“to the furnace, Jay. My son was talking to the furnace! He told me, ‘I hear voices in there, Mommy . . .’ I said to him, ‘Evan, you have to let us help you . . .’ We didn’t know what to do.”
    “He was always so angry at us,” Charlie said. “He wouldn’t take his pills. He would just hurl them at us. Then he’d just smile coyly. I couldn’t fight him anymore. It was like he was torturing us, trying to make us suffer along with him.”
    “Two weeks ago”—Gabby took a breath to steady herself—“we found something . . .”
    I took a sip of my coffee. “What?”
    “This is so hard for me to tell you, Jay. It really is . . . I went through his things. Because I was scared. I was scared at some of the things he was saying to us. He called me a stupid, uneducated whore . . . a wetback scum. He called your brother a miserable kike who could never get a job. His own father . . . I wanted to see where he was learning this from. What was influencing his crazy mind? And we found something. An application . . .”
    “For a job?”
    Gabby laughed. “ For a job? If only for a job! It was an application to buy a gun! A twenty-gauge shotgun. From a gun store in the next town. And for what? To kill someone, Jay. Maybe kill us. You see these stories on the news, about what people like our son can do. We said, this kid can’t have a gun . . . He’s mentally unstable. He’s been diagnosed by the state. He has a record with the police. These people cannot sell him a gun . . .”
    I screwed up my eyes in disbelief. “ How? ”
    “He lied, Jay. He lied about everything on his application. That he wasn’t sick; that he had no record. Maybe they would have caught it, or maybe not—but we went there. To stop them. We told the man at the shop, ‘Are you out of your mind? You can’t sell my son a weapon! Do you know what he might do with it?’ We threw the application back in his face. We were scared . . .”
    I said, “I don’t blame you for being scared.” I thought of my troubled nephew with a gun, with the image of Columbine or Virginia Tech vivid in my mind, with all the anger and sociopathic behavior he had shown. “You did the right thing, Gabby.”
    “I know we did the right thing. But then we found something else . . .” She looked at me, eyes downcast. “I can hardly even say it, Jay . . .”
    “We found a kind of diary Evan was keeping,” Charlie interjected. “These ramblings, crazy things . . .”
    “I have to cross myself to even tell you these things,” Gabriella said. “Things like, ‘Better to suck the dick of the devil than to live here with these two dead people one more day . . .’ That’s us, Jay. Our son was talking about us—your brother and me!” She dabbed at her eyes, shame and grief etched deeply there. “But we didn’t know what to do . . . We knew he’s acting truly crazy now. Off the charts. We can no longer control him. It’s clear he hates us . . . That he wants to kill us. And then himself. And who knows, maybe take other people with him . . .”
    “So what did you do?”
    “We showed it to him.” Gabriella looked at me as if seeking dispensation. “Everything. You know what he did? He takes me by the hair, and twists me, like he wants to kill me right there, and throws me against the wall. Look! ” She opened the top of her robe and showed me purplish marks covering her shoulder and onto her neck. “He’s too big for us to fight now. Look at your brother. He’s weak, old. He is no longer able to protect