Chapter 11 #2
The claw machine was by the door. Behind the glass, a heap of stuffed animals lay tangled up the way stuffed animals always lay tangled up in those machines, like they'd been through a small disaster together.
She stood up on her toes to see. I leaned over her shoulder and looked at the angle of the grabber.
I read it three times. The grabber sat over the heap at a slight tilt to the left.
The bear I wanted was three inches to the right of where the grabber would drop.
I waited. The grabber drifted. It clicked one notch right. I dropped the coin in.
The grabber came down. It caught the bear by the head. It came back up with one ear hanging by a thread.
She squealed. The squeal was the loudest sound she had made in three months.
I bent and pulled the bear out of the chute. It was brown and small and one ear was a tragedy. I handed it to her. She held it against her chest with both hands.
"His name is Beom-Beom," she said. "It means I love him."
"Then that's his name."
She tucked him under her arm. She took my hand again. She didn't let it go for the rest of the mall.
On the bus back, she fell asleep with her head against my arm.
The bear was wedged under her chin. The bus was almost empty again.
The light coming through the windows had gone the gold color light went in the late part of the afternoon, the kind of gold that made the inside of the bus look warm even though it wasn't.
I looked down at the top of her head. The braids were coming loose. The part down the middle was crooked. She'd done it herself this morning before she came downstairs.
I've never been a brother in any memory I have. I've been a brother for three months.
I let her sleep.
The bus dropped us at the corner. The house was a quarter mile down the country road, past the bend, past the line of trees that had been losing their leaves since the start of the cold.
We started walking. She was carrying the bear by one of his arms. The arm was going to come off if she kept that up. I didn't say anything about it.
We were a hundred yards out when I saw the light.
Blue and red. Rotating. Throwing color against the trunks of the trees up by the curve in the road. I saw it before she did. Something inside my chest that wasn't a memory and wasn't a thought went cold and steady all at once.
I stopped her with a hand at her shoulder.
"Wait."
"What?"
I didn't answer the question. I bent and picked her up and set her on my hip the way you set a child on a hip. She tucked her face into the side of my neck without being told. I didn't look down at her. If I looked down she'd see my face and she'd know.
I kept walking. I walked at the pace of a man who was going home. I didn't change my pace.
Two squad cars on the gravel of the drive.
One of them with the lights still going.
An ambulance parked at the side, lights off, not running.
Yellow tape across the front of the porch, strung from the railing to the corner post. The neighbor from the house at the bend was at the end of the walkway in a robe and slippers with her hand over her mouth.
She looked at me. She didn't say anything.
A young deputy was at the bottom of the porch steps. He lifted a hand when he saw me coming.
"Sir, I need you to step back."
"Where are they?"
"Sir. Step back."
Rhea's body had gone tight against me. Her hand was in the back of my jacket.
She had her face all the way buried in my neck now and she was breathing the small fast way kids breathed when they were about to come apart.
I put the side of my head against the side of hers.
I said her name once, into her hair, low.
She didn't scream. She cried. Quiet. Into my neck. The wet of it spread down inside the collar of my shirt and I didn't move my head off hers.
The older officer came down the porch steps.
He moved the way a man moves when he's done this part of the job too many times to count.
Mid-fifties. Gray at the temples. His face had the kind of weather on it twenty winters left.
Small notebook in his left hand. The right one came up to me palm out and then dropped.
"Son. Pete." He stopped a step away. He held my eye. "I'm sorry. They didn't make it. Both of them. Inside. The neighbor called in two gunshots a little after four."
I couldn't speak. I kept my hand at the back of Rhea's head.
He let the quiet sit for the count of three. Then he lifted the notebook hand.
"There was a note beside them. I want you to look at it before we bag it. If you don't know the name on it, we'll go from there."
I nodded. I followed him up the walk. He stopped me at the bottom of the porch because Rhea was still in my arms and he wasn't going to take her past the tape. He held up a folded piece of typing paper between two gloved fingers. He turned it so I could read it.
One line. Black ballpoint. The hand wasn't anyone's I knew.
We will see you again, Daniil Sorokin.
I read it once. I read it again. The white came in at the edges of my vision the way it did when my head was about to start hurting. I blinked it back. I put my free hand on the porch post to keep myself upright.
The name did something inside my chest the rest of my life hadn't been able to do. It didn't give me a picture. It didn't give me a face. It didn't give me a place. It gave me an ache. The kind a man feels when he hears a word he's known so long he stopped knowing he knew it.
I've heard this name. I've heard this name in a room. I've heard this name on a woman's mouth.
I didn't see her. I felt the shape of the name against my teeth. I felt the weight of it where my voice came from. I felt my own breath try to say it and stop.
Rhea lifted her head off my shoulder. Her face was wet. Her eyes were on mine. She hadn't let go of the front of my jacket.
"Brother. Are you okay? Please don't leave me too."
I bent. I pressed my mouth against the top of her head. I held her against me with everything in my arms that wanted to break loose.
"I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
The officer waited. He had the patience of a man who had held people through this before. He didn't move his eyes off my face.
I turned back to him. My voice when it came was steadier than it had any right to be.
"We'll go to a hotel tonight. The girl needs to sleep somewhere that isn't this house."
"There's a room at the Pinegrove a mile up the road. We'll sit on the parking lot. Detective in the morning."
"Officer. One thing."
"Go."
"The name on the note. I need you to find the Sorokin family. I think they know me. I can't remember them. But the name is mine. The name is mine."
I heard myself say it twice and I didn't stop myself. His eyes changed. He'd heard it the second time too.
"Sorokin." He turned the word slow in his mouth. "Yes."
"Find them. Tell them anyone called Daniil. Tell them Pete is here."
He nodded once. He put his hand on my shoulder. He squeezed it once. The grip was the grip of a man who'd put his hand on a lot of shoulders over twenty years and meant it every time.
"I'll make the call from the cruiser."
"Thank you."
He walked back up the steps. He bent and put the note into a small clear evidence bag a deputy held open for him. He sealed it. He carried it down past me without showing it to me again.
I stood on the porch with Rhea on my hip and the cold of the night coming up the steps at my legs.
The radios in the squad cars were low behind me, the soft crackle of dispatch talking to a town a long way off.
The neighbor in the robe had gone back inside her house.
The willow at the edge of the property moved once in the wind.
The bear was crushed between Rhea's chest and mine. Her arms were tight around my neck. The name was turning over in my chest like a coin I had been carrying without knowing I had it in my pocket.
I know the name. I don't know the man.