CJ said.
That earned him a shrug.
There didn’t seem to be much else to say, and CJ was within seconds of leaving when, in an instant that he couldn’t have stopped even had he known it was coming, he said, “Why did you kill Eddie?”
What struck CJ next was the depth of the quiet that settled over the room, over the entire house—as if the aged frame had stopped groaning long enough to hear the answer. The only thing that failed to abide by the hush was the grandfather clock, whose ticking seemed overly loud by comparison.
It took him a while to realize that the thing he was feeling in his chest was fear—fear of having asked the question, of having this thing that he’d carried for more than twenty years suddenly out there. Except that there was also something exhilarating in the asking.
However, even if he was experiencing a gamut of emotions, the moment had passed Graham by, except to have left him looking older, tired. At first, CJ didn’t think he was going to answer the question. Graham got up and poured himself another drink—more than the two fingers CJ had given him. Then, with his back to his brother, he said, “Why are you trying to dig up ghosts?”
“Because it’s not every day a kid sees his older brother murder someone.”
That seemed to deflate Graham. He leaned against the table that held the liquor, the bottles jostling from his weight. He didn’t say anything, and CJ knew that if he waited a hundred years in this room, his brother would hold the thing so tightly to his chest that CJ would never get to see it.
He got up from the chair and left the room without another word, only his steps didn’t take him to the front door. Instead he found himself fumbling at the lock on the door to the garage. When the light came on he descended the steps and pulled the tarp off of the 853, tossing it to the floor.
The blue car—polished a thousand times by a hand that loved it yet never used it—shone beneath the garage lighting. CJ stood on the passenger side, his hand on the convertible top. He stood there for a long time, and if Graham knew he was in there, he left him alone. When he was ready, he picked the tarp off the floor and covered the car, then left the way he’d come.
A single beam of moonlight has found its way past CJ’s drawn shades, emptying its light somewhere near the foot of his bed. CJ is awake and so tightly wound that he can’t fall asleep. The sights and sounds of the last several hours have been too much for a boy to handle, and he is only now coming to grips with the enormity of the events of the day.
Somewhere in the rooms outside of his own are the other members of his family, each dealing with things in their own ways: his mother with tears, his uncle Edward with a story from his Korean War days, his grandmother with the endless baking, and his father with grim silence.
He feels caught up in the totality of the thing, yet as an incidental object—one easily discarded by a wave on a convenient shore. Graham is the focal point, the one in need of comfort, the one whose story is told again and again until it even sounds right in CJ’s ears. He’s not sure at which point he realized that the accounting of events given by his brother does not match what CJ holds in his head—only that the realization came upon him like a creeping cold.
He wanted to say something, to pull an adult aside and tell them what he’d heard, what he’d seen. Instead he’d eaten the cake, taken the hugs, listened to the talk, and avoided looking at his brother. All of it left him feeling ill, as if the cake had been bad.
There is an owl somewhere beyond his window, and for once CJ understands its plaintive call. He understands too how there is something expectant in it—how the sound doesn’t just hang there or dissipate without a purpose.
When his door creaks open, he isn’t surprised because his heart has been gaining speed for the last hour. Even so, he finds his breath caught in his throat, especially when he sees the shirtless, sweaty form enter his room.
Graham leads with the knife, and the moonlight glints off the surface of the