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He backed away onto the lawn to watch the window again. The curtains moved. Shapes stirred on the other side, but the movements made the wrong kind of sense.
The shapes, though.
God, the shapes.
Dad and Mom.
Tom’s knees gave all at once, and he fell to the grass so hard that it shot pain into his groin and up his spine. He almost lost his grip on his brother. Almost. But didn’t.
He bent his head, unable to watch those shapes. He closed his eyes and bared his teeth and uttered his own moan. A long, protracted, half-choked sound of loss. Of a hurt that no articulation could possibly express, because the descriptive terms belonged to no human dictionary. Only the lost understand it, and they don’t require further explanation. They get it because there is only one language spoken in the blighted place where they live.
Tom actually understood in that moment why the poets called the feeling heartbreak. There was a fracturing, a splintering in his chest. He could feel it.
Benny kicked him with little feet and banged on Tom’s face with tiny fists. It hurt, but Tom endured it. As long as it hurt, there was some proof they were both alive.
Still alive.
Still alive.
2
It was Benny Imura who saved his brother Tom.
Little, eighteen-month-old, screaming Benny.
First he nearly got them both killed, but then he saved them. The universe is perverse and strange like that.
His brother, on his knees, lost in the deep well of the moment, did not hear the sounds behind him. Or if he did, his grief orchestrated them into the same discordant symphony.
So no, he did not separate out the moans behind him from those inside the house. Or the echoes of them inside his head.
That was the soundtrack of the world now.
But Benny could tell the difference.
He was a toddler. Everything was immediate; everything was new. He heard those moans, turned to look past his brother’s trembling shoulder, and he saw them.
The shapes.
Detaching themselves from the night shadows.
He knew some of the faces. Recognized them as people who came and smiled at him. People who threw him up in the air or poked his tummy or tweaked his cheeks. People who made faces that made him laugh.
Now, though.
None of them were laugh
ing.
The reaching hands did not seem to want to play or poke or tweak.
Some of the hands were broken. There was blood where fingers should be. There were holes in each of these things. In chests and stomachs and faces.
Their mouths weren’t smiling. They were full of teeth, and their teeth were red.
Benny could not even form these basic thoughts, could not actually categorize the rightness and wrongness of what was happening. All he could do was feel it. Feel the wrongness. He heard the sounds of hunger. The moans. They were not happy sounds. He had been hungry so many times, he knew. It was why he cried sometimes. For a bottle. For something to eat.
Benny knew only a dozen words.
