Little Brother

couldn't exactly place her.
    Meantime, I was headed for Darryl's father's place. I'd never really felt comfortable around the old man, who'd been a Navy radio operator and ran his household like a tight ship. He'd taught Darryl Morse code when he was a kid, which I'd always thought was cool. It was one of the ways I knew that I could trust Zeb's letter. But for every cool thing like Morse code, Darryl's father had some crazy military discipline that seemed to be for its own sake, like insisting on hospital corners on the beds and shaving twice a day. It drove Darryl up the wall.
    Darryl's mother hadn't liked it much either, and had taken off back to her family in Minnesota when Darryl was ten — Darryl spent his summers and Christmases there.
    I was sitting in the back of the car, and I could see the back of Dad's head as he drove. The muscles in his neck were tense and kept jumping around as he ground his jaws.
    Mom kept her hand on his arm, but no one was around to comfort me. If only I could call Ange. Or Jolu. Or Van. Maybe I would when the day was done.
    "He must have buried his son in his mind," Dad said, as we whipped up through the hairpin curves leading up Twin Peaks to the little cottage that Darryl and his father shared. The fog was on Twin Peaks, the way it often was at night in San Francisco, making the headlamps reflect back on is. Each time we swung around a corner, I saw the valleys of the city laid out below us, bowls of twinkling lights that shifted in the mist.
    "Is this the one?"
    "Yes," I said. "This is it." I hadn't been to Darryl's in months, but I'd spent enough time here over the years to recognize it right off.
    The three of us stood around the car for a long moment, waiting to see who would go and ring the doorbell. To my surprise, it was me.
    I rang it and we all waited in held-breath silence for a minute. I rang it again. Darryl's father's car was in the driveway, and we'd seen a light burning in the living room. I was about to ring a third time when the door opened.
    "Marcus?" Darryl's father wasn't anything like I remembered him. Unshaven, in a housecoat and bare feet, with long toenails and red eyes. He'd gained weight, and a soft extra chin wobbled beneath the firm military jaw. His thin hair was wispy and disordered.
    "Mr Glover," I said. My parents crowded into the door behind me.
    "Hello, Ron," my mother said.
    "Ron," my father said.
    "You too? What's going on?"
    "Can we come in?"

    His living room looked like one of those news-segments they show about abandoned kids who spend a month locked in before they're rescued by the neighbors: frozen meal boxes, empty beer cans and juice bottles, moldy cereal bowls and piles of newspapers. There was a reek of cat piss and litter crunched underneath our feet. Even without the cat piss, the smell was incredible, like a bus-station toilet.
    The couch was made up with a grimy sheet and a couple of greasy pillows and the cushions had a dented, much-slept-upon look.
    We all stood there for a long silent moment, embarrassment overwhelming every other emotion. Darryl's father looked like he wanted to die.
    Slowly, he moved aside the sheets from the sofa and cleared the stacked, greasy food-trays off of a couple of the chairs, carrying them into the kitchen, and, from the sound of it, tossing them on the floor.
    We sat gingerly in the places he'd cleared, and then he came back and sat down too.
    "I'm sorry," he said vaguely. "I don't really have any coffee to offer you. I'm having more groceries delivered tomorrow so I'm running low —"
    "Ron," my father said. "Listen to us. We have something to tell you, and it's not going to be easy to hear."
    He sat like a statue as I talked. He glanced down at the note, read it without seeming to understand it, then read it again. He handed it back to me.
    He was trembling.
    "He's —"
    "Darryl is alive," I said. "Darryl is alive and being held prisoner on Treasure Island."
    He stuffed his fist in his mouth and made a horrible groaning sound.
    "We have a friend," my father said. "She writes for the Bay Guardian . An investigative reporter."
    That's where I knew the name from. The free weekly Guardian often lost its reporters to bigger daily papers and the Internet, but Barbara Stratford had been there forever. I had a dim memory of having dinner with her when I was a kid.
    "We're going there now," my mother said. "Will you come with us, Ron? Will you tell her Darryl's story?"
    He put his face in his hands and