Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

about. I was fourteen when it happened, and I had this big brother that I more or less worshipped and then, like boom , the whole thing was shattered. Everything. Tressa was twelve. She, like, never even acknowledges the rest of us anymore. And our parents more or less disowned Jason. He was out on the streets, practically, right afterward. We tried to keep in touch, but, I don’t know.…” He took a big swallow of the drink and put it down. “After that, nothing was normal. And it never will be again.”
    Maurizio said, “Okay, you were fourteen, Jason was eighteen, and Tressa was twelve. You were all together when it happened?”
    “Well, it was summer, and Jason was about to leave for college. I think he thought he might miss us, or he’d never have let us go with him. See, he was the only one who could drive, and he said, come on, let’s take Max for a walk above Inspiration Point. It was, like, a Saturday afternoon; maybe a Sunday. There were a whole lot of people out.” He winced slightly and went quiet for a while. “Anyway, he’d never done anything like that before. Never! Tres and I thought we’d died and gone to heaven.”
    “Inspiration Point?” I asked. “You lived in the Bay Area?”
    He nodded. “You know Inspiration Point? In Tilden?”
    “I haven’t been there in a long time.”
    “Well, there’s this great paved path that goes up and down over hills and everything. It used to be a road to a missile site, and it’s really wide— people can walk three or four abreast. Anyway, people walk their dogs up there and some people bicycle. That’s what the problem was.”
    “I beg your pardon?”
    “Well, to make a long story short, you’re supposed to keep your dogs on their leashes, right? You know how that is?”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Well, Jason didn’t. Max was this really hyper dog, and he said it was because Max never got to run and who cared anyway? So he let him off the leash and a rabbit or something hopped across the road, and Max just took off. We kept calling him, but he wouldn’t come back, he was just way too excited— there were other dogs around and everything. Well, anyway, there was this man on a bicycle with a little infant seat on the back. You know those things? You’ve got to remember this was a long time ago— I don’t even know if they made those little helmets then. But anyway this kid wasn’t wearing one.
    “I don’t know. I just don’t know how it could have happened. Max just wasn’t paying attention, and he crashed into the bike. The father…”
    His face turned into a tragedy mask as he remembered. “You should have seen the look of panic on that father’s face. I thought he was going to turn himself inside out to keep the bike upright. But it went down, and I swear to God I’ll never forget the noise it made as long as I live, when Sean hit the pavement. When his head hit.”
    “Sean was the baby?”
    “Yeah. That was his name.”
    The horror of it flooded in on me. I imagined what it was like to be fourteen and see something like that and to know that your big brother was responsible— that you were— because there was no way at that age you could ever convince yourself it wasn’t your fault. It was your brother, it was your dog; it must be your fault.
    “He was killed?” I said, making it more a statement than a question.
    “Oh, no. Oh God, if only he’d been killed. He was horribly brain-damaged and lived nearly eighteen years, more or less as a vegetable. But a walking vegetable— one who had seizures all the time. He could only say a few words, and couldn’t take things in, couldn’t learn, but he could walk, sort of. If you could call it that. He was all crippled and spastic. He had to wear diapers, which somebody had to change. And you just never knew when he was going to fall over with a seizure. Oh God, it was horrible.” He tossed back the rest of his drink. I could understand the need to anesthetize himself; I was feeling pretty raw just hearing about it, not having to see it again in my mind’s eye, to hear that awful noise.
    He held up his empty glass, but Maurizio didn’t offer another. “Sean Dunson died eight months ago at the age of eighteen— exactly the age Jason was when it happened. And that was horrible, too. I know every goddam detail. He had a little virus, and his temperature went way up, which caused a series— series, please— of uncontrolled seizures. Somehow in the midst of all that, he