This Is Where I Leave You

bench at odd angles, the blood pooling up in the cracks between the vinyl seat cushions, the suffocating stench of blood and shit.
    He didn’t make a sound when I moved his head out from under the wheel so that I could sit down, but he groaned when I slammed the door, so I knew he was alive. So eager had Paul been to beat the shit out of Rusco, he hadn’t even bothered to turn off the engine, so I was able to raise both windows immediately. A few seconds later, the rottweiler hit the side of the car with a thump, his teeth gnashing against the glass. I stared numbly past him at Rusco, who looked back at me expressionless, his face painted with blood like a savage, while the dog howled and threw himself repeatedly against the car. At some point I threw the car in gear and drove slowly away, not wanting to shake Paul. Through the rearview mirror, I watched the rottweiler chase us for a little bit, then stop in the middle of the street to bark furiously at us. I should have thrown the car into reverse and run him over, but I didn’t, I just kept driving, and the ignored impulse became one more thing that would haunt me in the days and years to follow. If only I had backed over the dog. If only I had jumped off the roof of the car to help Paul. If only I had refused to get in the car with Paul to begin with. At some point I managed to get my bearings and drive us to the emergency room, but I have no recollection of that. I vaguely recall a nurse sticking a needle in me because Paul had lost a lot of blood, and then my parents showed up and they stuck needles in them too. The police briefly impounded the Cadillac for evidence, which is why at some point I woke up in a panic in the back of the police car that was taking me home. My parents would be spending the night in the hospital. The cop driving me was an old guy whose face I couldn’t quite make out from the backseat. He told me I’d saved my brother’s life. It would soon become clear that Paul didn’t see it that way. The silent consensus, evident in Paul’s glare, my father’s pained expression, and my mother’s lack of intervention, was that the wrong brother had been mauled. I didn’t know it at the time, but that was the night we broke, and in the 184years to follow, the jagged pieces of us would continue to drift further and further apart, small vital bits getting lost here and there, until there was no hope of ever putting us back together. Animal Control put down Max two weeks later, after a hearing my father attended armed with grisly pictures of Paul’s injuries. Suits and countersuits were filed, criminal charges leveled and dismissed. A few weeks later I finally kissed Alice Taylor in a darkened movie theater, and then surprised us both by crying like a baby. Saturday

Chapter 29
    5:06 a.m.
    Iwake up strangely energized, my stomach growling. Upstairs, the overstocked fridge offers me its bounty of sympathy food. I throw some cheese slices onto a soft bagel and then head up to the second floor. I haven’t been up here since I got back. The bedroom doors are all closed, so there’s really not much to see. I tiptoe up the attic stairs, which creak like a haunted house, and out the access window to the roof, climbing up the slate until I’m sitting at the highest point of the gable. When I was a kid I used to climb up here to look down at the block and gather my thoughts in private. Paul would climb up here with Boner to smoke weed and look at porn, and Wendy would come up to get a tan while her nails dried. I don’t know if Phillip ever figured out the roof. By the time he was old enough, we were all out of the house. Knob’s End is on a high elevation, so you can see a lot from up here. You can see into backyards for blocks, swimming pools, swing sets, barbecues, discarded toys. You can see across the rooftops to where the early morning joggers are running on the track behind the baseball diamond in the county park over on Fenimore. You can watch the sun come up, coloring the sky white, then pink, then blue. You can see your older sister, barefoot in boxer shorts and a T-shirt, walking hurriedly up the block from the direction of the Callens’, tying her long, mussed hair back as she goes, and wonder what she might be 188doing coming from there at this hour. And then, just minutes after she’s let herself in below, you can observe Linda Callen leaving your childhood home to quietly make her way down the block back to her house. It would