Ajar (2 page)

According to eyewitness reports, when Daniel
arrived at the pharmacy that day he paced anxiously up and down the
aisles for a while. Some witnesses say he was mumbling to himself.
Then the rest happened pretty fast. He walked up to the check-out
counter and before the smiling Naomi Tillson could say anything, he
pulled a gun from his coat pocket and shot her, right there, in the
face without saying one word. Her face blew up. Blood, teeth and
bone spattered the wall just behind the check-out. Janet Turback
had been looking at baby aspirin for her eight-month-old daughter,
Samantha, who was perched on her hip. She started screaming when
the shot went off. My brother turned and shot her, too. Luckily, he
was a pretty bad shot. The bullet hit her in the shoulder and she
fell on the ground. The baby started crying but was not hurt. Phil
Moretti, the high school football coach, was in the store, too. He
was talking to Craig Freehold, the high school quarterback, who had
come into the store to pick up his grandmother’s prescription. Mr.
Moretti rushed Daniel who shot him in the chest before he could
even reach him. He died later, on the way to the hospital. Mr.
Tillson had heard the commotion. Like a lion, he roared from the
back of the store. Daniel shot him, too, three times, but the
bullets only struck is thigh and right hip. The third bullet
careened off into the store somewhere. Craig Freehold somehow
caught a bullet through his right hand. How does someone, who is
not aiming, hit the high school star quarterback in his throwing
hand? There were other customers in the store, too, but no one else
was shot. According to the reports, they all ran for cover.

Then, after shooting everyone, my brother
calmly laid the gun on the counter and walked outside as if nothing
had happened. He lit a cigarette and sat on the bench. He hadn’t
said one word during the entire incident. Not one word.

Chapter
Three

We lived at 35 Mill Street. There are no
mills left in Sawyer but back in the days when there were mills,
there had been a giant paper mill: Tiner’s. Anyone who has lived in
Sawyer more than a one generation has a relative who worked at
Tiner’s at one time or another. Our house is a small house, just a
block up from the old mill building, which is in ruins now. My mom
and dad bought the house a few months after I was born. My dad died
two years later, from complications of pneumonia, and his life
insurance paid off the house but not much else. We’ve been pretty
broke since then. As a result, my mom had to go to work. She worked
at Samson and Goliath Cleaners doing alterations. She also did
alterations, at home, on the side. It wasn’t unusual, on my mom’s
day off to find a girl with an ill-fitting prom dress or a man
standing on a footstool in the middle of our living room. My mom
could make just about anything. She made all our curtains and
tablecloths and even reupholstered the furniture. If it involved a
needle and cloth, my mom could do it.

When the police car I was riding in pulled
up to the house, there were dozens of police cars out front, all
with their lights going. There was a crowd of people, too, some I
knew: neighbors, kids from school, and some I didn’t know. Then it
hit me like a ton of bricks. My mom must have died. I don’t know
why I thought that. Why would there be dozens of police cars in
front of my house if my mom had died? But that is what I thought. I
was terrified. My mouth was dry and I couldn’t swallow. I couldn’t
open the car door from the inside; it was one of those doors that
could only be opened from the outside. I waited impatiently for the
officer to do it. I was looking out the window at the people there
and at the house. The officer opened the door without looking at
me. I knew something was terribly wrong. I tried to run into the
house but the officer grabbed my upper arm and squeezed it tightly.
He pulled me past the crowd and up the front steps. He shoved me in
the door only I don’t think he was trying to shove me. It just
worked out that way because we both couldn’t fit through the door
at the same time. Mom was on the couch, crying with my uncle Elliot
on one side of her and my aunt May on the other. Uncle Elliot was
my dad’s brother; Aunt May was his wife. I rushed to them. Mom
stood and grabbed me. She pulled me to her with a sob. I had never
heard such a noise come out of my mother before. She sounded like a
wounded animal.

The house was swarming with people, all men.
Some wore police uniforms; others were dressed in black suits. No
one was really talking. If they said something to each other, they
spoke in hushed tones. They had drawers pulled out and things lay
strewn across the dining room table and chairs. I could hear people
upstairs moving around.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

I pulled away from my mother enough to look
her in the eyes. They were swollen. I looked down at my uncle who
looked away and when I looked at my aunt, she just dropped her head
in her hands.

I repeated, “Mom, what’s going on?”

“Daniel,” mom whispered, “it’s Daniel.”

“What has he done?”

It’s funny how you can know things without
being told. It’s funny how you could just sense things. I knew
Daniel wasn’t dead. I knew he had done something horrible. It was
like we had been waiting for something to happen. I didn’t realize
until later after I was able to piece together the story from news
reports—no one would actually tell me what he had done—how horrible
it really was.

“He’s killed a girl,” Mom whispered in my
ear.

I’m not sure how I got to the chair, someone
must have helped me, and I melted into it.

“Who?” I croaked.

My throat was dry and constricted. I wasn’t
even sure I was making a sound.

“Naomi Tillson,” my uncle hissed through
clenched teeth. No one knew about Phil Moretti yet. He had still
been alive when the police reached the pharmacy. He died in the
ambulance. We wouldn’t find out about him until we watched the news
later that evening.

Chapter
Four

My brother was my best friend growing up.
No, that wasn’t really it. I was his best friend. Dan had always
been a loner, but he had never been a bad guy. He wasn’t weird or
anything. He was just shy. And really, really smart. Everyone said
his shyness was because of our father’s death. I was only two when
Dad died. I don’t really remember him. My brother was seven. He
remembered him, not much, but he did. Mom would say he was just
like my dad. I think that bothered him, though he never said it
did.

Dan wasn’t a sports guy, like me. He was
more into math and science. He was always winning awards. Mom put
them up on the wall. When Bobby Fischer was on the news with his
chess, my brother took up chess and was a real pro. The school
started a chess team and my brother stayed after school every day
to play. He played with a timer and all. The team went to other
schools and played kids there. He even played with adults and he
always won. I couldn’t really understand the game. I always lost
and stopped playing with my brother. It really is boring to play
with someone who you can never beat.

Dan had a shortwave radio in his room and
would listen to places all around the world. Sometimes he’d sit up
late into the night. I don’t think my mom knew because he had
headphones. He’d write to all the places he heard on the radio and
they would send him a postcard in the mail. He had a scrapbook of
all the postcards and I would look at it sometimes. I’d try to
figure out where all the places were on the globe he had in his
room. He started to put pins in the globe so I could see all the
places he had listened to. He even built his own radio and let me
help.

When Daniel got a scholarship and went away
to college, I missed him a lot. It wasn’t that we did a lot of
things together because we didn’t. First of all, there was our age
gap. We had different friends and were involved in different
activities. But Dan was always there, at home, for me. He’d help me
with homework and listen to what was going on in my life. Having
Dan around was more like a feeling, like knowing someone was on
your team, rooting for you. That’s how it felt like having Dan
home; someone was on my side.

For the first two years, he did really well
in college. At least he got As in every subject he took. He said he
liked it and Mom didn’t ask too many questions. It didn’t seem like
he did too much in college. He never talked about it the way other
kids did. He didn’t seem to have any friends either, but Dan had
never really had any close friends in high school, just the other
kids on the chess team. He didn’t go out and he didn’t go to
parties. But I figured he was just a nerd and liked to study. But
things changed during his junior year. He came home unexpectedly on
the bus one weekend in March. He said he wasn’t going back. He
didn’t look well when he came home. He used to keep his hair short
and, while he was no statement in men’s fashion, he always wore
clean clothes. Now his hair was long and he didn’t comb it. He
didn’t wash his clothes and wore the same outfit for days in a row.
He didn’t bathe. He smelled. Mom called the college and all they
told her was they didn’t have the “facilities” for my brother and
that my mother should take him to a doctor.

Things did stabilize, if you want to call it
that. My brother would be up all night and sleep all day. He sort
of stayed out of the way. But he was getting worse. I knew he was
getting worse even though I had no idea what was really wrong with
him. I could hear him, in his room, talking. Sometimes he’d laugh,
sometimes he'd argue. But there was no one in his room but him. His
hair became matted. He would sometimes look at me as if he had no
idea who I was. Then, out of the blue, there would be whole weeks
at a time where he would get up, bathe, walk in to town and be more
like his old self. He’d even call up an old chess buddy and they’d
play a few games.

A lot of people blame my mom. I think I
blamed my mom for a while, too. But what could she do? She actually
did take him to a doctor who told my mother it was stress. He told
my mother that my brother was a “high achiever” and just needed
some rest. He gave my brother some pills but I don’t know if he
ever took them.

My mom was a great mom but she wasn’t a
super-involved mom. It’s sort of hard to explain. She made great
dinners, kept the house really clean, did all our wash and worked
really hard so we could have things. She couldn’t really go to any
of my sports games—I played three seasons, football, basketball and
baseball—because of her work. She didn’t go to open houses, PTA
meetings or anything like that, either. She always was too tired or
working. She was a lot like my brother; she didn’t go out and she
didn’t have friends. She was either at work or at home. The only
friend she ever had over was Aunt May, and technically, my aunt was
a relative, not a friend. In the evening, she asked us how school
was or asked me how my game went. We’d watch TV together but she
never really went beyond that. It was like my mom was there, but
not really there. My aunt May said it was because of my father’s
sudden death. She said Mom had been a different woman before my dad
died. But I wouldn’t know about that.

The police pretty much emptied Dan’s room.
They carted out all his journals. I had known about the journals
but I didn’t know what was in them. I used to see him hunched over
his desk writing for what seemed like hours. He would draw, too. He
was actually pretty good at art. I did finally get his journals
back. They found out where I was, years later, and asked where to
send them. I still haven’t brought myself to read them all the way
through or burn them, as they ought to be. I know they were filled
with pages and pages of people he thought had to die and reasons
they had to die. The police told me that. It was part of the
“evidence” used against him. Daniel had elaborate fantasies of how
people had to be killed. Naomi was in there. In a folder I got from
Dan’s lawyer were the photocopies of those pages. I checked and she
died pretty much the way he had planned it. He even had a pretty
accurate drawing in there, her head exploding all over the wall
behind her. Of course, Phil Moretti wasn’t in there because that
wasn’t planned. I have never been able to check and see if I was in
the journal. It’s just one of those things I’m not ready to know
yet. Still, he was my only brother, and I wish I had been able to
save him…

While the police ransacked our house, the
media began to arrive. Vans with station logos on the side lined
our narrow street. Cameras were set up pointed directly at the
house. Reporters with oversized microphones walked around scrawling
notes, or facing the camera and giving “live updates.” Aunt May
drew all the curtains but it didn’t help. You could feel their
presence, like a danger, outside. You could hear them buzzing like
a hive.

And we just sat while this went on around
us. Can you believe that? Not that we could have done anything, but
the point is we didn’t
do
anything. We could have asked
questions, objected as they sorted through our personal possessions
but we didn’t. We just sat and waited. Waited for what I wasn’t
sure. Were we waiting for it to be over? How could this be over?
Were we waiting for things to go back to normal? How could anything
ever even resemble normal again? Every once in a while a
plain-clothes officer, probably a detective, would come over and
ask a question such as, “Do you know if your son had any more guns
anywhere?” My mother always looked at them wide-eyed, unable to
answer. Uncle Elliot would grunt and Aunt May would simply look
away.

Mid-afternoon a woman appeared with the
police. She was serious-looking, tall and very muscular for a
woman. Her dark brown hair was tied back in a tight ponytail. She
had deep-set, brown eyes that looked almost black. She wore a
white, button-down shirt and black pleated pants. There was
something mannish about her but not quite. You could tell she was a
police officer. It was in her bearing, her manner. But when she
smiled at me, it seemed genuine. She introduced herself to Mom
first.