I am a Fourteen Year-Old Murderer

Asleep at the Wheel or Suicide?
In the months before my brother Gary dies, our father and step-mother return from South Africa with their other two kids. Gary doesn't spend much time with them. None of us do. The only thing that ever makes me want to visit at all is my relationship with my little sister, Betsy. We have a strong bond that will be tested by distance and fatherly fiat.

Gary and I spend the Friday and Saturday of my ill-gotten holiday from "Pooh" rehearslas nominally visiting our grandparents, Budie and Zadie, but mainly farting around on our own, eating too much, drinking a little, and talking a lot while we drive around. He is always encouraging in a funny, sideways fashion, telling me I should do what I want, what makes me happy, even if it's stupid.

Sunday morning he leaves for Corpus Christi to shoot a wedding. He is a photographer, and even though he is only eighteen, he is good enough to start getting a bit of work here and there. I remember waving good-bye to him in the parking lot outside our grandparents' condo.

He dies on the way back to San Antonio. I will breathlessly tell my friends in the years that follow how I am the last one in the family to see him alive. I don't remember how my other brother Aaron gets to San Antonio that Sunday, and he is no help now since he has blocked just about every single memory that he can of his childhood.

Somehow Aaron and I both wind up at our dad and step-mom, Adam and Laura's temporary apartment, where Adam tells us Gary is dead. I don't react at all. Aaron immediately bursts into tears. Adam keeps getting on the phone to tell people the news. Aaron is still crying. I just sit there. Across the bedroom Adam barks at me, "For Christ's sake, would you hug your brother?!" Hug him I do, begrudging them both every second of it. Who is my father to tell me what to do, how to feel, how to treat Aaron, the brother I instantly begin to resent since if one of them has to die, why can't it be him?

Aaron later admits to having the same thoughts about me, which goes a long way toward alleviating my guilt over being so hateful. I am fourteen. I am guilty.

Our father accuses his parents, our grandparents, Buddie and Zadie, of causing Gary's death by buying him a compact AMC Gremlin. Gary crashes the Gremlin head-on into a Cadillac, the passengers of which survive the accident.

As I understand things, it happens like this: Tired from shooting photographs at the wedding in Corpus Christi, Gary falls asleep at the wheel and crosses the yellow line, placing himself in the Cadillac's oncoming path. There are further accusations from Adam. It's all murky, but I'm given to believe that our father may believe my brother committed suicide. I think. Possibly, so Adam imagines, because in the year before his death, Buddie fills Gary's head with horror stories about how Gary's juvenile diabetes will bring nothing but pain and early death.

But in the two years he lives with diabetes Gary is healthy. The disease is manageable. And my grandmother's frequent mentions of diabetes aren't to Gary, but to Adam and Laura. Buddie is furious about the fact that before Gary is finally taken to a doctor and diagnosed at sixteen, he goes untreated for months while Adam and Laura, who know something is very wrong, believe vitamins and natural food will cure whatever it is that Gary has.

No one ever mentions the fact that on the night he dies, Gary is on his way to get me in San Antonio, to drive me back to Austin the next morning. With a terrible flutter in my stomach I think that maybe if he didn't have to pick me up, he would have stayed the night in Corpus. In a way it is my fault he is dead. This is not something that occurs to me until just now, right at this moment, as I write this paragraph.