I stopped off at Charlie’s on my way back to the motel.
Gabby opened the door. They had just finished up dinner, and she was in the midst of doing the dishes.
My brother was at the kitchen table, picking on his guitar. He barely looked up, neither surprised nor particularly happy to see me. His graying beard and ground-down, toothless smile seemed beaten down.
“Hey, Jay . . .” He picked at a tune. “What’s up with you, little brother?”
Gabby asked me if I wanted something to eat, and I told her no, that I’d had something on the way.
I sat down next to him. “You wanted me to help you find out what happened to Evan, Charlie . . .”
“I know I did, Jay,” he said. “At first.” He strummed a familiar chord progression to a song I knew. “Let It Rain” by Eric Clapton.
“And I’m trying to, Charlie. I really am. And I’m getting close. But now it’s you who has to answer some questions for me. The truth, this time.”
“Let your love rain down on me . . . Hey, Jay . . .” His eyes lit up. “You remember this one?” He played a few chords, raising his guitar high in the air like an old rocker. Neil Young’s “Heart of Gold.” “I’ve been to Hollywood, I’ve been to Redwood . . . ”
He banged on the strings. “And I’m getting old! I’m feeling that way, Jay.” He put the guitar on his lap. “You remember that trip we took? To Montreal?” His eyes grew alive again. “When I came to visit you up at college?”
I remembered. He had swung by Cornell on one of his final sojourns back east. I think he had just been released from a psychiatric hospital. At that time, I had never spent a lot of time with my brother, just random visits where he seemed mostly off the wall to me. A bunch of my friends at school and I sat around one night basically spellbound by his tales.
“You were a senior . . . ,” he said.
“A junior, I think.”
“Your friends were all so smart. They must’ve thought I was whacked out of my mind. And you know what?” He laughed. “I probably was . . .”
“If I recall, they actually all thought you were pretty entertaining.” I smiled.
“Yeah . . .” He chuckled amusedly. “I bet they did. I’m sure they’d never met anyone quite like me.” He leaned the guitar against his chair. “You remember, we were walking around up there. On Sherbrooke Street. Near the college. I had my guitar with me. I was playing to a bunch of pretty little chicks there . . .”
“You were trying to pick them up, Charlie. They were college kids. And you probably would have if you hadn’t had to find one for me.”
“Always watching out for my younger brother!” Charlie laughed, edging into a wide grin. “You remember how that one dude came up to you? Trying to pick a fight or something . . .”
I didn’t know where he was going with this, but the truth was, the whole two days up there were like a fog. We’d had some beers. Charlie got me stoned. I spent the night on a narrow bed in a Marriott while he screwed some street gal across the room. Most of it had long slipped away in my mind. “I sort of remember you were the one picking the fight, Charlie, but who can recall?”
“This guy—he didn’t like how you were talking to someone. About hockey, right? It was during the Olympics or something. He wanted to beat the shit out of you. Right there on Sherbrooke Street. You were pretty zonked out.”
“I was with you, Charlie.” I couldn’t believe with all the brain cell loss he could even bring that to mind. I hadn’t since.
“You remember how I got right in his face for you? The guy outweighed me by a hundred pounds!”
I recalled now. “We had to make a dash for it in the snow. You were about to whale him with the guitar. Then you thought better of it.”
“Of course. It was the only thing I owned!”
I shook my head at him. “How do you even remember that, Charlie?”
“Because I never wanted to put you in any danger, Jay. Not from me. That was about all I could ever do for you; the rest you had all figured out on your own. And I still don’t want to. Put you in any danger. I wish we could’ve been friends, Jay. Not just brothers, but friends . . .”
Maybe I should’ve said that I wished that too. That we could have been friends. But instead I drew my chair in and leaned close to him.
“Why don’t you tell me about Russell Houvnanian, Charlie?”