The Withering Road

My brother went missing a month ago.

The ‘Have You Seen Me?’ posters hadn’t even begun to fully yellow with age when I got that call from the police. I had thought that maybe, just god please maybe, they had found him alive. That he had just turned up, or it was some ridiculous hostage situation and he got free or rescued or…something. Anything but the call that I was dreading to hear. I guess there’s something to be said about manifesting things. The call I wanted to avoid more than anything else, was exactly the call that came.

“Mr. Walker, it’s Detective Dawson.” A familiar gravelly voice said on the other end of the phone. “Some…remains have been discovered, and we’re led to believe that it may be your brother.” There was a hesitance in his words. Like he regretted calling as much as I regretted answering. It was the rapport between us at this point, though. He’d never been able to give me good news, and I never had anything but defeat in return. But we had made an agreement. He was to be blunt. Never sugarcoat anything, don’t give me false hope. If he found him, just say so. If he found his body, the same thing. I thought it would make it easier. Rip off the band-aid, you know? I just…forgot that some band-aids feel like they’re taking off the whole limb when you rip them off. “Would you be alright to come down and identify the body?”

“…Yeah. Yeah, I’ll..I’ll be right there. Thanks, Detective.”

I hung up.

I think it was the shock of it that left me tearless. I couldn’t breathe, my heart was racing…but there wasn’t a single tear. Maybe it was some vain sliver of hope that it wouldn’t be him. But the police don’t call to have you identify a body unless they’re already certain from fingerprints or something like that and just need the confirmation. But I was going to hope. Spitefully. As if my hope could just will him back into the universe, unharmed. Even just..alive. If he’d been hurt, I would be there to help him get through it. I just wanted him alive.

But by the time I made it to the morgue, I realized that hope?

Hope is fucking stupid.

The medical examiner stood on the other side of the slab. A white sheet lay over a body, and I almost turned around and ran the moment that I got close. If I didn’t look, if I didn’t confirm that it was him, then he wouldn’t be dead. I wouldn’t have to see him dead. It was all just a horrible nightmare and if I walked out, then I could wake up, and he would be home. Everything would be how it was supposed to be…

“I’m very sorry that you have to go through this, Mr. Walker.” It was the Detective who spoke. There was a profound tonality of regret in his voice. “We tried to find other family members to —”

“There aren’t any other family members, like I told you. It was just us.” It was why I had been at this poor man’s desk every day for the past month. Why every bit of my free time that wasn’t spent at the precinct, was spent plastering flyers around town, or speaking with all of our friends about the last time they'd heard from him. We were all each other had.

I sniffed, and let out a slow, heavy breath, as if trying to prepare my lungs for how the sight was going to hit them. I think I was just trying to fool my body into being prepared because, in reality, I was hanging on by a tether. It was a weird sort of limbo, to be fully aware that you were about to feel like you’d been hit by a truck, but somehow that still didn’t prepare you for it.

“Are you ready?” Asked the medical examiner with a sort of gentleness that showed they had done this dance too many times. “If you want a moment to prepare yourself, he’s in rough shape, it can be very jarring.”

“I’m ready.” I nodded. I knew if I took another moment, I would never look under that sheet. “Just…pull it back, please.”

And so the sheet pulled back.

It felt slower than it was. Like my time was slowing down, my perception of it. I wanted to turn away. To look anywhere else and just let him…just let this corpse be in my peripherals. And then time sped to catch up with itself. In what felt like one swift motion, the sheet was folded onto his chest, and on the slab laid…

“Terry..” I choked out his name. It felt like all the air in the room had been sucked out. He was lying there, skin a sickly grey-blue in between vast stretches of purple and yellow bruises. His hair was combed back, but it was so much shorter than it had been. He looked like he had been beaten to death.

My hand flew to my mouth to keep from vomiting. It felt like a golf ball had suddenly been lodged in my throat, and no matter how many times I swallowed, the feeling wouldn’t pass.

“What happened?” The question came out strangled. “That’s my brother. That's...where did you find him? How did you find him? I need to know how he..”

The sheet was slowly pulled back over him, and I felt two arms lock around me as I was being led out of the room. All the while questions bubbled and burned.

Where had he been found? How? What had happened to him? Did anyone see him? Did anyone see him getting tossed there like garbage, and just kept going? Surely someone had to have seen something? Was the person who called secretly his killer? People’s brothers don’t just get dumped on the side of the road and no one saw a thing.

Detective Dawson walked me to the break room and closed the door. The smell of coffee that was brewed just a little too strong had started to dissuade that golf ball feeling that was lodged in my throat. When he asked if he could make me a cup, I nodded, trying to focus on anything other than the image that was now burned into my memory.

“Do you still want me to be blunt about things?” He asked after a beat of silence as he poured two coffees. “I know you said that’s what you wanted, but…” He made a weary sort of sound, one he’d tried to hide. “It’s bad. Sugar coating it might not make it hurt less, but it might let you sleep at night.” I took the offered coffee and just sat there for a minute. Letting the warmth of it seep into my hands, let it ground my thoughts. I almost wanted to apologize to him. I was the one who just saw their dead brother on a cold metal slab, but all I could think about was how much it had to suck for him to be the guy who dealt with this as their every day. Having to be the bad guy who told people how their friends and family were murdered, and how they were going to try and find who did it.

“Blunt. Clinical.” I shrugged, “Whatever makes it easier to tell. I just...I know people shouldn’t want to hear all the gruesome details about how their person died but if I don’t know, then I’m never going to find any kind of peace of mind. I’m going to sit and wonder, and with every horrible thing that happens to someone on the news, I’m going to be sitting there thinking ‘Is that what happened to him? Could it be the same people?’ And I…I can’t live like that.”

“I understand.” And it sounded like he did, for whatever it was worth. “We found him out on the side of Arrowhead Road. Someone called in that they saw a man on the side of the road, and were worried that he was unconscious, but they didn’t want to stop in case it was some kind of trap.” He shook his head briefly. All the videos online of 'this is how they get you' and different traps and setups to get people. They were valid and probably saved some people, but I couldn't help but wonder if it had cost him precious time when he could have been saved.

"If they had stopped, could... could he--" I couldn't finish it.

Detective Dawson took a sip of his coffee before he sat across from me, his hands clasped around the mug. “He...had passed long before he was found. The evidence suggests that he was dumped there and that what happened to him, happened somewhere else. The lab is working on all of the samples taken from him right now to try and narrow down where that might be.”

I nodded for him to continue, trying to quiet the noise in my head that was going through every gruesome possibility, every horror show moment in the documentaries and TV shows where this happened to people. Exactly why I needed to know.

“It appears as though your brother was kidnapped, and held captive since around the time he went missing. His wrists and ankles were bound, the…varying stages of bruising and healing, the malnutrition and dehydration, are all consistent with--..”

I went numb as he explained everything. Not quite an out-of-body experience, but it felt like I was simply…spectating. There was only his voice, laying it all out like a tape playing in the background, and the images of what he described playing like some… Texas Chainsaw zoetrope in my head.

He’d been beaten. The different stages of healing in the breaks and fractures, it seems like it was daily. Whoever had him, had chopped his hair, in some places right down to the skin, in others...right into the muscle. He had been assaulted, but there was no biological evidence to be found.

They had taken one of his eyes.

Taken his heart...

By the end of the conversation, one-sided as it was, I didn’t feel any better, but I felt…informed. It’s a shitty way of putting it, really. But it's the only way that makes sense. It wasn’t out of some morbid curiosity, despite the self-sabotaging part of my mind convinced that it was. It was…closure. As much closure as I could get without having the sick fucks who did it to him strung, quartered, and turned into dog food.

I thanked Detective Dawson. I got the paperwork that I needed after confirming that it was him. It was all very…autopilot. I absorbed the information that I needed. What papers meant what, what the next steps were, and that they would contact me as the case progressed. It wasn’t until I drove home, until I walked in the door and went to his room out of pure habit that the autopilot left, and misery made its home.

His room was empty. It was filled with his things, but it was so empty. His bed was unmade, and we would never sit and lament about things that never really mattered together on it. His dresser was full of clothes he would never wear again, except for what I picked out for his funeral. A shelf full of books he would never get to finish.

As this overwhelming emptiness set in, I saw the photo album on the shelf. Tucked away with his favorite books. It was in my hands and I was sat on the floor before I had time to reconsider. Time to run out of the room, lock it tight, and bury everything down. I think a part of me just needed to see his face. Alive, and happy.

It was the same album he’d had since we were kids. Covered in peeling glue where buttons and macaroni once stuck, with stickers so aged, you could barely make out what they used to be. The leather was worn, fraying at the edges like a well-worn jacket. I opened it and I stared at the photos in the album. They weren’t practiced and posed photos that would have resided in our mothers' photo albums. With smiles that had been punctuated with ‘Cheese’.

These were personal.

Candid.

Snapshots of our lives together in blurry and nonsensical chaos. This one was the moment the rope broke on a tire swing that hung over the lake, where I was flailing with absolutely no dignity and all the fear in the world. Another where we were too busy trying to smush cake into each other's faces that neither of us remembered to even blow out the candles that were melting away into the frosting.

Pictures of us at our parents' graves for each of our big moments. Graduation. New jobs.

Every selfie we ever took, every road trip, every perfectly mundane or ridiculously happy moment we managed to capture was glued to the pages, outlined with bright flashes of marker and pen, little snippets of his thoughts and memories enshrouding them, and the dates they were taken.

Tears stung at my eyes. My throat tightened. I tried so hard to keep it together. To blitz through the stages of grief and just go right to acceptance. To look back fondly at our memories and never have to face all of the misery alone. But it hurt too much.

“Fuck you, Terr.” I sniffed with all the petulance of a child as I threw the photo album out of my lap, and wept. “Fuck you for leaving me. We were supposed to look out for each other and you went and…got yourself fucking killed.” I pulled my knees to my chest and let out snotty, harsh noises as I battled between the anger I felt and the sorrow that was clawing its way into every fiber of my being. I wept out apologies for talking to him so harshly like it had been his fault he was dead. I was revolted at the way it all echoed. At just how quiet the house was now.

It had never been quiet, but now the silence suffocated me like smoke in every corner. Like some inescapable miasma.

By now, there would be some silly movie playing too loudly in the living room. We would be arguing in the kitchen on which take out to order, and inevitably order both so we could get on with trading our stories of the day. The fans would be blowing the comfort of white noise through the rooms. There would be the sounds of life. The sounds that made these walls feel like home.

Instead, there was just me. Just me and all the guilt, the anger, the sadness. Me and all these feelings that were drowning me because the one person I could talk to about them, the one person who could make them all feel smaller… was dead.