One Way Road 10 comments

By Dyana Herron

Last week, my brother was left alone in a small, windowless room with a child rapist. This man would, the following day, become a child murderer, as his two-year-old victim succumbed to her injuries in the local hospital of our Tennessee hometown.

When my brother learned of her death, he called me, sobbing. I was on Whidbey Island off the coast of Washington, organizing the spring residency for Seattle Pacific University’s MFA program.

I answered my cell phone while walking down the gravel road at Camp Casey, woods on both sides, the shore in the distance. Like an animal suddenly alert to danger, my senses heightened: I could see every tremor of leaf and fern, and the far-off surf pounded in my ears. Automatically I began to calculate the distance between us, the time it would take me to reach him—bus, ferry, plane, car.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just don’t have anyone else to talk to about this.”

That was true. Earlier in the week, my brother and his long-time girlfriend had split, this time for good. Our mother, who suffers from mental illness, had been hospitalized and so was unreachable in more than one sense.

Added to all of this was the stress of his new job. After working for the YMCA for ten years, my brother has, at twenty-five, just taken a position working in the court system as a liaison in cases of domestic abuse. He interviews both victims and perpetrators, assists them in filling out paperwork, and advises the judge in matters such as counseling and orders of protection. A lot of responsibility for someone without a bachelor’s degree and no formal background in either law or psychology.

“The lawyer stepped out of the interview room,” he told me, “and after a few minutes the man looked over at me and said, ‘You people with your fancy suits and your fancy shoes, you think you know what bad is. But you don’t know. You weren’t there. There are two sides to every road.’”

My brother has always had a temper, a well-developed sense of righteous anger. Once he was almost arrested for fighting a man who had trapped a beaver in a public park and was pelting it with rocks. If you had asked me a year ago to predict how he would react to this statement, I would’ve guessed it wouldn’t be pretty.

But he kept his cool. “Sir, you raped a child,” he said. Then, holding up the warrant, “And this piece of paper says you’re headed in one direction now.”

My brother feels a need to serve and protect others. I feel the need to protect him. As kids, it was easier—he needed protecting mostly from our mother, mostly for regular mischief, like when he shot out the back windshield of her Dodge Omni with his BB gun.

Or like another time when, seeing coals glowing red and white in the grill on our deck, he thought they were “crystals” and carried them inside to the living room on an aluminum pie plate to show me.

He dropped them, of course, when the plate burned his hands, and the coals ate holes in the blue carpet our parents had laid in our trailer only a week or two earlier. I did what seemed safest, most sensible: folded a bath towel over the black holes, flanked it on both sides with couch pillows, and opened my mother’s bible on top to the passage, “Thou shalt not kill.”

Chicken snakes in the barn, a cat skull hooked in the pond, mice in the walls at night, camel crickets in our grandmother’s cellar: such simple fears.

“Do you ever wish,” my brother asked me last week, “we could go back for just a little while to when we were kids? I mean, it’s not like everything was okay then, but we didn’t know how bad it was, how bad everything can get.”

“Yeah,” I said. We were both exhausted.

My love for my brother is a one-way road. Everything else you can say about a road holds true for this road, too: sometimes it’s smooth and sometimes it’s rough, sometimes it’s straight and sometimes it’s serpentine. It passes over every kind of terrain. But it continues in only one direction, forward and forward, and is as long as my life.