I looked at him. “I’m sure.”
“Griz, man—”
“Marco.” I kept my voice level. “If I need to handle my brother, I will handle my brother. Go home.”
He held my eye for a second longer than was comfortable, then nodded and got out without another word. I respected that about him. He knew when a conversation was finished.
I got Grim out of the back and walked him to my car. His hands were still bound in front of him and he moved stiff, jaw swollen on the left side from where I had caught him earlier. He didn’t say anything and I didn’t say anything. I put him in the passenger seat, walked around to the driver side, and pulled off.
I drove for about forty minutes until the city was completely behind us. Took a route I knew well that ended up at a stretch of open land off a road that didn’t get traffic at that hour. Flat, dark, nothing out there but space. I pulled off to the side and cut the engine and we sat there in the quiet for a moment. I had so many decisions to make, and there was so many ways that this could go. My brother had never been anything other than a problem to me, but I always loved him. I thought that we were supposed to stick together, but he never saw things that way. Ever.
For that, I blamed my mother. She raised us to be against one another. As kids that didn’t work. We always wanted to protect one another because we knew that we were all living in hell. But I feel like her, pinning us against each other really fucked with his head in a long run. He didn’t know whether to like me or hate me. He didn’t know whether to look out for me, or put my life in danger. And it didn’t used to be like that.
Then I reached over and cut the zip tie on his wrists. I wasn’t worried about him trying anything, because we were in the middle of nowhere, where I wouldn’t hesitate to smoke his ass if it came down to my life or his. Hopefully his ass has some sense. He seen what just happened to cherish, and I was not in a mood to be playing games. This situation could go one or two ways right now.
He rubbed his wrist slow and looked straight ahead through the windshield. The left side of his face was swollen enough now that his eye was starting to close. He looked rough. He’d looked rough coming out of that house too, whatever Cherish’s people had done to him over those days had its own story written across his body. But I wasn’t ready to feel sorry for him yet.
“You got something to say?” I asked.
He was quiet for a second. “You sure that shot killed her.”
“Yeah. You saw it. You can’t come back from that type of headshot.” I said, unfazed.
“She was just a—”
“She was a problem,” I said. “And I handled it. Same way I handle everything. You want to talk about Cherish or you want to talk about what’s actually between us. This happened because you blackmailed me into killing her and you knew I was trying to get away from shit like that. You keep making my life hell, and all I’ve ever done was try to protect yours. Yeah. I should have killed her ass back then, but you also shouldn’t have hunted me down and placed that kind of responsibility on me when you knew I didn’t want to be a part of shit like that.”
That landed. He turned and looked at me for the first time since we left and I looked back and didn’t move my face.
“Talk then,” he said.
I sat back in my seat and looked out the windshield. I had been turning this conversation over in my head for years. Played it out a hundred different ways. And now that it was here I didn’t want to perform it. I just wanted to say what was true.
“I loved you,” I said. “I’m going to start there because I need you to hear that before anything else comes out of my mouth. You were my brother and I loved you. I looked up to you. You were older and you were tougher and when we were young I wanted to be like you more than I wanted anything else. You know that?”
Grim didn’t respond.
“I watched Pops use you as a punching bag for years,” I continued. “Watched him take everything out on you because you were the one who reminded him of whatever he hated about himself. And you took it. Every time. Because you respected him even when he didn’t deserve one ounce of it from you. That used to kill me. Standing there watching and not being able to do anything that would actually stop it. He beat you more than he beat anybody else because he knew you had the potential to be greater than the jacket he’d placed on you. Man, as a kid you had the gift of gab that made people listen. You could sell water to a fish, and people genuinely liked you for you. He hated that. He wanted you to be cold and feared. Not liked”
I stopped for a second.
“That night.” I said it and let it sit between us. “You remember that night.”
Grim’s jaw tightened on the side that wasn’t swollen. He knew that I was about to have a conversation that needed to be had for years. The conversation on what actually pulled us apart.
“He came into your room drunk out of his mind. You had company. A girl that you had been fucking off with. And that nigga tried to—” I stopped and started again. “I got her out of there before he could hurt her. She was innocent. I gave her money, put her in a cab, made sure she was gone and wasn’t going to say anything. And when I came back inside and madeit to your room, he had his gun against your head. The nigga was jealous of you, and you couldn’t see that. But that night, the feeling of death hit me heavy. I felt in my heart that he was going to kill you. With that gun to your head, all that was left for him to do was to pull the trigger.”
I could still see it if I let myself. The way my father looked standing over Grim, that specific kind of drunk that turned his eyes red and made him into something that wasn’t fully a person anymore. This sick ass nigga really was going to harm the girl that Grim brought home, just to show Grim he was superior to him. He was sick. And my momma was in the other room quiet because she didn’t give a damn about anything other than getting high at that time. Mayhem had put her onto drugs years earlier, because he hated her ass just that much.
But that night, while this nigga had a gun to my brother head, he was ranting about how Grim had never been what he wanted. How everything wrong with his life had a face and that face was his own son. The gun pressed hard into Grim’s temple and Grim sitting there taking it because even then, even at that moment, he couldn’t fully turn against the man he knew as his father.
“He was going to kill you,” I said. “That wasn’t a drunk man making threats. He was going to pull that trigger and I saw it. I had maybe three seconds to make a decision.”
“So you killed him. That was your only option Griz?” Grim asked with his victim mentality still. I read about how people love their abusers, so this dude was still sitting here mad at me for killing the man that was going to kill him. His voice was flat but something was moving underneath it.
“I killed him,” I said. “Yeah. I put a bullet in our father’s head to keep him from putting one in yours. And nigga, you are ungrateful as fuck to be amongst the living!”
The silence that came after that was heavy in a way that had weight you could almost feel pressing down on the inside of the car.
