The Little Brother (31 page)

M
IKE'S PARENTS AND
I exchange emails (theirs are chatty and upbeat), and they send me birthday, Christmas, and Valentine cards each year. I still address them as Mom and Dad and they call me their son.

T
INA—COLOR-BANDED
braces long gone and still just as sweet and kind—flew to Spain to travel with me for three weeks after her high school graduation. We fell in love. She moved to Massachusetts and we lived together in an apartment while we both attended Boston University.

I dropped out of college, but we stayed together.

There was marriage talk. But then she broke up with me, telling me, “For you, love is linked with disappointment.”

“I'll do better,” I said.

“I don't mean to imply,” she said, “that you can ever be at peace knowing what happened to Tove, and the role that your father played in protecting Gabe and attacking her and her family. But I do think—or would hope—that you'd find peace, because you did the brave thing, even if you couldn't see it at the time. You do know that, don't you? You do see it that way, don't you?”

She talks to me on the phone now. I plan to pursue her again.

A
BOUT THREE YEARS
ago, I got a letter from Tove via her lawyer.

Here it is:

       
Dear Even,

       
I wish I could say that this isn't a difficult letter for me to write. I wish I could say that I'm okay and that everything's in the past now and that we can all move on.

               
But here's the thing. Although we can't be friends again, you'll always be in my heart and I'm hoping I'm in yours. So that's something.

               
I know that you were the one who turned in Gabe's video camera and set everything in motion. I think about it all the time, and how that must have been for you. How it must still be for you. Not a day goes by that I don't think about you.

               
I'm doing much better. You probably know about the Oxycontin bust, and how I got into opiates. I couldn't take it. I needed an escape. It got really bad. I was dying.

               
But I'm clean and sober now, and I'm volunteering at a women's shelter. I work at a doctor's office, and I'm back in college, taking classes, working toward a degree. I want to become a counselor. I want to help other women.

               
No boyfriend. Trust issues, says my therapist. Oh well. The doctors say I won't be able to have children because of residual scarring. I try not to think about it.

               
But I've got a little brown and black mutt from the shelter, Monkey, and Monkey and I are good. We live three blocks from my parents.

               
Things were bad with my mom and dad, then they got worse, and now they're better.

               
Please don't write back or try to get in touch. We're sort of always connected anyway. Does that make sense to you? I'm sure it must. I hope it does.

               
One last thing. I don't want you to go through life questioning what I think. So in case you wonder whether or not I'm glad that you turned the video camera in, I want you to know for certain that I am, and that you did the right thing.

       
Love,

       
Tove

EPILOGUE

A
BOUT TWO WEEKS
ago, eating healthier, exercising, and three weeks without a cigarette after a close-to-three-pack-a-day habit, Dad suffered a severe heart attack while on a treadmill and died almost instantaneously.

I found out from a late-night news program. (Ron Inouye called me the following morning with the details.)

While in bed flipping the channels, I saw Dad's face, and I turned the channel back just in time. A terror plunged through me as I listened and watched.

“Daniel Hyde,” the far-too-cheerful, hair-slicked, and tanned newscaster relayed, “a self-made multimillionaire who became a central figure in a case against the sheriff he once supported, died this morning in Newport Beach, California. He was sixty-one. Hyde died unexpectedly of natural causes.

“Hyde's relationship with Sheriff Krone, as many may remember, began to sour after Hyde's son was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for a 2003 sexual assault in which an unconscious sixteen-year-old girl was attacked in the elder Hyde's Newport Beach home.” At this point a photograph of Gabe in
an orange jumpsuit, hands handcuffed in front of him, appeared. “Gabriel Hyde was released in 2007.”

The photograph switched to one of Dad, Jimenez, and Krone in golf gear, arms on each other's shoulders, laughing and holding cigars. “At one time affectionately nicknamed ‘The Three Amigos,' the sheriff, assistant sheriff, and their most well-known contributor had an alliance that seemed unbreakable. But everything unraveled, and Hyde reemerged as a star prosecution witness when Krone was tried on corruption-related charges.”

Another photograph of Dad sitting on a bench, sparse golden-orange hair flapping in the wind and a thoughtful expression on his face.

“Friends say that Hyde was heartbroken and devastated by his son's arrest. Hyde has been described as generous and down-to-earth.” A quick cutaway to Nancy, older, sadder, pressing a tissue to her eye. “His wealth was not noticeable,” she said, “and he was devoted to his family,” a meaningful pause and gaze into the camera, “to his ultimate detriment.” Back to the smiling newscaster: “A private service will be held for family and close friends. And in other news”—I turned the television off.

Soon after, Inouye gave me Nancy's phone number because she wanted to speak with me. “He loved you so much,” she told me, her voice breaking. She wanted me to know that a few weeks before he passed, he'd told her: “Slow learners like me should have two lives, one for trial-and-error experimentation and one for real, serious living.”

I
SUPPOSE THERE'S
nothing left for me to tell you, except what it felt like to come back to SoCal for Dad's funeral.

Dad finally found his resting place on Sunshine Terrace in Rose Hills with our relatives. His funeral was on a hazy, gorgeous afternoon, slight breeze, lean clouds swimming across the sky, matching gravestones spread along the hill, row after row, reminding me of the tract homes in Cucamonga.

A blue canopy had been set up to protect us from the sun, with twenty or so of us sitting in plastic foldout chairs beneath it.

I sat in the front next to Gabe, and Mom was seated next to him. At one point, she reached her hand across Gabe's lap and pressed it into mine. But we haven't pursued this possibility of reconciliation further—at least not yet.

Though we didn't speak except for pleasantries, Gabe's presence comforted me. He looked like his sex-offender photograph come to life, except that now he wore a suit and had shaved his mustache and stubble.

Dad's casket had been propped on a stilt-like apparatus, next to an easel holding a photograph of him in a business suit with an opal background—hair combed to the side, sideburns, thick glasses—probably taken in the '70s.

A lawnmower rumbled in the distance, and it smelled of gasoline, grass, and dirt, from the fresh mound next to the dark pit into which Dad's coffin would soon be lowered.

The pastor, a droopy-lipped and sad-looking man, droned on about Jesus and the Bible, and for a long time I occupied myself by watching a cluster of ants in a bald dirt spot in the grass between my shoe and Gabe's.

“If the deceased were here today,” the pastor said, pressing the Bible to his chest, “he would tell you to place your trust in Jesus Christ, for he knows more today than ever that Christ is the way, truth, and light, and that no one gets to the Father but by him.”

If Dad were here today, I couldn't help but think, he would tell the pastor to get his lecture done with, so that we could all move on.

Everyone but Gabe and I left before a baseball cap–wearing Latino lowered Dad's coffin into the earth with a crane.

We stayed and observed, and then we both threw in fistfuls of dirt and watched them splat in dirt bombs against the casket's wood.

But it wasn't until my flight home from John Wayne Airport that I thought about how after we threw the dirt, Gabe held my hand for a moment.

On the flight back to New York, I had the inside seat. Mercifully, the middle seat was vacant, so that I had some privacy.

I leaned to tilt my forehead against the window, watching as the plane ascended, the homes and buildings turning into dots and the lights twinkling below. The toylike cars with their headlights twisted and snaked on the winding roads.

Twilight was spreading and clouds drifted; the ocean deepened, expanding in all directions. Everything flimsy, an echo of a dream, including Gabe's hand reaching to hold mine as if we were kids again, and not alone.