kin & keeper; part 2.

[steeplechasers]

In the last two months Dean hadn't had a particularly difficult time of getting to sleep; construction was tiring work, and though he always seemed to balk a moment on the verge of dropping off, remembering the possibility of nightmares, he always made it into rest eventually. Lisa had noted a few weeks ago that he hadn't had a bad dream for a good long time. She'd touched his face and smiled the smile that meant I'm so glad you're getting better. You deserve it.

He believed her-or had. It was well past one in the morning on that Thursday night and he could not for the life of him get his eyes to stay shut.

He focused on the silent blades of the ceiling fan, circling in and out of street-light, cut-up shadows flipping round and round; he focused on the weight of Lisa's body next to his, her spine pressed against his arm. Her black hair a liquid ink spill on the pillow, her dark arm stark against the white comforter. The gentle pulse of the thinning rain on the roof. There was a trick Lisa had taught him-some yoga thing-a breathing technique, inhale for a count of five, exhale for another five, over and over until the muscles relaxed, but he'd been counting the number five in his head for hours and it didn't seem to be working. He was tense, and he didn't know why.

Well, that was a lie. He knew exactly why.

Frustrated, Dean turned over in bed, separating himself from the touch of Lisa's back. He pushed one arm beneath the pillow and closed his eyes, willing his mind to blank out, to move through a white space instead of from thought to thought to thought of-

The floor was cold under his bare feet when he got up, rounded the bed, went to the window. He cast a backwards glance at Lisa to be sure he hadn't woken her and then lifted the gauzy curtain with one finger and peered through the crape myrtle tree and the rain to the Miller house.

It was dark, shuttered up, obscured by the night. The streetlamp that stood vigil above their lawn illuminated only a bit of concrete, grass drooping, the white and black address number painted onto the curb.

He leaned against the windowsill, wood biting into his hip, and looked. Looked hard.

Dean hadn't had a memory that vivid in-well, since Hell, if he was being honest. After Hell there had been nightmares in droves of everything he'd done, everything that had been done to him. The smell of scorched flesh had choked him for months. The sound of slithering chains or the snap of shackles and handcuffs had made him dizzy and sick and he'd gotten flashes-only flashes, really-scraps of colour and light and sound, at random, and the bone-scraping feeling of nails on a chalkboard all over him. But those had gone-they'd gone a while back, thank God, too stifled and disrupted by the chaos and calamity of the Apocalypse to burden him anymore. He'd had other things to dream about then.

But this-this was different.

A brief glimpse of light in the Miller house. The baby was probably awake. He thought of Lisa smiling at their rust-gabled house, the new happy family, and swallowed hard.

He hadn't even known anything could be remembered like that. He didn't think it was possible to get sucked into a memory to the point where he'd idled at the door and let the spaghetti sauce burn and felt the Kansas sunlight, the baby-smell of his mother's hands, prickling and blossoming behind his eyes as if he'd stared too hard at a bursting firework.

Surely that was something cinematic. That was the kind of thing you saw in movies, a shift into the past triggered by a barking dog or a passing woman. It didn't happen in real life.

Yet it had happened. He could still, faintly-even after the rain had washed the house clean and the images been gone for hours-smell the hospital on his mother's clothes, and feel the ghost of a hand in his hair, and imagine with perfect clarity the soft fragile feeling of Sam's baby-skin beneath his fingers.

This was troubling.

He frowned at the Miller house, watched the flash of light die back down. Slowly the darkness closed back in over its roof and his view pulled in to the glow of the streetlamp and everything it touched and nothing more, an isolated island of night.

He couldn't afford this. He had a job, something of a family, the burgeoning beginnings of a real life here, intruded on only once or twice by Castiel and warded firmly against anything that made his heart long backwards towards what once had been. He'd perfected his tricks of getting through the day without having his knees broken and his legs crippled by grief-the safe practise of dividing things into hours and minutes and getting through each one at a time, making himself busy when he found himself in too much quiet, quashing and smashing and locking up anything that resembled what he'd left behind. Or resembled-Sam.

He'd taken to ferociously ignoring everything that even remotely smacked of his brother. For a long time even something as simple as a rerun of The Good Wife or driving past the big white-columned public library had been enough to bring him to tears, had forced him to pull over until his breathing was normal again. He'd only let himself be truly destroyed when he was alone, after Terrible May. Now he was good at avoiding those things, pretending they didn't exist until they became flat and meaningless and he could stare them down without feeling a thing. This wasn't the healthy way to go about it, but it was the only means he had, and he couldn't afford this-couldn't afford a memory that old and bright, slipping through the cracks of his defenses, past the sentinels on his fortress walls, and freezing him up like that. It wasn't practical. It wasn't safe. He was trying so hard to get away from all that, to honour-to honour what he'd promised Sam, to live and be happy. How was it fair that it was coming back for him, now, after he'd been doing so well?

Tomorrow, he decided-silently, letting the curtain fall back to obscure the Miller house-he was going to work until his entire body ached and then he was going to come home and absorb himself in something, anything. Find something in the house that needed fixing. And he was going to fix that thing until he felt himself being boarded up and safe again and then he was going to sleep the whole night through and he was not going to think of baby eyes like trumpet vine, of holes in the Earth.

He was not going to think about that at all.

By the middle of the month, the hotel renovation was over, and a tiny lull in business meant that Dean was alone in the Braeden house for a good two weeks before the next contract was set to begin. He packed Ben's lunches so that Lisa wouldn't have to, raked the lawn and the backyard, cleaned everything he knew how to clean. Lisa came home around four every afternoon and he gently inserted himself into the process of making dinner, chopping onions or basting meat while she swayed her hips a little to the sound of the radio and called up to Ben to set the table.

It was good when she was home, when someone else was in the house. Dean could zone out just enough that the little whirls and eddies of activity that the Braedens stirred became hypnotic. It was when he was alone that things weren't as nice.

There simply wasn't much to do in an empty place like this, and everything he did get his hands on was too far removed to engage him-golf tournaments and daytime soaps on TV didn't interest him; he was too good at solitaire for it to be any fun; he was raking the lawn too quickly for the falling leaves to keep up. When the house got too quiet and his bones began to itch he tried sitting out on the porch, nursing a beer, watching the grey October sky roll overhead, but that didn't last long, either. The occasional sound of the wind-chimes above the door only served to make him anxious.

Without work to do his hands were idle and so he tried to find things that needed TLC-he swept and organised the garage, careful to let his eyes slide over the shrouded mass of the Impala; he replaced the shower curtain rod in the master bathroom. One afternoon he climbed up onto the roof and picked out all the places where it had been damaged by a rare hailstorm mid-July and spent all evening fixing the busted patches until it was too dark to see and he'd missed dinner and smashed his thumbnail with a hammer as well and he went to bed feeling nervous and uneasy instead of tired, as he'd hoped.

He hated this feeling-as if he were on the cusp of something that was about to happen and refused to do so.

Dean avoided the Miller house and conversation about it like the plague. The moment the house was empty on that first day off he pulled the baby announcement off the fridge and stared at it over the trash can for a while, tracing the pre-printed words with his eyes, looking at the cheerful cut-out blue paper balloons.

On second thought, he shredded it, and took its remains out with old receipts and voided checks to the curb for the garbage truck to take away.

If Lisa noticed its absence, she said nothing. She knew something was wrong, in her own way-Dean knew that much. It was impossible to hide anything from her for long. Though he couldn't recall it, he knew that at some point he must have told her everything-or enough-probably in one of his drunken stupors in dull June. Even if she couldn't pinpoint what was wrong with him now, she probably knew what it all led back to. The same thing everything led back to, all the melancholy and the alcohol and the silence: someone dying in a graveyard in the blackness of May. And it wasn't, she'd told him, her place to assume that she knew anything real about it.

Sometimes he almost wished she would ask him about it. Sit him down and say tell me about Sam. He knew that if that happened he wouldn't be able to breathe a word, because there was too much to tell, and too much he had to keep for himself-things neither she nor anyone else would be able to understand and appreciate about what they had been to one another, what they'd seen and done, the span of their lives. But still he almost wished that someone would ask the question, would give him permission to entertain the image of his brother's face in his mind again. He didn't have the strength to do it on his own.

Except now Sam's face was coming unbidden. The memory-fingers were still twitching at the back of his skull though he fought them back with everything he had.

And he managed to stave them off until work came back, and when it did come back he could have kissed someone for joy. The site was in a housing development only ten minutes away and when he arrived on the first day, a week out from November, the smell of turned earth and the rattle and buzz of machinery enveloped him like a pair of warm arms and he lost himself happily in them, quietly slipping behind his goggles and hard hat and work gloves and pushing himself into the blocked-out hours of his labour where nothing-not even memory-could find him.

He worked and sweated even in the growing autumn chill and kept on schedule and drove home safely, even in the rain. For a while he even thought that he had conquered it, that that scrap and smash of dream-vision had been a one-time thing, until he came home the day before Halloween to Castiel sitting on the Braeden porch, waiting for him.

He paused on the steps, looking under the roof to the man sitting on the porch swing, neatly folded up in his suit and coat as always and his hands on his knees.

Dean glanced over his shoulder; the driveway was empty. Some PTA meeting at Ben's school. Lisa wouldn't be back for a few more hours at least. He turned back, slowly, leaning down to set his toolbox on the wooden stair.

“What are you doing here?” he said.

Cas looked at him, but only briefly, and then turned his eyes away, almost as if the sight of him hurt-as if he were too bright to look at, or too dark.

“I only came to say hello,” Castiel replied. His face was turned to the Miller house.

“Okay,” Dean said, feeling hot and anxious in his throat. “Hi. Now go.”

Castiel's brow furrowed. “I'm sorry?”

“Please go,” Dean said, ducking his head, pushing a hand into his back pocket for the house keys. Didn't Cas know how bad this was? Showing up out of nowhere, a stranger to everyone in the neighbourhood, sitting on his porch waiting for him? Sitting there in the pale light like an amalgam of everything Dean had been trying his goddamndest to push away for the last two weeks?

Cas stood up, holding his hands out gently, mollifying. “I didn't mean to upset you, Dean-”

“I know, I know, just-just please go. I can't talk to you right now.”

Dean opened the door, leaving his toolbox on the porch.

Cas, of course, followed.

And Dean didn't have the heart to tell his friend to leave. He went into the kitchen, shedding his jacket and leaving it draped over a chair, and he could feel Cas lingering in the hallway. Probably squinting at Ben's baby pictures on the wall. Dean tried to stay neutral, to flatten himself, to find the safe spot in the unexpected disturbance of his separated hours.

“You know, most people would agree it's rude to show up unannounced,” he said, over his shoulder to Cas in the hallway.

“My mistake.”

“Do you want a drink?”

“You asked me that last time I came.”

“Well, do you?”

“I might as well.”

Dean caught up the necks of two bottles in his fingers and steeled himself, went down the hall again and pushed one into Cas' hand in passing.

“You seem to be doing better,” Cas said, abruptly, as Dean was sitting down on the edge of the coffee table, and Dean paused-looked up at him.

“Really,” he said.

Cas nodded, holding the bottle as if it were something obscure and electronic he wasn't sure about using. Tentatively he sat down on the arm of the couch, his coat bunching up beneath him, and opened it, toying with the cap in his hand. It rolled, its rivets catching between his fingers.

“Are you?” Cas said, squinting at him, his mouth held in a line of concern. “Doing better?”

Dean debated, for a moment, whether or not to tell him. Because on the whole, he supposed he was doing better-if better meant better at pretending to be alright. Dean was sure that at a certain point the pretending would simply become true. But for now he was only barely verging on what he'd call okay, and there were those-things in the back of his skull, and the memory in the doorway, and he wondered if he should say anything about it at all but before his mind could make itself up his mouth was saying “Yeah, I think I am,” and that was that.

Cas didn't say anything. He didn't look particularly convinced, but that didn't surprise Dean. Besides Lisa, Cas was probably the next best person at seeing plainly when he wasn't feeling quite right. But-like Lisa-he was too polite to mention it.

There was a long silence. Cas took a drink and made a small face.

“How've you been?” Dean asked, clearing his throat, feeling suddenly desperate to hear about someone other than himself. He looked into the neck of his bottle rather than anywhere else. It was narrow and dark and cool and safe. “How's, uh-how's the Upstairs?”

Cas sighed, shifted. “A mess,” he said. “The angels are very-divided. A few of them gunning for the top. There might be fighting soon.”

Dean glanced up at him; he did look a little ragged around the edges, now that he thought about it. A little beaten. “You mean, like. Civil war-type fighting?”

Cas nodded.

“And you're taking time out of weapons training to come check on me?”

The angel looked at him, and though his face was practically useless for emotion on the best of days, now it was very clearly surprised.

“Of course,” he said. “You're my friend, Dean. I find time for you.”

“You don't need to do that.”

“I want to.”

Dean swallowed hard, looked back into his bottle. His shoulders felt tight from working and heavy with the weight of Castiel's presence in the room. He could tell him-he could tell him what he'd seen, what had been triggered-someone willing to abandon a burgeoning war to see how he was faring would only deserve to know something like that, really. And maybe he could help, in some way, with that two-finger trick he'd always used, back when-

“It's-it's not ideal to have you showing up here, Cas,” he said, hating himself immediately. He didn't want to send Cas away, not really, but all the warning bells were going off in his head that this was the old life getting too close, and he wanted to bat it back before it took hold again. “I mean-it's nice to see you, it really is-I miss you like hell, but-”

Castiel's head dropped and Dean mentally smacked himself. Disappointing Cas was high up on his list of things that made him feel terrible inside. But Cas nodded, and gave him a soft smile.

“The Braedens,” he said. “I understand. And this is their home, I-I shouldn't be intruding.”

“It's not intruding, I just-it's just not ideal.”

God, but he sounded like someone's horrible boss, telling them that their work was not up to par, or someone's horrible lawyer telling them that their prospects were not looking good. Like some dick in a suit on TV. But Cas stood up, proffering his half-empty bottle, and Dean took it, set it down beside him on the coffee table.

“I won't come unannounced next time,” Cas said, his lips pulling up sadly. Dean stood, too, avoiding his eyes. “You know-if you need me you can call me down.”

“Wouldn't want to pull you off the battlefield.”

“I care more about you than any war I'd be fighting,” Cas said softly. His hand came up and his fingertips brushed softly against Dean's shoulder, over the place where the mark of his touch had once been, and then came back down by his side, a loose fist against his coat. “I know you don't have many people to talk to about-well. Everything.”

That word tumbled out of his mouth like an atom bomb and Dean flinched, closed his eyes for an instant.

“Yeah,” he said.

“I'll go. I'll be watching every now and then, if you need me,” Castiel said, and Dean looked down at their boots, toe to toe on the hardwood floor. He didn't think he could muster the courage to look the angel in the eye, not with that memory knocking on the back of his tongue. “Dean?”

“Yeah.”

“Be happy,” the angel said, and when Dean looked up from the gleam of Castiel's black shoes he was gone, and the house was empty again, and the front door still ajar.

He felt a pinching in his gut, and moved to close the door. It felt too cold underneath his hand, almost shockingly so, and he pushed his palm against his jeans as if to scrub the feeling off. On the porch the swing-chair was moving gently in an absent breeze, in the wake of the angel leaving him.

I'll be watching.

Goddammit, Cas. Something, now, in the newly-quiet house, in the front room, was moving in the back of his head like a worm beginning to push from a corpse's flesh and this time it was fingers of porcelain coming up through the crack, fingerprints dusted in ash, goddammit, Cas, why did you have to say that? and he felt sick. He felt sick.

Lawrence, Kansas

November 2 nd , 1983

Bedtime was eight-thirty, because Daddy didn't believe in sending children to bed right after dinner-or at least that was what he said.

There was an order in which things had to be done, when you were four years old and getting ready for bed, and Dean knew the order as well as he knew just about anything.

It went like this: Mommy called him upstairs every night at seven-thirty to kiss Sammy goodnight-Sammy, who was bigger now, and was just learning to smile. And then he went into his bedroom and got into his PJs and put his toys away, his Tonka trucks and his Play Family fire engine, and when his floor was clean he went downstairs to eat a bedtime snack on the couch tucked up against Daddy's arm while Daddy watched the news or something grainy in which invisible people laughed and nothing ever truly seemed to happen. And after Sammy was asleep in his crib Mommy came down, and by then it was eight-thirty, and Dean climbed the stairs after her, past the sound of Sammy's mobile turning gently above him, and they crossed his clean floor and he jumped into bed and the mattress bounced beneath his body. Mommy kissed his forehead and read him a story that always, somehow, seemed new, each time she read it, and she did all the voices, because she knew he liked them.

Daddy came up and ruffled his hair and gruffly said “Goodnight, buddy,” and then Mommy turned out the light and hummed a lullaby, a Beatles song, he knew-and he was proud of that, that he had a Mommy who hummed Beatles songs like that-and she sat with him until he got drowsy and just before she left him she whispered, “Goodnight, Dean. Angels are watching over you.”

This was how he got ready for bed, and he knew it better than he knew most things.

It was Sammy's half-birthday-he knew that, too, because Mommy had brought home cupcakes, even though Sammy was still too tiny to eat them. She'd even lit a candle in one and put it on the table in front of the baby's high-chair and Sammy had clapped his hands and kicked his feet and Dean had blown it out for him, because he was too tiny to eat cupcakes and too tiny to blow out candles, too.

Dean liked Sammy. He liked that he could stick one finger into the baby's hand and Sammy would clamp down on it or pull it into his mouth and drool on it; it made him laugh. He liked that he could lie on the floor with the baby and make faces at him and Sammy would smile and make little sounds and squirm. No one else on the street had a little brother like that.

And though he was a little bigger now, he still had little-baby eyes, big nickel-sized eyes that weren't so much green anymore as they were the colour of the lawn at the end of the summer, when it was baked and crunchy under Dean's sneakers, and it smelled like grasshoppers and sunshine-those were Sammy's eyes. At preschool, at the beginning of the year, Dean's teacher had instructed them to draw a picture of their family, and he'd overturned an entire box of crayons trying to find one that satisfied him, for Sammy's button-eyes. But Crayola, apparently, didn't have a shade for dead grass, so he'd used green instead, and his teacher had hung the picture up on the wall with all the others-Mommy and Daddy with stick-legs, and Sammy a blob and two green dots in Mommy's stick-arms, and Dean, stick-boy, holding a red baseball bat.

He hoped he could have another cupcake for his snack. It was, after all, Sammy's half-birthday.

But now it was seven-thirty-time for Sammy to go to sleep-bedtime beginning. Just like every other night, Dean went up the stairs on all fours, the faster to get to Mommy at the top.

Mommy scooped him up at the top of the stairs and he wrapped his legs around her, pushing his face into her sweet-smelling hair. She hummed and smiled and turned down the hall towards the dim nursery and he yawned against her neck, felt her hand pat against his side.

“Come on. Let's say goodnight to your brother.”

Sammy was looking at him through the bars of his crib and as soon as his feet touched down on the colourful rug on the floor Dean ran across the room, grabbed the smooth wood in his hands, peered in.

In the dimness Sammy's eyes were darker, liquid. He wriggled a little, looking up at Dean, and Dean smiled-leaned forward to kiss his little heavy head. He smelled like milk and baby shampoo, just like every night, and his big, big eyes followed Dean as he stood back up, looked straight at him.

“'Night, Sam.”

He felt Mommy at his back, the softness of her nightgown as she bent to smoothe Sammy's whispy baby-hair. “Goodnight, love,” she said-cooed-and Sammy burbled a little and reached for his toes.

He didn't seem very sleepy. Not as sleepy as Dean, at least. Daddy came in to say his own goodnight and Dean jumped into his arms to be carried back downstairs for his maybe-cupcake snack and partway down the stairs he was yawning, and before he knew it he was back upstairs again, tucked against Mommy's side, moving down the hall past Sammy's turning mobile, halfway to dreams already.

Daddy said goodnight and Mommy hummed her lullaby and Dean was already letting the glow of the nightlight fuzz and blur out before his eyes by the time she whispered, “Goodnight, Dean. Angels are watching over you.”

He must have fallen asleep quite quickly after that, tucked safely into his bed, the smell of Mommy's soft hands floating around his head, the smell of Sammy's baby-skin too, like a cloud of good things guarding him from nightmares. He felt his hands uncurl around his blankets and was gone.

When he woke, it was because of the smell-not a good smell. It smelled like the time Mommy had been sick and Daddy hadn't thought to clean out the refrigerator while she was getting better and she'd opened the door one morning and all the eggs had gone rotten.

Dean opened his eyes and lay still.

It was hard to see anything that the nightlight didn't touch. Just the familiar shadows of his room-the jutting corner of the baseboard-the gleam of his closet doorknob. The smell pushed against his face as if blown into it by something passing by and then faded, faded, just a little bit at a time, until it was gone.

Dean sat up, rubbing his face. Everything was quiet. Even the clock above his bed was quiet. He listened hard, as hard as he could-but there was only a very small noise from down the hall, in Mommy and Daddy's room, that sounded like the baby monitor.

Hesitant, he lay back down, balling the blankets in his fists and pulling them close to his face. The smell was still there-weird, at the back of his nose-and the blankets smelled better than the air. He curled up a little, thinking suddenly of monsters in the closet or under the bed, monsters who smelled like rotten eggs. Mommy had told him once that everyone knew that monsters were scared of blankets. He pulled them tighter around him for protection, found the silhouette of the porcelain angel statue on the shelf next to his window and fixed on it-surrounded by the dim green glow of the nightlight like a hulking halo. Monsters were scared of blankets and angels. He knew that. Everyone knew that.

Dean breathed through the blanket. There were very faint footsteps in the hallway-Mommy footsteps; he knew those. They were different from Daddy footsteps. If Mommy was awake then everything was okay.

He sighed, turned over, pulled the blankets with him. Closed his eyes.

There was the murmur of Mommy's voice back down the hall near Sammy's room and he listened, pretending it was her humming lullaby. Then he heard her footsteps moving back, towards the stairs. Everything was fine if Mommy was awake. She was probably going to get a glass of water.

Silence, again-deep silence-not even the sound of the clock above his bed. Which was weird, he thought, feeling himself drifting back into wakefulness-he'd fallen asleep to the sound of it ticking and now it was stopped.

Dean sat up, twisted, looked at the plasticine face of the clock above his bed in the dim green nightlight. The hands weren't moving. They were stuck, but he didn't know the time at which they'd stuck; he was only four, after all. Mommy hadn't taught him how to tell time yet.

Breathing, blanket bunched up over his hands, he listened, smelled that awful smell, too afraid to step out of bed lest a monster's hand snatch at his ankles from underneath. He turned his head a little, the better to see the angel on his shelf, but before it could come into focus there was the loud noise of something hitting the stairs-

“Sammy! Sammy!”

But that was Mommy's voice-that was Mommy hurtling up the stairs-Dean froze, kneeling in his bed, feeling his heart begin to beat beat beat like a toy drum inside his chest-

And then Mommy did something that startled him.

Mommy screamed.

Dean jumped, heart beat-beat-beating, and he threw his blanket aside-monsters or no monsters-and pushed himself down onto the floor, scurrying away from the darkness beneath the bed, stopping short at his doorway and grabbing onto the jamb. Downstairs, a loud thud, and Daddy shouting “Mary!” And Mary was Mommy's name-he knew that like he knew all the other things-

Daddy was a big black blur in the darkness, coming up the stairs, and he tore past Dean's room towards the nursery where everything was shadowed and still and no sound came from anywhere except from the mass of him. He disappeared inside and Dean crept into the hallway, clinging to the doorjamb with one hand, heart thump-thump-thumping. He was ready to dash back into the safety of his blankets if any monsters ventured forth from the blackness of Sammy's room.

He whimpered, quietly, and then felt stupid for whimpering; but he clutched a fist to his mouth all the same, staring, wide-eyed. His eyes were probably bigger than Sammy's, he thought, right now.

He could hear Daddy's voice-mumbling inside the nursery-but he couldn't make out what he was saying. Carefully he put one more foot forward, listening-

“No! Mary!”

The burst of light that erupted from Sammy's nursery was brighter than anything Dean had ever seen-brighter than the sun, even, brighter than the sun on the old lady's trumpet vine down the road, brighter than the summer on the dead grass, and he stumbled back, landed hard against the wall, heart pound-pound-pounding as if it wanted to jump out of his chest, and there began a great roaring from the room down the hall like a lion or a bear or something big and fanged-and then Daddy, tumbling out, clutching a bundle of blankets in his arms, and before Dean could even stand up straight Daddy was thrusting the bundle against his pound-pound-pounding chest and shouting, “Take your brother outside as fast as you can! Now, Dean! Go!”

Sammy was crying; Dean could hear him wailing even over the sound of the roar, but he didn't look down at his scrunched-up little face. He looked straight at Daddy and Daddy's face was contorted with fear and it scared Dean so badly, so immediately, that he almost started crying, too. But then Daddy pushed against his shoulder and Dean turned, tripped a little but caught himself and ran-straight towards the stairs, clutching Sammy hard against his chest, squeezing him tight. Take your brother outside, outside, outside, his little heart was hammering that word against his ribs, against Sammy's face pushed against his pyjama shirt, and his feet stammered down the stairs like the rat-a-tat-tat of the toy drum too and the hardwood was slippery under his bare feet but he got to the door-he fumbled one hand free of Sammy and twisted the knob-it came open, blown back by the night wind, and he threw one glance backward up the glowing stairs for Daddy but Daddy wasn't there.

Then the cool dew-wet grass between his toes. Not dry and baked and crunching, not the colour of Sammy's eyes, just night-grass, cold and damp. Sammy was still crying, his little face bunched up like a crumpled piece of paper, and Dean came to a stumbling stop just outside and looked down at him.

“It's okay, Sammy,” he said, even though it wasn't, even though his heart was still jackhammering in him, and he didn't know if it was okay at all. He didn't know that. He turned around, looking up at the howling gleam of the nursery window-and then Daddy was there, shouting “I've got you,” and his big arms were around Dean and he was being carried towards the sidewalk and there was the sound of glass shattering, the roar exploding, and fire shot from Sammy's nursery window like something from the movies.

Nothing was sleepy or hazy or nightlight-glowing now. Dean felt more awake than he ever had. He wriggled out from Daddy's arms and turned to look at the house, still clutching Sammy, who was still screaming and squirming and fighting in his arms, and watched the flames cloud and belch and lick up against the side of the house.

Daddy herded him backwards, down off the curb, across the wet street, and Sammy's screaming was so loud and hoarse and frightened that lights were coming on all down the road, even in the house of the old lady with the trumpet vine. And when they stopped moving, finally, next to the shiny black shape of Daddy's car, a door opened somewhere and Daddy disappeared briefly into the dark towards the sound of voices and Dean looked down at Sammy again.

His heart was so loud and pumping so fast he thought Sammy could probably feel it against his heavy head. His tiny fists were beating harmlessly against Dean's chest and Dean adjusted him a little, the way Mommy had shown him, so that his heart wasn't beating against his head, and Sammy looked up at him with big scared baby-eyes and fisted one hand around a button on Dean's shirt.

“It's okay, Sammy,” Dean said, because he thought that if he didn't get Sammy to stop crying he was going to cry, too-he was going to be a big scared baby sitting on the street crying, and he didn't want to do that. He wanted Sammy to stop wailing and he wanted Mommy to come out of the house and join them, in her nightgown, with her sweet-smelling hair, and he wanted Daddy to come back and hug him, and most of all he wanted to be back in his bed waking up from a very bad dream where things smelled like rotting eggs and his house was on fire.

But none of that happened, and Sammy didn't stop crying.

Not until Dean turned a little into the streetlight and saw something dark on Sammy's lip, stuck in the corner, the way his baby food sometimes got stuck. It looked-like grape juice, or something, something dark and wet, and he remembered how Mommy used to wipe food off of Sammy's mouth, so he did that-smudged it away with his thumb until it was gone, even though his hands were shaking. And when he did that, when Sammy's little baby-mouth was clean again, then Sammy stopped screaming, and his little face unscrunched, and he looked up at Dean with his big nickel baby eyes, blackish and liquid, and held onto Dean's button real tight.

Firetrucks came. Daddy came back, but didn't hug him. He leaned against the car, huddled over himself, wild-eyed, and it scared Dean, seeing him look like that. So he looked at Sammy instead. He let Sammy clamp down onto his finger and pull it into his mouth and drool on it, and he let Sammy coo and burble and kick his little feet, and Dean smiled at him so that he wouldn't be scared.

It didn't matter that he was scared. He was a big boy. He was four whole years old. What mattered was that Sammy was looking at him, and not at the fire, not at the tall roiling house, or the blue smoke drifting up into the black sky. He smiled, and leaned down to rub his nose on Sammy's nose, and Sammy made a happy little noise and pulled and tugged on Dean's button until it came off in his hand and Dean picked it back out and rolled its edge up across Sammy's forehead, gently. And Sammy's big wet eyes followed it up until it was too high for him to see.

The firetrucks wailed and the lights went around and around and still Daddy didn't say anything. A man in a hat came across the street to talk to him but Dean wasn't listening. He was rolling the button up and down Sammy's face, tracing the smudged tear tracks on his fat little cheeks, feeling Sammy's tiny fist thump-thump-thumping, like a toy drum, against his chest, like someone knocking on a door, like someone wanting to come inside.

Daddy let Dean ride in the front seat, that night, as he drove in a slow crawl away from the dizzy lights and now-empty street outside their smouldering house. Dean held Sammy on his lap and watched his little face in the passing streetlights-shadow passing over glow passing over shadow. Sammy was asleep, now. It was later than Dean had ever been up before. He was getting sleepy again, against his will, but he kept his eyes open to keep them on Sammy.

Daddy didn't say anything. He just drove, out of the neighbourhood, past the house of the old lady with the trumpet vine, and the tires hushed and rolled over the dew-wet asphalt like someone whispering to stay quiet. He didn't drive for long; he pulled over under a glowing yellow sign and parked and said, in a strange flat voice, “Come inside, Dean.”

Dean gathered up Sammy's bundle and waited for Daddy to open the door and then stepped down onto the cold, cold, wet parking lot in his bare feet. When the door closed again, a black flash in the nighttime, it slammed shut with a noise that echoed down the foggy empty street.

The cold burnt his toes but he followed Daddy's big shape, his big ridiculous shape in his black bathrobe and slippers heading for the rectangle of light beneath the yellow sign. Dean knew where they were-it was a hotel, like the hotel they'd stayed in when he was three, and they'd gone to visit Mommy's cousin in another state.

The lobby was buzzing and only three lights were on, flickering over the desk, and Daddy went up to the desk while Dean stood by a chair holding Sammy in his arms. There was a TV, turned off, and some magazines like the kind Daddy read, about sports and news. He yawned, hesitated, perched on the edge of one of the chairs, and pulled Sammy's blanket back a bit. His baby brother was sound asleep, his little fists uncurled, his tiny eyelashes spread out on his cheeks. Dean didn't know if babies had dreams, but he leaned his head down a little to whisper into Sammy's soft, cool ear anyway.

“You better have good dreams,” he whispered. “About dinosaurs or airplanes or something.”

Sammy didn't respond; he just breathed in his sleep, tiny little baby breaths. Dean swallowed and looked up at Daddy, who was still talking to the man at the desk, and hoped Sammy was having the best dreams ever. If Sammy was having them, then he could have them, too.

After what seemed like ages Daddy came back from the desk and touched Dean's shoulder and Dean carried Sammy, heavy and limp, all the way down a dark, dark hall to a room with the number nine on it, and Daddy pushed the key into the lock and opened it up. Inside it smelled like cigarette smoke and the stuff Mommy kept under the sink to clean the floor, and when Daddy flipped on the light, there were two hard-looking beds with yellow covers and flat pillows, and Daddy walked a little ways in and then stopped-staring down at the corner of one of those hard-looking beds, and he didn't say anything at all.

Dean stood in the door, holding the baby. His arms were tired and his legs were sore and he wanted Mommy and he wanted to go to sleep, but he didn't want to say anything. Daddy was scaring him, standing there like that, all big and ridiculous in his black bathrobe and his slippers, like a giant who was lost, a big old giant who couldn't find his way home.

“Daddy,” Dean said, very quietly, finally, and Daddy turned his head a little.

He came back towards the door and leaned down and gently pried Sammy out of Dean's arms and Dean let them swing at his sides. They felt empty and heavy and hurt. Daddy sat down on one of the beds and rocked Sammy a little, his tiny head against Daddy's big chest, and Dean walked over to the other bed and climbed up on it, unsure, afraid.

“Daddy?” he said. Then he swallowed hard and tried not to be scared for just a second, just long enough to ask, “When is Mommy coming?”

And then Daddy looked at him, lifted his head up, and his face reminded Dean of a map of the Grand Canyon he had seen once-all marked up with deep spaces and sad cracks. It was scary, to see that. It was scary to see his mouth pressed into a dark line and his shadowy eyes glimmering and his dark line mouth not saying anything and that-that was when Dean knew, as if someone had dropped a marble into his throat and it was sliding down and landing cold and heavy in his heart, that Mommy wasn't coming to meet them at the hotel, and she wasn't coming out of their house, and she wasn't going to sit on his bed anymore to hum the lullabies she picked out all by herself.

He started to cry. That was all he did. He sat on that hard ugly bed in his PJs with one button missing, crying, and Daddy looked down at Sammy and maybe he cried, too. Dean couldn't see. The room and the curtains and the black mountain of man holding his little baby brother blurred and swam together all hot and smelling like salt. And, sometime, he lay down on the hard ugly bed and made the pillow wet against his face and fell asleep like that, saying her name in thin sad noises in his throat, and his arms were tired, and his legs were sore, and he wanted to go home. He just wanted to go home.

December 1983

Things were different when you lived in room number nine at the Super 8 Motel.

There were noises at night-sometimes banging on the walls down the corridor which started usually around the time the red numbers on the clock said 12:45, or else around the time the red numbers said 4:03. The ice machine clattered and clunked and dropped chunks of ice into itself every now and then and always seemed to wake Sammy up where he slept in the crib the hotel had given them. Every now and then people walked by the room, past the thin door, talking loudly and bumping into things. Sometimes it helped to put a pillow over his head, Dean found. It made the banging and the ice machine and the people quieter, at least.

The bed was too big for him and it was hard and lumpy, but the pillows smelled nice after a while. Most of the time he slept like he was supposed to, although it was hard when Daddy snored or when the ice machine woke Sammy up, because then he cried and cried for ages until he cried himself back to sleep again. Daddy wasn't good at getting Sammy to stop crying.

Nights were bad, but days were okay-they were different, too, though. Daddy didn't take Dean to preschool anymore. Daddy would get up to go to his job at the garage, and before he left he would buy Dean a little pack of powdered-sugar donuts from the vending machine next to the ice-maker, and that was his breakfast. Daddy showed Dean how to heat up Sammy's bottle in the sink, stopped up and full of warm water, and how to test it on his wrist, and how to hold Sammy to feed him. In the morning Dean fed Sammy and watched cartoons with powdered sugar on his face until the lady down the hall came to check on them-she always wore high heels and Dean didn't know her name, but her earrings were big and a lot of the banging on the walls came from her room. Room twelve, which was where Dean was supposed to go, Daddy said, if anything happened while he was gone.

The big-earrings-lady would linger in the room for a while until Daddy came back on his lunch break, and gave her some dollar bills, and brought them food to eat. Then the hotel cleaning lady, who always looked at Daddy with soft brown eyes, which meant she liked him, Dean knew-the hotel cleaning lady, named Nora, would stay in the room with them for the afternoon, and read glossy magazines and make baby sounds at Sammy, who smiled a lot at her. Daddy gave her dollar bills, too, because she didn't have to be there; her cleaning shift didn't start until later at night; but she was nice, and sometimes she bought Dean snacks from the vending machine, and she always smiled at him.

He liked Nora, but he was careful not to like her too much. He always felt guilty, when he liked her too much, because she wasn't Mommy, and she never would be, and liking her felt like a bad thing when Mommy was gone. Sammy smiled a lot at her, but Dean didn't smile very much. He read comic books quietly on his hard, ugly bed.

Nora would leave when Daddy came back and when Daddy came back it meant he was done at work, and he would take them across the street to McDonald's most times, but other times he ordered pizza or Chinese food, because there was no stove in room number nine. For a while it was like a treat, every night, hamburgers or stringy pizza cheese and watching old episodes of M*A*S*H on the TV with Daddy all the time and going to bed whenever he felt tired, but after a while Dean started wishing for things like mashed potatoes or spaghetti or even the hard, crunchy carrots Mommy had always tried to get him to eat. Sammy still ate mostly baby food, which Daddy brought back from the store in jars, and one day after the Thanksgiving they didn't celebrate Dean was so hungry for something that didn't come in a paper bag that he opened one of Sammy's applesauce jars and shared it with him. The applesauce got all smeared over the baby's face, but they ate the whole thing together, from Sammy's tiny blue spoon-Dean pushing it into Sammy's mouth first and then scooping up more into his own-and Sammy wiped his sticky hands across Dean's mouth and made a little cooing laugh, and Dean laughed too and rubbed his nose on his brother's nose. Eskimo kisses. It was his first real laugh since the fire.

It was winter now, and it snowed a little, and Daddy ventured back to their empty house one day when it began to get really cold and came back with all Dean's sweaters and socks and his big coat. When Dean asked if they could go back to get the rest of his toys, the rest of Sammy's baby things, Daddy simply shook his head. He never answered when Dean asked about their house. It wasn't fair, he thought-it wasn't fair that he couldn't go back to his own house. It was still there, but they were here, in room number nine, where everything smelled like cigarettes and fast food, and Dean was getting tired of donuts for breakfast every morning.

He was also getting tired of Daddy. He wished Daddy would do something-talk more, hug him more, tell him all the things he wasn't being told. Stop leaving them with big-earrings-lady and Nora. Take them home. Dean was pretty sure people weren't supposed to live in the same room for this long. He was only four, but he was almost five, and he knew that.

But Daddy was a big quiet man and Daddy went to work and sometimes he stayed out later than normal, going places he didn't talk about. And when he came back at night he stayed up with the lamp on at the table reading books.

Dean didn't know what the books were, but it seemed like Daddy came home with a new one every week-books with weird letters on the front that weren't the alphabet, or with drawings on them, like stars and circles. One day Nora was clearing the newspapers off the table and saw them and clucked her tongue and did something with her hand-she touched her forehead and then her breastbone and then her shoulders and looked sideways at the books with disapproval. And she held the little silver cross on the chain around her neck the rest of the day. Daddy hid them away after that.

Sometimes the heater didn't work and on those days Dean would put on two sweaters and wrap Sammy up in some blankets and burrow under the covers of his hard ugly bed, to keep them both warm. Sammy usually fell asleep in his arms, or else he turned his head as far as it would go in the crook of Dean's elbow to watch the cartoons on the TV. When the cartoons weren't on sometimes Dean watched a man in a suit raise his arms and yell a lot about Jesus, and sometimes the people in his audience would tremble and shake and their eyes would roll and it frightened him.

It was almost Christmas and Daddy's weird books were everywhere and Nora clucked her tongue every time she saw them, and one morning, before big-earrings-lady came to pop her gum in the doorway and watch them, Dean bundled himself and the baby up and took one out of the pile and curled up on the bed to look at it. He couldn't read it yet, not really-he knew some words, but most were too big and too strange-but he flipped through its coarse grey pages anyway. Sammy's hand flopped out from his blankets and he smacked at the book as Dean looked through it, squinting, trying to figure out what Daddy was reading about.

There were pictures, but they weren't nice pictures-nothing at all like the pictures in the books Mommy had read to him, in his bed in the house. They were all strange, twisted creatures, ugly things. On one page, a man with a goat's head that gave him goosebumps. He heard the click of big-earrings-lady's heels in the hall and closed it, shoving it across the bed away from him. He didn't like it at all. He almost wished he had one of Nora's silver crosses on a chain to hold. He stuck his finger in Sammy's closed-up hand instead.

January 1984

On a Saturday, snowy and dark and cold, Daddy was home in the evening and Sammy was napping and Dean was lying on his hard ugly bed tossing a bouncy ball he'd won out of a dime machine in the grocery store up and down and up and down when someone knocked on the door.

Daddy got up immediately, and Dean sat up, rubbing at his eyes, the bouncy ball held in his fist. His stomach growled; he hoped it was the takeaway man, with Chinese food, even though they'd had Chinese food three times in the last two weeks.

Daddy opened the door, but not enough to give money to the takeaway man, so Dean lay back down again. His feet were cold. It was only a few weeks until he was going to be five years old and he had a feeling that he wasn't going to get any birthday presents. He hadn't gotten any Christmas presents on Christmas, either. It seemed like those kinds of things weren't going to happen anymore.

He could hear Daddy's voice, low and mumbling-and a lady's voice, too, a nice soft lady's voice. Slowly, he sat up again.

Dean could just barely see someone through the crack, past the bulk of Daddy's body. Whoever she was, she was soft and short and her hair was dark and curly, but everything else was hidden, and he couldn't hear what they were saying, but the lady seemed-anxious. Or excited. She was talking a lot, and quickly, and he could see Daddy straightening, his shoulders settling. She was telling him something he'd been waiting to hear.

They stood and talked for a long time and then Daddy, quite abruptly, closed the door on the lady, and remained there for a longer time still, hand resting on the knob, face hidden.

“Daddy?” Dean said, feeling his stomach grumble and twist. “When are we eating dinner?”

Daddy almost jumped, as if Dean's voice had startled him; he turned, looked at him. There was a flash in his eyes that Dean had never seen before, under the dark bow of his forehead. Then he looked away, towards the crib where Sammy was sleeping, and then he crossed the room a little, leaned down and pulled something out from under the bed-a duffel bag, one he'd brought from their empty house. He picked it up and put it on the mattress and then opened all the drawers in the bureau under the TV and began pulling out all his clothes and all Dean's, too.

“Are we going?” Dean asked. He held his bouncy ball tight, feeling suddenly very awake. More awake than he had in weeks.

“Yes,” Daddy said. “Find the baby bag, Dean. Put Sammy's things inside it.”

“His bottles and stuff?”

“Now, Dean,” Daddy said, gruff and sharp, and Dean scowled, but did as he was told.

He gathered all of Sammy's unwashed bottles and his little baby clothes and his pacifier and put them all in the baby bag that still smelled like milk and Mommy's hair, even after all this time, and when it was full and lumpy he zipped it all up. Daddy zipped up the duffel bag, too, then found a backpack in the closet into which he put all those weird books-even the ones with the library stickers-and everything else, his sunglasses, his toothbrush, Dean's toothbrush, the big leather-bound journal he'd gotten a few weeks ago-all of it.

Together, man and boy, they cleaned out room number nine and pushed everything they had into their bags and backpacks, and the noise woke Sammy up and he burbled happily and nonsensically while they worked. When they were done Daddy left, went down the hall to the desk, and Dean stood over Sammy's borrowed crib, looking down at his baby brother's big eyes and wriggling fingers.

“We're going someplace, Sammy,” he said. And Sammy, of course, said nothing, but reached up his little arms and Dean grasped one of his hands in his, and said, “Think we're going on an adventure?”

Sammy only made another noise, and then Daddy was back and talking quickly, too quickly for Dean to really listen. But then they were gathering their bags onto their shoulders and Dean was picking Sammy up and holding him on his hip the way Nora had taught him and they were leaving room number nine at the Super 8 Motel. And they were crossing the parking lot to Daddy's car, and putting their bags in the trunk, which made a hollow sound when things landed on its floor, a sound it hadn't made before.

Dean clambered into the back seat, balancing Sammy carefully on his lap, and before he could even get comfortable on the familiar dusty leather Daddy was driving them out, away from the parking lot, through the cold chilly nighttime towards the distant lights of a highway somewhere.

They ate dinner at a Sinclair station while snow fell gently outside the big black windows, and dinner was a bag of chips and a bottle of soda and a pack of powdered-sugar donuts. Sammy fell asleep on Dean's shoulder when they started driving again, but Dean stayed awake-as Daddy drove them towards the wet black hiss of a highway full of cars he twisted, looked back, out the window at the rapidly fading yellow sign of the Super 8 Motel, at the tiny pinprick streetlights of the neighbourhood where their empty house still stood, at the leaves on the bushes, the blank metal fences, the snow-globe landscape that had been home.

Dean knew-another marble in his heart. They were never coming back here again.