“Things got a little strange during the summer,” my mother continued. “But Brian’s calmed down now. Maybe that’s due to Eric, preposterous as that sounds.” My mother’s letters and phone conversations had enigmatically referred to these summer “problems,” but I’d never received a direct answer about what any of it meant. I remembered half-jokingly asking things like “Has Brian joined a religious cult?” and “Is he having a nervous breakdown?” only to receive the standard “No, honey, it’s nothing to worry over.” Even now, I could tell, she would promptly change the subject before I inquired. “As we speak,” she said, “Brian and Eric are downstairs, heating up dinner for us.”

They’d not only cooked dinner, but had draped the table with a checkerboard cloth and lit clove-scented candles. The setup overlooked the window’s wintery view of our empty field, the neighbor family’s barren peach orchard, and, beyond that, the stark grays and blacks of the Little River cemetery. I took my place at the table; Brian sat at my left elbow, and Eric, my right. The last time I could recall all four sides being occupied, my father had been here.

Brian ladled potato soup from a tin pot. Since I’d last seen him one Christmas previous, he’d cut his hair shorter, lost about ten pounds, and begun wearing things I attributed to Eric’s influence-a dark, bulky sweater, ripped denims, black Converse high-tops. These clothes didn’t make my brother “tough” or “punk” or whatever else he might have been striving for. They just lent Brian an even goofier look. And he’d developed an odd habit-he occasionally blinked forcefully, a random nervous tic, as if attempting to dislodge dust from his eyes.

The meal shifted from soup to main course. I’d swallowed five or six mouthfuls before I noticed my mother’s guns on the kitchen counter: three of them, as well as a leather holster and belt, a scattering of bullets, and handcuffs that shone in the kitchen light. One month earlier, my mother had called San Francisco to describe a disastrous escape attempt from KSIR. Although she hadn’t been there for the mayhem, she was nevertheless disturbed by what had transpired. The inmates had held two co-workers hostage; prior to capture, their kingpin had buried a hammer’s claw end into one hostage’s skull. My mother had told me how she planned to buy extra weapons. I remembered trying to explain how bizarre that sounded-guns in Little River, a town of less than a thousand people, a town where the most criminal act to occur in the last two decades had been the theft of ten gallons of gas at the local Texaco, “That’s just all your San Francisco peace and love speaking,” she’d said. “If you could see what I’ve seen…”

My mother saw me staring at the guns. “Do those have to be out in the open?” I asked.

To appease me, she stashed the weapons in a cupboard and returned to the table. Her voice took on a mock seriousness. “The way I see it is this. Now, if anyone tries to hurt you or Brian, they’ll have to deal with me.”

When she said that, Brian whispered a question to Eric. “Then where was she ten years ago?” My mother didn’t hear, and I assumed I wasn’t supposed to either. His words elicited a discomfited shrug from Eric. I didn’t ask what he meant.

I woke during the night and thought of how, as a little girl, I would sometimes sneak across the hall to Brian’s room. I’d kneel beside his bed, still woozy within my own somnolence, and imagine myself a world-renowned sleep researcher or a girl with superhuman powers who could enter the mind of anyone she wanted. I’d whisper words into the shell of his ear, words I honestly believed would reshape Brian’s dream scenarios to make him happy.

Three-thirty, according to the bedside clock. Pinkish white clouds bloomed in the night sky outside my window, the kind that glow through the darkness. I hoped they signaled snow. Lines from “White Christmas” lilted through my head as I stood from bed. I tiptoed. Now, as an adult, spying on Brian felt criminal, but I opened his door anyway.

Brian had left his blankets strewn this way and that, one’s fleecy corner spilling over the mattress to touch the floor. He wasn’t there, and I prepared to trudge back to my own warm bed. Then I noticed how Brian’s room had changed. His books were missing, as well as the posters he’d tacked up long ago, the advertisements for sci-fi films, the colorful monsters and aliens and astronauts that had held reign over his room for so many years. Gone, too, were the mobiles he’d hung in the corners, those ships and planes I remembered twirling from his ceiling on even the previous Christmas, the last time I’d come home.

Now, only one thing remained on Brian’s wall, a small memento he’d taped to the space next to his bed. I stepped closer. It looked like a photograph. I could see a group of petite boys, standing and kneeling in two rows, staring out from the picture. They wore uniforms; some held baseballs and bats. I scanned their faces, their eerie smiles and eyes, before recognizing one of the boys as Brian. That had been so long ago.

I looked around me, at Brian’s barren, strangely meticulous room. It had never been so clean, and something about it made me feel lonesome. I began to shiver, so I tiptoed back to my own room.

My friend Breeze telephoned the next morning. She and her husband planned to spend December twenty-third visiting friends in Garden City, and she needed a baby-sitter to watch her two children. I had nothing better to do. “Wonderful,” I said. Then, as I hung up: “How typical.”

The living room television was playing, sound off. A cartoon cast its vibrant greens and oranges over Brian’s and Eric’s faces. They lay sleeping on the floor, arms and legs splayed, as if frozen in a complicated dance. A pair of pillows from my mother’s bed sat next to their heads, and Eric cuddled one against his ear. I assumed she had placed them there before she’d departed for work. She could keep three, four, even a thousand guns in the house, and it still wouldn’t fool me: she’d always be her same worried, tame, overprotective self.

When I’d met Eric, his exaggerated seriousness and shadowy, downcast eyes terrified me. It would have been easy to imagine him sprawled on the floor in some icy bathroom, his slit wrists gushing blood across the tiles. But now, there on the floor with Brian, he looked harmless, even angelic. He smiled in his sleep. I didn’t want to wake him, but Breeze would be arriving soon with the kids, so I had to.

“Ahem.” No response. I opened a window, letting the frigid air curl into the room, and slammed it shut. At the sound, Eric’s eyes fluttered open. “Shit” was his first word. His hair looked like overgrown thistledown, garlanded with a ball of carpet fuzz. He looked toward the television, where a cartoon cat’s eyes crossed as a mouse bashed its head with a sledgehammer. The cartoon blended into a commercial; Eric turned, seeing me. “Oh, hi.”

“Good morning,” I said. “Hate to wake you two, but an old friend’s coming over to drop off her kids. How does helping me baby-sit sound?”

Eric yawned and placed a hand on Brian’s shoulder: it was a motherly gesture, strange and feminine. He nudged Brian, rousing him. “Kids,” Eric said. “How old are they?”

“Michael is about four, I guess. The little one’s still in diapers.” He gave me a horrified look. Brian, on the other hand, seemed confused, glancing from Eric to the television to me. “Breeze is on her way over,” I told him. “We get to baby-sit the kids for the day.”

While Brian dawdled in the shower, Eric assisted me in picking up around the house. He seemed to know better than I where things were located; he returned from the kitchen holding a can of furniture polish and a rag I recognized as torn from one of my father’s old shirts. A lemony spray sizzled forth; Eric glossed the rag over the coffee table, the TV, the rocking chair’s knucklebones. We didn’t speak, but kept catching each other’s eye: I watched him, he watched me.