The Truth About Aaron Read online

  Aaron put his head down and he placed his hands straight down by his sides. This wasn’t the first and wouldn’t be the last time our father grew angry over what he called Aaron’s feminine posture.

  After dinner, the four of us returned to the living room for our final rented movie when the phone rang. Dad sprang up to answer it.

  A few minutes later he reentered the room. “The guys are going out for a few drinks,” he told our mother. “I’m going to go with them.”

  “When will you be home?”

  “Ten thirty.”

  “All right, Dennis,” she said with a knowing chuckle.

  Around 3 a.m. Aaron and I heard our mom walk past our bedroom to the kitchen, mumbling, “That fucking asshole, that fucking asshole.”

  We heard her open the side door that led to the driveway. Aaron and I slid out of bed and tiptoed to the kitchen. Aaron took a knee so I could use his thigh as a boost onto the counter to look out the window. Our dad was leaning inside the driver’s window talking to his buddies. My mother stood behind him with her arms crossed, yelling.

  “Dennis, get your ass inside or get the fuck out of here!”

  As our dad turned and started stumbling toward the house, I jumped off the counter, and Aaron and I rushed back to our bedroom. With my head against our cracked bedroom door, I could hear them arguing. I relayed to Aaron what was going on.

  “Why the fuck do you have to embarrass me like that in front of my friends!” our father yelled.

  Our mom grabbed the rotary phone from the wall and smashed it over his head, shattering the phone into pieces. Then she stubbed the burning ember of her cigarette into his forehead, causing red ashes to fall in the dark.

  Our parents shoved their way into the hallway bathroom. Aaron and I snuck out into the hall. We saw our dad slamming our mom’s head against the white sink, over and over until she slumped to the ground.

  As my dad stood above her, they both looked our way.

  “You see this coward, boys?” our mom yelled from the bathroom floor as blood streamed down her forehead. “He’s a piece of shit. He thinks he is tough because he can beat a woman.”

  Aaron and I ran back to our beds. Aaron was crying, so I got on his bed and held him in my arms.

  “Say something to make me laugh, D,” Aaron whispered.

  This time I had nothing to say.

  Chapter 3

  I HATED THE BELT, HATED the hangers, hated my father’s hand. Our father would hit us for anything from a bad grade to disrespectful behavior to sheer clumsiness. One morning when I was nine, he lifted me up by my left arm, and, with my legs dangling in the air, spanked me repeatedly, hitting me on the rear end each time he said a word, as was his custom. I always hoped he wouldn’t have a lot to say.

  Aaron was next to me sobbing as I took my beating for accidently spilling my cereal.

  “Are you crying?” my dad asked Aaron.

  He dropped me and turned his anger toward Aaron, taking him by the arm and administering another beating. After a few minutes, our dad left the room, leaving Aaron and me on the floor, wiping our tears with our shirts.

  Whenever Aaron and I sensed a beating was coming, we ran into our bedroom. As our father got closer, we could hear his footsteps on the wooden floor and his belt buckle clink as he started to take it off. We would crawl underneath our beds and put our backs flush against the wall. Every time he reached for us, we sucked in our stomachs, trying to keep his searching fingertips from grabbing us.

  Eventually, he’d become frustrated and leave, saying, “You have to come out of your bedroom at some point.”

  When it was quiet and we felt safe, Aaron and I would emerge from underneath our beds and embrace each other with tears in our eyes, snot running out of our noses, dust on our shirts and shorts, wondering if we were in the clear. Some days we were; others we weren’t.

  Once, I told our dad I was going to call the Department of Children and Families, and he handed me the phone before saying, “Call them. As soon as you hang up the phone, I will beat you boys harder than you’ve ever been beat before. They will have to pull me off of you after they break down the door.”

  One evening Aaron and I were at the kitchen table trying to finish our homework so we could attend the big high school basketball game with our dad. About a mile from our house, Bristol Central High was hosting crosstown rival Bristol Eastern. I was in eighth grade; Aaron was in fifth.

  With tip-off approaching, I worried that I wasn’t going to finish in time to make the game. Aaron had completed his assignment and was getting dressed. Nervously, I tapped my pencil on the table as I thought about a question from my homework assignment I was trying to answer.

  A few minutes later I mindlessly tapped my pencil again on the table. Just then, I felt something stab into my scalp, two inches above my forehead. I reached up and pulled the two prongs of a vacuum cord out of my head. When the blood began to pour, I started screaming. Aaron ran into the kitchen and started screaming, too. The right side of my face was covered in blood. I thought I was going to die.

  I kept a towel pressed against my head for the rest of the night. I didn’t make the game.

  Late that evening, after Aaron and my dad returned from the game, I heard my parents talking. “It has to stop,” my dad said. “It was too close of a call tonight.”

  Chapter 4

  SEPTEMBER 12, 2003

  IT WAS GAME DAY, and we couldn’t wait to get on the field.

  Aaron and I were just hours away from playing in our first varsity football game together. Aaron was a thirteen-year-old freshman wide receiver and I was a seventeen-year-old senior quarterback at Bristol Central.

  That morning I woke up before Aaron. I unraveled the clothes-iron cord from my feet, because my legs hung off the end of my bed and underneath the ironing board my mother used. I sat on the edge of my bed for a few minutes just looking at Aaron sleeping, my best friend. I thought about all the times we had attended high school football games at Muzzy Field in Bristol as children. Under the stadium lights and behind the bleachers, we played tackle football with other kids as the game was going on. When the crowd roared, I’d look at Aaron and tell him, “One day we’ll be out there together.”

  Aaron finally woke up and had to pull his legs out of the hamper at the end of his bed. “Good morning, D,” he said, rubbing the crud from his eyes.

  We had a small closet: Aaron and I shared the left half while our father’s clothes occupied the right side. Our mother had ironed all our outfits the previous weekend. Now, on Friday, only two items remained on the plastic hangers on our side: our maroon game jerseys. Aaron wore number 15; I wore number 14.

  We got up and walked to our bathroom to brush our teeth. We nudged each other for sink space, competing to see who could keep their toothpaste-spit away from the clean faucet while being elbowed in the stomach. We made weird faces at each other trying to force a laugh so the toothpaste would fall onto our chin or splatter onto the mirror.

  WHEN HE WAS YOUNGER, Aaron was ice-skating for the first time at our cousin’s birthday party at an indoor rink. Aaron challenged another kid who was an experienced skater to a race. Aaron was in the lead as they neared the first turn, but Aaron forgot one thing: he didn’t know how to turn on skates. So he kept flying straight and smashed his head into a wall.

  Everyone at the rink turned to the source of the loud bang. Aaron dropped to the ice, landing on his back. He got right up, amazed at not being hurt. He didn’t start crying until he noticed the blood coming from his mouth and dripping onto the ice. Our aunt Lisa, seated at a nearby picnic table, cautiously shuffled in her shoes to him as fast as she could. She picked up his two adult front teeth off the ice, her eyebrows raised in shock. Aaron spotted them and let out a piercing scream. Aunt Lisa skittered off the ice back to dry ground and put the teeth in a Ziploc bag, but there was no saving them.

  Days later, a dentist fitted Aaron with two prosthetic front teeth. He would always h
ave issues with them. Sometimes he’d bite into an apple and end up losing his teeth. Once his fake teeth were out, it looked like he had a pair of short No. 2 pencils protruding from his gums. To get a rise out of me, he’d bring his head down just above the surface of the table and act like he was using them to write on a sheet of paper. Our abs would hurt from laughing.

  THAT WASN’T AARON’S ONLY hard collision as a child. In the summers, when our parents were at work, we loved to build and hammer things. So one day when I was in third grade we went into the woods in our backyard with a few friends and started hammering a piece of wood into a tree with nails. I was holding the board steady and our friend was banging on a nail. As he was hammering, the rusted hammerhead flew backward and smashed into the left side of Aaron’s head.

  My heart stopped. Aaron dropped to the ground, landing on his butt. I rushed to him and saw he had blood oozing out of his ears and nose.

  “Am I going to be okay, D?”

  We were both scared. Aaron got up and was able to walk back into our house, where I used paper towels, peroxide, and Q-tips to clean him up.

  Many years later, I’m left to wonder: was this the first hit of many that affected my brother’s brain?

  OUR MOTHER WAS IN the kitchen drinking coffee, smoking a cigarette, and reading the local newspaper. She always looked for sports stories about Aaron and me. She’d cut them out of the Bristol Press and tack them onto the bulletin boards above our beds. Aaron and I hated those articles, because they’d fall on our beds in the middle of the night—along with the sharp tacks—but our mom loved looking at them while she ironed.

  Aaron and I put on our jerseys and headed to school—our normal routine on game day.

  I was so excited, I couldn’t get the game against Xavier High School out of my mind all day. I saw Aaron a few times in the hallways and made sure he understood the plays.

  “D, I know what I’m doing,” he said. “You’ve told me a hundred times already.”

  When the final bell rang, Aaron and I went home to take a pregame nap. When my alarm buzzed, we went to the living room and lay on the floor. Our father, who had just returned home from work, was sitting on the sofa. A few hours before kickoff, he always rubbed our feet with his strong hands. With blades of grass on his forearms and with dirt stains on his white tube socks, he dug into our arches to break up the soreness that had built up in our feet from the week of practice.

  I walked alone into my room and put on my maroon football pants and long maroon socks. I valued this time. I looked over the play sheet that was wrapped around my left wrist. I wanted to be perfect—especially because it was our season opener and my first varsity game with Aaron. We had both worked so hard for this moment.

  Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep, I’d roll out of bed, tiptoe to the kitchen door, slide on my shoes, flip on the sidelight, and go outside. Under the amber glow of the crackling driveway light, I’d jump rope with my blue weight vest strapped on. Aaron often woke up and joined me on the driveway.

  “Man, you are crazy,” he’d say, shaking his head from the top of the steps. But then, seconds later, Aaron would be a few feet away mimicking my motion because we only had one jump rope and had to share.

  We’d only stop when our mother came to the door. “What are you doing?” she’d ask. “Come back inside and get to bed.”

  Before bed every night, we’d see who could do the most push-ups and sit-ups. When one of us would stop, the other would say, “Hey, if you’re not working now, someone else is.” This was what our father often told us, and we repeated it to each other hundreds of times. We wouldn’t quit until our muscles locked up.

  Other times before bed we’d compete to see who could plank the longest. We’d hold the position and stare at each other, waiting for the other one to drop. Our entire bodies would shake, but we wouldn’t give up until our bodies collapsed to the floor; neither of us ever wanted to lose.

  If it was raining, we’d go to our basement and set up cones to run drills. We’d play tag, chasing each other around our pool table to improve our agility and quickness. We’d get on our knees and play tackle football. Other times, we’d run up the stairs from the basement, around the den wall, back down to the basement, and around the pool table like it was a track around a field.

  When our father returned home from work, we’d do everything in our power to convince him to join us on the driveway and throw us the football. Aaron and I would push and shove each other, trying to gain position in order to make the catch to impress our dad. I was older and stronger at the time, but Aaron always made it a battle.

  We’d play home run derby in our backyard. Once Aaron jacked one of my pitches through our parent’s bedroom window. My mother poked her head out of what remained of the shattered glass and asked what the hell happened. Aaron replied, “I finally hit his curveball!”

  WHEN IT WAS TIME to return to school, where we would meet up with our team for the ride over to the stadium, our dad followed us to the car. He gave us a hug and a kiss good-bye, and we got in. I rolled down the driver’s-side window, and as I backed out of the driveway, he strolled along with us shouting words of encouragement until we reached the end of the driveway. For years, our father had talked about how special the day was going to be when his two boys took the high school playing field together, and now that day had arrived.

  Aaron was the only freshman on our team, and I worried that he was nervous. He had as much athletic ability as any of the wide receivers on our team, but he was too young to know it.

  I told him that the locker room was quiet on game day—much different than after school on practice days. “When you’re getting dressed I want you to envision what you have to do and how you’re going to get it done,” I said.

  I continued. “Before you run with the football tonight, make sure you exaggerate every catch with your eyes. Look at the ball all the way into the tuck. Play hard on every snap.”

  He nodded.

  “Also, the first time I touch the ball, I’m going to score tonight.”

  He thought I was joking and started laughing.

  “I did it last year and I’m going to do it again,” I said. “You just watch.”

  He looked at me as if I were out of my mind.

  We parked near the custodian’s entrance. We both put our headphones on and listened to our slow-jam mix—Boyz II Men, Jagged Edge—to keep us calm before releasing all of our energy on the field.

  Through the cafeteria’s glass windows, I saw two yellow school buses lining up with their engines running, waiting to take our team to Muzzy Field, our school’s home stadium for football and baseball games.

  After a brief team meeting in which we reviewed our first few offensive plays and discussed last-minute adjustments, I grabbed my gear and the game ball, and walked outside. I met Aaron on the sidewalk. He stood about ten yards away and I took a three-step drop and threw him a pass. Aaron exaggerated the catch, tucked it, and tossed the ball back to me.

  The team loaded onto the two buses. I took a seat and Aaron sat behind me. Aaron put his hands on my shoulders and squeezed. He whispered into my right ear, “You’re going to dominate today.”

  “You are, too,” I said. “We have been waiting a long time for this. Let’s both have a day!”

  I was always the last one off the bus, so I could watch my teammates in their maroon uniforms stride into the stadium. Aaron waited for me to rise, but I told him to walk out in front of me. I followed closely behind.

  As soon as we got off the bus we could smell the burning coals in the concession stand grill. The yellow-jacketed event staff was busy getting the stadium ready for the crowd. I slowed as I neared the front entrance. Every time I reached this spot for our home games, I paused. My dad had played here. My uncles had played here. Even Babe Ruth played here when he was in the minor leagues.

  In the old-time locker room, I sat in front of my wooden locker, my eyes closed, visualizing the game ahead. Then I tied th
e laces on my black Adidas cleats and jogged onto the field. I loved feeling the crunch of the gravel underneath my feet as I ran past home plate, down the third base line before reaching the left field grass, where we warmed up. Aaron was already out on the field.

  AARON WAS PHYSICALLY MATURE beyond his age and so skilled that my father often said, “When Aaron develops, he will be special. He’s as gifted as they come.”

  When Aaron was in the seventh grade, he could dunk a basketball. He was an all-around better athlete than I was, and I never possessed his leaping ability. It got to the point where I told Aaron, “Look, if you want to play H-O-R-S-E with me, you can’t dunk because I can’t.” Aaron would nod his head and then we’d go outside to play. But then his very first shot would be a tomahawk jam.

  “What did I just tell you?” I’d say.

  “Oh yeah,” he’d say, then he would smile at me. It was his way of playfully sticking it to his older brother.

  We challenged each other often as kids.

  One time at a restaurant Aaron boasted he could eat a four-pound burger. He was only twelve at the time, and as his older brother I knew how to push his buttons. “Aaron, there is no way you can eat that entire thing,” I said.

  Aaron ordered the burger. It filled the entire plate. A few big bites in, his face already covered with ketchup and cheese and beef juice, he looked at me with his mouth full and said, “D, there’s no way I can finish this.”

  We both started laughing.

  We gave the leftovers of the burger to our dog, an eighty-pound purebred white German shepherd named UConn. We loved to take a football outside with UConn and try to juke him and run past him on our narrow driveway. He’d nip at our legs and sometimes grab hold of our pants and rip our clothes as we tried to move past. It was a nerve-racking game, but we wanted to replicate what it was like running away from defenders on the football field.