My Brother Keeps Telling Me Something in Our House Is Broken

Trevor is fifteen. He's my stepbrother, he's autistic, and he's minimally verbal. That doesn't mean he's not smart. It means the words he uses come out in whole chunks, like each one is a frozen moment from his life that he pulls out and plays back when he needs it.

If he's upset he asks, "Where are the spongebob popsicles?" Years ago the ice cream truck ran out of the kind he liked and it wrecked him for a week. Now upset equals that whole memory, popsicles and all. You learn to decode him or you don't get him at all.

He has another one. "Dog's broken." He snapped the head off a little dog figurine when he was a kid, and ever since, broken anything equals that. A storm half-tore a branch off the tree in our old backyard and he stood at the window pointing at it for days. "Dog's broken. Dog's broken." Until we had the thing cut down.

We moved houses a few months ago. My dad got a better job and that was that. I was twenty, barely into community college, and suddenly living in a new place with new walls and Trevor having three meltdowns a day. I hated it too. I just had more words for it.

The meltdowns faded after a couple months. But Trevor wasn't right. When he's calm he can give you one or two words for an answer. Lately he couldn't even manage that. He looked tired in a way that scared me a little. And he kept saying that phrase.

"Dog's broken," while I did the dishes, his eyes on nothing behind me.

"Dog's broken," over a game of Go Fish, staring at the space just past my shoulder.

"Dog's broken," murmured from his own room at night when I walked past the door.

He never said it around our parents. Only me. Only when they weren't there to hear.

I left him alone for maybe forty-five seconds once. Just ran out to grab the mail. When I came back in he was standing in the kitchen with his fists clenched so hard his knuckles were white and his whole body vibrating like a plucked string.

"Where are the spongebob popsicles?" he got out. Then, louder: "Dog's broken! Dog's broken! DOG'S BROKEN!"

It took me almost an hour to bring him down. Video game, his music, a snack. The whole toolkit. He didn't touch the snack.

The worst night started at three in the morning. I woke up because someone was pacing around my room. It was Trevor. He doesn't ask for help, he just appears. That's his version of knocking.

"Trevor? You okay?"

Nothing. He kept pacing, faster. "Where are the spongebob popsicles?"

He was spiraling. The worst thing you can do is tell him to go back to bed, so I got up and took his hand and led him down the hall toward his room. We reached his door and he stopped dead. Then he spun around and sprinted back the way we came.

"Trevor, what's wrong?"

My voice came out sharp. I heard it land wrong. He's fifteen and he never gets to say "I'm scared" or "it hurts." He gives you clues and you have to be his detective, and sometimes I'm a lousy detective and I hate that.

He stood at the far end of the hallway, looking past me. Looking at his doorway. His lip was shaking.

"Dog's broken," he whispered.

I turned around slow. His room was dark except for the nightlight. I stepped inside, looked everywhere, breathed in and out like I was trying to show him how.

"What scared you?"

"Red."

"Red?" I was looking around an empty room and my skin was crawling anyway.

"Yes."

I asked if he wanted me to sleep in there. He said yes. When I turned to go grab my blanket he said "Stay." So he went and got it for me, disappeared into my room and came back with his arms full of bedding.

I made a spot on his floor. He got back in bed. And while I was arranging my blanket I heard him talking to himself the way he does when he's winding down, replaying someone else's sentence like a song stuck in his head.

"The button comes off."

Our stepmom says that. Trevor has a shirt with a loose button he keeps pulling off and she has to sew it back on. "The button comes off." Chunk from her, stored.

That shirt lived in his closet.

I sat up. The closet door was cracked open. I don't know how I hadn't noticed. I'd just stood in that room scanning it.

"Trevor?" My voice was barely there. "Is something in the closet?"

"The button comes off."

"Trevor!"

His eyes found mine in the dark. "Yes," he said.

I told him to go get Mom and Dad. Right now. He said "Dog's broken" like a prayer and walked out of the room without arguing, which somehow made it worse.

I stood there listening to his footsteps fade down the hall. I could hear my dad and stepmom stirring in their room. Just hold on. Just wait thirty seconds.

Then: creeeeak.

The closet door swung open toward me. Nightlight glow fell across the inside.

There was a person leaning against the clothes rack. Bent wrong. Folded at angles people don't fold at.

It wasn't standing there. It was slumped there. And I understood, all at once, in a way I never wanted to, what Trevor had been trying to tell me.

It tipped forward like something shoved it. Slow. It hit the carpet with a dead thud and something dark spread out underneath it, catching the nightlight, wet-looking. My whole body locked up.

"Red," Trevor had said.

My hand found the light switch on the wall. I flicked it on.

The closet was empty. Clothes hanging still. Carpet clean. Nothing there. My heart was hammering so hard I could hear it.

"Can't reach without the ladder."

I spun. Trevor was in the doorway, hands in fists, shaking. "Can't reach without the ladder," he said again.

That was another chunk. Stepmom, staring up at a dead bulb in the foyer fixture. And Trevor, laughing, every time he threw his sticky hand toy at the ceiling and it stuck and somebody had to peel it down.

Can't reach without the ladder.

I was still doing the math when my eyes went up.

something came down on me from above. The air left my lungs all at once. I was face-down on the carpet, halfway inside the closet, something heavy pinning me flat while my arms burned with fresh scratches. I kicked. I rolled. The door slammed against my legs and whatever it was, it was trying to get me inside that dark space, all the way inside, and keep me.

Then my dad's voice, far away: "Matthew!"

I was yanked backward by my shoulders and I was out in the hallway with my dad hauling me up and I was crying or laughing or both.

My parents never saw anything. They believed us, or at least they believed we were scared, which got us out of that house. We moved across town to somewhere smaller. Trevor's calmer now. I'm calmer now.

But every so often we'll be sitting on the floor with the cards or the controllers, and Trevor will go still. He'll look past me. At the space just over my shoulder.

"Dog's broken," he'll say.

And I don't turn around anymore. I just put my hand on his knee and say, "I know, buddy."