The sound of metal bouncing off porcelain and a loud thump drew me to my feet. I hurried to my bedroom door, assuming the ruckus to be an earthquake. It wasn’t until I heard the groan that I realized the ground wasn’t actually shaking and that something else, something human and destructive, had caused that noise. Jake! It was the natural assumption, given we were currently the only two in the house. His bedroom door was wide open, so I turned in the other direction toward the bathroom.

“Jake?” I knocked on the door, careful not to push it open. There was no privacy left in our home. Even the bathroom was fair game. Dad had taken all the locks off the doors to prevent Jake from bolting himself up inside.

“I’m fine. Go away.”

His four words were overcome with emotion, and I instantly knew what was happening behind the door. Desperately swinging it open, my eyes fell onto Jake sprawled on the floor with a chair lying on its side. In the bathtub sat a shower rod, which appeared to have just recently crashed to the ground. In his hand was a thinly rolled sheet and on his face was clear guilt and panic. The thud had been my brother dropping off his sheeted noose.

“Don’t tell Mom and Dad,” Jake said, in a voice so anemic it matched his colorless complexion.

“Tell them what? That you were trying to kill yourself? Did it ever occur to you that I’d be the one to find you hanging?” Tears spilled over as my throat closed tightly, and each word that escaped the funnel was pitched higher than the next. He was going to let me find him dead! “Why? Why are you doing this?”

“I don’t know.” He dipped his head, dejected, his eyes swollen with emotion. I dropped to my knees and pulled him into my arms and held him tighter than I’d ever held anything in my whole life. Maybe I could squeeze the sadness out of him, and then he’d want to live again.

“Nothing happened.” Jake faltered as he fought for the words. “I fell right through the knot. Please don’t tell Mom and Dad. They’ll send me away.”

I pulled out of the hug and examined his neck. Aside from some redness, there were no permanent marks, although I was certain he’d have some nasty bruising from the fall. Still, keeping something like this a secret from our parents? I wasn’t sure I could.

“They aren’t going to send you away.”

“Last time I was at the hospital, the psychiatrist said if I didn’t stop trying to kill myself, they were going to lock me up in a mental institution.”

“A treatment facility, Jake, not a mental institution.”

“It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to go there.”

“Then stop trying to kill yourself.”

Jake dropped his heavy head into his hands and shook it back and forth. Despair had overtaken his life; it was that misery which forced his hand. I gently rubbed his back as I could think of nothing else to soothe his wounded soul. This was suicide attempt number four; although it was the first I’d been called on to attend. I noted that Jake was being challenged to get more creative with each subsequent try. My parents had grown increasingly savvy, and with every attempt, more things were removed from his reach. All potentially dangerous items had been locked away, including anything sharp or ingestible. After today, I had to wonder if we’d be checking out bed sheets to keep Jake from hanging himself on them.

“Why do you do this to yourself?”

“I don’t know,” he whispered.

“I think you do.”

He looked down at his trembling hands and wrung them together.

“I won’t tell Mom and Dad on one condition.”

Jake lifted his head, and the tiniest ray of hope shone in his tired eyes. “What condition?”

“Tell me why you want to die.”

* * *

The bed tent was one of my finest. I’d taken extra care to clip it higher than usual. Jake had recently begun a growth spurt, and I knew his gangling arms and legs would not fit in my standard-sized creation.

Before retreating to my room, we’d repaired the bathroom to the best of our ability. Aside from a wobbly shower rod, it would be impossible for our parents to know what Jake had been doing while they were away. I still wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing with this deal, but nothing else had worked on him, so I felt it was worth a try.

“What is this?” Jake asked, touching the smoothness of the sheet.

“It’s a safety tent. When you’re inside, nothing can hurt you.”

“Emma, no offense, but you live in a fantasy land. Nowhere is safe.”

“Well, this is. I spent months under this with Quinn and Grace after you came home. They were scared of your screams.”

Redness enveloped his cheeks, and he fidgeted uncomfortably before looking away. I touched his arm.

“It wasn’t your fault.”

“Grace hates me.”

“She doesn’t hate you. Grace just doesn’t understand what you’ve been through.”

“She hates me.”

Sighing, I gestured toward the opening in the tent, welcoming him in.

“I’m not climbing in there. That’s stupid.”

“We have a deal, Jake. Get in before I change my mind.”

Begrudgingly, he crawled through the opening and I followed him in. Once we were both sitting cross-legged on my bed, Jake repeated his earlier observation. “This is stupid.”

“I know. We’ve already established that.”

Although he preferred silence, my brother had slowly begun to communicate again. More often than not it was surly remarks or angry outbursts, but at least he was talking. It had been nine months since the kidnapping, and up until today, he’d seemed to be improving. Of course the whole school ordeal had been a setback, but now that he was home again and making music, I’d thought the suicide days were behind him.

Jake picked up a book on my bed, turned it over a few times, and then said, “You study a lot.”

“What else do I have to do?”

“Go outside. Have fun with friends. Anything but staying inside and studying.”

“I could say the same to you.”

“I don’t study.”

“I meant the staying inside part. Do you miss school?”

The bitter scoff was his only reply. After multiple rounds of heavy debating, it had been decided that Jake would return to his middle school to finish up the last semester of his eighth grade year. A string of tutors had kept him at grade level during the months that followed the kidnapping, so when the time was right, he could rejoin his classmates. Academically, he was more than ready, but we all knew that wouldn’t be the main problem. Socially Jake had regressed to timid toddler levels.

Hoping to ease him back into the normal life of a teenager, Mom and Dad had thought that returning him to the familiar environment of the middle school would prove less of a shock then dropping him directly into high school as a freshman the following fall.

Keith had been the biggest vocal opponent of Jake’s return to school, followed close behind by Kyle. Perhaps they could see the writing on the wall, or maybe they just understood how cruel boys that age could be toward a broken soul. But Mom and Dad thought they had that covered. Before the crime that rocked his world, Jake had had a close set of friends, ones who were ready and willing to help make his school transition an easy one. And that, in a nutshell, was what my parents had been banking on when they made the decision to send him back in the first place. Perhaps they’d envisioned a cocoon of safety surrounding him; but what they hadn’t foreseen was that Jake himself would sabotage the entire operation.

See, he had no intention of rejoining the old friend group and instead spent his first days actively avoiding them. And when they did find him and tried to engage, Jake reacted with the coldest of shoulders. Eventually he got what he wanted – a table to himself in the far corners of the cafeteria where he could wallow in the depths of his despair. Kyle was always there, staying a safe distance while still within range if he were ever needed, but Jake had long since cut our little brother out of his life. The rejection had scarred Kyle as much as the wounds he’d received from Ray. But he was nothing if not loyal, and never once abandoned Jake, even when he’d not been afforded the same courtesy.

Isolated and vulnerable, Jake left the door open for bullies to get a foothold. After only a couple of weeks, he was coming home with bruises all while steadfastly refusing to rat out the culprits. It was almost as if Jake welcomed the fists. There was no fight left in him. He did what he was told without protest. Kyle, of course, did not subscribe to Jake’s apathetic ways and spent more time home on suspension for fighting than at school.

Jake’s final day came two months later when an altercation in the boy’s bathroom woke him up and he rained fury down upon his tormentors. It took three teachers to pull him off, and two bullies were sent home battered and bruised. Had he been anyone else, Jake would have been expelled; but because of his special circumstances, my brother was given a one-week suspension. Which turned into three when he refused to return, and then into an epic battle of wills with our beleaguered parents. In the end, Jake won the fight, resumed homeschooling, and returned our frazzled household to ‘normal.’

It was during this time that music returned to the McKallister home. Once such a common sound in our musical family, the beautiful melodies had stopped the day Jake disappeared, and no one had thought to pick up an instrument since. But part of the deal Jake had made with our parents in order to resume his stay-at-home studies was that he would promise to begin practicing again. The day Mom dragged him to the piano was one I’d never forget. I was in my room when I heard those first few notes, and as if it were a beacon of light on the horizon, I followed its lifesaving beam.

Peeking into the family room, I saw Mom and Jake sitting side by side at the piano. She was coaxing him to play, but he was a wounded soul in need of guidance. I watched as her fingers pressed over his and they played a song together. The sight was so sincere and profound that I backed out of the room to give them the moment in private. Instead, I sat with my back against the wall, silent tears of relief and joy streaming down my face.

“That song you were playing yesterday,” I addressed Jake under my bed tent, “the one you played over and over, what was it?”

“It was nothing – just something I made up.”

“That’s not nothing, Jake. It was beautiful. You’ve always been so talented. I thought the music was helping you cope. What happened today? Why did you try to kill yourself?”

“Because nothing can cure me, Emma. I’m doomed.”

“Why do you say that? You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You have no idea what I did.”

I saw something then, deep in his shattered gaze: shame.

“Tell me. That was the deal.”

The silence lasted so long I assumed this conversation would be like all others… lots of stress with no resolution in sight. But Jake surprised me with the first bit of honesty I’d heard since his return.

“That day,” – he spoke so low that I had to lean in to hear him – “when he took me and dumped me in that room, I wasn’t alone. I didn’t know it at first because Ray was such a fucking nightmare, you know. I was just focusing on staying alive. But when he finally left me alone for a few minutes, I saw him, in a cage… cowering away from me.”

“A boy?” I asked, wide-eyed and disbelieving. How had this never come out?

“No, a dog.”

“A dog?” I repeated, still reeling from the information dump I was receiving.

“Ray had picked him up at the pound a week before, starved him, abused him. By the time I got there, the little thing was as traumatized as I was. He was this small terrier mix. Ugly, with coarse fur, and all folded up with his tail between his legs. He shook so hard I thought he’d stop his own heart. I tried talking to him, but he growled if I got near. It took a few days, but I finally coaxed him from the relative safety of the cage, and we bonded. I even gave him a name – Glen. In honor of dad’s stupid pet names, you know.”

I nodded and smiled sympathetically toward him. I already knew where this story was going and that it would not end well for poor little Glen.

As if acknowledging my fears, Jake misted up before continuing. “I never thought I’d see any of you again. Glen became my world, and I loved him more than you could ever imagine. He was there for me during the worst of times. He tried to protect me, Emma – snapping at Ray, even biting him a couple of times. But see, that’s what he wanted. Glen wasn’t brought there to be my friend. He was brought there to be a pawn in this elaborate mind game Ray was playing with me. The whole point was for me to love the dog so he could then be ripped from my life like everyone else I ever loved.”

Everything was falling into place. Or so I thought. How could I have known the deprivation ran so much deeper than my innocent mind could ever have fathomed?

“He used Glen against me, delivering ultimatums – him or me. I tried so hard to save him. I sacrificed myself, took the pain so he wouldn’t have to, went without food so he could eat, but I knew… I knew the day would come when I couldn’t protect him anymore.”

Jake took a moment to draw air into his lungs. He was shaking from the sheer force of the memories sweeping through him.

“None of this was your fault,” I said, in a weak attempt to ease his sadness. “You did your best. You have no reason to feel guilt and no reason to punish yourself over this.”

“You don’t understand, Emma. Ray didn’t kill Glen.” Jake dipped his head, a sob escaping him. “I did.”

It took a minute to recover from his admission, but when it finally hit home, I burst into tears. I hadn’t even known Glen, and yet I’d become fully invested in that little dog who’d loved my brother enough to try to protect him from a monster.

“It got worse every day… the choices I had to make to save him. I knew at some point I wouldn’t be strong enough to put Glen first. The dog was going to die; it was just a matter of when and how much he was going to suffer. Do you understand, Emma? I had to do it. I couldn’t let him have my dog. I owed Glen that much. So I did it. I killed him. And when he died, so did I.”