What the Summer Took

Smitty was ten that summer, and Max was seven. The two of them walked to the Quick Stop on Route 9 almost every day in July, because their mother got tired of hearing them complain about being bored. Four blocks. They knew the way by heart — past the Coopers' dog that barked but never came off the porch, past the fire hydrant on the corner. Max held Smitty's hand at the one crossing that had traffic.

Smitty had their father's dark hair, cut short for summer. Max had their mother's, lighter, almost sandy, and it never stayed out of his eyes for long. Smitty walked a little ahead most days, working out in his head whether he had enough allowance left over for a candy bar. Max trailed a half-step behind, narrating.

“Tommy Feld says his brother can ride a bike with no hands the whole way to school.”

“So?”

“I bet you could do it better.”

“I don't even have a bike like that.”

“You could still probably do it better.”

Smitty didn't argue. There wasn't much point in telling Max that things didn't work that way, that Smitty wasn't automatically better at everything just because he was three years older. Max wouldn't have believed him anyway.

"I want the orange one," Max said, once the store came into view.

“You always want the orange one.”

“It's the best one.”

“Grape's better.”

“No, it's not.”

They kept at it the rest of the way, the same debate they'd had a hundred times. Smitty liked it, honestly, though he'd never have said so. Heat came up off the asphalt in waves. Cicadas sawed away in the trees. Max's hair was pasted to his forehead, and he kept swiping it back with the flat of his hand, already talking about the fort they were going to build in the Coopers' side yard that afternoon, how this time he wanted a real roof on it, not just a sheet.

The bell over the door jingled. The air conditioning hit them both at once, and Max let out a little groan of relief, like he'd been rescued from something. Behind the counter, Mr. Petrosky was ringing up a woman buying cigarettes. He was middle-aged and going bald, with wire-rimmed glasses that kept sliding down his nose and a gut that pushed against his shirt buttons. A faded Navy tattoo on his forearm had gone soft and blue with age. He lifted his chin at the boys. Everybody on that street knew them.

“Ten minutes," Smitty said. "Mom wants us back for lunch.”

“I know.”

They went to the back, to the long refrigerator case with the glass doors fogged at the edges. Max pressed his face right up to it, and the cold came through the glass in a thin sheet against his skin, a relief so sharp after the walk over that he closed his eyes for a second before he even started scanning the cans.

"Orange," he said again, and yanked the door open.

Smitty was still deciding — orange cream or root beer — when the bell jingled a second time. He didn't think anything of it. Then Smitty heard Mr. Petrosky's voice. It was loud and sounded scared.

“Whoa. Whoa, hey, take it easy.”

Smitty turned. Mr. Petrosky had both hands up in front of him, palms out, like he was stopping traffic at an intersection, and his face had gone the color of old paper, his mouth slack with a fear Smitty had never seen on a grown man before. A man stood at the counter in a black ski mask. Smitty's brain snagged on how wrong it looked before it even got to the gun — it was ninety-four degrees outside, the kind of mask he only ever wore himself in January, and here was a grown man wearing it in July like it was nothing.

The man had a pistol leveled at Mr. Petrosky's chest, shouting at him to put the money in the register into a paper bag, now, everything running together in one ragged voice.

Smitty grabbed Max's arm and pulled him back against the shelves. "Don't move," he whispered. "Don't say anything." His heart was slamming so hard he could feel it in his throat, but some older part of him — the part that always walked a half-step ahead — was already thinking about where the door was, where he could shove Max if he had to.

Max nodded, eyes huge. He was still holding the orange can, and his palm was slick with sweat and cold, and it slipped.

It hit the tile floor with a loud clatter and rolled down the aisle.

The man's head snapped toward the sound. He didn't look to see what it was. He just spun and fired, and the shot filled the whole store, a flat crack that seemed to happen inside Smitty's skull as much as out in the air, and then a ringing after it that swallowed everything else for a second. The smell of gunpowder reached him a moment later, sharp and metallic, and everything around him seemed to slow almost to a standstill, like the world had thickened and he was moving through it underwater.

Max made a small noise, more surprised than hurt. He looked down at his stomach like he was checking on something he'd misplaced. "It burns, Smitty," he said. "It hurts." Then he put his hand there, and when he brought it back up, it was red, and the front of his shirt had already started to darken, a wet patch spreading out from the middle of him and creeping toward the waistband of his shorts. His face changed. He looked at Smitty like Smitty could fix it.

Smitty's whole body had gone electric and useless at once. This isn't happening, he thought, some part of him still standing outside himself, still waiting for it to turn out to be a joke, a trick, anything but what he could see with his own eyes. He wanted to scream, and no sound would come. He wanted to grab Max and run, but his legs had stopped answering him.

Then Max's knees gave, and he went down.

Smitty's eyes were still on his brother when the man turned back to the counter and fired again. He saw it happen in pieces, the way you see something and wish you hadn't — Mr. Petrosky's hands still raised, the bag half-filled in front of him, and then the sound and the way he folded backward into the cigarette rack behind him, glass and cartons coming down with him, his glasses skidding off across the counter. The man grabbed the bag and was gone. The bell jingled a third time.

Smitty was on the floor before he knew he'd moved. He got Max's head into his lap, the way their mother did on the couch some nights, and pressed both hands flat against the wound. The blood was warm, and it wouldn't stop, no matter how hard he pushed, and some small, terrible corner of his mind was already keeping score of how much of it there was and how fast.

“You're okay. You're okay, you're gonna be okay." His voice came out high and cracked and not like his own. "Hold on. Hold on, Max, look at me.”

He believed it while he said it — he had to, there wasn't room in him for anything else — and underneath the believing, something kept whispering that he might be wrong. He hated that part of himself for even thinking it. He held on tighter, like he could keep Max here by force if he just didn't let go.

Max's eyes found his and stayed there. His mouth opened as if he were going to say something, but nothing came out. His breathing went shallow, then short, then spaced further and further apart, and each one seemed to cost him more than the last.

“Somebody's coming," Smitty said. He was crying now and didn't notice he was crying. "I promise. I got you. I'm not going anywhere, I got you, just hold on—”

He didn't stop talking when Max's eyes went soft and unfocused. He didn't stop when the breathing caught and didn't start again. The paramedics had to peel his arms off his brother one finger at a time.

They never caught the man in the mask. The description could have fit half the men in the county, and the getaway car was gone before anyone thought to look at a plate. The file went into a cabinet and mostly stayed there.

Smitty carried that afternoon into the academy with him, and then onto a beat for six years, and then into a detective's badge. He didn't talk about Max — not to his first partner, not to his wife for a long time, not really to anyone. A bell over a shop door could still make something drop in his stomach at forty years old. He couldn't leave a family without answers, not ever, and everyone he worked with noticed it eventually, even if none of them knew why.

At the academy, an instructor once told him nobody could have done anything different that day, that a ten-year-old had no business trying to be a hero. Smitty had nodded and said he understood. He never brought it up again. He also never once managed to believe it.