Stone (Pittsburgh Titans 2)

I’d envisioned Brooks—with all his good taste and designer strengths I’ve seen throughout his home—would have slick, leather-bound journals. Instead he kept his thoughts in spiral-bound notebooks of varying colors.

After a slight hesitation, I make myself reach in and pull them out, knowing that if I waver, I’ll go scurrying out of this room and might never come back in.

Spreading out the notebooks, I count five in all, each holding two hundred pages’ worth of my brother’s personal life.

I grab a purple one, open the cover, and see the page filled with lines of words in blue ink. There’s a date at the top of the first page and then words just start flowing. No delineated paragraphs. No doodles. Just lines and lines of my brother’s thoughts that I gloss over and don’t read in detail.

I go through the other journals, looking at the dated entries, and put them in order. The first journal—a dark-green spiral notebook—starts in his junior year in high school. That was my freshman year of college.

He didn’t journal every day and some were just a few lines long. Other days, he might write a several paragraphs.

For some reason, I don’t start on the first page but rather flip through and skim until certain words catch my eye and cause me to read with more depth.

Many of the entries are tirades about our father, and perhaps I focus on them because I understand them so well. Our father was a tyrant when it came to school and hockey, riding us both hard to perform greater than his greatest expectations and coming down on us if we didn’t. He used his hands on us, never meek about slapping if we didn’t measure up.

I learn quickly that Brooks got double the pressure once I left for college because he was the only target for my dad’s control and abuse.

One entry dated in the spring of Brooks’s junior year strikes hard.

I’m so tired of Dad comparing me to Stone. I’m tired of hearing about Stone’s greatness all the time. I’m never going to be as good as him on the ice, and I wish my dad would understand that. Sadly, I can’t tell him this because I don’t want the repercussions.

It pains me my father did that, especially since he wasn’t especially proud of my college years on the ice. At least he never told me such. He wasn’t big on affirmation, more on instilling fear.

The one thing I do marvel at is that Brooks’s entries have nothing but good things to say about me. While Dad may have been shoving my supposed greatness down my younger brother’s throat, Brooks still looked up to me. Recounted our phone calls, my visits home, and his excitement of me returning for summer break.

In other words, my brother’s feelings for me were still pure and untainted by our father.

Lifting my head, I glance around the bedroom. It doesn’t seem as off-putting as before. My gaze moves to the other journals, and I know I’m not going to be able to stop reading. It doesn’t matter that it’ll probably take me hours upon hours or that I’ve got a mid-morning practice.

Now that I’ve started, I want to see it through.

I move over to the bed, prop myself against the headboard, and dive back into the journal.

CHAPTER 15

Stone

The sun rose about an hour ago, and I’m exhausted.

Tired to my bones, sick to my heart, my gut full of volcanic fury at my father.

There’s some mental self-flagellation going on for being so passive the last few years, and reading Brooks’s journals has only made that burn brighter.

And I’m still not done.

I push up from the floor where I’ve had my back propped against the side of Brooks’s king-size bed. I haven’t left the room all night, alternating between lying on top of the bedspread while I read to pacing around with a notebook in hand as I absorbed his memories. Occasionally, I perched on one of the two chairs near the window, and this past hour, as my eyes grew heavy, I moved to the floor and leaned against the bed with the frame digging into my back, hoping the discomfort would help keep me awake and on task.

I’ve got a handful of pages left, but I take a moment to push up off the floor and ease my cramped muscles and aching joints. I stretch, the last notebook in dark purple still in my grip, and then yawn deeply as I glance at the bedside table.

Almost seven thirty a.m., and I’ve got to be at the arena by ten.

I’ve absorbed so much information in the last several hours, I feel like my head is about to explode.

There was a lot of good—so many entries where my brother memorialized moments we spent together. Calls I would make from college when we would spend hours on the phone talking. Brooks wrote that it was “one of his favorite escapes” when I called because things seemed normal.