The Cause and the Effect
Dawn was raped once, when Ryan was eleven or twelve and Trey was maybe fourteen. And Trey dealt with it—the way he'd been dealing with things since their father went to prison. It maybe wasn't the best way but it was quick and effective and Ryan can remember the way his mother cried, how she wouldn't tell them what was wrong, where it hurt. And he knows it was the right way.
Dawn was a waitress and the guy was the restaurant manager and the police believed her but there wasn't enough evidence. Trey spent six weeks in the dark in an alley waiting and finally he caught the guy alone after closing and broke every bone in his face with a tire iron but he didn't kill him. It took a certain kind of devotion to do something like that in cold blood and Ryan admired it even though it scared him. But after that it was like something broke in Trey, something that kept him connected. After that he was more like their father.
And Trey spent almost a year in juvie for it, and by the time he got out they were living in Chino. Dawn was different, too, she'd stopped fighting or maybe she'd never been much of a fighter to begin with. She'd stopped fighting and started drinking, and if you asked Ryan that was where it all started, not when his father went to jail, not with Trey's stint in juvie, not even the first time Ryan'd been suspended from school. There was a certain amount of justice in all of those, but what had happened to Dawn was purely unfair.
Somewhere down the line Trey stops trying to protect Dawn and starts trying to hurt her. And if he's honest with himself Ryan knows when and he knows why, too. And he doesn't—can't—blame Trey, not when he knows he'd have done the same, not even when he gets caught in the middle. Because after their father and before AJ there are half a dozen other men, and some of them are decent and one of them--. Ryan's thirteen, which makes Trey fifteen, probably.
He comes home a little early from soccer practice, and he's limping because he fell and someone cleated him and he's got a huge swelling lump on the side of his knee, and he lets himself in with his key and limps upstairs to their bedroom and Robert is doing something to Trey. And Trey isn't struggling, exactly, but there are bruises on his wrists and bruises down one side of his face and later Ryan learns that there are bruises in other places, too, bruises that weren't even formed yet.
And Robert says, hey, look, it's the kid, shame he had to see this. Now he'll want a turn.
And Trey's underneath him, making small sharp noises like something inside him is breaking but when Robert says this his eyes open. And he says, no, you can't, you promised, you promised if I let you you wouldn't.
And Robert laughs. And says that Trey didn't exactly let him, did he? Robert had to take it. But he lets Trey up and Trey--limping as badly as Ryan—drags Ryan out of the house and down the street to Theresa's and after a while Ryan falls asleep there on the rug. When he wakes up it's morning and Trey is gone.
He's gone back to juvie, which is where he learned to hotwire a car in the first place. He's wrapped Robert's car around a telephone pole. And the only thing that saves him from serious time is that his bruises don't quite match up. They come and get Robert, too, and take him away.
That's when Dawn says that she needs him, that he pays the rent, they need him. And Ryan knows she didn't mean it the way it sounded, she never does. She just didn't think. But Trey doesn't forgive her, and he's done with saving people.
So Ryan comes by it honestly.