## Dean
**Fourteen months. A motel in Nebraska. Afternoon.**
I had the guns spread out across the bed. All of them. The Colt 1911, the shotgun, two knives, the Beretta, Sam’s Taurus. Cleaning after the job. Routine. Oil, rag, magazine out, count the rounds. The sound of metal against fabric was the only thing that calmed me down after a hunt.
Johanna sat on the floor. On the blanket Sam spread out first thing in every motel because the carpet was always filthy and Sam knew things like “babies put everything in their mouths” and “motel carpets have more bacteria than a gas-station bathroom.” The blanket was purple. I hated it. Johanna loved it.
She was playing with a spoon. Banged it on the floor. Banged it again. Laughed. Banged it again. Babies were simple. Babies needed a spoon and a floor and they were happy.
Sam was in the shower. I could hear the water. I had maybe three minutes.
I took the Colt apart. Barrel, slide, spring, frame. My hands did it on their own. Twenty years of practice. Dad had taught me when I was seven. Seven. I didn’t think about it. Not now.
Johanna banged the spoon. I wiped down the barrel. Johanna banged the spoon. I oiled the spring. Johanna—
Silence.
When a baby goes quiet, something’s wrong. I’d learned that in thirteen months. Babies were loud. Babies cried, laughed, babbled, banged spoons on the floor. When a baby went quiet, either they’d found something they weren’t supposed to have, or they were—
I looked over.
My heart stopped.
Johanna was sitting on her purple blanket. The spoon lay forgotten beside her. In her hands—in her tiny, chubby, fourteen-month-old hands—was the Beretta. Sam’s Beretta. It must have rolled off the bed. Or Johanna had pulled herself up and dragged it down. I didn’t know. It didn’t matter.
She had the muzzle in her mouth.
In her mouth.
She was sucking on it. Like a teething ring. Like everything she got her hands on, because she was fourteen months old and teething babies put everything in their mouths, everything, and I had a loaded—
No. No, it wasn’t loaded. I’d taken the magazines out. All of them. I always took the magazines out before I—
Had I?
My mind was blank. Completely blank. I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember whether I’d taken the magazine out of Sam’s Beretta, because I’d picked it up last from the bed and then Johanna had laughed and I’d looked over and then—
Three seconds. I needed three seconds for everything. But those three seconds lasted a lifetime.
I stood up. Slowly. As slowly as I’d ever moved in my life. Slower than with any ghost, any demon, any monster. Because monsters didn’t have Berettas in my sister’s mouth.
“Jojo,” I said. My voice didn’t sound like my voice. It sounded like the voice of someone who was dying. “Jojo, sweetheart. Give me that.”
She looked at me. Green eyes. My eyes. Happy. Clueless. She chewed on the barrel and smiled, drool running over the metal, and I could see the trigger, and her fingers were so close—
Baby fingers were too small for a trigger. Too weak. I knew that. The rational part of me knew that, the part that knew guns, that knew how much pressure a trigger needed, that knew a fourteen-month-old baby couldn’t—
But the other part. The part that was Dad. The part that had held four-year-old Sam in my arms while the house burned. That part screamed.
I knelt down. Slowly. Held out my hand. Slowly.
“That’s not a toy, baby. Give it to Dean.”
She chewed. Looked at me. Made no move to let go.
I wrapped my hand around the gun. Around her hands. My fingers over hers. So big against so small. I pulled. Gently. Not too hard, because a sudden yank would scare her and scared babies held on tight and—
She let go. Just like that. Because something new was more interesting—my face. My face, which must have looked like death, because she reached out and touched my cheek and said, “Da,” and I—
I held the Beretta. Took out the magazine. It was in there. It was damn well in there. Loaded. Full. Fifteen nine-millimeter rounds, and my fourteen-month-old sister had had the barrel in her mouth.
My hands were shaking. My hands never shook. Not with demons. Not in Purgatory. Not with Dad. But now they were shaking so badly I could barely hold the magazine.
I set the gun on the bed. Far away. Picked Johanna up. Pressed her against my chest. Too tight. Way too tight. She squealed—not in pain, in surprise—and I loosened my grip, but I didn’t let go. I couldn’t let go.
“Shit,” I whispered. “Shit, shit, shit.”
Johanna grabbed my hair. Pulled. Laughed. For her, everything was a game. For her, the world was a place full of things you could touch and put in your mouth, and some of them were spoons and some were teething rings and some were loaded nine-millimeter pistols, and she didn’t know the difference because she was a baby.
Because she was a baby and I was an idiot.
The water in the bathroom stopped. Sam came out. Towel around his hips, hair wet, and he saw me—on the floor, Johanna against my chest, the guns on the bed, my face—and he knew immediately. Three seconds. We were more alike than I wanted to admit.
“What happened?”
I couldn’t speak. I pointed at the Beretta. At the magazine beside it. At Johanna, babbling in my arms and chewing on my T-shirt.
Sam went white. Not pale. White. The color drained from his face like blood from a wound, and he stood there, dripping wet, staring at the gun and then at Johanna and then at me.
“Was it—”
“Loaded. Yeah.”
“Did she—”
“In her mouth. Yeah.”
Silence. The kind of silence that screams.
Sam sat down beside me. On the floor. Wet, half-naked, and he didn’t care. He put his hand on Johanna’s back. Beside mine. Like always. Two hands on one tiny back.
“We need a safe,” he said. Quietly. Matter-of-fact. Sam in crisis mode. “A portable one. For the guns. Always. Every motel. No exceptions.”
“Yeah.”
“And we never leave them out again—”
“Never again. Yeah.”
Johanna looked back and forth between us. She felt that something was different. That the air was different. She laid her head against my chest and curled up, and I thought: She’s scared. Not of the gun. Of us. Of what was written on our faces.
I kissed her head. Her hair smelled like the baby shampoo Sam bought—the expensive kind, fragrance-free, because he’d read three reviews. She smelled like Johanna. Like the only thing in this world that was good.
“It’s okay, Jojo,” I said. “It’s okay. Nothing happened.”
But something had happened. In my head, it had happened. In my head, I’d looked three seconds too late, and the trigger had moved, and the sound—I knew the sound of a nine-millimeter, knew it in my sleep, and in my head I heard it now, in this motel room, with the purple blanket and the spoon and—
“Dean.” Sam’s voice. Close. Firm. “Dean. She’s okay. She’s here. She’s okay.”
I breathed. In. Out. In. Out.
Johanna chewed on the collar of my T-shirt. Her teeth—the one she had and the ones coming in—pressed through the fabric, and it hurt, a little, and the pain was good because it was real.
“I’m like Dad,” I said. I didn’t know why I said it. It just came out. “He put a gun in my hand when I was six. And I—I leave them on the bed while she—”
“You’re not Dad.”
“I—”
“You’re not Dad, Dean.” Sam looked at me. Those eyes. Brown, serious, relentless. “Dad wouldn’t have even noticed. Dad would’ve said she needed to learn early. You—you’re sitting on the floor practically crying because you were scared. That’s the difference.”
I wasn’t crying. Almost. But not quite.
Johanna lifted her head. Looked at me. Put her hand on my face, the way she always did when something was wrong. Her fingers were wet and sticky and warm, and she said, “Da.”
Da. Her only word. Her word for me.
“Yeah,” I said. “Da. I’m here.”
That evening I drove to Walmart. Alone. Johanna stayed with Sam. I bought a portable gun safe. Combination lock. Steel. Thirty dollars. Thirty dollars for something I should’ve bought fourteen months ago.
I sat in the parking lot and stared at the safe on the passenger seat and thought about Dad. About the guns in the trunk of the Impala, never locked up. About the knives on the kitchen table. About the shotgun beside the bed. About Sam and me growing up with that, never knowing anything else, thinking it was normal.
It wasn’t normal.
Nothing about our life was normal. But this—this I could change. This one thing. Buy a safe. Lock up the guns. Make sure my sister never put a loaded pistol in her mouth again.
I drove back. Locked up the guns. All of them. Every single one. Johanna watched from the bed, sitting in Sam’s lap, chewing on the spoon, and I thought: You’ll never know. You’ll never know how close it came. And that’s a good thing.
Sam looked at me. Nodded. Once. Briefly.
That was enough.
Johanna banged the spoon against Sam’s knee and laughed, and the sound was the most beautiful sound in the world, and I swore to myself I’d never risk it again.
Never again.