Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore

Author:Mikal Gilmore
Language: eng
Format: mobi, azw3, epub
ISBN: 9780307423641
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 1994-11-10T10:00:00+00:00

GAYLEN’S STORY IS ANOTHER matter, and trying to tell it raises some peculiar problems for me. Aside from my father, Gaylen—who was born as Gaylen Noel Gilmore—was the only member of my family who was never interviewed at one time or another about his life. In addition, I could find few witnesses or sources willing or able to fill in the missing chunks and secrets. Consequently I have little testimony from which to reconstruct him, except for the narrative of my own memory and the memories of my brother Frank and my cousin Brenda. What’s troubling about all this isn’t that I don’t have interviews or sources about my brother’s life, but rather that I should feel I even need such a thing so that I can tell his story. After all, I did grow up with Gaylen—I fought with him, laughed with him, resented him, and mourned him. I should know him—and if you had asked me at the outset of this project, I would have said that I thought I knew Gaylen better than I knew almost anybody else in my family.

But it wasn’t long before I realized that I didn’t know any of these people as well as I should and that I might never know them well enough. There were simply too many spaces between me and my brothers, and Gaylen, like Gary, was somebody who was gone from our home a lot— either in jail or halfway across the country or carousing in the night, looking for the same forbidden rapture that we all ended up looking for. There is only so much I know about what went on during Gaylen and Gary’s absences from our home—and, of course, it is in the space of those absences that the two of them tried to make or remake their lives. In other words, it was in their private lives away from the scrutiny of my family that they pursued their biggest desires, committed their worst sins, and felt their worst fears, and whatever those experiences were, their memory and meaning died along with my brothers. Maybe that’s for the better. Maybe I should know only so much about those secrets.

Still, I’ll never stop wondering. I look at what happened to Gaylen’s life and I know that I am looking at another mystery—one that I feel especially disturbed by. If it is true that the way a person dies can sometimes tell us truths about the way the person lived, then I know this much: Gaylen lived with horrible wounds that could not be healed, but they weren’t what killed him. What killed him were the things he could not stop doing to himself.

I have never missed anybody in the world as much as I miss Gaylen. Not my parents. Not Gary. Not even the woman I thought could take the place of them all. If I could choose one lost person to spend one more hour with in my life, Gaylen would be that person. I would ask him to solve the mystery, and tell what it was that made him obliterate himself.

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