register of actions

There’s a website in Colorado where you can buy your family a piece at a time. CoCourts, it’s called. You make a login. I made mine at some hour I’m not proud of, picked a username I won’t repeat here, and put money on the account like it was a vending machine. Fourteen dollars and fifty cents of credit. That’s what it costs to go looking for a man the state has been keeping better track of than any of us ever did.

I wasn’t looking for the record. I was looking for an address. My brother needs to be served papers in a matter concerning our mother’s estate, and to serve a man you have to know where he is, and I don’t, because the people who would know won’t say, and the one who would have told me is the reason for the paperwork. So I typed his name into the box. And the box gave me back seventeen years.

People of the State of Colorado v. my brother. Eight counts. One county, mostly. He never left the valley that raised him hard, like a dog that won’t quit the yard it was beaten in.

2005T318. Driving Under Suspension.

He drove anyway. Of course he drove anyway. Suspension was a word the state used and the road was a fact, and we were raised to trust facts over words. That’s either the whole story or just the first line of it. He was in his twenties. I was already gone from that town by then, or telling myself I was.

2008M155. Public Indecency.

There’s a version of this that’s funny. A bad night, a drunk brother, a small county that files paper on everything down to the weather. I keep that version in my pocket. I take it out when the other versions get too loud, and I hold it, and it never quite holds up, but it’s mine and I keep it anyway.

2013M419. Theft. / 2013CR58. Menacing.

Two months apart. October, then December of the same bad year. Whatever went that autumn went all the way. And look at the word they chose. Menacing. Even the charge is a euphemism, a word that stands in the doorway with its hat in its hands so the real word doesn’t have to come inside and sit down at the table with the rest of us.

2015CR142. Drugs.

Here is the year I could point at my brother and feel clean by comparison, and I want to be honest that I did point, and I did feel it. I was using too. I just had letters after my name that said I was qualified to understand what I was doing to myself. Around the same stretch my sister was working the only economy that would take her in, and we all had our opinions about that, and none of us had a leg to stand on. Three kids from the same house, each of us finding a separate door out of our own skin. His was the one the county wrote down.

2017M271. Other.

Other. That’s the county’s shrug. The file exists and the story inside it is sealed or lost or simply never said out loud. I could request it. I keep not requesting it. Every family has an Other, a case type with no name, and I already know more of ours than I can hold.

2022C88. Protection Order.

And here she comes. My mother. The last name to enter the record and the only one of us who never carried a case of her own, walking into the docket at the very end the way she walked into every room, late and unarmed. She is not the defendant. She is the reason. The order said he was not to come near her.

The order was active the day she died. He was in the house. He left her there a day, maybe more, before anyone came.

There was no investigation. I want to write that sentence flat, no music under it, because that’s how it sits in me. A woman dies with a protection order active against the man in her house, and the county that filed paper on public indecency and a suspended license and every small stupid thing my brother ever did looked at her and filed nothing. My sister prefers it that way. My sister has always preferred him. So the record simply stops, and the last person in it is the one person in it who never did anything but love us badly and stay.

Every line above ends the same way in the right-hand column. Status. I used to read that word the way you’re supposed to read it, as resolved, as handled, as a door clicking shut on something finished. Now I read it as a verdict on all of us, entered by a clerk who never met a single member of my family and summed us up better than I can:

Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed. Closed.

I still have credit on the account. Fourteen fifty, minus what this cost me. Enough to go looking again. I keep the tab open. I tell myself it’s about the address