Two brothers make a family

The Baltimore Sun

His memories gathered rain.

The Christmas ornaments, the baseball card collection, the baby blankets his mother had boxed and labeled with marker and masking tape - Tyler Krus' whole childhood was spread out on the front lawn, getting drenched in a sudden August shower.

"Nick!" 17-year-old Tyler yelled, his voice brittle with stress. "I told you not to put this stuff out here!"

Nick, 15, sprinted out of the house. Together the brothers struggled to drag moving boxes and furniture across the grass to the dry porch.

Afterward, breathing hard, Tyler surveyed the chaos that his family's neat Parkville ranch house had become. The porch was buried beneath a mountain of belongings; Nick's room was torn apart. The living and dining rooms were wall-to-wall boxes, full of their parents' possessions - their mother's bike helmet; the guitar with mother-of-pearl details that their father had made for her, even though she didn't play. Some rooms had signs on the door: "All trash - give away and sell everything."

The house had already been sold. What couldn't be stored in their uncle's barn would have to go.

Just thinking about it made Tyler tired, and yet in a sense he also felt more normal than he had in months - more like other high school valedictorians bound for prestigious universities, and more like his future classmates as they prepared for move-in day. He wasn't just sorting through his family's past: He was packing for college.

Of course, other rising Johns Hopkins freshmen didn't have to contact a Realtor or fill a Dumpster, to find a home for the family cat, to disconnect the answering machine that played their mother's voice. They didn't have to clean out their father's workshop, which, four years after his death, still conjured a sawdust smell. They didn't have to pack their parents' jubilant wedding portraits or their father's office plants, which their mother watered diligently after he died until, three days before Christmas 2005, she passed away, too.

Most of all, they didn't have to worry about little brothers.

Since their mother's death, Nick had depended on Tyler more than ever. Nick lived with his grandmother during the week, but on weekends, he stayed with Tyler in their parents' house, where they did laundry and yardwork and subsisted on a dubious diet of Captain Crunch and canned soup. Nick felt most comfortable in their childhood home and was devastated when their relatives decided that it would be healthier to sell the house after Tyler left for school, and have Nick live with his grandmother.

So, Tyler made a promise to his brother. He swore that they'd live together again after the first semester ended - maybe buy a cheap house somewhere a little closer to Hopkins, without all the memories. Then he'd go back to shopping for groceries and trimming the hedges.

First, Tyler needed a few months of having what other freshmen had. He wanted to make friends, to forget what had happened to his family. To be young again, and free.

Something crashed inside the house. Tyler saw Nick standing by the attic stairs in a blizzard of foam peanuts and sighed.

Just one semester.

Trying to fit in

"Where are your parents?"

His new roommate's mother was the first to ask the question Tyler dreaded. And why wouldn't she wonder? It seemed that everyone else arrived with grown-ups that move-in Saturday in early September. Mothers made beds; fathers lumbered up stairs with luggage. Tyler's aunt and grandmother had dropped him off, but now he stood alone in the cramped room on the third floor of Griffin House with just his computer, a set of sheets and a can of shaving cream.

"I have an unusual situation," he told her. "Both of my parents are deceased. It's complicated." He didn't say more, and she didn't ask. Afterwards she took him and his roommate out for a crab dinner.

Tyler was relieved that his past had slipped so quickly out of the conversation. For him fitting in at college was a far bigger worry than academic survival, because good grades were the one thing that had always come easily. The previous fall, when his mother was still alive, he had taken classes at Hopkins, falling in love with the campus, the energy of its classrooms, the release of being lost in a tough math problem. Though he planned on a triple major, in math, physics and economics, he was confident that passing would be no problem.

Making friends was another story. There hadn't been many close ones at Loch Raven High School. After his father, David, died in the spring of 2002, suffering a massive stroke while swimming laps at the gym, and his mother's mind began to darken, Tyler felt isolated from everyone except Nick.

During junior and senior year, Tyler missed dozens of days of school, and everyone wondered why. He couldn't tell them how Rosemary Krus had started hearing her late husband's voice, how her hazel eyes had the sad, wandering look almost all the time now, and how he had to stay home to watch her. The few friendships he had disintegrated. Finally, after she died, he called his friends one by one to say he was sorry. He was too busy dealing with bills and lawyers and his little brother to have friends anymore, and please don't call again.

Part of him had hoped they wouldn't listen, but they did.

At Hopkins, though, he'd arranged to live in what he heard was the most social freshman dorm. He quietly made a place for himself alongside his roommate's lacrosse equipment and Pez dispenser collection. Stretching his sheets across the bottom bunk, he vowed not to say another word about his parents. He wanted to seem as average as possible, at least until he made some friends.

Yet the gulf between him and the other students still seemed vast during those first Frisbee-tossing, homework-free days. For one thing, Tyler was gone a lot, dropping off Nick's favorite take-out lunch on his first day of high school, driving him to rock band practice, and staying overnight with him at their grandmother's many weekends. People constantly asked Tyler's roommate about his whereabouts.

Then there was the issue of drinking, which seemed to dominate the freshman brain. On the bulletin board in the dorm stairwell there was even a chart that matched optimal alcohol intake with students' weight. Tyler didn't drink anymore. He hated the sad, hollow feeling he got the next day. Depression was a tendency he had inherited from his mother, and, though he took medication to control it, he had seen what it had done to her.

To compensate, Tyler threw himself into what little socializing he had time for. Whenever possible he stayed up for the late-night hallway talk that veered suddenly from the curvature of space to the proportions of Britney Spears' rear, gorged at getting-to-know-you barbecues hosted by various clubs and chauffeured his classmates to the Inner Harbor, the mall, and wherever else they wanted to go.

He wanted to remember every moment. His classmates snapped cell phone pictures, but Tyler went a step further, bringing in the video camera that he'd found while cleaning out the house.

His father had bought the camera just a few months before he died. Tyler assumed that the tape inside was blank, but one night he checked.

It was a family Christmas video.

He watched it in semi-darkness, crouched under his desk so the power cord would reach.

"What year is it?" his father's voice boomed from somewhere.

"2001!" two little boys chorused. The camera panned across presents and a breakfast of fruit salad and French toast. There was Sharry, the cat, and didn't Tyler still have that T-shirt he was unwrapping? Their mother's laughter rang in the background.

They were happy memories, but underneath was sadness that was almost more than he could bear. That year had been the final joyful Christmas. After their father died, late December was the time when his mother slid into her deepest depressions.

Then came last year's holiday, which was spent on the phone with a lawyer trying to figure out what would become of him and Nick, and deciding what to do with the gifts their mother had left behind.

There were hours of footage on the camera - after Christmas came snippets from middle school concerts, and so on. Tyler watched it all, abandoning his plans for the night. Why, he wondered, did old memories have to crowd out new ones?

His brother's keeper

Nick was keeping an eye on his big brother. Though Tyler was always cheerful on visits to their grandmother's, where they scribbled homework and watched old episodes of Lost, Nick sometimes wondered if he was happy.

Tyler had taken on so much responsibility lately that sometimes he seemed 10 years older instead of two. Growing up, they had always acted the same age, hanging out with the same friends and joining a band together: Nick played drums, Tyler the bass. They never looked much alike -Nick had his mother's blond hair and soft features, while Tyler was dark and had a strong jaw like their father - and yet they felt as close as twins. Their grandmother, Josie Keene of Perry Hall, still likes to tell the story of when Nick was born. Rosemary held out the fair-haired baby to his brother, who opened his tiny arms wide.

"I need him," Tyler said.

They'd shared a happy childhood. Their mother and father, a certified public accountant and a computer programmer who made guitars in his spare time, agreed that family was the most important part of life and arranged their schedules accordingly. David picked the boys up from the bus every afternoon; Rosemary helped with homework each night.

All the Kruses embarked on bike rides and scuba dives, took gardening classes at Cromwell Valley Park, where both parents volunteered, and went on long hikes there.

But after their father died and their mother couldn't stop grieving, Tyler grew up fast. Rosemary was in and out of psychiatric hospitals, sometimes disappearing for days at a time.

It was terrifying at first, but life for him and his brother had to go on. He learned to cook and vacuum. He quit the band because he no longer had time for it. He fought with their mother and - when she seemed stable enough - started spending a lot of time away from the house, sleeping over at his girlfriend's. College would be his ticket out. He applied to far-off schools - Cornell, Yale - and Nick was happy for his brother. A weight was lifting.

Then their mother died, and it came crashing down again. Nick felt that he was the burden.

Tyler became an emancipated minor, but Nick was still legally a child. Although their grandmother had custody, Tyler said he wanted to care for Nick, too. He withdrew his applications from the far-off schools, automatically and without complaint. There was nothing Tyler wouldn't do for him, Nick realized during these terrible months. He wasn't surprised that, when Tyler settled on Hopkins, he promised to find a new home for both of them.

After their mother died, Nick only saw Tyler cry once. Nick wept the morning her body was found, but Tyler was calm, offering refreshments to the relatives and friends who came to mourn. His sobs came weeks later, and then they were brutal and racking. He climbed into Nick's bed. And after the tears stopped, they fell asleep together - the way they sometimes napped when they were little children.

It was as much for Tyler as himself, then, that Nick sometimes spent the night on the floor of the Hopkins dorm room, wrapped in his brother's blankets.

Tyler needed him.

A heavy load

The semester was slipping through his fingers.

Tyler was so busy - going to class Monday to Thursday, eating dinner Thursday nights with Nick, working in a research lab on Fridays, spending much of the weekend with Nick, dealing with more lawyers, helping Nick get his learner's permit, talking with relatives in charge of his parents' estate, and a thousand other tasks.

His grades - in complex analysis, business law, oral presentations and physics - were good. But he was missing the parts of college that he cared about most: the easy camaraderie, the pints of ice cream passed around, the news of fraternity parties shouted down halls or slipped under doors in the form of discreet invitations. Tyler's dorm mates noticed in him a sweet and almost frantic desire to make friends during the few hours that he was present. He never turned down a request to explain vectors, or give someone a ride to a movie that he wouldn't have time to see himself.

When he came home from a day of errands people often asked, "Tyler, where ya been?"

"Out," he replied.

A month into the semester, hardly anyone knew the story of the boy down the hall. Tyler did well hiding his worries, chief among which was money. Before his parents died, he had barely thought of it, but now his precarious finances were a constant reminder of how alone he was. Many of his classmates had well-off parents who bankrolled flashy iPod stands and surround-sound televisions with $100 monthly cable bills. Tyler, on the other hand, constantly fretted that his hard-won scholarships might fall through. Though his parents hadn't been wealthy, and his mother, who had stopped working, left debts, half of the proceeds from the house would eventually be transferred to his name, at which point the college might reduce his financial aid.

A discussion with his financial aid officer left him so upset one night that, when a girl from a neighboring dorm noticed the emancipation documents on his desk, he was too tired to make up a story.

"My parents are deceased," he said.

He explained the basics of his situation to a few other classmates, mostly guys in the dorm whom he'd begun to trust.

"You've got to be careful who you tell," one of them had said. "You don't want to be known as Orphan Boy."

His words chilled Tyler. He kept quiet.

Yet he knew he was only half-living what was likely his only shot at college. He'd even missed the activities fair, where student groups recruit new members. He felt as if he was failing himself, and it made him sick.

One day in late September, an idea crept into his mind. He knew that it was probably a pipe dream, a waste of energy he couldn't spare. But at least going for it would mean he'd given freshman year his all. Later he discussed a plan with Nick, because moving forward might involve telling his story, their story, to the entire school. Tyler would run for class president.

Tyler for president

"Find out yet?"

"Did you guys win?"

"Fingers, toes, everything crossed!"

The pajama-clad girls lounging in the hallway called out encouragement as Tyler and his running mate, Nate Levin, passed by on the way to the Student Council meeting where the election results would be announced. His dorm was pulling for him, he knew: the halls were plastered with his posters, and many students wore his campaign T-shirts.

He'd run on a standard platform of school improvement, asking for cleaner bathrooms, shorter cafeteria lines and a golf club, campaigning hard in early October. But what really stirred the campus was the short biography that Tyler posted on his election Web site, which also linked to a Towson Times article about his family's succession of tragedies. Most students hadn't realized that the boy they'd occasionally seen with Tyler was his brother, that Nick was the reason that Tyler was away so much.

Tyler had thought long and hard about sharing the past that he had worked all semester to conceal. But the questions about his whereabouts kept coming, and he knew that people wondered more and more about him, that some were even beginning to say that he was weird. He didn't want Hopkins to turn out like high school. It would be best, he thought, if he could just tell everyone himself, all at once - use the campaign to get his background out in the open and over with, so everyone would start forgetting sooner.

Besides, Nate, his running mate, thought it was a great idea: Tyler's ability to survive without parents really did say something about his leadership skills.

But the campus reaction was not what Tyler or Nate had expected. Some students were sympathetic, but others were taken aback, even resentful. They couldn't believe that someone so swamped would want still more responsibility. They thought Tyler was looking for pity and votes.

No one said anything to Tyler directly, but Nate heard the talk.

Bewildered, Tyler tried to explain, posting a response on his Web site, though he wasn't sure if his classmates were listening. The election looked as if it might be a lost cause.

Still, he enjoyed campaigning. He'd met more students around campus in a shorter time than he ever thought possible, and he'd made good friends, including Nate, who lived across the hall.

Running for president wasn't the only adventure of the semester. Even though he had barely danced before, he began practicing for salsa team try-outs. He joined the Stressbusters, a campus group that gives free back rubs. Though he was also studying for midterms, he was able to spend more time hanging out in the dorm, mostly because he was learning to maximize his time on campus. He planned meals around when the dining hall lines were shortest. He started staying up all night, fueled by a diet of sushi and Mountain Dew.

His mind raced with ideas of how to make Hopkins better. His favorite was a Halloween dance, which he described to Nate as they walked to the election meeting. He envisioned black lights and jack-o-lanterns, maybe even a corporate sponsorship. If he won, somehow he'd find time to plan it - even if he made the salsa team, too.

"How are you going to do all this, Tyler?" Nate asked as they crossed the campus green. "If we win we meet three times a week."

"I can do it," he said.

In the meeting room the upper-class student council members reclined at a long polished wood table, and the freshman hopefuls crouched along the wall, Tyler's several opponents among them.

A shaggy-haired boy stood up and rattled off the winners for each office: Senator for Finance. Senator for Legislation. Senator for Leadership Appointments.

Nate nodded when they called his name for Vice President, then turned his eyes to his friend.

"President: Tyler Krus."

"Awesome," Tyler whispered, then prepared to take notes.

A need to escape

On Parents' Weekend, though, the new freshman class president wanted to disappear.

For weeks beforehand, Tyler had overheard his classmates discussing the restaurants their parents would take them to, and how good it would be to have a break from cafeteria food.

Then, on that Friday in late October, the dorm suddenly emptied out, because so many people had gone to stay in hotels with their parents.

The campus was packed the next morning. Parents were everywhere, wearing tweed jackets or matching jogging suits, scolding their kids about getting haircuts, buying Hopkins sweatshirts for younger siblings, the fathers slinging long arms across their sons' shoulders, the mothers manning the video cameras, all of them goofy with pride.

Tyler wanted to escape, but he couldn't because the freshman class officers were expected at the dedication ceremony for a deluxe new dorm. He had to stand on a stage and clap for all the parents who had donated money for dining halls and music rooms, and now sat smiling in the audience beside their children.

That night, the class presidents were scheduled to help with a donor dinner, but at the last minute Tyler wasn't needed. By then, it was too late to accept the invitation to eat with Nate's parents.

So Tyler grabbed a chicken sandwich from a campus cafe and went back to the empty dorm, alone.

In the days afterward, Tyler's life seemed to suddenly rush downhill. Student Council meetings, salsa practice - he'd made the team - and schoolwork demanded more energy than he had to give, even if he didn't also need to drive Nick around and counsel him all night about girls. Tyler obsessed over scholarships, where he and Nick would live next semester, if they managed to buy a place, and whether or not he'd even be able to afford another year at Hopkins. He worried about being a good president.

He sometimes stayed up several nights in a row to try to get everything done. It felt as if he had spent every ounce of himself, yet it still wasn't enough.

Lost in the moment

Then he got sick.

One morning about a week after Parents' Weekend, Tyler woke sore and achy. He dragged himself out to some meetings that couldn't be canceled and called Nick as usual, but crawled back into bed as soon as he could. A girl a few doors down brought him ramen noodles, but he wasn't hungry.

Lying there in the bottom bunk, for the first time since his campaign began, Tyler allowed himself to think about his parents. It didn't matter how good his grades were, or what offices he got elected to. He wanted them to be alive. He wanted his father to go out and rent video games, the way he used to when his sons were sick. He wanted his mother to warm up some chicken noodle soup, like she always would. He realized that he wanted them both there beside him more than he could say.

And he knew that part of the reason he couldn't get up was that he was depressed.

Before she died, he had seen his mother get this way, staying in bed for days at a time, wanting to get up for her children but lacking the strength.

The last night of her life, he and Nick had wanted her to sleep more than anything, because in bed she would be safe. Instead, she wanted to go outside into the frigid darkness, away from the house that reminded her of her husband, though they had repainted and reupholstered everything to help her forget. Tyler tried to stop her. He believed that she had been skipping her medications, and there was no telling what she might do. She fought hard, but Tyler wrapped his arms around her and held tight. Twice they called the police, who came by but said there wasn't much they could do. Finally Tyler had to let her go, and she flew out the back door, into the bitter December night in just a sweat shirt. Nick screamed for her to come back.

Tyler watched her leave, then packed up Nick and drove him to a friend's house, where they slept over. The next day they went to school.

The boys were later told that their mother had roamed the neighborhood that night and early the next day. She walked in traffic; she cut at her wrists.

She finally wandered into a neighbor's garage.

There, she found the rope.

Tyler could understand her despair. He knew the obliterating pain of losing someone you love, like a swan dive into an empty swimming pool. He wasn't angry with his mother for leaving him in charge of everything. He had watched her fight for more than three years to keep living, but somewhere along the way her spirit faltered, and she was gone long before she took her own life. Tyler was glad that her suffering was finished.

He had sometimes imagined how peaceful it would be to follow her. Particularly in the weeks just after she died, he thought about surrendering to his despair almost every day. He wouldn't have to be responsible for anything anymore. The sadness would stop.

But even in the worst moments, Tyler knew that he would not give in, just as he knew he wouldn't now, curled in his bunk, with grief settling over him like another blanket. When morning came, he would make it out of bed no matter what. For himself, and for Nick, he would always get up.

Making a house a home

The last day of classes was Dec. 11. There was a brief period of gaiety, and then the campus buckled down for exams. Tyler's last one was Dec. 20 - just a few days before the anniversary of his mother's death.

Most weekends that month, he and Nick spent cruising neighborhoods around Timonium. In their laps were rumpled stacks of Internet listings of houses for sale. Both boys gravitated toward ranch houses like the one they grew up in, with nice yards and trees, though they agreed it didn't matter where they lived, as long as they were together.

On Sunday afternoons, he and Nick showed up early at open houses. Brokers still tethering balloons out front greeted them with surprised looks.

"Who's in charge here?" they often asked.

"I am," Tyler answered.

Then they usually tried to sell him on the pool table that came with the house, or the plasma TV.

But Tyler's mind was on more practical things. He tried to imagine how his mother's couches would fit in the living room, if there would be space for his dad's collection of guitars. He also calculated how many roommates each house would hold. If Tyler managed to buy a place, several of his friends from Hopkins were thinking about moving in with him.

It would be, Tyler thought, a little like his own frat house.

Well, not exactly, with a little brother floating around. And Tyler would miss the college life he was leaving behind. But he was beginning to realize that, though he could never share in his classmates' carefree existence, his losses had led to other gains.

Like watching Nick blossom this fall in high school, getting straight A's. Nick was always smart but never much of a student. He was working harder this year, Tyler knew, mostly so his brother would have one less thing to worry about. Now Nick was on track to be in the top 20 of his class. Tyler was hoping that he would get into a good college, maybe with a scholarship.

Nick talked sometimes about going to Stanford in California, but they both knew he never would.

A bond unbroken

On a recent December afternoon, the brothers toured a house they'd noticed in Towson. It was Tyler's favorite, and he even took a girl he'd started dating to look it over. Four bedrooms, big yard, a nice room out back where Nick's band could play. It looked like it had been a much smaller house at one time, no bigger than the one they'd grown up in, but over the years additions had been made.

The house was close to Cromwell Valley Park. Before Tyler dropped Nick off for the day, the boys decided to visit a bench erected there in their parents' memories. They drove up the winding road that led to the memorial, through brown fields lined with tall white fences.

Suddenly, Nick yelled, "Watch it, Tyler!"

Their car had startled a family of deer, does and fawns, grazing nearby.

The does leaped over the high fences to the safety of the pasture on the other side of the road, their dark eyes bright with panic. But the fence was too high for the fawns to follow. They scattered into nearby woods, tails flashing white with alarm until they disappeared into the shadows.

"Tyler," Nick asked. "What are they going to do?"

"Don't worry," Tyler said. "They know how to find each other."

abigail.tucker@baltsun.com

ABOUT THIS STORY

Abigail Tucker began reporting this article in August. She interviewed Tyler Krus more than a dozen times over the next few months during his first semester at the Johns Hopkins University and personally witnessed many scenes described in the story. While other scenes reflect how Tyler recalls events, Tucker also interviewed Tyler's friends and family, including his brother Nick, their grandmother, an aunt, Tyler's college roommate, his running mate for college office and other classmates. Those interviews, plus Tucker's own observations, corroborated Tyler's account and provided context and detail for the story.

Online--/ For a photo slideshow and audio, go to baltsun.com/brother

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