“Let me in!” shouted my brother, hammering on the window frame.
He was on the second story, on the roof outside my bedroom window, face scrunched into an angry snarl. We’d been fighting over a DVD, and I’d tossed the offending object outside on the rooftop to get him to leave my room. Naturally, he’d climbed the fig tree next to the roof to get the movie, and was furious when he discovered I’d taken it back inside and locked the window.
“Climb back down the tree,” I snapped, sick of the argument. It was a stupid thing to argue about, I know, but we had both annoyed each other so much we no longer cared what we were fighting about; we were just fighting for the sake of it.
“Let me in,” my brother repeated, and when I refused again, he punched the window pane.
The glass shattered and fragments sprinkled onto my blankets, burrowing in between the covers, sinking among the books and figurines on the shelves and covering my carpet in a thin layer of prickles. My brother’s expression turned into shock, almost amusement, as he contemplated his bloody fist.
“Whoops,” he said, blinking.
My little brother, Charlie, and I didn’t always fight like this. When we were younger we used to work as a team, pressuring ice creams or trips to the beach out of our parents. It’s only in the last year or so the fighting escalated. Before, our bickering was punctuated with periods of time where we talked, joked around, and played. We’re too busy now to chat or relax with our family- my brother juggles lacrosse and his middle school social dramas; I have crew and AP classes to contend with. It’s good that we’re both challenging ourselves, certainly, but I can’t help but fear that we’ve lost something.
I haven’t had many losses in my life. Last year, however, several people I cared about passed away, and each time I was told over the telephone. The thin chord snaking out of the wall was the only lingering connection I felt I had with my deceased friend. Although I couldn’t say anything, my mouth opening and closing like a gaping trout, I didn’t want to hang up. This caused several awkward situations where the person on the other end was clearly uncomfortable and wanted to put the phone down as soon as possible but didn’t want to leave me alone in the house without someone to talk to about it. Mostly, I think, they wanted me to say something, but each time my stomach clenched and my mouth dried and I couldn’t think of anything to say. Knowing me, that is a rather shocking statement.
A couple of days before school started, my father was at a genetics conference in Brazil and my mother took Charlie and our two tiny dogs up to Lake Tahoe. I had only just returned from a summer camp in New York and didn’t want to shift locations for at least the next month, so I stayed home alone. I lounged around the house, eating everything in the cupboard- even canned mushrooms and the bread that had been sitting forgotten in the toaster for 3 days.
Late Sunday afternoon I was so bored I had rearranged my books alphabetically, then by genre, then by color and size. I had worked my way through two seasons of the Simpsons, and was now watching Pat Robinson gleefully announce that liberals were working for the devil. I was reveling in the fact that I didn’t have to fight with my brother for the remote.
The phone rang, the brittle sound cutting into Robinson’s cold-eyed smile. I flicked off the television, danced into the kitchen and picked up the phone on the second ring. My voice rang out in the sudden empty silence of the house.
“Hello?”
“Hey, honey,” Mom said and I instantly knew something was wrong- she never calls me honey. There was a sound behind the rush of the car in the phone speaker- an inhuman wailing. A slow, piteous and grotesque cry that sucked the blood out of my limbs and the water out of my mouth. I stood, frozen to the pale linoleum of the kitchen floor. I was stone; I think if I had tried to twitch my fingers would have cracked and fallen to the ground.
“Listen, something happened while we were away.”
Mum was on the verge of breaking down. Somebody had died; I knew. The inflections in her tone were there, the slow careful choice of words. I could almost see her, head up, blinking away tears, concentrating fiercely on the road ahead, gripping the steering wheel so tightly the rubber began to peel away in long, black strips. Not again, I pleaded silently. I don’t want to hear it again, don’t want to know someone else has died. The wailing continued, and I was terrified.
Had Charlie died? I couldn’t grasp the idea, couldn’t wrap my mind around it, but the thought was there, dark and spitting. I realized I wasn’t breathing and tried to force myself to calm down.
Breathe.
Charlie who I had dressed in ridiculous coats and hats that fell down past his feet. When he was barely three weeks old, I decorated him in necklaces and handkerchiefs until he was so deeply buried all you could see was a mound of material and one little, wiggling toe.
I used to blame all my pranks on him, even thought it wasn’t physically possible for him to have done it. “Charlie did it,” I would say, pointing to the pink crayon on the wall three feet above his head. He called me “Sassy” because he couldn’t pronounce ‘J’s, which I thought was incredibly sweet until his first sentence: “Sassy…did it.”
Breathe.
Charlie, who defended me when I was sent on time-out, and slipped little notes under my door, apologizing for being unable to protect me. Once, when my mother sent me to my room for spilling orange juice on the carpet (somewhat deliberately), Charlie marched up to Mom and declared, “Mommy, you can’t do that to my sister. You’re going on a Time Out, and then you’re going in the recycling.”
Before he was born, I made a T-shirt in day care that said “Big Sister” in bold purple print and wore it every day. When his teacher asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he grinned and said, “I want to be a Big Sister!”
Breathe!
“The dogs were killed by a coyote,” Mom blurted out suddenly, and then fell silent again.
The wailing in the background intensified but was interrupted by choked breaths and I realized the horrifying sound was my brother crying. “They’re gone, they’re gone,” he screamed and my stomach plummeted. But I was breathing.
A few days after the dogs died, I heard snuffling from my brother’s room. I pushed open the door and probed carefully into the darkness.
“Charlie?” I whispered, stubbing my toe on his history textbook and twisting my feet into the knot of clothes on the floor.
The lump on the bed shook slightly.
He’s too young, I thought suddenly. This isn’t fair. He shouldn’t have to learn about death like this, losing two dogs we’ve had since he was four. I was furious at the world for daring to hurt him, and was ready to take it out on the nearest bookshelf, or window for that matter, but all that would have done was confuse Charlie, and hurt my fist.
I didn’t know what to say or do, so I just sat on the edge of his bed, saying nothing at all. The sniffling lessened and became a quiet trembling.
“I just wish,” he said quietly, “I hadn’t let them go out in the morning. And I yelled at them the night before. I wish I hadn’t.”
He buried his head among the pillows again, and I impulsively hugged him. I hadn’t hugged my brother in years, I realized. He’d been so independent- I’d been so independent- he’d never needed a hug, and I’d never needed to give him one.
Two days ago I was cursing at my math text book, and Charlie wandered in, alternating between munching on gummy worms and slurping down coca-cola.
“Ha ha, you have homework,” he teased, grinning.
“This makes no sense,” I complained.
He fingered the page, staring thoughtfully at the problem.
“Oh this is so easy,” he said archly, “for these sorts of issues one must use parenthetical citation, and take the multiplicity of um…Y, and use the divisible properties to you know…figure it out.”
“Thanks a lot.”
“Anytime, anytime.”
Charlie and I still fight, but a lot of the bickering has morphed into playful banter, prodding one another into laughter and amusement. There’s a blurry consensus between us that yes, we are both incredibly stubborn, but we also both know that after each fight comes an apology, and a joke. As long as you can laugh about a fight, I think, it’s not serious. And I can laugh at every single fight I’ve ever had with my brother.
The candles glittered in the half-light of the dining room. Charlie was lighting them quickly from a ridiculously long match and the candles burned quickly, dropping bits of hot wax on the cake.
“I think I should blow them out,” he announced.
“When it’s your birthday,” Dad answered, “you may.”
“It should always be my birthday,” Charlie decided. “Hey, I know what I want for Christmas: an iPod. Yes, like the new ones…or a mini would be okay, I guess. Oh yeah and there are these phones that flip open sideways and have hella stuff in them.”
“It’s called a sidekick,” I said, drumming my fingers on the edge of the table. The candles continued to melt.
“No,” he countered, “these are way better.”
“Can I blow out the candles now?” I said tersely, “and Charlie, stop asking for stuff. It’s my birthday.”
“I see your point,” Charlie said, stroking his chin thoughtfully, “except that …I don’t care.”
“You are so annoying,” I said, a little too loudly.
“I know,” Charlie answered smugly, “It’s the entire point of my existence.”
“I’m so happy for you.”
“How about we cut the cake?” offered Dad long-sufferingly. The candles were indeed burning dangerously low and the pools of wax beneath them were going to make it taste rather odd.
“Happy birthday!” Charlie said and began singing, “Happy birthday to you…”
When they finished, he grinned at me cheekily and I smiled back.
“Blow out the candles,” said Dad.
I blew. I only got half.
“Pretty pathetic,” Charlie said.
I knocked him on the back of the head. He poked me in the side and I started tickling him until we were engaged in a full kung fu battle of poking, tickling and laughing.
“I’m only going easy on you because it’s your birthday,” he said.
I laughed and blew out the rest of the birthday candles.