1.
I’ve been going through my mother’s stuff. Photos. Letters. Contents of her junk drawer. Decades of bills paid, annotated and carefully filed.
And then my brother shows up.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. In fact, it explains a lot. That sense of movement, like a lizard that twizzles my periphery. That thing in the corner that is but isn’t moving.
“I thought you were my mom,” I say.
“Sorry to disappoint you,” he answers. His voice comes directly into my head.
I turn off the shredder. Lift out the basket of pharmacy-bill cabbage. Take it outside to the compost bin, shedding crinkled strips.
A shadow of movement: “Still here?” I ask.
“Where else would I go?” he answers.
His birth certificate was in an envelope labeled “Memories.” Stapled to it: his death notice. David Michael. Born May 16. Died just three days later.
I look up Erythroblastotic. It starts with blood type incompatibilities between parents. As the first, I survived. Any baby after: attacked by Mother’s antibodies. Mom and I essentially killed my brother.
Back to shredding shredding shredding. Tax returns. Lists. Marked-up Snoopy calendars. The ache of going from Mr. & Mrs. to only Mrs. The sorrow of cradling a star-crossed babe.
I fix a shredder jam with a pair of hemostat scissors, yanking clumps of ruined paper. Dust like ash wafts through the room. “Don’t jam so many pages through,” my brother advises.
No need to tell me Why the Jam. I only want to Unjam this thicksy-dust confetti of my parents’ lives. I was their princess. Their Only. Yet here is my long-lost brother making the family triad an imperfect square.
Three days.
Born when I was barely walking.
Three days.
What will I have of him now?
2.
Next morning: still here. He, my invisible angel, ghostly brother. I, his anchor to immortality.
I need to see him, so I draw. First, a mother and child. A pietà gazing at a newborn clearly doomed.
“No,” he whispers. “Not that!”
I draw him youthful, dreamy, carefree smile tickling his hairless lip.
“I look like a girl,” he complains.
“Is that so bad?” I counter. “I always wanted a sister.”
A sad young man emerges, black hair curly like my father’s, lower lip pouty like my mother’s.
“Who’s that delinquent?” he asks. “Not me. I’d have married. Carried on the gene pool.”
He pauses for effect.
What does this shape-shifting interloper expect? To share my place in existence? I was Mother’s Apple. Daddy’s Star. Sole conveyer of their particulate path. Now I’m in the home stretch of my life, flying solo, disassembling what I cannot incorporate of my parents’ residue, inventing fictions of a brother who could have been but wasn’t.
Between the shredding and the sorting, piles to cherish, piles to gift, I draw him as he comes to me, with something always askew. Too fat. Too skinny. Too Anglo. Too Mexican. Too stupid. Too sad. Too macho. Too gay. Too straight. Too stoned.
“Que féo,” he says. “I would have been much better looking.”
“So you draw then,” I say, throwing down the pencil.
“That’s not my talent, sister,” he retorts. I sketch a child throwing a tantrum. “No, Big Sister, that is you,” he says. “You and your sulky moods.”
3.
Day Three: He decides he wants to be a musician. “Like Dad, only I’ll skip the 9-to-5,” he says.
I draw him passed out in the back of a tour bus, guitar sliding onto the floor, joint dangling.
“Not that kind of musician,” he protests. “I want to play saxophone. Like Coltrane.”
I draw a man with a sax passed out in the back of a tour bus.
The squawking horn, the scent of Daddy’s Tres Flores. David Michael learning. Up the scale. Down.
“Play a tune or something!” I complain.
“I need to master the basics,” he insists.
I tell him to go to the other room until mastery is achieved, and then return to shredding. Making powder of my father’s Army records, my mother’s Nursing diploma.
A friend lets herself in. “Didn’t you hear the doorbell?” she says. “Who were you yapping at?”
I’ve seen ghost movies; she will not believe what I tell her. “It’s my brother,” I say.
Doubt clouds her face, but all she says is, “Oh.” Then she talks about getting help. With shredding. With boxes in the garage. With delusional grief. “Let me know,” she says. “Whatever you need.”
I do not know what I need but maybe I know what I want. Maybe I want my brother.
By afternoon, he has switched to guitar. He says it’s for my sake, so we can talk while he plays. Noodles chords behind questions. Teases. Encourages. Laughs. Somehow knows me in a way that lovers never could.
David Michael, who would have lived had I not been the first. Who Father buried alone while Mother grieved from her bed. How long? How long? Three Days?
“Relax,” he says between the notes. “You are the last person living who cares I ever existed. Sister, I’m here as long as you are.”
I draw a man the age he would be now, handsome, not yet stooped, curly hair whitened, thinning. A man with Daddy’s sparkle, leaning into that crooked hint of a grin, like he’s just about to make you smile.
makes up truths, changes the endings, and calls it fiction. Once she learns how to pronounce denouement, she plans to live happily ever after. Her work has appeared in Flash Boulevard, MacQueen’s Quinterly, and Poydras Review, among other places.
