My Brother's Keeper

There is a door. I am on one side. You are on the other. Standing in your checkered vans. I can see you standing there, not knowing what to do. You are afraid. You are staring at your father. My father. Someone is bleeding. The kitchen floor is covered in glass.  My brother is crying and trying to clean up. He is only eight. I don’t know why it happened any more than you do. This isn’t about that. I can’t tell you why. Some things just happen and we stand there and watch. If I had been older, I would have helped, but I didn’t know what to do then. I am there too. You can see me if you look. I am covered in blood. It is on my school uniform. Mother is gone. I don’t know where she is. I look at you. I catch your eye and I know you will save me and I will save you. It’s just how that I don’t know. It’s just how that I can’t imagine. It’s just how that will take me out of this world.

But, I am still with you now. I am here now. Please take a look at me. Remember my sweet eyes, because they will look at you with love. Remember how I smell, because it is that you will miss. Remember my skin and my smile born out of longing. In the darkness, you hold things to yourself. We call that love. I loved the broken thing. My father. I held his broken parts in my hand like so many flowers disintegrating into dust. I knew it would happen. That’s the other part. I knew it would happen, but I couldn’t stop it.  When we were watching it. We knew it would change us, but not how. The how is what I’ve forgotten most. The pact I made with you and with myself is still there, unbroken and unflinching. You will say it was me. I will agree. I am the culprit of our deviance. I am sorry, dear brother. I am sorry, my father. I am sorry, my mother. It is this thing. This hatred of choices, I carry, but cannot put down. If I were to put them down, what would happen? Love could come in the door like a butterfly.

After the end, you will say you saw it coming. But, you didn’t. You held me in your arms and loved me. I didn’t want it to ever end, but I had to go to school. The girls’ school with witches posing as nuns. Their hatred changed me too. Wrapped in normal clothes with pinned back hair, I look like the rest of them. You will say I was the best, but I wasn’t, I was just angrier than they were. She was my friend. Katie Santini of the mother on the couch and the playboy magazines where we asked the questions of sex and ate cookie dough. When Katie stood in line with us, the mother nun, Mary-Catherine asked Katie why she was fat. It started then. The anger. I never told you, I beat Katie with a lunch pail until she was bleeding and crying. Blood was on her uniform then too and we became the arbiters of one another’s pain and forgiveness. I put the pills I found into the holy water and watched while everyone got sick. Sick from lack of spirit within themselves. Sickness that felt like love. It still does.

School was closed, but no one ever found out who did it. It wasn’t so bad, no one was permanently sick; I just wanted the nun to stop being so mean to Katie. I guess I was wrong. Still, I would never take it back. It was as satisfying as any thing that you can do and get away with.

My brother, you came to my room when I was only thirteen. I was in bed, my smile was innocent, but you knew I was not. It was before I knew. You crawled into bed and we lay like that against all things holy. Against god. Against hatred. Against our violent home. Your arms were like paradise. Something I did know about, but wanted to. You smelled my hair and I cried for hours and shook the shakes of longing. How can you say it was wrong? You can look at it and say for genetic reasons. The propagation of species it is wrong. I will believe you. That’s what they did on my father’s side. That’s what made our uncle retarded. A genetic flaw. But, you touched me softly and told me I was beautiful. You told me my secret name: angel water. You whispered a cobweb I couldn’t get out of and now, we are here and deciding the future. Well, one of is.

When---or I should say before the day when I went to the other side. I stood before you like a shimmering candle. You ate me with your eyes and told me you found another girl. I knew it would happen. I’m not sorry. In fact, as long as you think so, I will yearn for a life we can be proud of for both of us. But, I am lost now. I cannot explain to Katie who I am crying over night and day. I cannot explain that it is my own brother. There are consequences for that, with no forms of sympathy. 

“In one way, longing kills us all,” you said under the Jacaranda trees lying on those sharp pointy things at 3 am. In the middle of Franklin Hills, Los Angeles smells like wet leaves. “Dead to the world,” you said about our parents, when we would sneak glimpses of the moon and pretend it would be okay. The thing that would never be. I loved you then as I love you now. I remember your smile and the gap filled grin. When I look into your eyes I have no fear of the future. But, it is in your eyes that I see my own death. I do see it. I do not look away. I don’t welcome it. I love this world more than anyone. I love the taste of oranges in the summer and the laughter of my father when he makes me taste watermelon juice. I’m supposed to like watermelon, but I never do. He laughs at me and tells me about the universe. It is in his laughter that my own madness grew.

I told you about the grey-blueness of them. In the mirror, you see it too. I stand alone at first and look at my naked body. I am beautiful. You come in beside me and looked at me. It felt like forever. Watching and waiting for the other to make the move that no one could say no to. In my eyes though, we both see my father. You got lucky, you got eyes from the devil, so we can see one thing, but not our own father. “The devil is better to be with you than away from you,” you say.  When the devil is away from you, you can’t see what he is doing. If he is in your bed, then you know. You can feel it. The cause of your humanness being opened bit by unstoppable bit.

In time I know you will forget I was ever there, in the ways I was. You will remember things like drinking orange drink from McDonald’s and keeping that a secret from our parents. You will think of our babysitter, the one who taught me to French kiss, the one who taught us how dirty a crank caller could really be. You will think of me while undressed with your wife and you will feel guilty. No one will be what I was to you. It’s my voice that you won’t be able to remember and you’ll want to. You’ll try for months to find that one tape I made when I was in school, but you won’t find it and my voice was on nothing else. You’ll think I left because of you. That’s not the reason I’m going. The reason is not you at all. The joy my body felt for knowing you, made this life sweet. The reason I am leaving is I can’t make sense of not loving anyone else and I can’t make sense of what happened to my father. That is why. I can’t make you believe it though. You will think it is because we did the forbidden thing. I want you to know, my darling brother, that you gave me the one reason to stay. Like oranges and the yellow bird or childhood or the speed of roller skates. The innocence isn’t lost if I say it. In the innocence I found you. The blood from father and the madness is stuck in my mind forever though. The only time I ever forget it, is when you look at me and smile and say, “I want what you want.”

Say goodbye to my beautiful pink dress that glows in your mind. Say goodbye to words on paper that fill me up or leave me breathless. Say goodbye to sitting in churches and cursing God. Say goodbye to Valium’s pull and the hot sex of the bar-room floor. Say goodbye to air and its glorious filling of the lungs. Goodbye to the sting of whiskey. Goodbye to an after the gym cigarette. Goodbye to my fair city, filled with more beauty than I can name. The list of things I will miss should include my mother, and it does. Her voice and the dolls she made me when she couldn’t afford to buy them.  The list of things I love is too long and to say them all would cheapen what they mean to me. My last thought was not about the mundane. My last thought was of you and your warm hands on my skin and the look in your eyes holding me captive and of my father bleeding on the kitchen floor.