“That he looked like Jake Gyllenhaal,” I remind her. “That’s what you said to me, anyway.”
Mariah leans back in her chair. “Next time I decide to drag you somewhere for the sake of my nonexistent love life will you just hit me with a two-by-four?”
I smile, and it’s been so long that my face aches when I do. “Next time,” I promise.
I let her tell me about how she’s sure our French teacher has a brain tumor, because what else could be making her assign five poems to be memorized in a single week, and how the latest rumor in school is that Lucille DeMars, a goth kid who only talks to a sock puppet she wears on her right hand and who calls that performance art, was caught having sex with a substitute teacher in the music practice room.
I don’t tell Mariah that when I first saw my father, I felt like all the air around me had gone solid, and that I couldn’t for the life of me draw it into my lungs.
I don’t tell her that I feel like I’m going to burst into tears all the time.
I don’t tell her that this afternoon I went into the patient lounge and googled “head injuries” and found more stories about people who never recovered than about people who did.
I don’t tell her that after all those years of wishing my brother would come home, now that he’s here, I wish he wasn’t. Because then the doctors and the nurses and everyone who’s taking care of my dad would come to me, instead of him.
I don’t tell her that it’s hard to fall asleep, and if I get lucky and
I especially don’t tell her what happened just before. Or after. Instead, for the whole forty minutes Mariah is here, I let myself pretend that I’m the girl I used to be.
There are many moments I thought I’d get to experience with my brother that never happened because he quit the family. Like having him grill my first boyfriend before a date, or teach me how to drive in empty parking lots, or buy me a six-pack of beer to drink under the bleachers after prom. When he first left and my parents were separated, I used to write to him every night. Somewhere in my closet behind the stuffed animals I can’t bear to throw away and the clothes that no longer fit is a shoe box filled with letters I never sent, because I didn’t have an address for him.
I’ll be honest, I used to imagine our reconciliation, too. I thought it might be seconds before I got married- Edward showing up just before I walked down the aisle, telling me he couldn’t miss seeing his baby sister’s wedding. I pictured everything fuzzy at the edges, like in a Lifetime movie, and him telling me I’d grown up even better than he’d ever imagined. Instead, I got a stilted hello over my father’s respirator. My mom said Edward came down to check on me a couple of times after I had my surgery when I was still pretty out of it, but for all I know, she’s just making that up to make me feel better.
Which is why it’s still surreal to have him standing at the foot of my bed, holding a conversation with me. Behind him, muted, the television shows a contestant spinning the Wheel of Fortune.
“Are you in a lot of pain?” he asks.
“I’ve been hurt worse,” I tell him.
My dad used to tell me that a wounded wolf wasn’t himself. He might know you as a brother but rip your throat out with his teeth. When pain factors into the equation, the outcome is unpredictable. I’ve told Edward that I’m not in pain, but that’s a lie. My shoulder might not hurt, thanks to the drugs, but morphine’s done nothing for my heart.
This is the only reason I can give for why I use every word like a weapon to shove him away, when all I really want is to be held right now.
“I know why you left,” I tell him. “Mom told me.”
The fact that he’s gay doesn’t faze me. But I’ve always felt like the whole mystery surrounding my brother’s exit was on a need-to-know basis. At first my mom said it was because Edward and my dad had a fight. Eventually I learned it was because Edward had come out to my dad, who said something that was apparently so god-awful Edward had to leave. Here’s my take on it, though: millions of gay teens come out to their parents, and some have stupid reactions. Just because my father wasn’t perfect, Edward bailed. And that led my mom to blame my dad, and eventually they broke up. The story of my life, as framed by my brother’s impulsive decision to make a grand exit.
“You know what?” I say. “I don’t even care why you left.”
This isn’t a lie, actually. I don’t care why Edward left. All I really want to know is why I wasn’t enough to make him stay.
I’m dangerously near tears right now, something I attribute to the fact that you can’t get any goddamned sleep in a hospital, since someone’s always waking you up to take your blood pressure or your temperature. I won’t let myself believe it’s because Edward has gotten underneath my skin. I’ve worked too hard building a brick wall around my feelings to admit that he might have chiseled his way inside so fast. “Did you find Jesus or Buddha or something in Thailand?” I say. “Guess what, Edward. I don’t forgive you. So there.”
I sound like a spoiled brat. He’s reduced me to that. I hate him even more for making me into someone I’m not than I do for the fact that he’s been sitting upstairs with my dad, making
But Edward doesn’t even flinch; it’s as if he’s reading the text of me with some magic internal Rosetta stone that makes him understand what I say is not what I mean at all. “Right now, this isn’t about you and me,” he says patiently. Calmly. “We have all the time in the world to figure things out between us again. But Dad doesn’t.”
The fact that he’s finally asking for my input about my father makes me dizzy. For a moment, I feel ridiculously happy-the way I used to when Edward picked me up from elementary school in his old beater, and all my friends had to go home instead with their moms in decidedly less cool vehicles. He let me name his car, actually.
“Cara, he can’t stay hooked up to life support forever.”
Maybe it’s the pain medication in my system; maybe it’s just plain shock. But it takes me a few seconds to connect the dots. To realize that my brother, who’d left after a fight with my father, had grown that hatred like a spider plant until, years later, its offshoots threaten to fill every inch of him. “You hate him so much that you’d kill him?”
Edward’s eyes grow darker. Mine do that, too, when I’m angry. It’s strange to see it mirrored in someone else’s face. “You have to be ready to make some hard choices.”
That’s when I lose it. Who is my brother to tell me about choices-my brother, who gave up on this family six years ago? He has no idea what it’s like to hear your mother crying at night through the walls, to have a strange woman come up during your dad’s daily wolf talk at Redmond’s and slip you a piece of paper with her phone number on it. He has no idea what it is like to attend your own mother’s second wedding, and then come home to find your father drinking himself under the table, asking what the ceremony was like. He has no idea how it feels to be responsible for buying groceries so the family doesn’t starve, for forging signatures on report cards and making excuses when your father forgets a teacher conference. He has no idea what it’s like to visit his mother and see her with the twins and feel obsolete. He has no idea.
The reason I’ve made the choices I have is because I wanted to save my family, just as much as Edward was hell-bent on destroying it. Because when you get down to it, the only person you can trust is the one you’d lay down your own life for. And I’m going to do that for my father now, no matter what Edward thinks.
I cannot look at him, so I stare over his shoulder. The contestant on
“I know you’re hurting,” Edward says after a moment. “This time, you don’t have to go through it alone.”
“It?”
He glances away. “Losing someone you care about.”
He’s wrong, though. Even with him standing three feet in front of me, I have never felt so isolated. So I do what any wolf would, if cornered. “You’re right. Because I’m going to do whatever it takes to make sure Dad gets better.”
Edward’s mouth tightens. “If you want to be taken seriously, then act like an adult,” he replies. “You heard the doctors. He’s not coming back, Cara.”
