Mom insists I can’t possibly remember anything from when I was that young. She’s also quick to dismiss the notion that Ricky would have gone out of his way to scare me. “He was always good to you as a baby,” she says. “He loved you.”
And yet other memories surface. Like the time he led me into our parents’ bedroom and set me on the top of their tall wooden dresser. My legs dangled over the edge, and while I might not have understood the danger of how high up I was, I knew enough to understand I was stuck there.
“Don’t move,” he instructed me solemnly, before walking out of the room.
I sat perfectly still, waiting and waiting for him to come back. I must have been scared. Even now I can’t figure out why he left me up there like that. Was he hoping I would cry out for him? Did he want me to fall? Whatever his intentions, I remember reaching out my arms to him in relief when he finally came back to lift me down.
If he was disappointed that day by my silent brand of terror, secretly wishing for a more vocal manifestation of panic, he didn’t show it. He simply wrapped his spindly arms around my quivering body and set me gently on the floor.
“Don’t tell Mom,” he probably said. Or maybe I already instinctively knew enough not to.
WHEN MOM WAS UPSET WITH Ricky, it was as if the whole house suddenly became wobbly. There was something deeply unsettling about hearing her yell at him, asking him why he had to give her so much trouble, all while he looked at the floor so she wouldn’t see him smiling. Later, he could casually stroll into the living room and ask her for twenty bucks, and she’d hand it over. As he folded the money into his wallet, he’d look at me and wink.
Once, after a particularly big blow-up, Ricky left and returned with a rose bush in a black, plastic bucket. He carried it to the backyard, took a shovel from the shed, and started digging a hole.
Mom came outside just as he was watering the newly planted rose bush and said, “What’s this?”
“A surprise for you,” Ricky replied.
Mom smiled. That night she made fish cakes for supper and I knew Ricky had been forgiven. He was always forgiven.
PERHAPS BECAUSE I WAS SO sensitive, or because I was her last baby, or simply because I was a girl, Mom coddled me. I’m sure she only wanted to protect me, but looking back, I sometimes wonder — if Mom had paid more attention to Ricky, would it have made any difference? I doubt it. If our dad hadn’t gone and killed himself by falling off a roof, would that have changed anything? It’s hard to say. I don’t remember much about my dad. I was only four when he died, but Ricky was twelve and it must have hit him pretty hard. Sometimes it still makes me jealous that my brother got to have a dad for at least part of his life. Mom has albums full of pictures of the two of them doing stuff together: building a tree fort in the backyard, fishing off the pier in Boelen, standing with their arms around each other in front of our putty-coloured brick bungalow. And while I’m in some of those pictures, I’m just a side-bar. The baby in the background. There is one photo of Dad holding me on an ugly gold and brown sofa, but even in that picture his eyes are on my brother who is standing on the cushion beside him, with one arm thrust into the air like Superman. So, when it comes to our dad, Ricky is the one with all the memories.
LATER, WHEN I WAS IN grade one and I wanted to play with the big kids after school, I felt, maybe for the first time, my father’s absence in a concrete way. Not his actual absence, because I didn’t remember enough about him for that, but the fact of his absence.
I’d grabbed my bike to join a game of cops and robbers that was starting, but quickly discovered I couldn’t keep up because of my training wheels. I couldn’t figure out why other kids my age knew how to ride a two-wheeler when I didn’t. Tina Martin told me. Her dad had taught her over the summer. Brian Lowther’s dad had taught him too, and the unfairness of that simple fact hit me like a kick in the ribs.
Ricky found me in the backyard with a screwdriver, where I was trying, with all of the determined concentration of a six-year-old, to take the training wheels off my bike.
“What’re you doing?” Ricky asked, sinking onto the grass beside me.
“I want to play cops and robbers,” I told him. I attacked the bolts on my training wheels with renewed energy, banging the screwdriver uselessly against them.
“You can’t use that,” Ricky said, taking the screwdriver gently from my hand. “You need a wrench.”
He disappeared inside and returned carrying a hard, black case. He opened it to reveal a collection of metallic tubes and one long handle. “It’s a socket wrench set,” he explained. “See all the different sizes?” I hugged my knees to my chest as I watched my big brother remove my training wheels using our dead dad’s tools. When he was done, we both stood up and I gripped my bike by the handle bars.
“Come on,” Ricky said, leading me through the front gate to the sidewalk. “I’ll teach you.”
You can see how easy it was back then to be fooled by him. He wasn’t just my big brother; in many ways he was my hero.
THE REST OF MY DINNER with
