“I’m nearly hoping you don’t have the money. See you in twenty-four hours.” His laughter floats out the door as his friend takes his foot off my brother’s chest and follows him out. The moment they leave, my mother’s cries grow by the second. I want to comfort her, but I’m on my knees, trying not to think about the invasion on my body.
“Declan.” I’m searching his face. His soft brown eyes—the same as mine—smile up at me.
“Hi, Kiddo.” His grin has always been a comfort when shit hit the fan, but now that I’m older and have taken a pounding from life, his grin doesn’t comfort me; it just makes me sad, and it makes me remember what once was.
“Twelve thousand, Declan?” I shake my head, and he lies fully back. His top rises, and I hate how prominent his bones are.
“When did you last eat?” I take his arm in my hand, and he doesn’t stop me as I turn it over. I expect the fresh needle marks, yet seeing them still dries up any hope that was about to flourish. Each week he makes me the same promise that he will get clean, and when I get back, he’ll be a new man. The stupid part of me wants to dream that he will. I snort at my naive thoughts. Yeah, and maybe my mother will stop drinking, and my father will walk through the door. Why not go wild and let me quit my job that keeps the roof over our heads and food on the table.
“I’ll get the money.” Declan’s smiling up at me through cracked lips that plead for water, that he doesn’t even know his body is craving. I rise, and my mother continues to wail in the corner. She’s managed to get her cigarettes and lighter out of her pink dressing gown pocket, so she’s not that traumatized. I enter the kitchen, and the smell has me swallowing saliva. Taking down a mug, I fill it with water and return to the sitting room.
My brother drinks and slowly sits up.
“You remember that Christmas…” he’s laughing at the memory that hasn’t left his lips yet.
I examine his face; a cut above his eye is still bleeding.
“The one where mum knocked over the Christmas tree, or the one where she fell into the bath?” The list was endless, but none of them were funny. Not when you craved your father to walk through the door every Christmas, but he never did. Each year I grow harder until it doesn’t matter. Nothing matters, only surviving.
“The one where you swore you saw Santa Claus.” Declan finally says, and his long arm wraps around his waist like he can keep the laughter in that spills from his lips and fills the room. His laughter fills the room with a small amount of light that I bask in for just a moment. I’m smiling down at my brother. It reminds me of us under his blanket late at night after our mother had passed out from drinking. Declan had a way with words, a real natural storyteller. He would take me away from our home and bring me to the magical lands of Ireland where pots of gold sat at the end of rainbows, and banshees wailed about death. He made me believe for those brief moments that maybe there was something more to this existence than this.
“It was one of mum’s boyfriends.” He’s still laughing, but his words sober me up.
The endless stream of men through the door never got old. Each one as much as a write-off as my mother, who still wails in the corner like a fucking banshee from one of Declan’s stories.
I’m tempted to tell her to knock it off, but I don’t waste my breath. I need to bandage Declan up.
“Can you stand?”
I hate how easily I lift Declan from the floor. It’s like a light sack of tinder for the fire.
“Don’t leave me.” My mother whimpers from the corner. Anger bubbles in my veins, and if it could morph into something more, it would scorch her.
I leave with Declan. His room is a bare mess. His bed frame is long gone. The dirty mattress on the floor is covered by a sheet that I can not lie him on. He hobbles over, and I stop him.
“I need to change it, Declan. It has sick on it.”
“It’s my sick.”
He’s ready to lie down when I whip the sheet from under him. I don’t meet my brother’s eyes.
“How are you going to get the money?” I ask the stupid question as I throw the sheet onto the pile of clothes next to his chest of drawers.
He lies down and groans as I pull open his curtains and let some light flitter into his room.
“Come on, Maeve, close them.” He slings an arm across his eyes. But I don’t close the curtains. I force open a window to let in some air.
“Declan, this is serious,” I say while staring out onto our lawn that died a long time ago. My gaze travels further as a group of young people huddles together while one jams to a beat that another makes.
“I don’t know how I’ll get the money.”
I step away from the window at my brother’s admission and leave him as I grab the first aid kit in the bathroom. My mother’s cries have ceased as I re-enter my brother’s room and kneel down on the floor beside his mattress.
“What about Lenny?” I ask and cringe. I hate even mentioning Lenny’s name. But he is a local
