The Big Sister - Part One

by Lexie Ray

  Nick and I finally reached the gate of the zoo, where Jennet and Luke were waiting for us, panting comically.

  “Hey, let me get this,” Nick said, reaching into his wallet.

  “You’ll do no such thing,” I protested, groping in my pocket for my own stuffed wallet. “Seriously, dude. When things are good, I spread the love. I haven’t forgotten the time you dipped deep into your pockets to help us out with groceries.”

  Nick was always so generous, even though I knew he could hardly afford it. He got gigs often enough to afford the rent, but I’d seen inside his apartment. Much of his furniture was battered, and he seemed to always dress in the same pair of jeans and the same leather jacket. He wasn’t dirty — far from it. But he definitely had a musician’s uniform, and I knew his gigs hadn’t been enough to pay for four tickets to the zoo.

  “I really don’t want you to spend your money on this,” he said. “Really. Let me.”

  “That’s enough out of you,” I said, grandly fanning the bills on the countertop at the ticket seller’s window. “My good fortune is all of your good fortune.”

  If I couldn’t repay the things I owed to my friends every so often, I was pretty sure I’d go insane at the idea of all the debt I was incurring. It really did take a village to enable me to live, to raise my brother, to try my best to give him the life I thought he deserved.

  But I was a part of that village, and if I could do something simple like this to make their lives a little better, I’d always do my best to give it a try.

  The worker behind the thick glass panel slid out four tickets, and we walked into the zoo. On a regular Miami day, with the sweltering humidity, it would’ve been impossible to enjoy even the lush flowers dotting the beds around the sidewalks.

  “This is really beautiful,” Jennet remarked, trailing her fingers through a vivid tangle of hibiscus blooms.

  “Almost as beautiful as our present company,” Nick said gallantly.

  Jennet laughed and shook her head at the hopeless paramour, just as I glanced over and saw Luke discreetly pantomiming barfing all over the concrete. I raised my eyebrows at him, and he shrugged. If I hadn’t seen his sketchbook last night, I would’ve been inwardly cheerful at another positive sign that he was a normal boy, responding like others his age would to certain social situations.

  Instead, my worry persisted. What was eating at my brother?

  “I think we have happened upon our first specimen,” Jennet said, using the lofty voice she employed for some of her jokes. “The unshaven musician, lurking through the bushes.”

  “I heard that,” Nick said mildly, parting the vegetation with both of his hands and poking his head out. He snapped at Luke like a wild animal, and my brother flinched away and giggled. Why had he drawn that knife? Why had he scratched it out? Weren’t we past this? Couldn’t we be normal?

  “All right, here we go,” I said, eager to distract my mind from worry over my brother’s state of mind. “The first actual animal. Let us feast our eyes upon the fearsome crocodile.”

  “Who loves to feast on little boys, given the chance,” Jennet declared, making as if she were about to try to hoist Luke over the edge of the fence separating us from the clear pool.

  Luke laughed, dodging away from our roommate while simultaneously craning his neck to get a better view. The crocodile floated just below the surface, its eyes and nostrils the only things above water. Its sheer size boggled my mind. If my brother did — God forbid — tumble into the exhibit, I wouldn’t be able to save him from the enormous reptile.

  I didn’t even think I could save him from himself.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be doing something?” I demanded, a little more harshly than I meant to. “If we’re going to be sketching every animal here at the zoo, you’d better get started.”

  “Such a task master,” Jennet sniped, giving me a toothy smile. “Well, you heard the lady. Get every wrinkle in that skin, every sharp tooth.”

  My brother eagerly fell to his sketchbook as Jennet wandered away toward Nick, who’d taken an interest in the nearby gorilla exhibit.

  I let Luke sketch for a couple of uninterrupted minutes before I elbowed him.

  “Ow,” he complained. “What’s your problem?”

  “What’s my problem?” I repeated, my eyebrows raised. “What’s your problem? What’s going on? Didn’t I tell you that you needed to come to me with all your problems? Where’s that trust, Luke? Families trust each other.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, giving me a brief, piercing look before returning to his sketchbook.

  “I’m talking about this,” I said, smoothly snagging the book from him and flipping backward until I found the page in question — the drawing of the knife that he’d taken so much care to scribble out. If he really hadn’t wanted anyone to find it, he should’ve torn the page from the book and flushed it. Or burned it. Or buried it.

  “That’s nothing,” he said after a pause that was longer than I liked. In fact, I liked nothing about this situation. Nothing at all.

  “Not what it looks like to me,” I said. “That looks like something you were trying to get off of your mind. That’s what sisters are for, Luke. I’m your family. You can talk to me.”

  “Anytime we talk about this, this is how you get,” he said, staring at the crocodile below us. “You hate talking about this.”

  “You got me there,” I admitted. “I don’t like talking about it. But that’s another thing you have to understand about families. We do things we don’t like to do for each other all the time because we love each other. You think I like washing your stinky clothes? You can bet your butt I don’t.”

  A smile ghosted across his lips. “Well, I don’t like washing your disgusting dishes, either.”

  “But we do it,” I said, ruffling his hair. “That’s what family does. The dirty work. That’s who you can trust. Me. And I can trust you.”

  “You can trust me,” he said, nodding.

  “So tell me about the knife,” I said, even though I knew what I was going to hear. I always knew what it was. I just wished we could move past it. That was all I wanted. To shove that stupid knife into the past, where it belonged.

  Unfortunately, my brother’s past wasn’t exactly the best place to be. Even his memories of it were always trying to flee, finding themselves in his present in their effort to get away from the terror and heartbreak.

  It seemed that even though I’d done what I thought was my best to bully our social workers into finding Luke the best home possible, I’d gotten the better living situation — by far.

  From what I’d been able to glean from my brother’s hesitant retellings, his mother — not our deceased mother, his other mother — had been the one who’d wanted to adopt my brother. She’d been going through a divorce, one that had contributed even more to her empty nest syndrome. Her only son had recently left home, fed up with the fighting and carrying on that she and her soon-to-be ex were engaging in.

  So Luke’s new mother had an empty nest to fill, and she did it with an adoption of my baby brother, shortly after marrying a man she barely knew.

  My brother was too young to realize all of this, of course. I pieced the full picture — the fullest picture I could achieve, of course — from what he thought he knew, what he’d overheard, what he’d experienced.

  His new mother had loved him. That much was clear. She’d wanted him, had cared for him, but, like me, she hadn’t wanted his past to weigh him down. She’d never told him about his real parents dying in that wreck, about his real sister struggling through life with the sole goal of winning him back into her family. She’d wanted him all to herself.

  Maybe, in some realm of reality, everything would’ve turned out all right. Maybe Luke would’ve grown up knowing that his family loved him, and maybe it wouldn’t have mattered that it wasn’t his real family. I’d learned, growing up, that it didn’t take blood ties to make a real family. Jennet
and Nick were as close a thing to family as I’d ever known.

  But things had gone wrong. Things had gone very wrong.

  When Luke’s new mother had married the veritable stranger, she hadn’t banked on the idea that the man didn’t want kids. Didn’t want anything to do with them, in fact. That he’d only married her because her one child was grown up and gone and she was too old to have any more. He’d been terribly surprised when she brought Luke home from the orphanage. They’d talked about it, but he thought she was joking. Or delusional. Or just making conversation.

  But my brother was no joke. He was a real, live human being, one that cried at night and woke his new parents up and gradually but persistently grated on the man’s nerves. The older Luke got, the worse the man apparently hated him.

  Luke started to learn that he wasn’t safe when his new mother left him alone in the house with the man. My brother was just a child, and he needed things like food and attention. But the man was unwilling to provide them. When my brother would cry out of hunger, the man would give him a spanking for whining.

  When Luke learned not to cry in front of the man, the man would still ferret out punishable offenses. Sullenness. Attitude. Sneakiness.

  And when spankings stopped satisfying the man’s hatred of Luke, he tried for other forms of cruelty. Spankings became beatings, though the man was always careful to leave no marks — or at least leave them in places on my brother’s body that wouldn’t show.

  The situation was despicable. But the one bright spot came when the man assessed the weapons in his arsenal and tried for a little psychological warfare.

  “You know,” he said conversationally to Luke one night, poking his head inside of Luke’s bedroom after his wife had gone to bed. The voice had startled Luke out of a doze. “You’re not her real child. She has a real child, but he’s grown up and gone. You’re just a little weasel of a thing she took from an orphanage that no one else wanted. No one else wanted you.”

  Luke’s new mother had never told him he was adopted, but now he knew. He knew, with no small degree of hope, that he didn’t belong here, that he used to be in some other place — a place that was probably safer than here.

  The first chance he got — the next morning, after the man had gone to work and he was getting ready for school — Luke cornered his new mother with the knowledge he had gained in the most unexpected place.

  “I wish he wouldn’t have told you,” she said, sitting heavily on the edge of the bed she shared with the man who hated Luke. “I really wish he wouldn’t have done that. I didn’t want you burdened with that information. Not at such a young age.”

  Burdened? Luke felt unburdened, free, hopeful for the first time in a long time. Adoption was good news. That meant he had a place somewhere else, somewhere away from that terrible man.

  “Would you tell me about my real — my other parents?” he asked. “Who are they? Why did they put me up for adoption?”

  “This isn’t something I want to just unload on you before you go to school,” the woman said, shaking her head. “I want you to get a good education. I want you to be someone wonderful. Maybe we’ll talk tonight over dinner, when we’re all together.”

  All together meant with the man, and that wasn’t what Luke wanted. He was afraid that his face would betray him, that the man would recognize Luke’s weak hope for what it was and crush it. No. He needed to know now, when he had his new mother to himself.

  “Please tell me,” Luke said. “I promise — I promise I won’t tell anyone. I just want to know. I just need to know. Now.”

  Surprised by his intensity, or maybe just relieved that she didn’t have to bear this secret any longer, she told him. His parents were dead. He had lived for a time at an orphanage with his older sister — me. And she had adopted him shortly after marrying the man who was the main source material for Luke’s nightmares.

  “My older sister,” Luke said, trying the words out. A link. A tenuous link to a past he was no longer a part of, a place he used to be. An escape. “She didn’t die.”

  “No,” his new mother confirmed. “Well, as far as I know. She was adopted, same as you, but to another family. Now, scoot. I hear the bus at the corner.”

  There were hundreds more questions that Luke wanted to know the answers to, but he had to exercise patience. This was going to be a chess game. He would have to choose his questions wisely, have to make sure he got his new mother alone, be content with learning everything eventually, methodically.

  He only felt marginally guilty at school that day that he could hardly sit still in his desk, let alone pay attention. The latest bruise from the man, on his ribcage, hardly even hurt anymore.

  A different place. A sister he never knew he had. A chance at liberation.

  “Faith?”

  I blinked a couple of times, my brother’s wan face coming into focus.

  “Yeah?”

  “You kind of zoned out for a few minutes,” Luke said, his face pinching with worry.

  “I was lost in the past, I guess,” I said, unclenching my hands that had become inexplicably sweaty in the pleasant day. My fingernails had made little half moons in my palm, indentations that I knew would fade in a few minutes. “Were you saying something?”

  My brother shrugged, and I frowned. We were still new to each other. I had to keep reminding myself of that. He had no reason to trust me — though I often wished that the fact that he was hear with me, now, would be reason enough to confide in me.

  “I was asking you about the knife,” I said, finally regaining my train of thought. It was too easy to get derailed with Luke. I had so many regrets.

  “I just drew it,” he said.

  “And why did you scribble it out?”

  “Because I knew it would upset you,” he said. “Everything upsets you.”

  I knew I wasn’t that transparent. “Not everything upsets me,” I lied. “I’m just worried about you. You’re going to be starting at a new school this fall, and —”

  “Wait, a new school?” Luke interrupted. “What do you mean?”

  I smiled and dropped my pursuit of an explanation for the knife — for now.

  “What, did you think this was just some random trip to the zoo?” I asked him. “No, sir. This is a celebration. You’re going to St. Anthony’s this fall, not that horrible public school.”

  Seeing my brother’s face light up — and being the one behind the joyful transformation — was enough to banish my worry to the dark corners of my brain. I lived for these moments, for these fleeting seconds when my brother was actually excited about something and not all balled up inside of himself, afraid to come out.

  “Really?” he asked. “I’m really going to St. Anthony’s?”

  We’d made a campus visit early in the summer, touring the beautiful grounds and meeting with some of the teachers there. While Luke had explored playground equipment, I’d spoken with the principal, who’d assured me that a tentative boy like Luke would flourish under the right circumstances — the very same circumstances that St. Anthony boasted.

  “You’re really going,” I said. “You’re enrolled and everything. We’re going school shopping tomorrow. We have to get you that cute uniform — tucked-in shirts and ties. Think you can survive?”

  My brother beamed and nodded emphatically. He didn’t care about ties. He just wanted out of that cesspool of a public school he’d been in during the past year. He’d been bullied by his peers and ignored by his superiors, the teachers just wanting to shoo the students from grade to grade with as few hiccups as possible.

  “That crocodile better be museum quality art by now,” Jennet warned, approaching us with her hands on her hips. “Seriously! What is taking so long?”

  “You’ve got to see these gorillas, Luke,” Nick added. “I don’t know how you’re going to draw them, though. They won’t stop moving around.”

  “Go on, then.” I prodded my brother, noticing belatedly that he’d been sketching this
entire time. The crocodile in his sketchpad really did look like it should be hanging on the wall of some museum or gallery. How long had I zoned out, thinking about all the horrors he had grown up with?

  I pushed myself away from the lurking reptile’s tank, repressing a shudder as I walked toward my friends. This was going to be a good day. I was going to make it a good day — for my brother.

  Chapter 6

  School started, and we settled into a tried and true routine. I rolled myself out of bed to cook breakfast for both Jennet and Luke — when I could manage it, of course. Marcus had enabled the first tuition payment, but there would be another for the second semester — and many more after that, if St. Anthony’s turned out to be as good for Luke as I hoped it would be. I was looking to work as hard as I could to try to secure the tuition money, and taking on escorting more often than usual.