Fall Semester
July 2008
I still remember Chris, and I hope that he knows somehow. I’m sure he does. It seems like it was all part of the plan. It's like he dug his way into my skull and he is walking around in my cerebellum, pulling and pushing and yanking away at synapses or whatever it is that is up there- giving me an awful headache and bringing his image to the front of my mind at the worst possible moments, like when I‘m moments away from sleep or when I'm stuck at the front of the classroom about to give a report like last month when I was all set to start talking about The Scarlet Letter and when I looked across the room all I could think of was how much better his paper would have been and I stumbled over my words and got a C. I can imagine him, a sticky mess with a smug look on his face- that self assured smirk is displayed across his cheeks, just like it always was in all the pictures of him as a kid.
It’s fall now. The newscasters keep saying it's warm for the beginning of November, still in the sixties, but I don’t think it is. It’s never warm enough, and I hate the fall because when the frost starts it always makes me think of Chris and, well, I don’t want to think of Chris anymore. It’s been too long, and I’m starting to get envious of the kids at school who had parents die or leave when they were really young because when they talk to me they ask me if I remember all his details. They ask because the details have been slipping away for them, they don’t remember the color of their mother’s eyes or sound of their father's voice. But when I speak I hear Chris’ voice, because his voice hadn’t changed and mine still sounds as childish as ever. And when I look in the mirror I see Chris’ eyes, and his cheeks, and his lips, and his chin. Even his dimples, which are smaller on me, are still there each and every time I look in the mirror, guaranteeing me that his details will never slip away.
It’s been six years now since he died and I’m old now. I guess when I think of how old I’ve gotten I see if from his eyes, looking at myself in awe, shocked that I’m sixteen and I’m gangly and ugly and I think that he’d laugh at me all day long if he saw me, so that is one of the upsides to the whole thing. He isn’t here to point out my stupid acne and how long my arms are, hanging from my body awkwardly and limply when I walk to school and too long to cross over my chest when I hold books in front of it. I kind of wish he was, because the good thing about having a twin is that he’d look the same, sort of, except of course he was a boy so he wouldn’t be able to relate to me growing boobs and how the boys tease me. I think he might have made it better because he was friends with all of them so he wouldn’t let them pick on me in the first place. They went easy on me for a year or two, but then they forgot all about him and it makes me mad to even think about it. Sometimes when they stand against their lockers, their shoulder blades on the walls and their back packs around their feet and hanging from their hands, I imagine Chris among them, telling them to shut up when they start teasing the girls and they land on my name. Last week was Halloween and no one else gets sad at all the fall holidays anymore. They all dress up for Halloween and get excited about Thanksgiving break and as soon as leaves start falling they are giddy about making Christmas lists. When it’s fall everything reminds me of Chris, and I can't even walk with my head down looking at my feet because I’m wearing boots and my feet are stepping on leaves, and the crackle over every single leaf reminds me that it is fall and it has been another whole year that I’ve gone with out my brother.
Since it’s high school we get these thick yearbooks with hard covers and each year they have pictures of all the kids that died that were supposed to graduate that year, so in two years everyone will see his picture and then they will remember him again. For a few weeks he’ll be fresh on their memories and then when they are old and feel out of touch with their youths they will drag the yearbook out and remember him again, in new houses, new cities, in adult clothes, wool sweaters and khakis, drinking and on leather couches with spouses, and maybe their eyes will water when they think about how young he was and all the rumors that flew around the town that fall. For a moment they will pretend that they really remember Chris and that they are mourning him instead of their own young bodies and the times that they smiled and laughed with total sincerity. I have a picture in mind, before he was in the hospital, from the summer before he died. It's both of us on the beach and I’m sitting on the towel looking all annoyed and upset because he had knocked over the sandcastle that I made and I had some sand working its way in my bathing suit. But he is in front of me and leaning all cheesy and dorky toward the camera and his face is covered in freckles. Both of his hands are on his hips and he is giving that same old smirk. I think it’d be the nicest picture because then people who have forgotten about him would only be able to remember him looking smart and funny, maybe like a bit of a show off, but still happy.
The only thing worse than people not remembering him is the people who do. I don’t know why mom never thought about moving away after he died. Until three years ago she still worked in the same restaurant as she did when it all happened. When I got off the bus from school I’d go there sometimes and she’d let me sit in the booth towards the back and do homework and she’d bring me grilled cheese sandwiches and chocolate milk. She’s always working and it bugs me, but she has to I guess. We moved out of the house and we live in a little apartment on Main Street. It’s one bedroom and I sleep on the couch. But it's better now. He would like it. Anyway, I’d go there and sometimes people would see mom and start talking about him, not noticing me in the booth behind them. I’m easy not to notice. He was always the one who got everyone talking and I guess it’s just part of God’s sense of humor that he still has that same effect on the world. I never thought that He was that funny and when people use to come up to me and hug me and tell me that this was all part of His plan I thought that He was a real asshole too, but mom tells me to calm down when I say things like that. Usually I just pretend to take a deep breath and I close my eyes and inside I scream at the top of my lungs because I don’t think that He has any plan. No one would if they saw Chris after that night.
All those old women who would sit here and talk about dad when Chris was still alive are still here and they just got older and now when they gossip about my family they do it in louder voices because their ears don’t work anymore. They laugh at my mom sometimes and sometimes they make tisk tisk noises when she walks away and say that the men in the hospital should have taken me away from her. Sometimes someone will see me and recognize me from family photos that were put on coffee cans near cash registers when people were trying to help mom pay for Chris’ hospital bills. They’ll come up and pinch my cheeks and hug me and sometimes they will cry. The older they are the more likely they are to cry or to call me the wrong name. I’m always being called Beth or Tammy or whatever random name they pulled out of thin air. I suspect that they are just picking the names of other girls they knew whose dads’ were mean and drunk. And these old women you can almost taste the medicine on their breath and in their clothes and they never want to let go. I worry that for the rest of my life people will stop me on the streets and hold me, like I am marked for life by that fall. If mom notices me being ambushed and she isn’t caught up taking orders and filling coffee cups she comes over and pretends to yell at me to run along home and I’ll escape the hugs of strangers. I usually end up crying as I walk down the road, my backpack in tow and I wish for once my brother were there for me to talk to about it all.
I don’t know what Chris remembers and what he doesn’t remember. I don’t know when or if you stop feeling things after you lose consciousness. And I figure that if he isn’t right there sitting behind my eyes and watching all of this that he at least deserves to hear from me what happened so at times, when he pops into my head late at night, in those last moments when my eyes are heavy I try to retell the story to him, but it scares me to think of it still. I get nightmares sometimes and I see my dad running down the halls after us, and we are little again and he is bigger than ever and just as mean. His hands are always inches away and we are running down hallways that get longer and longer with each step. I remember how brave Chris always tried to be when dad got focused on me and when he stopped hitting and started touching and I love Chris for that. A lot of the boys at school scare me because when I look in their eyes, especially the boys who have dad’s cool blue eyes, I see him. I don’t think I’ll ever get married because of it. I had my first kiss this summer, but it was with Sarah, a girl who moved in to the apartment building a few weeks before hand. We don’t talk now and I blush when I see her in the hallways at school. I think about how nice it would be to just walk up to her and hold her hand and to have someone to talk to sometimes, but I haven’t yet. Maybe during winter break I’ll try talking to her, but I’m not certain.
It was the middle of November. The leaves were starting to crunch with frost under our feet when we played in the yard but dad never was the type to rake anyway. The leaves always waited till the spring when the leaves were wet and soggy and mom sent us out with rakes and a promise of soda if we worked hard at cleaning up the yard. I remember that we were in our room fighting over the leftover Halloween candy when we heard the fighting start. Chris’ face always changed when he heard dad yelling at mom. His smirk would go away and his mouth would turn into a flat angry line and his forehead would furrow. We sat quietly as we heard the voice elevate. The effect of the alcohol took its place into dad’s voice, making it at once louder and softer and Chris put his arm around my shoulder and whispered something about how I could have all the gum I wanted. All I wanted was to melt into the floorboards and be part of the house that he couldn’t pick up or push or hit. I usually focused all of my thoughts on melting, my skin boiling and seeping out from underneath my jeans and my canvas shoes. This time I remember trying to make out words and staring at the wall through the doorway of our bedroom, hoping that the voices would stay on the first floor and that mom would say something to make him laugh and to start kissing her. She didn’t.
It hurts that people blame mom for sticking around because they don’t realize that it didn’t start like this. Mom still has family albums from when we were babies and dad is in all the pictures, big and smiling and smirking out of all the frames, holding us. I used to get mad seeing these pictures because now half our family is gone and even though I don’t miss dad and I hate him for what happened. I stole one picture of us. It’s sometime after we were just born and we are all red and wrinkly and I’m in pink and Chris is in blue which is the only reason that you could tell the two of us apart. Mom is holding me and staring off all dreamy and tired to the left and dad is holding Chris. If you rip the picture down the middle you are left with our family now. I don’t think that dad got to follow Chris to heaven, both because of what he did to him and what happened after that.
The fighting wasn’t letting up and Chris took his arm off my shoulder and ran down stairs yelling at him, using every swear word he ever heard dad use at mom and us. I stayed in our room and hid between the bed and the wall, trying to be as small as possible, trying to melt my legs. When I heard him fly against the wall, scream, and then get quiet I was so afraid that I thought that I would never leave the room. Sure he hit us before, but I don’t think I even heard mom’s body make a thump quite that big. Mom’s voice got hysterical and the door slammed. I rocked back and forth, feeling the weight of my body transfer on and off the balls of my feet and my butt, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. Things got quieter and quieter after mom stopped screaming. Chris moaned and whimpered, I think, but I don’t know if I really remember hearing that because they were downstairs. Maybe I just adopted that part of the story from mom’s version of it. She never tells it to me, but once she had a friend over and they drank in the living room and talked about it until mom cried and it sticks in my head because I never did hear mom cry besides then and once at the hospital.
I don’t remember any sounds until the ambulance showed up, roaring and scary. It filled the room with red lights and mom yelled for me. I ran down stairs where I saw Chris, bloody and small and on a stretcher, like a body in a scary movie, but it seemed less real than anything I’d seen on TV. Mom had blood on her white t-shirt from where she had held his face to her chest. Dad wasn’t there. I didn’t know until later that night that the door slamming was him running out and getting into his Jeep and that he was already dead by the time the ambulance got to our house. He drove the truck right into a car full of teenagers who were coming back from the last football game of the year and the truck rolled over. He was dead when they got there but the kids were all okay, just broken bones and bruises. The hospital was full of his handy work that day. We didn’t go to his funeral because we were holding vigil for Chris, sitting by his bed, mom holding me while I cried and held his hand. His face looked totally different. It was slack and black thread held his cheek together. Dad knocked him across the face so hard he knocked out three of his teeth on the left side. I don’t know what happened to them. Maybe he swallowed them with all the blood or maybe they fell on the floor and the police cleaned them up.
Chris basically slept for two days in a hospital bed. Mom said that when I was sleeping the second night Chris’ body gave up. I think he must have already left his body because I know that if he was still in there he would have been fighting till the last moment, like he always did with dad even though he was so much bigger. And I think that if he could be he’d be here fighting for me and mom, protecting us when he could. His funeral was on a Tuesday morning, and I missed so much school that fall that mom had to home school me for a bit. No one really was there, me and mom and the pastor from the church that owned the cemetery down by the highway. Chris was in the newspaper, a school picture of him with a cowlick and freckles fresh from the summer. He was all smiles in that picture so it doesn’t feel right to me. To me, Chris will always be a smirk and an attitude. And I’m okay with that now. I think it would have driven me nuts if he were still around.
I hope he hears when I pray at night, because I always send them up to him. We haven’t gone to church in forever, so I do think that mom agrees with my theory about God being an asshole. But Chris is my twin, and he is half of me, so I feel like the chunk of my heart that was ripped away when I saw his blood on mom’s chest is the part of him that was mixed up in me. I’m sure he is missing part of his heart too, and maybe when I close my eyes real tight and I see his smirk he can feel me thinking of him and missing him and hoping that he is okay. Someday I’ll be in heaven with him, and mom too, too soon if she doesn’t stop working so hard, and it’ll be like that picture that I was talking about, all ripped in half would be sewn back together. Maybe if God wants to pull through big time he’ll even fix whatever it was that was broken inside of dad and make us a whole family like we were way back before I can remember. Until then every fall I’m going to think of him and miss my brother.
Copyright 2008 Jessa Marsh
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