Little Sister

There are two men walking around somewhere in the world who had me as their little sister for seven years.

I only got to see them sometimes when they were my older brothers. Sometimes our dad would pick me up and take me to their house in Pennsylvania, and Justin would be there playing video games. It would be Call of Duty, or the one where you just ride a skateboard around the streets of some city, and I would just sit with him and watch him play since he’d get annoyed when I played it wrong.

Sometimes Dad would visit Mom’s apartment with “a surprise,” and to my delight, Jesse would be visiting on break from the military. He would sweep me up on his shoulders and stoop to carry me through the living room, doing a circle around the low coffee table.

Dad always came over smelling like cheap bergamot men’s cologne and stale cigarette musk. He was tall and wide, and he would take me in his car to get fried fish and ask the restaurant for extra hot sauce for me. He had short cropped hair and a perpetually under-grown beard and he always wore silver rectangular glasses that mimicked my mom’s brown ones.

Whenever my mom would yell at me, he would tell her I was little and try to explain to me how to behave better so that she wouldn’t yell anymore. He taught me once how to army crawl, and when he took me back to Mom’s apartment and I got down on the floor to demonstrate my new trick, his laugh was squeaky and so loud that our upstairs neighbors heard it.

One of the times I’d gotten to go to my Dad’s house, I walked through the living room and down the stairs into the small square basement room that, at 16, Justin called his bedroom. The room used to be Jesse’s room during high school. He wasn’t usually around because of the military. Justin told me, guiding the little man down the street and back toward the skate ramps, that he was going to join the military after high school because both Jesse and Dad had done it.

I didn’t want him to. I thought it meant he would have to kill people. Jesse wasn’t killing people in my mind. Or if he was, he was being nice about it. But I knew Justin got boy-angry at times, and so I was less sure that he was going to be nice about it. And he wasn’t as big and strong as Jesse, who was probably really good at dodging the enemies and army crawling under grenades, so he would probably get hurt. And he seemed smart enough to do something else, to go to college like my mom said I was going to do. And I didn’t want him to go away for so long.

He was sitting on the edge of his bed toward his TV in the corner of the room, moving a little man on a skateboard around a simulated skate ramp with his Xbox controller. Justin wasn’t as tall as Jesse and Dad, but he was nearly as wide. He had dark brown hair, but where mine was practically black, his was a more obvious chocolate. In the face, Jesse was basically Dad’s beardless twin. Justin was a close second but with chubbier, ruddy cheeks. The way he was sitting, I couldn’t see him. Hadn’t he heard me walking inside?

I bounded toward him quietly, putting one of my tan little hands on his pale arm and patting him to get his attention. He turned to look at me, eyes cutting to the side to glance at me faster than his head could move. On the TV, the little man was drifting toward a ramp. Tears were stuck between his brown eyelashes. My smile turned into a frown.
“Why are you crying?”
He sniffled and put down the controller. He pulled out his phone. “My girlfriend broke up with me.”
I blinked. “Oh.” At 7 years old, I knew I didn’t really understand anything about
romance. “Did you do something wrong?”

He looked at me for a moment, and then looked down at the little screen. “Yeah,
probably. I dunno... she won’t talk to me. She just told me we should break up. I dunno. I tried to talk to my mom about it but she just says that’s what girls my age are like.”

He was still, looking at what was probably his girlfriend’s last text messages to him, his head bowed mournfully. I was standing next to his bed, bouncing against the edge of the mattress unconsciously with my hip. I stopped. I felt that a strangled embarrassment drawn from needing the comfort of his little sister hung over him. The quieter embarrassment of being needed but not knowing what to say drove me forward to awkwardly wrap my arms around his neck. He pulled
away, sniffing harshly and wiping his tears. He picked up his controller again, and started trying to show me how to get the little man up the ramp. I didn’t understand. I somehow got him up a set of stairs and then down the street. I waited for him to get mad at me, but he didn’t say anything mean. I guess he was too put out to tease me anymore.

Then Dad was at the door. “Hey. Your mom wants me to bring you back home now.”
I ran into his arms, and he carried me away and back to New York. Over his shoulder, I said goodbye, and Justin waved , already switching to Call of Duty.

A few months passed. I started to notice one day that it had been weeks since my dad had come to see me. Sometimes I would ask my mom when Dad was coming next, and she would close up like a cardboard box, so I stopped asking. One day she was taking me to stay with my babysitter while she worked. We always passed an old fire alarm box that was on a triangle shaped block when we were going, and I had been wondering about that box. I asked her if people really used it when there was a fire.

She told me it didn't work anymore. I asked her,
“But what do people do if they don’t have their phones and it’s an emergency?” and she replied with great passion,
“Don’t you worry my love, I will be the firefighter. I am your mom and your dad, and everything to you,” which was not what I’d asked her at all.
We had been holding hands to cross the street, and mine went slack in hers. I walked beside her in silence the rest of the way.

In the year that followed their disappearance, my mom ranted loudly to her cousins on the other end of the phone, or else to herself in our kitchen, about the theories she’d come up with about the boys who’d left. The story, according to her, made her quite the victim.

Justin hated having a black stepmom and wanted Dad to have a white girlfriend instead. Jesse was the nicer brother, but since he was in the military he was too busy to stop my dad from making such a big mistake.

And my dad had reported a false story to HR at the senior care facility they both worked at about her putting her hands on him during an argument so that she’d get fired and he could go off to be with Justin and Jesse’s mom again, or maybe another white woman who wasn’t her.

Was this story really true? I couldn’t know. All I could remember of my brothers and father from our sometimes was how much I loved them and them me. But didn’t adults know better? My mom’s story had no mentions of me at all. Maybe Justin and Jesse were glad they didn’t have to get told off anymore as being too rough with me when they grabbed me and swung me around by my arms and legs to make me laugh. Maybe Dad didn’t want to eat fried fish with me in his car anymore. Maybe they were happy they didn’t have to come all the way to
New York to see a little sister only sometimes.

They never told me otherwise.