“What would you do if I fell into the canal?” Karen asks, smiling her coy twelve-year old smile, as she tip-toes closer to the embankment. Her shoe sends a few pebbles tumbling over the edge. My mind plays a horror movie scene, in which Karen falls into the canal and drowns.
It’s an effort to keep my hands in my pockets and off her arm, and a greater effort not to tell her to “be careful.”
“I’d jump in and pull you out,” I make a show of yawning, and rub my eyes as though bored. Karen is pushing boundaries the same as Jacob. She’s waits another beat for me to say something, then pulls back from the canal on her own.
I know better than to think I’ve won. There’s only the next confrontation. The next boundary.
“Well, what if you had to die to save me?” She persists.
I hate thinking about death lately. It’s everywhere I look with the kids growing up.
“Hey, who’s my Angel?” I ask, smiling suddenly.
Karen rolls her eyes. Weird brother, she thinks. Weird brother who has never had a girlfriend, who acts like he’s my dad, and who embarrasses me because people always want to know why he’s dropping me off at dance practice.
I wonder what the hell I’m going to do with myself eight years from now.
“Well, what would you do?” Karen demands.
“I’d jump in and catch you.” I yawn again, this time sincerely. I hadn’t wanted to go on a walk tonight. Work had gone late, but Karen wanted to walk with me, and that’s rare enough now that I can’t say no.
“Even though you’d die?” Karen presses.
I nod.
Karen groans, annoyed that I don’t have the romantic sensibilities to and orate this like Edward from Twilight. Then she dances ahead and runs backward, to show me how dangerous she can be. How wild and uncontrollable she is now that she’s “grown-up.”
I’ll run backwards right next to the canal, she laughs. She gives me a look like she knows she’s getting bigger and that soon she’ll have no need in her life for a weird older brother. She looks at me like I’m a toy from her childhood she’s almost forgotten.
Karen’s eyes gleam like a light bulb just lit up over her head.
“Well, dad said he’d die for me too. So what’s the difference?” Karen smiles at me like she’s caught me in a trap. See, BC? She arches her eyebrow. I’m so big I can even pull a trick on my big brother and make him fall for it.
I stop in my tracks.
My stomach twists at the implication.
What she really wants is to know about what happened two months ago. When her father told her he’d slap her, and she’d run off to school crying. She wants to know why when she came home her father’s eyes were blood red and there were bruises all over his face. She wants to know why the only bruises I had were on my knuckles, and why her father had apologized to her immediately and then gone to his room.
She wants to know why it suddenly seems like I’m the boss.
What she wants to know the most is why, even when I do right by her, it makes her feel worse about our family.
I open my mouth to speak, and then make a few sounds that corpses might make when pressed into odd shapes so that the air is forced out of their lungs.
I want to tell her about a boy her age. I want to tell her about a crazy boy who had loved nothing in the whole world, who fell asleep every night alone and feared that the universe was an abyss without hope.
I want to tell her how that crazy boy had seen a baby girl, and decided that she would grow up to be different. Had decided it so powerfully, that he had not known it for years, and only realized when he looked back at every decision he had ever made and how they all formed a path. I want to tell her about how that boy had feared the abyss so badly his stomach hurt. I want to tell her that he had gone on being afraid right up until he had found a love so bright that the abyss began to fear him instead.
She wants me to sum up in a sentence, the whole essence of my being.
There is victory in her eyes. The victory an adult feels when they conquer another adult.
I lick my lips.
“The difference… is that I don’t believe in heaven.”
