This story is dedicated to ShawShaw. Thanks for the banner. It is also dedicated to my brother Bryan. Thank you for making me feel more normal.
She couldn’t scream. Couldn’t work her tongue to make so much a single syllable. Her throat was tight and her tongue was thick. So she whistled. She whistled long and loud and clear. And pointed. Frantic pointing asking all of us to see what she, in her horror, could not articulate. See! She demanded, unable to speak. She whistled louder. See what I cannot say!
Everyone paused too late. The realization stuck for a moment like water reluctant to leave a faucet. What are you going on about Sharon? The question delayed immediacy. Sharon was our neighbor and she had been out tending to her garden before fright had seized upon her throat with the force of strangulation. All she could do was whistle. But by the time everyone turned to see what she was pointing at, Dr. Mann’s wife had already backed up over Bryan’s two year old head.
At least a little bit, anyway.
As far as anyone can remember, he had been stacking rocks on the back of her bumper. His small stature easily hidden behind the bulk of the car, Dr. Mann’s wife had not been able to see my brother when she turned to back up. So, as logic would dictate: squish.
Bryan, too confused to be particularly scared, crawled out from under the car’s bumper. He stood up from the ground. His chubby legs wobbled. He had no knee caps but had indents sucking in his baby fat like dimples, as do all children of that age. Then he turned his bloody head around in confusion, read the expression of horror on the faces of the adults, and began to scream. Everyone almost collapsed in gratitude that he was still alive.
Seeing that my brother was, in point of fact, actually alive enough to scream, I returned to playing with my sticks. I had a fort to build. Besides, the adults had already swept down on him like secret service agents trying to protect the president. There wasn’t anything I could do. It never occurred to me that a few more feet traveled and Bryan would have been nothing but a red smear across the driveway. We had a long and ugly driveway, and it would have shown no mercy to his small body.
While my parents had raised enough money to pave the top of the driveway, the bottom was a jagged and unkempt mess of rocks. The car would have jumped from crevasse to crevasse, snapping to and fro like a rubber band, until my poor brother was nothing but so much red goo. But Sharon’s whistle had saved him, if not completely in time. He lived, screaming and afraid, and I turned back to play with my sticks because I had yet to understand that people could go so far away they could never come back. I would have to wait until the fourth grade for that lesson.
My father came home minutes later, pulling into the driveway at forty-five miles an hour. My mother’s inability to reliably relay facts had trickled down just enough to inform him only that my brother had been “run over.” Not that he was still alive, which even at five I understood instinctively was the most important piece of information from the day’s events. Dr. Mann came over next. He held his stethoscope to Bryan’s chest. Examined his head. Then concluded that it was just a minor cut, thank God.
So everyone worried for a bit, and ran through all the might have beens. Could have died. Guts everywhere. Blood. Brains. The normal routine. Except me, because I had a fortress to build out of sticks. And when all that was done Bryan returned to stacking his rocks on the driveway with a band-aid stuck under his blond curls and that was that. I asked him if he was okay sometime later when we were again unsupervised. He ran over to me and grabbed my earlobes, in reply, so I regretted asking the question.
Bryan is several times more resilient than most people give him credit for, and so as is the habit of babies, he grew up to be a man.
Approximately sixteen years later, Dr. Mann’s wife was working the reception desk in her husband’s office when my brother came in to get his medication adjusted. Near his adult height of six and a half feet, his crazy blue eyes filled with mad laughter even as his mouth never so much as twinged to form the hint of a frown or a smile, my brother stood silently in front of her. My brother is an obvious sort of man. He’s quiet but his demeanor suggests at any moment that he could begin to rant or scream or laugh. It took Dr. Mann’s wife only a few moments to notice him.
“Well Bryan Woods! I haven’t seen you in years! How are you?” She asked enthusiastically.
Bryan, with the sort of dead pan delivery and genius usually known only to stand-up comedians with years of experience, twitched his face as though he was having spasms. Then, while jerking his body in the manner of an epileptic, he stuttered “I-I ain’t buh-been ruh-right since you ruh-run me over.”
Then, after checking in and without another word, he sat down and read a copy of Highlights magazine. Yes, Bryan is several times more resilient than people give him credit for.
