“I love you, Mom. It’ll be okay. You’ll find something you love.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m going to go shower.” I trudged upstairs.
“I have homework,” Kes said, following me up to our bedrooms. He ducked inside mine and healed my palms and knees. “Wear Band-Aids in case she notices.”
Before Kes even left my room my cuts were gone, as was the stinging, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to the feeling of being healed. Of my body being injured one minute and repaired the next. Not that it didn’t come in handy like it had this evening. Without Kes, Mom would be worrying about unemployment and a pile of medical bills. Broken bones required a lot of attention.
So, despite the twinge of guilt that always rose when I thought it, I was glad Kes had come into our lives.
I learned that there was much more to this world than what met the eye at the ripe age of ten, when my fraternal twin brother disappeared and no one noticed but me.
Kestrel collapsed at school during recess. A ring of children quickly formed around him on the playground, while others screamed and ran for the nearest supervising teacher. A classmate of ours saw him falter and raced to get me from where I swung on the monkey bars.
I ran faster than I ever had to get to him, but it wasn’t fast enough to help him. He wasn’t breathing when I fell to my knees and begged the teachers to help him, to do something, anything. They did the only thing they could. They called 9-1-1 and ushered the children inside so they wouldn’t bear witness to the tragedy unfolding before us all.
I refused to budge, staying as close as I could to my brother.
Less than five minutes later, an ambulance screeched to a stop in front of the school. We heard its siren across town, getting louder as it rushed through the cross-hatched streets with its lights flashing. The paramedics quickly assessed him and then started CPR. Breaths alternated with chest compressions. For several long minutes, they tried. But exhaustion set in and nothing seemed to work.
One pushed on his chest so hard, one of his ribs cracked.
I’ll never forget the splintering sound.
But no matter how much air they forced into his lungs, my brother, who looked so much like me, never stirred. Never took another breath.
His chest was still.
So terrifyingly still.
It was all I could stare at as he lay there.
My teacher held me as they lifted him onto a gurney and loaded him into the ambulance, and then the sirens blared as Kestrel was whisked away. Dad picked me up and we met Mom at the hospital, arriving just in time for them to usher us into a small, private room where a weary doctor stepped in. He said he was sorry, but there was nothing they could do to revive him. Kestrel had died before he even arrived at the hospital; he had likely died the instant he collapsed on the playground.
Another sound I’ll never forget? My mother’s wail. It sounded like she’d been cleaved in two.
Dad’s shoulders shook as he held her and I remember sitting in a cushioned chair stunned and unable to wrap my ten-year-old mind around what the doctor said. My brother couldn’t possibly have died on the playground. This couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t.
And yet I’d seen him lying there, his chest unmoving and broken.
Then, what felt like hours later, after my tears stopped and our mother’s wails had turned to soft hiccoughs and sobs, my father sat down next to me, hugging me to his side, and a miracle happened… Kestrel began to breathe. His heartbeat returned. He was alive, and not only that, he was perfectly healthy. He was thriving. It was nothing short of a miracle and beyond anything anyone at the hospital had ever witnessed.
Upon hearing the news, Mom bawled. My strong-as-steel dad held her and cried along with her, and my tears started up again because I couldn’t fathom how it was possible.
I saw him lying there. I heard them break his body.
I heard the sadness in the nurse’s voice when she offered to reach out to the chaplain for us.
I listened mutely as the doctor struggled to find words to compassionately break the news no parent, no sister, wanted to hear.
But he was alive, they said. And the three of us cried again.
The tears we shed after the miraculous recovery weren’t those of grief, but unbridled relief.
Only, Kestrel did die that afternoon and it wasn’t him who returned to his body.
Something else did.
I knew it the moment I walked into his hospital room. As the nurses and doctors buzzed around, observing him and checking his vitals, celebrating the miracle of his resurrection, he observed me.
Kestrel was quiet. Too quiet. And no one noticed or wondered why.
With corn silk hair and silver-blue eyes, my brother looked like a cherub, but from birth had acted like an absolute demon. Kestrel was always sick, and he used that excuse to get out of everything from trouble to homework.
Throughout our childhood, he was always suffering from some malady. The flu, asthma, pneumonia, stomach virus, unexplained fevers. Yet no pediatrician could explain why he was ill so often. Mom had sought opinion after opinion; a laundry list of specialists ran every test they could think of, even for the most obscure diseases and ailments. According to them, his immune system wasn’t to blame. Since there was no medical explanation, they brushed it off as bad luck and the result of being exposed to germs at school.
Beyond his random mild illnesses and even on the best of his days, Kestrel was sensitive. Things bothered him. He didn’t like food or drink that was too hot or too cold. He hated to have his arms covered, so he lived in tank tops, refusing to wear jackets even in the dead of winter. He slept with four specific stuffed animals. God help us if one of them was misplaced. He would rage and cry and tear the house apart at the seams to find it, and we would help him just so he would stop screaming.
He hated it when anyone spoke in the car and insisted on taking his shower precisely at seven p.m., or else he refused to take one at all. He hated the dark and demanded that every light in the house between his room and Mom and Dad’s blaze all day and night.
I would close my door to drown myself in darkness and escape the incessant light so I could rest. It drove him crazy that I didn’t give in to everything he wanted.
I can honestly say that my brother hated me, but it wasn’t something he learned over time. He hated me from the moment we were born. As toddlers, if I walked into the room he was in, he wailed until I left it. As a young boy, he threw rocks at me until I ran inside. He tried to shove me down the stairs a few times. That ended when I threw his favorite blanket in the fireplace and watched it burn. I got in trouble, of course, but it was worth it. He didn’t try to break my neck again.
The night before he died, Dad called us downstairs for dinner.