Half Brother
Authors: Kenneth Oppel
Half Brother
KENNETH OPPEL
For my whole family
PART ONE
T
his is how we got Zan.
He was eight days old and his mother was holding him, nursing him. He was cuddled against her and she made comforting sounds, waving the flies away with her free hand. Her back was turned so she didn’t see the gun when it fired the dart into her leg. She looked around with a grunt. She saw a man and a woman on the other side of the cage. She stared at them long and hard, still feeding her baby. She knew. It had happened once before, and she knew it was about to happen again. She shuffled deeper into the corner, held her baby tight. Then the tranquilizers kicked in and she slumped clumsily against the wall. Her eyes were still open, but had a glassy look.
The man opened the cage and moved swiftly towards her. He wanted to get to her before she dropped the baby, or rolled over and crushed it. The mother sat, paralyzed, watching as the man pulled her whimpering baby away from her body. Outside the cage, the man passed the baby to the woman. She wrapped it gently in a soft blanket and cradled it in her arms, making shushing sounds.
This was my mother.
As she walked away from the cage with the baby, she sang to him, songs she’d used with me when I was little. After a few days she got on a plane with her new baby, and flew home to us.
NE
Z
AN
I
woke up, a teenager.
It was six a.m., June thirtieth, and I was in a sleeping bag on the floor of my empty bedroom, in our ugly new house on the other side of the country. When you didn’t have curtains, the dawn was your alarm clock.
I didn’t care. It was my birthday and I was thirteen years old, and there was something exciting about being up so early, seeing the first light slant across your walls, hearing the birds make a racket, and knowing you were the only one awake in the house. The day seemed huge.
Dad had promised to take me for a swim at the lake, and then out to a pizza place for dinner. I hoped he hadn’t forgotten. Because, with Mom away, I wasn’t too sure he’d remember to get me anything. I’d mentioned a new bike, but he’d never been much good at things like birthdays, especially when he was busy. And right now he was super busy, getting ready for his new project.
I sighed. If I was lucky, the movers would come, and I’d get a bed for my birthday. I looked around my new room, trying to decide where I was going to put all my stuff when it finally arrived.
Scattered beside me on the floor were a bunch of magazines and comics, and I started paging through the latest issue of
Popular Mechanics.
There was a really cool article about how you could live in your own helicopter, and the pictures showed this big double-decker chopper on pontoons, tied up at a lakeside dock. Inside the helicopter was this super-happy family. There was the mom and daughter being happy in the kitchen and the father being happy in the shower, and the two sons being happy playing with toys in their bedroom. The chopper was surprisingly spacious. The family could fly away whenever they wanted and live all over the world, but still be at home.
I wished we could’ve moved like that.
All we had was an ancient Volvo, and it had taken Dad and me six days to drive from Toronto to Victoria.
We could’ve flown, but Dad had wanted me to see my own country. He’d told me a bit about the Canadian Shield and the Prairies and the Rockies. A road trip, he’d said, just the two boys, while Mom was away in New Mexico, picking up the baby. We’d see all the cool sites, eat burgers and drink milkshakes, stay in motels with swimming pools, and have a blast.
I was suspicious right away. I knew the whole thing was cooked up to distract me—like giving someone a handful of Smarties on a crashing plane. But Dad was a really good talker. When he was enthusiastic,
you
got enthusiastic. He made you feel like you were the only person in the world, and he was sharing these things with you alone.
So I got pretty excited, and the day after school was out, we packed up the car and headed off. At first we talked a lot—actually, Dad did most of the talking, but I didn’t mind, because he usually didn’t talk this much to me. Normally he spent his days at the university, lecturing, or working on his research, and when he came home, he was all talked out, and didn’t have much left to say—not to me anyway.
I really liked being with him the first couple of days. He’d already been out to Victoria for the job interview, and he told me how beautiful it was. Mountains and sea practically everywhere you looked. The house we were going to live in was huge. The climate was the best in Canada. He told me how exciting it was going to be for me, starting at a new school. New teachers, new friends. It was going to be a big change, but Dad said change was wonderful and invigorating and the best thing that could happen to us as human beings. I’d love it, he said. He’d already decided, so there was no point asking
me
how
I
felt.
But not even Dad could talk for the entire eight hours we spent each day in the car—and every day he got a little quieter. Turned out we didn’t stop at as many tourist sites as he’d promised, because he had everything scheduled very tightly, and he knew exactly where he wanted to be at the end of each
day. So mostly what I saw of Canada was moving at fifty-five miles an hour.
Sometimes, instead of sitting up front, I sprawled across the back seat, reading Spider-Man comics and Ray Bradbury, or just listening to the radio. Dad let me choose the stations at least, tuning into new ones when the old ones evaporated with the cities, and provinces, and time zones we left behind. The Rolling Stones belted out “Angie” over and over again, and Dad watched the road, lost in his own thoughts. I sucked on orange Freezies, and the car smelled like french fries and ketchup, and the Fresca I’d spilled outside Thunder Bay.
On the fourth night, we were back in our motel room after dinner. Dad had hardly talked to me all day. Things had gone completely back to normal. I was just cargo.
Dad picked up one of his big books—on linguistics or primates, they all looked equally huge and terrifying—then glanced up like he’d just noticed me. Maybe he was feeling sorry for me, because he gave me a handful of change and said I could buy us something from the vending machines.
I went down to the end of the hall. I put in some nickels and dimes and got Dad a bag of his favourite potato chips. Then I decided on a Mars bar. I pressed the button, and watched the big corkscrew coil turn. But it stopped too soon and my Mars bar was just hanging there. I thumped the machine, but it wouldn’t fall.
And suddenly I was angry. It happened to me like that sometimes, a big solar flare of fury inside my head.
Dad got his chips. That was typical. Dad always got what he
wanted. But me, no. I hadn’t wanted to move. I liked Toronto. I liked my friends, and I’d wanted to stay, and Dad hadn’t even
asked.
He just talked and talked and told me how great it was going to be.
And now I couldn’t even get a stupid Mars bar. I grabbed the machine by the sides and tried to shake it. It moved a little. I put my weight into it. I was furious. I was like one of those mothers who sees her kid trapped under a car and suddenly has the strength to lift the whole thing. I figured if I could just tilt the machine forwards an inch or so, my chocolate bar would fall loose.
I got the machine rocking, and then it was rocking too much, and I felt the huge refrigerator weight of the thing pushing back, and I knew it was going to fall on me.
Two huge hands slammed against the machine and I looked over and saw this enormous guy putting his shoulder to it and pushing it back into place.
“You coulda been killed, buddy!” he puffed.
“Geez,” I said, staring stupidly at the machine.
“These things crush you, you know,” said the guy. “Happened to a cousin of mine in Red Deer.”
“Really?” I said numbly.
“Oh yeah, big time. That your Mars bar?”
I nodded. He reached through the flap, grabbed it, and handed it to me.
“Have a good night now,” he said, and started plugging his own coins into the machine.
“Thanks,” I said.
I went back to our room. It took Dad a few seconds to glance up from his book. He probably had a paragraph to finish. “That took a long time,” he said.
“The vending machine almost fell on me.”
Dad put down his book. “Were you pushing it?”
“A bit.” I felt sick. Not just about the close call, but about how furious I’d been.
“Ben, you should never,
never
do that!” he said. “Those things can kill you!”
“You don’t have to get so mad!” I said. Maybe it was delayed shock, but my knees went wobbly and tears came into my eyes. Dad came over and hugged me.
I was glad he was hugging me, but at the same time I didn’t want his hug because I still felt angry with him.
Later, after he was asleep, I lay awake for a bit, watching the headlights of the passing cars through the curtains and wondering what life was going to be like in Victoria.
The next day, instead of leaving at the crack of dawn, Dad let us have a long swim in the pool and then we took a detour off the Trans-Canada to a place called Drumheller where they’d discovered dinosaur bones. After that, it was up into the Rockies. The views were fantastic, and Dad made plenty of stops so I could take pictures.
On day six, we got to Vancouver and took the ferry across to Victoria. Our house, it turned out, wasn’t actually in the city itself. It was on the outskirts, in the country, because we didn’t want neighbours. Or, as Dad said with a wink, the neighbours didn’t want us.
The university had found us a place off West Saanich Road.
It was mostly farmland, with some pastures where you’d see cows and horses. You could drive a few minutes without seeing a single house.
“And here we are,” said Dad, pulling into a gravel driveway.
The place looked kind of sullen and dingy to me. On our old street in Toronto, the houses were red brick, skinny, and three stories tall. This one was wide, but just two stories. The bottom was wood, painted dark green, and the top floor had some kind of pebbly stuff that Dad called stucco.
“It’s perfect for us,” he said enthusiastically, as we walked to the front door. “Come on, wait till you see your new room.”
My bedroom really was much bigger than my old one, and there were two bathrooms upstairs, so I wouldn’t have to share with Mom and Dad any more. It was strange, and a bit lonely, walking through all the empty rooms. They had nothing to do with me.
The only part that wasn’t empty was the downstairs extension, which the university had just finished before we arrived. It still smelled of wood and fresh paint. It was like a little guest house, connected to the kitchen by a door. You walked in and there was a playroom with cushions and a wooden box of blocks and toys and picture books. There was a little red table with matching chairs. There was a kitchenette with its own sink, fridge, hot-plate, and high chair. Beyond that was the bedroom. The chest of drawers was already filled with colourful little T-shirts and shorts, and there were packs of diapers and a pail for the dirty ones. There was a comfy chair, and even a shelf with stuffed animals.