Authors: Stephanie Brother
TWO SHOULDERS
AREN’T BETTER THAN ONE
We
drive to the hospital in silence, the sound of Nathan’s favorite band playing
softly in the background.
I stare out of
the window, looking at everything that we pass but taking nothing in.
It’s as though my mind is frozen at that
point Nathan answered the call and it won’t restart until we get there and I
know.
It’s the longest and shortest two hours of my
life.
A blur of cloudy thoughts and an awareness
of Ethan and Nathan and the things that Wendell’s call interrupted.
I can only see Nathan from where I’m sitting
and his profile looks so serious as we pull into the hospital parking lot.
Ethan turns and gazes at me over the back of
his seat, worry coming off him in waves.
“We’re here, Carrie,” he says but it’s as though he’s
asking me a question.
Will I be able to
walk in there and cope with whatever we are going to find out?
I don’t have an answer but I nod anyway and
that seems to be enough for him.
Nathan
finds a parking spot.
The air is cold in
a way that only comes with nightfall.
I
pull my sweater closer into my body, drawing my hands inside the cuffs.
Ethan opens the trunk to retrieve the things
he gathered at home.
There’s an odor that all hospitals seem to have,
probably a mix of disinfectant and food, but it seems to smell like something
more sinister; the creep of sickness and death.
I follow the twins as they negotiate their way through the corridors,
asking for directions every so often.
They keep looking at me and I know they probably want to hold my hand
but it’s awkward.
There’s a lingering
sense of something interrupted hanging between us.
It’s as though fate intervened and cut short
our foolishness.
I feel a vicious stab
of guilt that almost doubles me over.
We turn a corner before reaching a small waiting
room.
Wendell is there with his head in
his hands.
He has abrasions on his
fingers and wrists.
And a small bandage
on his forehead.
“Dad,” the twins say at the same time.
Wendell is on his feet and across the room in seconds.
“Carrie,” he says, pulling me into a
hug.
“She’s out of the operating room
and in recovery.
They said it went as
well as it could and that we just need to pray now.”
“Pray?” My voice sounds vacant and hollow.
Wendell nods and I turn, looking for a seat.
My legs are weak, as though they have lost
their solid bone interior.
My hands feel
weak too.
I’m sure if I was holding
something it would fall from my grip.
I hear the twins asking their father questions about
the accident but I can’t take in his responses.
I close my eyes and think of my mom.
I make a promise that I’ll do whatever it takes just so long as my mom
survives.
I’ll try harder at
college.
I’ll do more chores around the
house without complaining.
I’ll
volunteer and do the things I’ve always meant to and never gotten around to;
there’s a local foodbank that I’ve meant to sign up to support, and a
soup-drive for the homeless.
I’ll be a
better person, someone who thinks about others. All of this is good but I know
it’s not enough.
I know I need to make a
bigger commitment.
If fate thought that what
I was doing with Ethan and Nathan was so wrong, I need to make sure it doesn’t
happen again.
At that moment I promise
that I’ll stop thinking about my stepbrothers in that way.
We’ll go back to being family again.
It isn’t too late.
We can just put everything down to the fact that
we are young and foolish.
I’ll tell the
twins we should have known better.
I should have known better.
We sit and wait.
Hours pass like they did in the car and my mind is fogged with worry and
fatigue.
Ethan and Nathan take seats on either
side of mine.
I don’t know when I fall
asleep but I wake with my head in someone’s lap, one heavy hand on my shoulder
and another on my hip.
I try to turn,
but I’m so stiff from sleeping uncomfortably that I struggle.
“Hey,” someone says from across the room.
It’s Wendell.
He’s looking much better than he did last night.
“Is she okay?” I ask hoarsely.
“She’s doing well.” His smile lights up his face.
“She’s groggy from all the meds but she
squeezed my hand and managed a few words.
The docs are really pleased with her progress.”
I sit up, taking in the amazing news.
Mom’s getting better.
Maybe my promises made a difference, or maybe
not.
Whatever.
I feel good for making them and mom getting
better is all that matters.
I don’t get to see Mom that day.
They want to keep visitors to a minimum in
case of infection.
We decide to stay at
a hotel around the corner from the hospital.
Wendell remains at the hospital and the twins and I drive over.
I feel like the walking dead.
All the stress has really taken it out of
me.
I catch them looking at each other,
communicating something but I don’t know what.
Maybe they are just worried about me.
The intimacy we shared hangs between us even though all our minds are
elsewhere.
At the desk, Nathan goes to book a family room but I
ask for a single.
Both the twins frown
but they go ahead and pay anyway.
I take
my key card and we make our way in the direction of our rooms.
We come to my door first and it’s so damn
awkward.
I put the key card in the door and push it open.
I feel the boys coming in closer as though
they want to come in the room with me but I stop and turn.
“I need some time,” I say.
“We just want to make sure you’re okay,” Nathan puts
his hand on my shoulder and squeezes gently.
His tenderness brings tears to my eyes.
“I’ll be fine,” I say turning to look at them.
Their normally bright blue eyes seem dull and
ringed by the dark circles that come with a terrible night of broken sleep and
worry.
Their hair is mussed and their
chins are scruffy with a day’s growth.
They’re standing so close and all I want to do is slip into their
embrace and hide there.
I want to draw
on their strength and cry myself out.
I
want to hear their reassuring words.
They would take care of me.
I
know this.
They are so close but I’m alone.
It has to be this way.
I step back into the room, my hand on the
handle as a sign that they can’t come any further.
Nathan nods once, as though he understands,
but his expression is grave.
“Call us
when you want to go back to the hospital,” he says and I nod.
I don’t watch them leave to go and find their
room.
I can’t.
I have a lump in my throat that feels like a
boulder.
When the door is closed I make
no move to turn on the light.
I drop my
purse to the floor, flop onto the bed and cry myself to sleep.
TWO TRUTHS
AND A LIE
It
takes Mom months to recover from the accident.
I make good on my promises, spending lots of time at home doing chores
and trying to make her life as easy as possible.
I volunteer at the food bank and it feels
good dedicating time to help others.
I’m
being the best sister I can possibly be to the twins too and that means
pretending nothing ever happened before the accident.
My college work has been getting better grades.
I’m on top of my assignments in a way I’ve
never been before.
I’ve even been going
out more with my friends and it’s been fun.
Everything’s great, except that it isn’t.
I have a terrible empty feeling inside that I can’t
seem to fill with promises and better intentions.
I went on a date last week and it was nice, but
I don’t want nice.
Nice didn’t make the
ache go away.
All my promises feel good except the one I made about
the twins.
The trouble is that it seemed
like the most important one at the time, and I can’t go back on it, no matter
how much I want to.
I’m sitting at the
kitchen table with a glass of iced tea when they breeze in the backdoor.
They’ve been out for a run and are out of
breath and dripping with sweat.
It’s so
hot out I don’t know how they can exercise but it doesn’t seem to bother them.
“Hey, Carrie,” Ethan says, pulling up a chair next to
me.
Nathan fixes them some water and
takes the chair opposite me, then they both down their drinks.
This close, I can smell them and their scent
fills my mind, making me woozy.
I
plaster a smile on my face.
“What’s up?” I say, to break the awkward silence.
“Not a lot these days,” Ethan says.
He makes it sound like a joke but there’s an
undercurrent of something in his voice that makes my heart skip.
Nathan gives him a look that’s filled with warning but
Ethan just shrugs his shoulders and glares back.
“How long are you going to keep this up, Carrie?”
Ethan continues.
“Keep what up?” I ask, attempting innocence that
sounds so false.
“Pretending that nothing happened between us.”
“Ethan,” I hiss.
“Don’t do this.
Not here.”
“What?” he protests, putting his hands up, palms
facing forward.
“It’s been months and
it’s like you’ve just switched off.
You
won’t talk to us.
You don’t want to
spend time with us.”
Nathan sits forward, resting his hands on the table.
“What my brother means is that we want to know what’s going on.
We’ve given you space because that’s what you
seemed to need, but now we
need
to
know, Carrie.
You’ve turned into a
stranger.”
I shake my head, but I know that
they are right.
I’ve been putting on a
friendly front but if it hasn’t felt natural to me, it sure won’t have felt
natural to them.
“We miss you,” Nathan adds
gently.
“We miss how things were
before…”
“Before my mom almost died,” I say bitterly, hoping they’ll
back down when they hear the emotion in my voice.
“But she didn’t, did she?” Ethan says.
He reaches out to take my hand but I snatch
it back.
“She nearly did,” I hiss.
“My mom nearly died and look what we were
doing while she was going through that.
We were….” I can’t even bring myself to say the words.
“Fuck this,” I say, exasperated.
I stand, taking my tea to the sink and
pouring it out.
I watch the liquid
disappear, trying not to register the pain I feel inside.
I don’t want to hurt them.
My stepbrothers are good men.
They have good hearts.
I know that they only want to talk about this
because they feel the same way as me.
I
love them.
But I can’t love them that
way.
Not after I promised.
“It wasn’t your fault, Carrie.
We weren’t doing anything wrong.”
“How can you say that?” I turn to face them, anger and
frustration boiling up inside me.
“How can you be like this?” Ethan sounds so
wounded.
I feel awful. This is not what
I wanted.
“The way you talk, it’s like
you think we’re disgusting.
We love you,
Carrie.
That’s what we were doing that
night.
We were loving you, nothing
else.”
He stands then, and heads out of
the room slowly, like he has the weight of the world on his shoulders.
Nathan turns to me but says nothing, then follows
his brother.
Love.
It’s just a word.
It has four small letters.
By
themselves they mean nothing. Joined together they mean everything.
I go and outside and just stand, gazing at
our back yard.
Mom has been planting
again, and the flowers flutter in the breeze.
They have a truth.
They love me.
I know that as
certainly as I know the sky is blue.
I have a truth.
I made a promise.
I need my stepbrothers to understand that we can’t be
anything more than we are – a fake family forced to live together until we were
old enough to leave home – but they won’t.
They can’t. Because understanding why I made the promise can only end up
a being taken as a criticism of them; of the way they feel and the things we
did.
Nothing I did that night with them
felt wrong at the time.
It all felt
right and good.
The connection between
us was so deep it was almost like a physical bond.
So what does that make me?
Denying how I feel makes me a liar.
I know this.
But I can’t go back.
I just
can’t.
I spend the next few hours locked in my room, staring
at my ceiling.
The hollow feeling is
always there but now it feels bigger somehow, and deeper.
Katelin calls me and she must hear the blue
in my voice because she tells me that we just have to go out tonight.
Excuses form at my lips but I stop myself
before I verbalize them.
I can’t lie
here all night feeling sorry for myself.
I’m letting regrets eat me alive.
“Sure,” I say.
“Get your sexiest gear on, lady,” Katelin
shrieks.
She’s a great best friend,
always full of enthusiasm.
She’s
sunshine on a stick.
“I’ll pick you up
at 8 pm and we can leave my car in the lot overnight.”
We say our goodbyes and I drag myself into the
shower.
I do as Katelin ordered and put
on my teal lace mini-dress and gold heels.
I curl my hair and apply smoky eyes.
I feel on edge.
Dangerous.
It’s as though I know something has to give,
one way or another.
I need to break out
of this funk.
When Katelin sounds the horn outside I grab my clutch
and jacket and sprint down the stairs.
I’m trying to avoid the twins if I can.
Our earlier conversation is hanging over me and I don’t think I can face
them.
The house is quiet though, so I’m
out of the door with no problems.
The bar is heaving when we get in.
It’s happy hour and everyone is drinking from
huge pitchers and fishbowls.
The music
is pumping and I know once I get on the dance floor I’ll be able to lose myself
in it, even if it’s only for a few hours.
We find Abigail and Brandy at the bar and they add our
drinks to their order.
I ask for two Red
Devil’s, because it worked so well last time.
I catch the girls looking at each other as I down the drinks in record
time, but I don’t care.
I grab Katelin’s
hand and pull her towards the dance floor.
The lights strobe in time with the beat and I’m lost
in the pulsing, frantic rhythm that vibrates through me.
I put my hands in the air and get a sudden
flash of another time I was here, dancing between Ethan and Nathan, with so
many different thoughts on my mind.
I
wish I could go back to that moment and walk away.
Maybe my heart wouldn’t hurt so much if I’d
never danced with them and heard what they’d spoken about after.
So many things could have been different.
I feel hands on my hips as someone tries to dance up
close to me.
I turn and see a man I
don’t recognize. He’s young like me, and kind of cute. He smiles and his
perfect white teeth reflect the flashing disco lights.
“Hey, I’m Aaron,” he says.
“Carrie,” I reply.
I wouldn’t usually dance with a stranger.
Not like this.
But I’m different tonight.
Reckless.
Out to burn away my misery.
Maybe
Aaron-Perfect-Smile can help me.
I dance
like I did for the twins, hips swaying seductively.
Katelin gives me a worried look but my
falsely enthusiastic smile must fool her because she turns to dance with the
others.
When the music changes Aaron asks me if I want to take
a walk with him.
I know what he’s asking
and despite the fact that my heart is aching, I let him take my hand and lead
me outside.
It’s a warm evening and
Aaron walks us through the lot, towards his car, I’m assuming, while he talks
about his friend who’s making it big in L.A.
I’m not really listening.
I feel
woozy and it’s taking all my concentration to remain upright in my heels.
Aaron has a nice ride but I don’t want to get in it
with him.
I start to say that I think I
should go back inside but he has the door open and he uses his size advantage
to back me towards the vehicle.
“You’re
fine,” he says, when I tell him I need some water.
I put my hand on his chest as my back meets
the side of his SUV.
“I want to go back to the club,” I say, and the panic
that is rising inside me seems to clear my head.
His eyes flash darkly and I know in my gut
that I’m totally out of my depth.
He
smiles, and I don’t know why, but that makes me fear him even more.
“You like teasing?” he asks.
“You put on that dress for one reason,
baby.
Let me give you what you’re
begging for.
“I’m not begging for anything,” I reply, keeping my
hand against him, ready to use all my body weight to shove him away.
I don’t need to though.
Just as Aaron opens his mouth to reply, a
shadow falls across his face.
“You okay, Carrie?” Ethan asks, taking me by the elbow
and pulling me toward him.
Nathan is
there too, crowding Aaron and making him look like a prepubescent boy.
I nod but it doesn’t seem to appease my
stepbrothers.
Nathan grips Aaron’s
shoulder in his massive hand and squeezes as he leans towards him.
“I don’t like what I think I saw,” he says in
a voice filled with menace.
I’ve never
heard cuddly
Nath
get really angry.
I’ve never seen this side of him.
“You need to stay the fuck away from Carrie,
do you understand me?”
Aaron looks pissed, those snake eyes of his still
flashing with malice, but Nathan must squeeze harder and shove him away because
he stumbles backwards.
“Stay away,” Nathan hisses, getting right in Aarons
face.
I pull away from Ethan and try to
intervene. I couldn’t bear Nath to get hurt because of my stupidity.
What was I thinking leaving the bar with a
total stranger?
Eth holds me back
though, and Aaron seems to have changed his mind about the confrontation because
he puts up his hands and says he wasn’t doing anything.
Then he makes a big mistake.
He tells Nathan that I was begging for it.