Three Weeks With My Brother (9 page)

I could feel my family’s eyes on me when I finally walked in the door. By then it was dark, and everyone was seated at the table, but my mom seemed to understand that I wasn’t hungry, and she simply nodded when I asked if it was okay if I could go to my room. Or rather, our room. Again, the three of us were sharing a room, and in the darkness I lay down on my bed and stared at the ceiling.

While my anger had subsided, I was confused. I told myself that I wanted to be alone, that it was better for me to handle my feelings in my own way, yet I couldn’t shake the desire I had for my mother to come into the room. Like most children, I believed that attention somehow equaled love, and of the three children I got less of the former, implying less of the latter. Micah, after all, had always been treated like an adult and because he was the first to experience everything from walking to talking to getting into trouble, he received the attention granted to those who occupy the head of the line. My sister on the other hand—both the youngest and the only girl—was accorded almost double privileges. She spent more time with my mom than either my brother or I, had fewer chores, seldom got in trouble, and was the only one of us who got more than one pair of shoes at a time, the reason being, “She’s a girl.”

More often than not, I was beginning to feel left out.

The knock didn’t come for an hour, and by then, I was feeling downright sorry for myself.

“Come in,” I said, and sitting up in bed, I wondered what my mom was going to say. When the door opened, however, it wasn’t my mom who entered the room. Instead, it was Dana.

“Hi,” she said.

“Oh, hey,” I said, glancing over her shoulder. “Is mom coming?”

“I don’t know. She wanted me to ask if you were hungry.”

“No,” I lied.

My sister came and sat on the bed. With long sandy-blond hair parted in the middle, pale skin and freckles, she looked like Jan Brady on early episodes of
The Brady Bunch
.

“Does your stomach hurt?”

“No.”

“Are you still mad at Micah?”

“No. I don’t even care about him anymore.”

“Oh.”

“I mean, he doesn’t care about me, right?”

“Right.”

“And neither does mom.”

“She does, too. Mom loves you.”

“Did she worry about me while I was gone?”

“No. She knew you were fine. But she does love you.”

My shoulders slumped. “No one loves me.”

“I love you.”

Though my sister sounded utterly sincere, I wasn’t in any mood to hear it.

“Gee, thanks.”

“That’s not why I came in here, though. To tell you that, I mean.”

“I said I wasn’t hungry.”

“I didn’t come to tell you that, either.”

“Why did you come in then?”

She put her arm around me. “I came in to tell you that if Micah doesn’t want to be your best friend anymore, I’d be happy to be your best friend.”

“I don’t need a friend.”

“Okay.”

I looked around the room before finally sighing. “Wanna play with the Johnny West set?”

She smiled. “Okay.”

Over the next couple of months, while Micah spent time with his friends, my sister and I began to spend more time together. She wasn’t as exciting as Micah, but while she never wanted to jump out of tall trees, she was amazingly easy to get along with. Still, I was occasionally too rough with her, and every so often she would end up crying and I’d beg her not to tell mom.

She would, though. Dana told my mom everything and even though she didn’t intend for me to get into trouble, I’d often end up doing extra chores while my mom watched me with a frown.

Without my father around—and the terror implied by the ever-present DEFCON countdown—my brother began testing his limits. He stayed out later than he should have, began picking on me even more, talked back to my mom, and pretty much began acting like a teenager at the ripe old age of nine.

This couldn’t have been easy for my mom. She was thirty years old, working full-time, and alone; the last thing she needed was any
additional
(as opposed to the
regular
and
allowable
) stress from the three of us. She began clamping down on Micah—who began talking back even more—but at nine, my brother was no match for my mom. She believed in both the carrot and the stick and wielded them expertly, like a samurai using a sword. She had no qualms with saying things like “I brought you into this world and I sure as hell can take you out,” and then acting sweet as sugar a moment later, arms open for a hug.

Nor had she changed her views on sibling affection. For example, while my mom was pleased that my sister and I were spending more time together, she also recognized that things had changed between Micah and me. Though some parents would have considered our newfound sibling rivalry a passing phase, my mom didn’t like it, nor was she willing to put up with it. She began making comments like, “You three will always have each other, so you’d better be nice now,” and, “Friends come and go, but brothers and sisters always stick together.” Though my brother and I listened—and perhaps even understood her words on an instinctive level—we continued to argue and fight and go our separate ways.

One night, however, my mom came into our room, just as we were getting ready for bed. Micah and I had been in another fight earlier in the day, this time because I’d accidentally knocked his bike over. My mom hadn’t said anything about it over dinner, and I supposed she’d just chosen to ignore it this time. She helped us with our prayers as she always did, then as she turned the lights out, she sat beside Micah as he was crawling under the covers. I heard them whispering for what seemed like a long time and wondered what was going on. Then, surprising me, she came and sat beside me.

Leaning close, she ran her hand through my hair and smiled gently. Then she whispered: “Tell me three nice things that Dana did for you today. Anything. It can be big or little.”

I was surprised by her question, but the answers came easily. “She played games with me, she let me watch my show on television, and she helped me clean up my toys.”

Mom smiled. “Now tell me three nice things that Micah did for you today.”

This, I had to admit, was a little harder.

“He didn’t do anything nice for me today.”

“Think about it. It can be anything.”

“He was mean all day.”

“Didn’t he walk with you to school?”

“Yes.”

“So there’s one. Now think of two more.”

“He didn’t punch me too hard when I knocked over his bike.”

She wasn’t sure whether to take that one, but finally nodded. “There’s two.”

“And . . .”

I was stumped. There was nothing, absolutely nothing else to say. It took a long time for me to come up with something—and I have no idea what I eventually came up with. I think I resorted to making up something, but my mom accepted it and kissed me good night before moving to my sister’s bed. It took my sister no more than ten seconds to answer the same questions, and then my mom crept from the room.

In the darkness, I was rolling over and closing my eyes when I heard Micah’s voice.

“Nicky?”

“What?”

“I’m sorry about punching you today.”

“It’s okay. And I’m sorry about knocking over your bike.”

For a moment, there was silence, until Dana chimed in, “Now, don’t you both feel better?”

Night after night, my mom had us name three nice things our siblings had done for us, and each night we were somehow able to come up with something.

And to my surprise, my brother and I began to argue less and less.

Perhaps it was too hard to make up things; after a while, it just seemed easier not only to be kinder, but to notice when another was being kind to you.

We finished out the school year—I completed second grade, Micah third. In June, my grandfather decided to put a new roof on his house, an endeavor he decided Micah and I would help with. Our knowledge of roofing and experience with tools could be summed up in a single word—
huh
?—but we quickly knew we wouldn’t let that stop us. It was, after all, something new, another adventure, and over the course of a couple of weeks, we learned the art of pounding nails until our hands and fingers blistered.

We worked during one of the nastiest heat waves of our young lives. The temperature was close to a hundred degrees, the humidity unbearable. More than once we grew dizzy, sitting up on the roof of the baking house. My grandfather had no qualms about having us work right near the edge of the roof, and we, of course, had no qualms about it either.

While I escaped unscathed, earning $7 for two weeks’ worth of work, my brother was less fortunate. One afternoon, while taking a break, he decided to move the ladder, since it seemed to be in the way. What he didn’t know was that a shingle cutter (a sharp, heavy, scissorslike tool) had been left on the uppermost rung. As he fumbled with the ladder, the shingle cutter was dislodged and came torpedoing down. It struck him an inch or so above his forehead. Within seconds, blood was gushing out of his head.

He screamed and my grandfather hustled over.

“That looks pretty deep,” he said, his face grim. After a moment, he nodded. “I’d better get the hose.”

Soon, water was pouring through the hose over my brother’s head. That, by the way, was the sum total of his medical treatment that day. He wasn’t taken to the doctor or the hospital. Nor did Micah get the rest of the day off. I remember watching the water turn pink as it flowed over the wound, thankful that Micah had a “thick skull” like me.

By the time school resumed in the fall, I’d finally become used to life in Nebraska. I was doing well in school—to that point, I’d never received a grade lower than an A—and had become friends with a few of the other kids in class. Afternoons were spent playing football, but as summer heat gradually began giving way to autumn chill, our life would be upended once more.

“We’re moving back to California,” my mom informed us over dinner one night. “We’ll be leaving a couple of weeks before Christmas.”

My parents had reconciled (though at the time we weren’t even aware that they’d officially separated) and my dad had taken a job as a professor at California State University at Sacramento, where he would teach classes in management.

Our time in Nebraska came to an end as abruptly as it had begun.

C
HAPTER
6

Yaxhá and Tikal, Guatemala

January 24–25

O
n Friday morning, Micah and I touched down in Guatemala and stepped into a world completely different from the one we had just left.

After passing through customs, the tour group boarded vans and drove toward Petén, passing ramshackle houses and small villages that seemed to have been assembled with random bits and pieces of material. In some ways, it was like stepping back in time, and I tried to imagine what the Spanish conquistadores first thought when they arrived in this area. They were the first to discover the ruins of what was once a flourishing civilization, whose large cities included temples rising as high as 230 feet and silhouetted against the dense jungle foliage.

I’d been interested in the Maya since I first read about them as a child, and knew they’d attained intellectual heights unrivaled in the New World. In their Golden Age, from
A.D.
300 to 900, their civilization encompassed the area including the Yucatán Peninsula, southern Mexico, Belize, Guatemala, parts of Honduras and El Salvador. The culture reached its height amid the jungles and swamps of Petén, Guatemala, where they built the cities of Yaxhá and Tikal.

The civilization was a study in contrasts; a sometimes brutal culture that engaged in human sacrifice, the Maya were simultaneously employing the concept of zero a thousand years before the Europeans, and were able to calculate into the hundreds of millions. Their knowledge of mathematics allowed them to chart the stars, accurately predict lunar eclipses, and develop a 365-day calendar, yet legend has it that they never used the wheel.