An ex-student of mine asked me to post the first short story I had published, so here it is… a true lesson in humility!

“The Coat”

Mary lay on the train tracks waiting for the six-fifteen to pass by and crush her to death.  Life as she had known it was over.

“Oh, the coat, the COAT!” she cried, willing the train to be early.

*

She did a lot of things growing up in Amarillo,  Texas.  She played with bugs the size of her dog, covered herself in oil from head to toe just for fun, rode horses through the local convenience stores.  But there was one thing she could never do:  she could never wear a coat.  Time after time she would sit in the sweltering Texan heat, watching beautiful women parade across her TV screen in the most exquisite coats she had ever seen.  One day she decided she had to have one.   She went to her parents with the request.

“Well, little darlin’,” her father drawled, “can’t see why you’d wanna wear a coat when it’s hotter than a firefly sizzlin’ on a light-bulb.”

Her mother was afraid that the heat had finally got to her darling sweet child.

“Do you have a fever, my sweet little baby dumpling?”

Late that night, as she lay shivering in the tub with fifty bags of ice lumped all around her, she vowed to never give up the dream.

*

When Mary was old enough she went to college in New York, where it was cold and blustery.  On her very first day she went to Macy’s and bought herself a new coat.  On the way home she was mugged, thrown out of a moving taxi, pushed onto the subway tracks by a homeless transvestite, and beaten bloody by a man in a cape who wanted her shoes.  As Mary stumbled out of the emergency room, limping, shoeless, and with dried blood caked in her hair, she was overcome with emotion.  The tears ran down her face and she hugged her new coat tighter to her body.

“I can’t believe this,” she said to strangers who walked by her in wide half-circles.  “Look, I finally have a coat!”

*

She wore the coat all through Indian summer.  People would stare at her, and she knew why.

“I know it’s because of you,” she said to the coat in the mirror one night.   “Something just isn’t right.”

The next day Mary went to twenty different stores, looking for a better coat ­– a snugglier, fluffier, cozier, more beautiful coat – but she couldn’t find one that was just right.

“I will not give up the search!” she declared, drooling and flushed, to a small boy on the escalator.

As the boy’s mother rushed him away she clenched her fists in frustration.

“If I have to use my last dying breath, I will find one!” she cried to the retreating figures.

*

And then one day she saw it.  The coat of her dreams.

“It’s fleece,” the man standing next to the hot-dog stand sniffed at her.

“Huh?” Mary replied, dizzy from staring.

“I said it’s fleece, my coat is fleece.  I saw you admiring it.”

The little man smiled knowingly at her, then turned to throw eight long knives at a woman standing inside the plastic walls of a bus stop.  They plunked around the woman’s head, her limbs, and the crowd clapped in delight.

“It’s just so fluffy and so, so … sooooo white,” Mary said, resisting the urge to snuggle up to it.

But the man simply ignored her and took a bow.

*

At night she would dream about the man’s coat.  The downy folds pressing into her sides, the collar billowing into her neck, the soft fluffy cuffs tingling her wrists.  Some nights the coat floated above her like a cloud, others she rode the coat-cloud to faraway lands.  One night she dreamt that the little man had sold her the coat, and it was hers forever.  She woke up in a cold sweat, tears glistening in her eyes.  It was then that she made this promise to herself: I will have it one day, as God is my witness!

*

A few weeks later Mary saw him in Central Park.  He was in the center of a crowd, swallowing sticks of fire.  She couldn’t believe her luck.

“How much for the coat?” she screamed.

He swallowed another stick as the people clapped and whistled.

“Anything, I’ll do anything!” she cried, pushing her way through bodies.

When she got to the center he looked at her, fire-stick poised, and raised an eyebrow.

“Anything?” he said.

She nodded so hard she developed a migraine.

“I must see if you are worthy,” he said, swallowing more fire.

*

They met a small Italian restaurant a few days later.  He wore the coat all through dinner, but she didn’t mind.  She couldn’t take her eyes off it.

“Watch it,” he said to the waiter with the plate of spaghetti.

During dinner he told her the history of the coat.  He had stolen the lamb from an elderly couple in Brandenburg, East Germany, during a routine spy mission.  He smuggled it home on a Red Cross freight plane, and later had it skinned by an underground couple in Connecticut who were wanted for various treasonous crimes.  After that, a bearded Italian man named Mario – who was rumored to actually be a bearded Italian woman named Maria – took the fleece and delivered the coat to him exactly three days later.  He/she had only the following warning:  “If you stain it, it will be bad.”

“Anything, ANYTHING!” Mary cried.

The little man held up his hand, then leaned closer.

“I will watch, and I will learn,” he said, his eyes flaring with intensity.  “Now go!”

“I AM WORTHY, YOU’LL SEE!” she said as three large tattooed men with dark glasses picked her up and hustled her out the door.

*

After that he was always around.  At intersections while she waited to cross, in the waiting room while she had her pap smear, at the market while she thumped melons.  Every time she turned around, he was there, all snuggled into the beautiful fleece coat.   He never tried to speak with her, never even tried to make eye contact.  But she knew he was watching her, deciding her worthiness.

“He gives me the creeps,” her best friend said as they sipped hot chocolate at the lodge in Vermont.    “I mean, he just shows up skiing on the black diamond right next to you?  Four hundred miles from home?”

Her eyes narrowed at Mary. “I think he’s stalking you.”

Mary shivered at the memory of him barreling down the mountain next to her, his head bent with purpose.  At times he skied perilously close to her, but always he kept his eyes forward like he didn’t see her.  At one point he jumped a mogul and almost landed directly on top of her, but even then he didn’t bother to look her way.  How dare he! she bristled.  What if he had fallen into me? The coat could have been ripped to pieces!

They both looked across the room at him, sitting at the bar.  He sat on a stool, sipping brandy and making Pterodactyls out of little square bar napkins.  A group of people sat transfixed as his hands moved like lightning to form the prehistoric birds.  Her best friend looked on for a while, then let her eyes rest on his coat.

“Great coat, though,” she grudgingly admitted.  “The fleece is white as snow.”

Mary sighed and smiled.

*

After two months he suddenly stopped showing up.  He wasn’t at the gas station when Mary had her oil changed, or at the spa when she had her legs waxed.  He wasn’t even waiting for her after she had her head sheared at Great Cuts.  Her studies began to suffer, she began chain-smoking, she began daydreaming in class.

“Why, oh why!” she screamed in biology class, suddenly standing and knocking her lab chair backward.  Her arms were raised to heaven as the tears spilled from her eyes.  “Why am I unworthy?”

Everyone stared at her over their dissected rabbit brains, but no one had any answers.

*

She became frantic after two months turned into three.  She developed a facial twitch and forgot to shower.  She painted her small apartment with coat-clouds. She kept a journal of all the words she could make with the words coat, lamb, and fleece.  She even bought a pet sheep.  It defecated all over her apartment while she walked the streets in search of the coat, but she didn’t seem to notice.  Her best friend soon grew weary.

“Look, he’s gone, so get over it!  What’s done is done.”

Mary grabbed her friend with both hands and shook her.  “What’s wrong with you? she shrieked, little streams of spit flying out of her mouth. “You saw it for yourself!”

Seconds later she fell to the floor in a crazed stupor.

*

The doctor brought her a fleece coat soon after she was admitted.  It was a poor imitation.  He put it on her lap, took a step back, his pen poised expectantly over his medical pad.  Mary became alert for the first time in days.  She jumped up, stuffed the coat in her mouth, ripped it to pieces with her teeth, spitting each mouthful at the doctor.

“Idiot!” she said.  “Did you think you could fool me?”

Her parents flew all the way from Amarillo, Texas to take her home.

“C’mon, sweet darlin’, I think ya got a hankerin’ fer home,” her father drawled from underneath his ten-gallon hat.

Her mother screamed into her ear, just to make sure her precious sweet baby daughter could hear her.  “SWEET PUMPKIN PIE?!  IT’S YOUR MOTHER, HONEY-LAMB, YOUR MOTHER!  WE’RE TAKING YOU BACK HOME, MY LITTLE SUGAR LUMPKINS!!”

But Mary refused to go.  She couldn’t bear to be that far away from it.

*

“Your daughter is suffering from schizophrenic compulsive idiotic fetish syndrome,” the doctor said.  “I think we can help her with drugs.”

“Now don’t ya go messin’ with no lobotomy, little cowpoke,” her father said to the doctor with a wink and a smile, and took his wife by the hand.

“TAKE CARE MY SWEET PRECIOUS BABY APPLESEED!”  her mother said before they left to catch their cab back to the airport.

*

One day, while Mary was looking out of her barred, inflammable, plastic, shatterproof window, something caught her eye.

She could barely believe it, but it was true.  It was him.  And, yes, he had it on!

He walked right under her window carrying a large bench from the hospital grounds.  He balanced it on his chin, then began to file his fingernails.  He made sure the dust didn’t fall onto the coat.  At first she could only cock her head to the side and let a long string of drool fall from the corner of her mouth, but after a few seconds she suddenly felt strong.

“Doctor,” she said gathering herself up, “I’m ready to go home.”

“Congratulations, Mary,” the doctor said and shook her hand.

“No hard feelings about the coat?” Mary asked.

“None whatsoever.”

*

When she moved back home she found her pet sheep dead in a pile of sheep shit and piss.  It didn’t matter much, though, because soon he began to appear again.  The coat – if it was possible – was even whiter and fluffier than before.  Her twitch went away, she went back to school, she decided showering was a good thing.

*

A few weeks later her best friend pulled her aside while they were ice skating.

“Isn’t that him?” she asked, pointing to a man in the center of a circle of people.

There he was, spinning furiously on one skate.  The coat winged out at the ends, making it look like he had on a skirt made out of clouds.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh,” said the crowd.

He skated backwards for a while, then suddenly leapt into the air.  The coat flew open, revealing the fluffy white folds of fleece inside.

“Ahhhhhhhh,” came another collective sigh.

*

Things went back to normal for awhile.  He stood outside Sbarros while she paid for her lunch.  He lingered near the dressing rooms at the boutique while she tried on outfits for her Aunt Estelle’s funeral.  He was even hovering near a tombstone during Aunt Estelle’s funeral in Texas, chiseling a montage of angels onto the slate.  Two couples stood by transfixed as the rock particles flew in every direction.  Mary’s mother and father noticed him right away.

“Mighty damn fine coat that man over there’s wearin’,” declared her father during the service. “Little strange, though, since it’s hotter than the devil’s whorehouse on the fourth of July.”

“DO YOU KNOW HIM, MAMA’S SWEET LITTLE POOKIE-WOOKIE PUDDING PEA-PIE?”

*

One day, as Mary watched him sculpt the Virgin Mary out of a block of ice in Rockefeller Center, she started to lose hope.  She sought the advice of her best friend.

“You have to help me,” she pleaded, wringing her hands together and tearing the skin off her knuckles.

“The coat?”  her best friend asked quietly.

Mary nodded quickly.  “I don’t know what I have to do to prove myself!”

“What have you done so far?”

“Nothing,” Mary said.

“And it hasn’t worked?”

Mary shook her head helplessly.

“Then let’s get down to business,” her friend said.  She threw back a shot of whiskey, lit a cigarette.

*

They sat over the large sheets of scribbled plans.   Her best friend was lost in a cloud of smoke as she talked.

“The plan is simple.  You walk aimlessly about for a few days until he returns.  Secretly hidden in your own cotton/polyester blend coat will be a miniature camera.  You’ll control the movement of the camera by rapid eye movements.  Three quick blinks and the camera moves left. Two, it moves right.   In your ear will be a small receiver so that I can communicate with you. I’ll alert you to his presence, and then you act casual until he comes within focus of the camera.  When he does, I’ll signal you with a small beep in the receiver.  This means to blink five times: this makes the camera  take a picture.  I’ll also have a high-powered pair of binoculars.  When I see you blink five times, I’ll jump out to the left so he’ll turn and you can get profile.  Then I’ll jump to the right so you can get the left profile.   Once the pictures are secure, we split up and meet at the abandoned warehouse. We’ll develop the pictures using a makeshift darkroom that I’ve designed on page four.  From there we cool our heels until dark, then infiltrate the federal building, using climbing gear, chewing gum, and a small transistor radio.  When we get in we’ll have four minutes to break the password and access the mainframe.  Then we’ll match his pictures with the ones in the confidential files and find out where he lives.  We’ll scale his building, and once inside, you’ll apply a small compress of ether to his nose, while I grab the coat.  After that, it should be gravy.”

Her best friend took a long drag of her cigarette and poured herself another whiskey.

“Or we could just knock him out and grab it,” Mary suggested.

Her best friend slung back the shot of whiskey, her eyes narrowing.

“Even better.”

*

They stood in the Laundromat, folding huge pairs of underwear.  Outside the building they had placed three chain saws.  They knew he would show up.  It was too tempting.

“Hey,” said a fat woman waddling up to them, “what are you doing with my clothes?”

Her best friend grabbed the fat woman by the neck and wrestled her into a dryer.  She popped in two quarters.

“Can’t allow for screw-ups now,” she said from behind her dark glasses.

They went back to folding underwear.

In a few minutes he came into view.  He approached the chain saws, pulled the cords, juggled them.

“Quick,” her best friend said, “before the crowd gathers.”

They rushed outside and threw a large sheet of plastic on the ground.  They pushed him onto it and then jumped on top of him.  The chain saws crashed to the ground with him.  He writhed and screamed at their frantic grabbing.

“Be careful!” he screamed, as they wrestled with the coat.  In their haste they kicked one of the chains saws toward him.  The edge of the blade made contact with the sleeve of the coat, splitting it.  Blood oozed from his arm and stained the coat with a thick layer of red.

“Noooooooooooo!” Mary screamed and passed out cold.

* * *

Mary checked her watch: six-ten.  Only five more minutes until death, she thought.   From somewhere in the distance she could hear people clapping.  She rose and followed the tracks to a small crowd that had formed right at the edge of them.

“What’s going on?” she asked a man at the back of the crowd, making sure she didn’t step off the tracks.

The man turned to look at her.

“The guy is incredible!” the man said enthusiastically.

Mary craned her neck forward, but she couldn’t see anything over the heads of the people.

“What guy?”

“The guy with the great coat,” the man said, pointing to the center of the crowd.

“Coat?” said Mary, stepping off the tracks, just as the six-fifteen whizzed by.

She pushed her way into the crowd.  In the center stood a tall man with a brush in his mouth, painting a mural of the “Last Supper.”  On his back was the most beautiful black coat she had ever seen.

“Izzie oh luck ma cut,” the man said to her.

“What?”

The man took the brush out of his mouth.

“I said, I see that you like my coat.  It’s fox.”

“It’s so soft and so, so … soooo black,” Mary said, resisting the urge to touch it.  She sighed and felt the smile slowly spreading across her face.

I’m going to be a mother for the first time.

No one can forecast when this will happen, but all signs point to anytime between next week and a decade.  Fifteen years, max.

When the time comes, I will essentially have the care and responsibility of a ten year old male who is–and is not–a child.  When he becomes my son, I will love and guide and clothe and feed and protect him from the dark with the knowledge that I will do these things, every day, until one of us leaves this earth.  He will never grow up, he will not experience the pain and awkwardness of adolescence, and he will not marry or strike out on his own, ever.  He will be ten when I become his mother, and he will remain ten forever.

His name is Joe.  He’s my big brother.  He is fifty years old but has the mental capacity of a ten year-old.  But he isn’t a child.  (And he is.)

My family doesn’t discuss the particulars about my impending motherhood–we don’t make plans, or try to predict how long my father will be alive, or discuss how my older sister Robin and her husband John have already taken over much of my brother’s care, and that eventually it will be my turn.  To do this, I will have to move back to Rhode Island after spending almost half my life away because Joe is part of a wonderful work and recreation program and it would be cruel to remove him from the only life he’s known.  It is understood that when the time comes, I will extricate myself from my current job and personal relationships and living situation, and return home to be my brother’s mother.

*

My future destiny as a mother began in July 1960.  My mother was nineteen years old and a week overdue with her first child.  She was slow dancing with my father at a wedding when my grandmother–my father’s mother–stepped up behind her and tapped her on the shoulder.  “Come with me, little girl,” my grandmother said, “your water just broke.”  A few hours later the doctor released my mother from the hospital with instructions to return when she started having contractions.  But she never did.  A week passed, and then another.  My parents didn’t know enough to be worried, but my grandmother, who had been a midwife for over forty years and had firsthand experience with the complications of a “dry birth,” had never heard of a baby surviving weeks after the protective sac of amniotic fluid had burst.  She called the doctor often, but his stony response remained the same: He was the doctor.  By the end of week three, my grandmother’s fears had mutated into rage.  “My daughter-in-law is ten months pregnant,” she shouted into the phone.  “She needs a cesarean, and she needs it now.”  This did not impress the doctor.  He started explaining who had the medical degree, but my grandmother interrupted him again: “If something is wrong this child, it’s on your head!”  Although rampant medical malpractice lawsuits were still a thing of the future, apparently these were exactly the words he needed to hear.  “Send her in then,” he conceded gruffly before hanging up.

My grandparents took my mother back to the hospital.  As the hours passed and the nurses pumped more drugs into her system, she started slipping in and out of consciousness.  It was only weeks after my brother was born that my mother, relieved to finally have her son safely at home, confided in my father: all she could recall from her many hours in the labor room was the doctor’s frightened face above hers, and then, sometime later, his panicked voice as he urged the nurses to hurry and prep her for a cesarean.  “We have to get this kid out now!” she remembers him yelling before the room faded to blackness.

Six months later my parents sat in another doctor’s office and received the devastating news: Joe’s inability to hold his head up, or shake a rattle, or maintain eye contact was due to severe mental retardation and cerebral palsy, most likely the result of a lack of oxygen to the brain due to the late delivery.  Their son, this new doctor informed my parents, would never walk.  He would never talk or be capable of even the most basic communication, and he would be a “vegetable” for the rest of his life.  The best option, the easiest option, he said, was to put their baby in an institution.

But my brother wasn’t a “vegetable” at six months, and my mother wasn’t going to let him turn into one.  She began the excruciatingly long process of teaching Joe how to walk by positioning a towel between his legs to hold him up, and then gently kicking his feet forward.  She did this day after day, month after month, year after year, until he took his first wobbly steps at five.  By the time he was five and a half, Joe could totter around the house easily, though he still couldn’t communicate even his simplest needs.  His only attempts came from pointing–at himself, or a cupboard or an object in the room–but most times this only resulted in tears and frustration.  He cried often, and threw himself on the floor in fits of rage, and the exhaustion and stress of raising him and my sister, who was three by the time Joe learned to walk, pushed my mother to her limits.  She consulted with more doctors, but the answer was always the same: Joe’s “condition” would be best served by institutional care.  My tired yet undefeated mother only shook her head and left these visits newly determined to prove them all wrong.

And then, a couple of months after Joe turned six, my mother’s responsibilities tripled.  She had another baby to care for–me–but this was good news, and not just because she wanted Joe to have many siblings: with my arrival my big brother finally started to show an interest in talking.  The first noises came from deep inside his throat as he hovered around my crib, and while my parents couldn’t make out any words in these noises, they were hopeful.  When I started speaking early (“Very early, and you haven’t stopped yet,” my mother would tease dryly), Joe and I began “talking” to each other–in grunts and whines that quickly developed into our secret language.  Before I was out of diapers, I became his interpreter and constant companion.  I would translate these noises–he’s hungry; his stomach hurts; he’s afraid to go to bed–and then supply him with answers in the same grunts and whines that only we understood.  When I was three, and Joe was nine and needed his tonsils out, the doctors arranged for me to have mine out as well; I didn’t need the surgery, but I was the only one who could tell the doctors and nurses about Joe’s progress, and it was the only way I’d be allowed to stay by his side.

One of my earliest memories comes from soon after our time in the hospital: I’m standing in the back of my mother’s station wagon, my arms around the headrest, when my mother turns to me and says, “It’s time for you and Joe to talk to each other like everyone else talks.”

I don’t remember my part in teaching Joe to speak clearly, but eventually–with my mother’s continued faith and dogged resolve, and lots of help from friends and relatives–Joe was eventually able to attend a special school.  Slowly, with the patience of many people and my mother at the helm, my brother slowly transformed into the very loving, intelligent, and charismatic person he is today.

When my mother passed away during the night in July 2000, Joe was a month shy of his fortieth birthday.  He had been living in a private group home for six months because my mother thought it would help him become more independent.  And though she never cited it as a reason, we all knew that she also wanted to spare him the daily confusion and pain of her progressing cancer.  I don’t think, however, that any of us actually considered the moment when she would be gone and we’d have to tell her son.  Of course Joe knew that she was sick and that one day she would be going to heaven, but we weren’t prepared for the next morning when he walked in the door, eyed the crowd of his silent relatives calmly, and announced that he would be right back; he had to “check on his sweetheart.”

“Hold on a sec,” I said, because everyone was looking at me, waiting.  I delivered the news as gently as I could: Mom died last night, and she was in heaven now.

“Nuh uh,” Joe said, eyes wide behind his glasses.

“She did, buddy.  She isn’t in the bedroom.  She went to heaven last night and she isn’t sick anymore.”

“Nuh uh, Miscell.”

“It’s true.”

“I want to see,” he said, so we walked up the hallway together.

We stood close in my parents’ bedroom doorway, staring at the bed.  How empty it looked without her there.  As I waited for my brother to absorb her absence, my mind started racing: How would we ever care for him with the same devotion?  How would he ever recover from this loss? How would we all recover and make our way without her?

My brother finally turned to me.  “She go to heaven?”

“Yeah.”

“Sure?  Sure, Miscell?”

“I’m sure.”

He didn’t cry until the funeral a few days later, but throughout the entire service you could hear him talking loudly, incoherently, between his sobbing.  At times the  priest had to compete with Joe, but he didn’t falter once as he praised my mother and her many accomplishments.  And when he said that he was positive she was looking down on us now, that God had surely invited her instantly to His side because of the sacrifices she had made in her life, every head turned my brother’s way.  I knew what they were thinking, because I was thinking the same thing: what happens to him now?

For months afterward, Joe and I would have the same conversation over and over again on the phone–me in Ohio, finishing up a graduate degree, him in the group home he would leave soon after to move back home because living away felt like a double loss in the end.  “I miss her,” he would say simply.  “I thinking about her all day sometimes.” All I could say back was, “Me too.”  Some nights this would be enough, and some nights there was a long silence that followed, where all the words we learned together would fail us completely.

*

But here is the hardest part of my story with Joe, the embarrassing truth that has taken me years to admit: despite my special bond and love for my big brother, despite the fact that I would willingly and gladly fight to the death to protect him, the prospect of caring for a person who learns simple tasks slowly and then forgets them quickly, and who will never, ever stop needing me, makes my heart pound with terror.  Writing about this, and the deep shame that accompanies my fears, is almost impossible.  After hours of trying and failing one night, I finally e-mailed a friend for suggestions, and she e-mailed me back with this advice: Write a letter to your mother.  Time it, and try not to edit.  Write it like no one will ever read it. So I did, and here’s what I came up with:

Mom: I’m scared to live the life you lived.  I’m afraid to do and say the same things, day after day, because I know Joe needs this but I’m afraid what it will do to me over time.  I don’t have your courage, and I don’t want to remind Joe to swallow ten times a day because he’s drooling again.  I don’t want to lose my temper with him because his clothes are everywhere in the house except where they belong, in his drawers or in the hamper.  I don’t want to remind him to wash his face, brush his teeth, take his meds, leave the cat alone, pay attention, put his pad and pencils away, find his glasses, go to the bathroom, make sure you wash your hair in the shower, stop messing with the cat, focus and sit closer to the table, because you’re spilling pasta/cereal/ice cream/soup on yourself and on the floor, go back and wash your face because half of it is still dirty, remember to shave, take your meds, did you take your meds, and sure I’ll stay home with you again tonight, of course I’ll play another game of Fish, another game of War, and of course we can go to back to Chuck E. Cheese, but wash your face, it’s still dirty, and make your bed, and pay attention, and be careful, you’re stepping on my foot, and please please leave that cat alone, and I already told you three times to take your meds so will you just stop fooling around and do as I say?  I don’t want to lose my temper because I’ve reminded him to do the same things he’s done every day for almost fifty years but still forgets, starting with almost the second he gets up in the morning.  I don’t want to yell but I know that some days, maybe more than once a day, I will reach my limit like you did at times, like Robin does now at times, and even then, after I yell and feel horrible and apologize profusely, I know he’ll still forget and we will begin all over again.  I’m afraid what this will do to me physically and mentally.  And I’m afraid that no man will ever want to be a part of this life, or be able to love both me and Joe, and I’m afraid that he won’t want to be Joe’s brother-in-law and step-father all in one, and I’m scared to death that he won’t appreciate the man and the child that coexist inside of Joe, and that one day he will get tired, and he will pack, and he will walk out the door.  I’m afraid that I will want to go with him.  And mostly, mostly I’m just terrified, right down to the core, that the brother I adore so much will be a burden instead of one of the greatest joys of my life, like he is now.  I’m not you, Mom, not even close, and I’m terrified to do your job for the next forty years.  I’m ashamed to admit this, but it’s the truth.  I need you here to guide me.

*

Last summer my family–Joe, my Dad, Robin, and John–came for their annual visit to North Carolina.  Each day we went to the beach, and each day my brother spent most of his time digging an enormous hole in the sand–his favorite thing to do.  And as always we teased back and forth with him, and held hands with him in the ocean, and helped him clean up after half his lunch ended up on his face, arms, legs, and bathing suit.  And as always, too, on this visit I lost my patience with him at least once (white couch + Joe + chocolate ice cream = disaster) while also marveling not only in his enviably happy nature and his sharp sense of humor, but his childlike and not-so-childlike reactions to his world.  One day drawing a distorted face on his ever-present pad (“this your face,” he giggled, adding pimples and a too-big nose and waiting gleefully for my threats of payback), the next revealing the inner life I often forget exists.  Like he did one day at the grocery store a few days after they arrived.

“Because I retarded?” he whispered, and I turned and saw the two adult men staring at him.

I glared at the men briefly.  “No, Joe, because you’re special,” I said.

“Different,” he insisted. “Wrong somehow.”

“Special,” I insisted back.  “Everyone can see.”

His doubtful look said he’d let it go, but he knew better.

As always on these visits, my brother had the unique ability to exasperate me, make me laugh until the tears starting falling, and break my heart … all in the same day.

On the last night of vacation we went out for Italian and at one point I leaned towards my father and said, “Dad, I don’t know why I always forget, but when did mom die again? Was it the 24^th or the 27^th?”

“I think it was the 23^rd,” my father said, and then my sister Robin interjected: “No, Dad, you’re thinking of her birthday, March 23^rd.  I think she died on July 27^th.”

“Robin’s right, it was the 27^th,” John confirmed, and we went back to our meals.

Although the question and answers were casual, we didn’t feel casual: she was missing in this family, still, and we always found a reason to talk about her.  Tonight it was about the date of her death, but it could have just as easily been a comparison of her Bolognese to the one I was eating beside my big brother.

A few minutes later, my father’s serious voice interrupted my conversation with Robin.  “Joe has some questions for you, Michelle.”  His eyebrows shot up an inch.  “About death.”

Joe’s eyes were troubled when he turned to me.  “I want to know, I don’t know,” he began, “but when you die, you just go up to heaven and walk around? Or–or does God give a new body for down here and then you a different person walking around?  You think and eat the same things from before? Or what the new body wants?”

Two nights before, in a different restaurant, Joe sat in the booth ignoring his burger and fries, his full attention captured by the blue balloon he insisted I tie to his wrist despite John’s teasing.  Wide-eyed and completely transfixed by the way it floated back and forth under the air-conditioning vent, he moved his arm over the table, guiding the balloon as his lips mumbled silently, delightedly.  He didn’t notice the sentimental, teary looks we exchanged and have for years, the words as clear as if we had spoken them aloud: forever a child.

But on this night, like so many others, I was reminded again: my forty-nine year old brother was not a child­–or, at least not always.  Sometimes he was a grown man who was preoccupied, like most adults, with life’s mysteries.

I tried my best to answer Joe’s questions about death.  I told him that some people believed that our souls were passed onto different bodies, and that this was called reincarnation; I told him that others thought that when our bodies died the energy inside us could pass into other living things, like trees; I told him that still others believed our bodies were shells, and when we died we went to heaven, where life was perfect and we didn’t have to worry about our bodies getting sick or hurting anymore.  That this is what our mother believed, too.

“Just souls floating around up there?” he asked.

“Kind of, I think.”

He screwed up his eyes at me.  “No tree.  I take a new body.”

“You don’t want to go to heaven?  It’s supposed to be really cool up there.”

“Cool?” His eyes grew big behind his glasses.  “How?”

“Well, like you’re always happy, and you can eat whatever you want.”

He looked across the restaurant for a moment, then back at me.  “Chocolate?”

“Tons of chocolate.  Rivers of it that you can swim in and drink.”

“Oh.”  He nodded, satisfied.  “Okay, I pick heaven now,” he said with a grin.

*

Almost daily now, I think about my mother’s refusal to accept the future the doctors forecasted for Joe.  I think about her determination to keep her son close and help him thrive, and I wonder how long it took for her to truly understand and accept that she would have a “forever child.”  I wonder how she felt knowing that Joe would never leave her sturdy nest, that he would never discover his own path in life so that one day she could enjoy a well-earned, peaceful retirement with my father.  And I wonder, since it will be my job one day, how she managed a lifetime of guiding Joe through the seemingly mind-numbing repetition of their days and nights together.  Sometimes I try to imagine how I would have reacted when that doctor, so long ago, said that the best option, the easiest option, would be to send Joe to an institution.  Would I have considered this easier path, even for a few seconds?  I don’t think so, I hope I wouldn’t have, but I do know that this sort of speculation was foreign to my mother.  She was a strong woman, and she wasn’t concerned (not at nineteen, not ever) with the easy road in life.  And although she rarely discussed her difficulties raising Joe, she told me once that she left that meeting knowing her son would walk and talk and have not only a meaningful life, but a wonderful one, full of family and friends and love–and she was right.  I may have helped Joe’s transition into speech in a very small way, but it was my mother who taught him everything else.  She helped him become a confident, intelligent man while also nurturing the boy who still loves to draw pictures and blow bubbles in the backyard and write letters to Santa every Christmas.  My mother’s amazing strength and love turned my brother from a would-be “vegetable” into a strong, happy man and a strong, happy child.  Because of her, Joe is my little and big brother, and he is exactly right, exactly as he is.