Terra Orndorff

Not My Brother’s Keeper

Keith and I lived in the woods. Not literally, of course, but we wouldn’t have cared either way. We ran up and down the hills exploring sunup to dinner time. Never worrying about ticks or snakes or getting kidnapped. Freedom coursed through us like a river after a storm. Unending and powerful, we ran. We climbed. We hid from each other, always giving locations away with laughter.

My brother and were close. His mother was his. Mine was mine. His father is my adopted father. Regardless, my brother protected me and I him. We did not get in trouble when we were together. Only when we were alone did the hammer ever fall, when the other failed to be present for a logical defense. Peas in a pod is what we were. I heard the nails on the chalkboard within my dad’s head every time Keith and I ran out the door. Expectations of a feminine little girl play in his mind. Instead, I brought dirt, fishing poles, blue jeans, boots. Maybe not what he wanted in a daughter but what he got. I am sure Dad wanted us to have a good relationship. Maybe he just didn’t want us being best friends.

Mom and Dad married when I was four. Keith, two years older. I idolized him. Followed him everywhere. Did everything he did. It took him no time to enjoy having a constant playmate, a partner in imagination all too happy to play soldiers. Basketball. Hide and seek. We amassed so many G.I. Joe and He-Man toys the stories continue for hours. So many soldiers down and lost within the woods.

Seven years after the combination of families, seven years after finding my best friend, the circus came to town. The thought of going, of being subjected to clowns and innumerable strangers, appealed to me not at all. Jealousy struck hard, though, when Keith’s mom stopped after school at Mamma’s.

“Floyd said it is fine, Edith. I’m bringing him back right after,” is what she told Mammaw.

Fear settled into my heart, though, when Mammaw told Dad. The anger exploding from him, from the man who only showed me gentleness, terrified me. When Keith did not come home that night, the fear grew. It continues to grow as the days passed.  I wandered the woods every day after school for weeks knowing he would show up. Reappearing, as if by magic, made more sense than him being gone. We played in these woods all the time. Never worrying about anything. Teasing about kidnapping but always protecting. A child being kidnapped, by a parent no less, made no sense.

Mom and Dad discussed the situation with attorneys so many times. Hushed voices on phones. Murmurs from rooms behind closed doors. Many conversations I know nothing about. Dad stopped talking to Mammaw as I gathered the pieces. Keith’s mom took him. Not to the circus. She took him to California where they lived with her parents.

I stepped onto the bus at eleven years old with my brother. Laughing. Giving each other heck. Protecting each other. We stepped off that same bus together. Thoughts of snacks at Mammaw’s running in our heads. Instead, my brother was stolen by his mother.

About a year after I lost my best friend, horror among horrors, our home burned. To the ground. Nothing left but ash and the skeleton of a drill press. The home built by the actual blood, sweat, and tears of my dad and his brothers – gone. A contractor built the new one. Without a room included for Keith.

Another year later, Keith came home. No one discussed the situation with me. No one told me he was coming or where he had been or what he had been doing or why he was back. He just reappeared. Like magic. Two years prior that trick would have knocked me off my feet. After two years, though, of having heard nothing from him, of loneliness and relearning how to be an only child, apathy poured from me. That same deluging river of freedom we once shared now pours forth only distance. Something was different. Something hard to place.

Brother and sister once again. This time in a more conventional manner. More fighting. More separation. We coexist. Our last name bound us, defined us as siblings. The bond survived only in memories, quarantined to our minds. Wherever Keith spent the last two years was where our connection was left behind.

Brothers protect sisters. Mine protected me, once upon a time. Now, though, he fed on my anxiety. Anxiety that only increased its hold on me while he was gone. Keith raised my anguish, exploited my weakness, and reveled in my insecurity. The start of high school could not have been more ill-timed.

“I’m going to make high school hell for you,” Keith sneered, walking past me to the room Dad built for him upon his return. Two years older, but only a grade above, he knew everyone in the school already. I took his words to heart and believed them to be true. To this day, I believe he meant it. From the day he came home, I could feel the anger when he looked at me.

“I HATE YOU,” I screamed with all my soul, slamming my bedroom door, tears streaming down my face. I did not know why he left. I did not know why came back. I did not know why he hated me. I did wish he was still gone, though.

High school equated to a horror film in my mind. Consolidation happened in junior high. In a land of small schools, White River Valley High School’s birth came from the deaths of three other schools. Junior high consolidation only started the process. Two junior highs sprung forth from this consolidation. High school marked the final step. A fresh new hell for me, the incredibly awkward, introverted girl, forced to join up with a whole group of strangers – again.  Smart, athletic, friendly, yet I felt no fit. Flitting from group to group, belonging everywhere yet nowhere. Forming few true bonds. I was a floater.

Keith forgot his cruel words to me as soon as we stepped off the bus. He forgot me. This is good, I thought to myself. If he ignores me, he is not harassing me. His sights simply fell elsewhere. My friends. My brother, my once best friend, made his rounds. Flings happened throughout the year with most of my friends. I refused to be the middleman, a scapegoat, a target for complaints of heartbreaks from girls I had warned. For myself, I managed to salvage friendships from relationships he blew up. Most girls wizened up. It was his on again off again relationship with my closest friend that pushed me to the brink.

Something in his pursuit of her. Complete lack of care.

Complete disregard for me from both.

My friend, Therese, never tried to stay away from Keith. She insisted only on being closer. Their dalliance in my closet was the closest I came to letting them both burn. With our parents gone, I folded laundry, but they remained nowhere to be seen.

I knew where they were, though. I think about how stupid it was for them to be in my closet. Keith had his own room, on the other side of the house, no less. Much more private. My room made me complicit; I suppose. Meant I get in trouble, too, if they got caught. I internally laughed as they finally emerged. Lipstick smeared on them both. Wanting our parents to see, I resolved to say nothing. Let them get caught.

We used to protect each other. Now we pray for retribution.

I’ll be damned if my need to avoid confrontation and protect them both didn’t overwhelm me.

            “Go look at your faces,” I tell them. Continuing to fold laundry on the couch. Saving us all from turmoil when Mom and Dad got home.

Sometime after that, less than a year, Keith quit school. Moved out. I could breathe again. We attempted to reconnect as adults, over a decade later, but whatever existed as young children died and stayed dead. I remained an only child in that circle.