The Big Sister - Part One (12 page)

“Hey, calm down,” I said, fighting to do so myself, fighting to tamp down the rising panic. Something was wrong. Something was happening to my brother. “How about we meet sometime tomorrow? Like after school, maybe?”

“No!” Luke practically yelled, making me wince and turn the volume down on my phone. “It has to be now! Right now!”

My mouth opened and shut, trying to decide what I should say to appease this raw edge of desperation in my brother’s voice when I heard a fainter shouting in the background on Luke’s end of the conversation.

“Who the fuck are you talking to?” it demanded. I didn’t like that tone of voice at all. Who would curse like that at a child? “Who gave you permission to use the goddamn phone?”

“Who is that, Luke?” I asked as calmly as I could, but the soft beep in my ear told me he’d ended the call.

I stared at my phone for several long minutes, wondering what to do. Was my brother in trouble? Why, after all these years of silence, was I only just now hearing from him? Had he ever even known about me? He’d sounded excited, at first, when we first began talking. The fact that he wanted to live with me was an added plus.

But why had he been so desperate to set the wheels in motion on the whole thing? I had no hope of becoming his guardian until I was at least eighteen, and that wouldn’t happen until July. Didn’t he understand that? It had broken my heart to hear his disappointment — no, his desperation — when I told him he’d have to wait a few months. I’d been waiting years for this day, so it was different for me. July sounded much closer now that my goals were finally within reach.

And who had that other, angry voice been on the phone? Surely not his new father. Did the man always talk to my brother like that? Was Luke in a bad situation at home? I found that hard to believe, especially with the assurances the social workers had given to me.

For the first time, I felt a small stab of panic myself. My social worker had changed since I started living with my foster family. Could it be possible that Luke’s had as well, and that any pertinent details — like a mean, raging father — had slipped through the cracks with protective services?

I cast around for other explanations. Maybe it wasn’t Luke’s new father. Maybe it was someone playing a trick on him. Or maybe Luke was grounded — some minor infraction that had happened at school, perhaps — and he wasn’t allowed to use the phone. Yes, maybe that was it.

Even as I tried to explain away my doubts and fears, I knew that my lingering unease meant that something was going wrong. Who could I contact for help? I had the number, now, of where Luke was staying — unless he hadn’t been calling from home. That was another possibility. Maybe he was using a phone at some stranger’s house without permission, and that person had been angry by Luke’s forwardness.

Biting my lip, I selected the menu option for recent calls. Before I could talk myself out of it, I quickly pressed the button to redial the number Luke had just called me from. I wanted to reassure him that everything would be all right. More than that, though, I wanted answers. Something wasn’t all right with my brother, and as his older sister, it was up to me to figure it out and correct it.

“What do you want?”

I flinched as that same gruff voice I’d heard in the background answered the phone.

“Hello,” I said, clenching my teeth to keep my voice shaking. “May I please speak to Luke?”

“Don’t call here again, bitch.” The soft beeps told me I’d been hung up on again — right after being called a bitch. Who did that? The voice sounded like a grown man. Surely this wasn’t one of my brother’s current guardians. It couldn’t be possible. If I could pick up on the fact that this guy was bad news, then surely a professional social worker would be able to figure it out, too.

I wracked my brain for more options. Should I call the police? I didn’t know my brother’s address, or even if the unpleasant man I’d just spoken to was related to my brother at all. Plus, I didn’t want to get Luke in trouble. The last thing I wanted for my brother was to be punished because of a mistake I’d made.

Luke had reached out to me initially. I hoped that he would take the next chance he got to make contact again, to tell me what was going on, to let me know how I could help him.

That day happened sooner — and much more dramatically — than I thought.

Not a week after that first phone call, I was just closing up at the restaurant. It had been a decent day with good tips, but I was dead on my feet. The best days were ones that kept me busy, but they always took a lot out of me.

I was running through a list of things I still had to do in my head — roll silverware, sweep, mop, and lock up — when the bell on the entrance door jingled.

“Sorry, we’re closed,” I called over my shoulder, instantly moving the locking up portion of my night up on my list.

I continued wiping down the tables, waiting for the resulting jingle of the bells as the person realized their error and left the restaurant, but it remained silent.

I finally turned to confront the errant customer and stopped what I was doing, dropping the rag I’d been using to the floor.

It had been years, but I’d know my brother from anywhere. He had the same light hair as me, the same green eyes. And who else would just stare at me like that, drinking me in? The phone call had been a while back, but I knew he’d finally come.

“How did you find me?” I asked, gripping the back of a chair to keep my hands from shaking.

“My mom told me,” he said. “Not my real mom. My adopted mom.”

It was then that I noticed the blood.

There were flecks and puddles of it dried on his shirt, and his hands had a rusty stain. I rushed over to him, belatedly registering his automatic flinch, and seized his hands.

“Are you hurt?” I demanded. “Where are you hurt? Who did this to you?”

I wanted answers, but my brother didn’t seem to be in the talking mood. He stared up at me with wide eyes, his lips all but buttoned closed.

“I’m not angry,” I said, trying to ease the intensity of my tone of voice. “I’m just surprised and concerned. Is this ketchup?”

Even as I asked the ludicrous question, I knew that it wasn’t. I knew what ketchup stains looked like, and this definitely wasn’t a condiment.

“Are you bleeding from anywhere?” I asked, holding his shoulders and giving him a light shake. “I’m just trying to make sure you’re all right. Do I need to take you to a hospital? A doctor? The police?”

At the mention of police, Luke shook his head violently — no. Okay. No police. But what had my brother so spooked? I thought he’d be a little more joyful the first time he saw me, especially with how eager he’d been over the phone. Of course, I hadn’t anticipated the fact that he’d be practically dipped in blood on our first meeting, either.

“Are you hungry?” I asked, switching tacks to try to get him to talk. “I’m the only one here. It’s my job to close up. I can make you something in the kitchen.”

Luke shook his head a little more slowly this time. I had only tenuous control of the panic surging through my body. This wasn’t how I wanted my first meeting with my brother in his young memory to go. I needed to help him. He’d come to his big sister because something was wrong, and I was going to figure it out and make it right.

“Come sit down,” I said, putting my arm around him and starting to lead him to a table.

What had started out as a flinch at my closeness became a wince and a grunt, and I immediately stopped.

“You are hurt,” I said, realization dawning on me. If it was his blood on his shirt, my brother was hurt badly. There were that many stains. “Tell me where. We don’t have to go to the hospital, but I have to make sure you’re okay.”

He allowed me to gently peel up his shirt to examine the side where I’d jostled him a bit trying to get him to have a seat. I didn’t find any open wounds that would leak as much blood as I was seeing on his clothes and hands, but I didn’t like what I saw — dark bruises over his ribs, faint burn marks dotting his fair skin, abrasions that were only half healed.

Somebody had been hurting him.

“Tell me what happened,” I said, unable to stop the tears from running down my cheeks. My brother had been suffering for a long time. I could see physical evidence of it. “Tell me everything.”

He didn’t tell me everything that night. Our relationship was too new, he didn’t know how to trust yet, and there wasn’t enough time.

I got him cleaned up and into a spare shirt that one of the cooks kept in a cubby in the kitchen. I also relieved him of a bloody steak knife he’d been concealing in his pocket — the same knife he’d used to stab his stepfather.

My blood curdled when I realized I’d spoken with the stepfather when I talked to Steve. All of my fears had been correct, and all of the excuses I invented to try to explain away my brother’s troubles hadn’t helped one bit. The man who’d been so awful over the phone was the man who was responsible for all of the harm that had come to Luke.

Luke’s new mother had been tentatively forthcoming when he started asking her more questions about his birth family, more questions about me. She’d given him my phone number, gleaned from Social Services, and had told him whatever she knew about my life and what I was doing now. She didn’t know everything about me, but she knew enough to stoke the fire of hope inside my brother.

But she had never suspected that her husband was abusing Luke — or, if she did, she was blind to it, or tried to explain it away, as I first did. She loved Steve, and she’d married him. She didn’t want to believe in the kind of monster that man was.

Steve had surprised Luke in bed one night when he first realized what my brother was doing, probing for answers, for an escape route.

“Your mom’s getting suspicious,” Steve said, wrapping a belt around his knuckles. “And she’s been crying more than usual. And when she cries, she doesn’t want to put out. You know what that means, you little shit?”

Luke wasn’t sure what it meant, so he only filed it away in his brain for later. What he did know was what usually came after his stepfather finished wrapping his knuckles for protection: pain.

“It means I don’t get any,” Steve continued, almost conversationally, like a father-son chat. Luke was young, but he wasn’t so naïve to believe that anything good could come out of this. “And it means you owe me big time for taking such a huge dump on my fun. A man’s gotta have fun, you little bastard. You’ll learn.”

The blows fell like rain into Luke’s soft belly, making him double over and try to use his small hands to protect himself — in vain. Steve beat him so badly that Luke had to fake sick the next day for a single, simple reason: He couldn’t get out of bed. But after that night, my brother stole a knife from the kitchen and started keeping it under his pillow.

That knife came in handy the next time Steve came for a bedside chat.

“You know what your mother thinks now?” the stepfather slurred, his voice fuzzy with drink, breath stinking as he slobbered and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “She thinks you hate her. She thinks you’re asking all these questions because you don’t want to live here anymore.”

Luke swallowed and resisted the urge to pull his covers to his chin. He’d turned to his side, in the direction of the door, as soon as he’d heard Steve stumbling down the hall, and his fist was closed over the hilt of the serrated knife.

“Frankly, I think that would be a fine fucking idea,” Steve continued, fumbling at his waist, struggling to coordinate his fingers enough to unbuckle his belt. “I want you out of my life, fucker. You’re a waste of money, a waste of time, and a waste of space.”

“Then let me go,” my brother said, courage bubbling boldly within him. Couldn’t that be the answer that would solve everyone’s problems? If he could just leave, Steve and his mother could be alone, and they wouldn’t have to worry about him anymore.

“You’d like that, wouldn’t you?” Steve laughed, nearly knocking himself off balance as he yanked his belt from his jeans. “You’d like it if you got to leave me in fucking hell with that woman. God, I could just hear the wailing she’d do. She wouldn’t get out of bed for weeks, and she wouldn’t let me in bed for the same amount of time. No, sir. You’re staying right where you are, and I’m going to break you of this little habit of yours, upsetting your mother.”