Tears glisten in her eyes but she blinks them away with the sadness that falls momentarily over her countenance.
“Jonah, look who’s here.”
“You don’t need to announce me. I’m not a guest,” I tell her as I step to the bed and meet my brother’s eyes.
He garbles something unintelligible that I know is a greeting, his attempt at pronunciation seeming worse than the sounds he was making last week when I spoke with him. Even with the speaking valve . . . It feels like everything is on a constant decline.
“Yeah, yeah.” I lean down and give him a pseudo hug and rest my forehead against his for a moment, almost as if I’m recharging my twin meter. He’s the same but so very different. “You’re still the better looking one,” I say as I stand back up with my jaw clenched to fight the helplessness I feel.
He gives a partial laugh that ends in a coughing fit. My mom pushes me out of the way as she pulls him up so he doesn’t choke.
“You sanitized?” she asks, her voice going into panic mode over me bringing germs into his room.
“Yes,” I mumble, feeling inept as I step back and let her help him in ways I can’t. Ways that have changed and evolved over the fifteen years he’s been a prisoner in his broken body and mind.
“Just rest, Jonah. You’re fine now,” she says after fixing something on his ventilator. He draws in a deep breath and calms.
“Rrrr,” he says for my name with the next struggle of breath.
“Yeah?” I lean down closer so he doesn’t have to fight so hard to be heard, and grab his hand even when I know he can’t feel it.
But I can.
And I need this connection with him more than anything right now.
“Good.” He takes a second and closes his eyes as if each word is a battle to be won. “Gm.”
My smile is soft and sincere and hides the emotions clogging in my throat. Our eyes hold—one twin to another, two halves of a whole—and I know his is the only praise I need. His is the one who matters the most.
“I miss you, J.”
Tears well in his eyes and slip from the corner to the pillow beneath his head. I hate that he can’t wipe them away. I hate that it’d kill him if I did it for him. He may be paralyzed, but I’m still his little brother by four minutes and two seconds and even like this, he holds tight to that tiny bit of pride.
“He’s exhausted, Hunter,” my mom says as she steps up and adjusts his pillow for him. “His sleeping pills are kicking in and he needs to get to sleep. It’s way past his—”
“Yes. Fine.” I don’t need to be reminded of the Ambien he takes nightly to combat the anxiety that’s caused him to have nightmares in the past few months.
The anxiety I wonder is because he fears he’s dying.
She steps in front of me to fuss some more while I struggle with what to say like I always do, caught in that need to pretend like everything is normal when nothing is.
It’s so very different when we’re face to face.
On the phone, I feel like I’m filling him in on the world outside of this damn prison cell—almost as if I’m letting him live vicariously through me.
But when we’re face to identical face, it’s brutal.
Face to face, I can see his reactions and feel the guilt. If I talk about hockey, I feel like the asshole who’s talking about the one thing he loved more than me. If I talk about women, his other favorite love, then it’s a stark reminder of the things he’ll never get to feel again. And if I talk about trivial bullshit to fill the air, he knows I’m at a loss of what to say to him—my twin—and isn’t that worse?
So when my mom clears out of the way, I sit there with him and hold his hand he can’t feel and connect without words he can’t speak, but still feel a sense of peace. Nothing can rob the two of us of that. Except of course, death.
His exhaustion from leaving the house and going to the game is evident in the bags under his eyes, and it’s not long before he succumbs to it. His eyes fall heavy and the muscles in his face relax as I whisper to him that I love him.
But even with him asleep, I don’t look away. I can’t. All I keep thinking is how I packed my schedule today to avoid this emotional bullshit and how wrong I was to do so. This is my brother. He deserves better from me . . . and I should be able to deal with my parents, because this time with him is what matters most.
How many moments like this will I get? How many more times will I be able to tell him I love him face to face? How many more times will I be able to find my calm with him?
Not enough. And yet my pride has kept me away.
As if guilt didn’t rule my life already.
Fuck.
I close my eyes and shake my head, knowing I fucked up. Knowing I should have figured he’d be worn out from the game, and that I’d get so little time with him.
“Love you, J,” I whisper as he settles into slumber. “Love you more than you know.” I can’t take my eyes off him. I need to memorize the lines on his face. The same ones we should share. But where I have laugh lines and crow’s feet from the sun, his are less pronounced or not even there. Mine show a life lived and his show a life lost. So I visually trace the lines he does have, over and over, needing to map them. Needing to commit them to memory.
The problem is, the longer I sit here, the calm Jonah gives me is slowly eaten away by resentment.
At my parents. At the world. At fucking God and fate and everything in between, because why is he there and I’m here?
Knowing he’s completely asleep, I turn to face my mom. She’s sitting in a chair at the foot of his bed, her eyes focused on the television show that’s on but that I can barely hear.
“You didn’t show up before the game like you were supposed to today. I had everything set up for him.”
“Hunter.” My name is an apologetic sigh that snaps my anger like a livewire.
“I had plans to empty the arena so I could push him on the ice. So I could let him skate again—”
“He’s too sick now to let him—”
“He can’t get much sicker, Mom.” I stand and move to abate the anger.
Or try to.
There’s no abating shit right now.
“Let him have whatever fucking joy he can. Christ.” I shove a hand through my hair and turn my back on the damn case of trophies.
“Oh, you know Jonah,” she says with a wave of her hand, as if we’re talking about the weather outside. She stands and moves to the seat I just vacated. She takes her time tucking his arms beneath the covers so he doesn’t get cold. “He has his routines and when we step outside of the routine too much it’s hard, and he gets upset—”
“Upset?” I chuckle without an ounce of humor. “Robbing him of the experience would make him upset.” I look out the window to the streetlight’s orange glow and try to compose myself. “Next time, I’ll just pick him up and take him myself.”
“No, you won’t.” Defiance edges her tone and does nothing to soften the tight smile she gives me. “We’re his guardians and will do what we think is best for him.”
All I can do is stare at her and her subtle but stinging rebuke and wonder if she hears her own words. If she realizes she may have lost two sons that day, because she gave up on me too. She devoted her life to him, forgetting that I need her too, just in different ways.