“I thought you had two brothers?”
“I did. I mean, I do. But we built the fort before Rem was born.”
“Rem?”
“Remington. We call him Rem. Sebastian and I made the fort. We call him Seb.”
I nod, wanting him to continue.
“So, my pops wouldn’t let that happen when it came time to build the fort. He would not let me do whatever I wanted or let me get mad at Seb if I did not get my way. He wanted a plan. Pops was more of a field marshal. He organized supplies, had us draw out what we wanted, and I had to watch over my brother to see that he had a great experience.”
Lex looks at me, but I avoid his eyes. I can listen to him, but no one is getting in.
“As you can imagine, making sure a younger brother has a great experience is not a job an eight-year-old kid wants. A kid just wants to go out there and build stuff, right? Or a kid wants to be the student, not the teacher. But everybody in the family has a role. Everybody in the family has got some part that they play. Mine was ‘older brother’. Mine was, you know, the protector. It was ‘I gotta look out for them.’ It was to make sure he, and later, they, stayed safe. You know, they are grown now, and they don’t need me anymore, but it is still my job. I love my job. My time in the military too. My job then was to keep America safe. I had some shitty experiences, and I had some great ones, but I wouldn’t have traded it.”
Lex seemed like he had it all, brothers, a father that cared for him. He got to explore the world and see what it was all about. I got beat and told to try harder, to become a better housewife. In a way, I was envious of him, but I couldn’t tell him. I couldn’t allow myself to fall for him. I’d endured enough heartache in my life. I was done. He didn’t need to get to know me, I didn’t plan to stick around long enough.
9
Lex
“Tell me more about the fort.”
Her voice is soft, curious. It makes my heart swell. My chest constricts, knowing she’s listening. I need to keep her mind off of whatever it is that seems to continuously shred her insides. She needs a distraction until her burden becomes more manageable.
“Mmm. Well, Sebastian, he was always the smart one. So, my dad helped me figure out that I needed to give him smart jobs, which meant he was in charge of planning. He helped draw blueprints for our fort.”
“Blueprints? For a fort? I’ve never heard of such a thing.” She laughs.
“I know, right?” I chuckle and shake my head, realizing how ridiculously serious it all sounds now. She shares my smile and my heart flip-flops. Damn, she has a beautiful smile.
I look away before she catches herself and shuts it down.
“Here’s the thing. You can draw a square and call it a fort, but Pops wanted us to take our jobs seriously. So, if Seb was the smart one and plotting was easy for him, then he needed a job that played to those strengths. He was seven years old, and I was eight, but he was the one figuring out where the best place to put the door was and where the best place to put the windows were.
“He figured out that if you put the doors on the west side, you’d always get the sunset and it is going to be hot as hell in the summer, and if you don’t put a window on the side of the wall toward the house, well, then you don’t get to see who is coming at you from the house. What kind of kid thinks of those things when they are seven? Those were the kinds of things he thought through.”
I shake my head, still not believing how big-brained he was at such an early age. Not much has changed since then.
“This is the same kid that figured out that we needed a safe place to put treasures, a cache, a place to hide things. So, we built a secret safe. That was an important part for us, and it made the fort more magical.
“Funny thing is, Seb designed things into that fort that did not come into our play until Rem, our younger brother, came along. It was as if Seb knew something more would be needed later. Rem was the funny guy. He was–and still is–the playful one. He has always been an adventurer, always taking risks. He’s been the lifeblood and energy of the family ever since he was a toddler.”
“Lex?”
I am so caught up in the memories that I had forgotten she might not want to hear all this.
“Yeah?”
“What was your job? Just a protector? Just to watch out and let Seb have all the fun?”
“Ah, no, no. It wasn’t like that. My job was to watch out for everybody.”
“Yes, but what kind of job is that?”
“Wow, good question. Well, part of that was to walk the space and make sure there were no nails or glass or rocks on the ground when we started to build. Pops taught me something called futuring. I had to look out and think about what we were going to need next week, what we were going to need next month–all of that.
“But I didn’t have any real concept of time. Hey, I was just a kid. But I could look at it like summer and winter. Those were the things I could kind of grasp at the time, so I knew that after spring came summer and when we got out of school, they would close for the summer. And then in the fall, they would reopen, and we would come back. So, that was my first lesson in futuring.
“And you know what? They have jobs in the Marines just for people who do future work. It’s a real thing. They do all the planning and forecasting way out in advance, and when it gets closer, they stop working on it and leave the last details to someone else who does present planning. If a building is going to be built by the Marines, the futurist scouts the natural resources, understands the permitting regulations, determines what the cultural influences are going to be, and what needs to happen and be available before the architect starts drawing. Then that stuff gets built on top of the foundation you have laid the groundwork for.
“That was sort of what I was supposed to do with the fort. I was supposed to figure out ahead of time what we were going to need, for example, if we were going to need nails, how many? It is all great if you have boards lying around, and you can build a fort with them. You can even build a lean-to. Or you can build a summer shack that falls apart after a year.
“But a futurist has to think about what if there is wind or rain or snow. That is sort of where Pops trained my mind to go. Like, that was the things my pops taught me as the oldest child, to look ahead. The oldest child has to be the most prepared. The oldest child has to protect everybody. They have to, to the best of their ability, do all that.
“And it is a smart thing to do it that way too; because they are usually stronger and more experienced. I was only a year older than Sebastian, but that was my role. I had to figure out that my role was to figure out what was coming down the pike and figure out how I was going to take care of everybody.”
“Did Seb build a good design?”
“Yeah, surprisingly, he was really good. He was actually super geeky about it. He liked it so much he wanted to go to the library. He wanted to see books about forts and treehouses. He wanted to make a ramp to the top of the fort. He wanted to do stuff that was fun, but also smart. These days, we call it ‘engagement’. He built in activities for engagement–some of which we didn’t even discover until Rem came along.
“Even though it was a ground floor fort, set up against a tree, he decided it still needed a rope swing and a place where we could hide snacks and stuff. That it needed some sort of latch to keep people out. That it needed a weapons armory for big nerf guns, we did not even own yet. Those sorts of things are what he thought of. So, then it was way more fun than just putting a box out in the yard and cutting a hole in it for a window. Like I said, slapping up boards together and putting nails in could have worked, and it would have lasted for two days, a month at best, instead, that fort is still in existence today.”