Little Sister

I feel fine.
        I wanted to finish the rest of half-eaten birthday cake in the fridge, it looks like a platter where a massacre took place, a battlefield of sugar rushing agents. Kids, they will eat anything except what they should eat. When you asked me to throw a birthday party for my nephew, your son, I did it because I knew you couldn't. The medication the hospital gave you made you sleepy, often through mealtimes, and you only ate when I came to your room in my house past midnight with a plate of food in my hands. Nothing in my house is mine right now, and normally in such circumstances my attitude would resemble some form of a demonic white woman with an endless supply of Aerosmith tunes and cheap Vodka - I'm swimming in it. I'm listening outside of my guestroom, your bedroom, listening to sleep. The low, blurring, heavy breathing, interruppted by tiny whimpers.
         When you whimper I remember when I was a kid and I had nightmares. Our mother was never home, a bar kept her occupied. You'd rush to my side and make me a milkshake in the middle of the night. You'd drop a couple of drops of green food coloring in it, and carry me back to my room. I sat up in bed drinking it, in my fuzzy footie pajamas, while you watched and telling me to hurry up. Now I'm bringing you plates of nutrition, feeding your kids and making sure they get to school and finish their homework. I even check the math - with a calculator, of course. This isn't a triumph, this is a very unevenly matched game that you're losing.
          You came to my house, a house I managed to own at only 24, two weeks ago with a bandage wrapped around your head, and your left arm in a cast. Your son, my nephew Aven, who usually jumps around and screams when he's at his calmest, was staring at my Welcome mat, unable to look up at me. Your daughter Miri was sucking her thumb, and clutching her backpack straps, and she is in middle school. After I made the kids macaroni and chicken tenders for dinner and they showered and went to bed - you finally broke down and explained that he had finally gone way too far. Finally? I asked. After years of shoving you into walls, fucking other women, and draining your mutual accounts of everything - often making you do drastic things to feed your kids. He had broken your arm when you told him Miri was going to wear a miniskirt to school the next day. She had bought it with her own money, saved up from babysitting jobs, and it wasn't too provocative. No daughter of his was going to dress like a whore, were you some kind of whore? What were you doing when he was working 80 hour workweeks? Raising his kids?! Raising them to be whores! Fighting back was something our dad taught us, but you over-estimated your strength and under-estimated the time it would take him to jump over the dining room table in some kind of primitive lunge. Miri told me last week after coming to my room in the middle of the night, after I fed you, that she thinks it's her fault. She can't sleep, she picks at her food. Aven gets lost in my XboX, which is pretty much now his. Which I guess is fine, I'm 28 and still not married, maybe an xbox isn't what I need anymore, anyways. Aven eats everything, maybe to cover up you two not eating. He volunteers to take out the trash for me after I cook dinner.
         He works at a chemical plant 15 miles outside of the city I live in, 5 miles outside of the one your mail is still going to. Mondays are my night off. I told you in a note that I knew you'd see when you woke up to use the bathroom that I had a baby shower for a friend that I needed to go to. Aven volunteered to make dinner - frozen pizza, and Miri sat with him, allowing him to teach her how to play "Left 4 dead' on the Xbox. I know his shifts usually end at seven or so. I left my house at 6, but I stopped to get Taco Bell. Carbohydrates equal energy. There is nothing like raw energy, it can take you places. When it all comes to a series of interlocking moments, we tend to examine ourselves. Morals are a badge of honor that people like to wear, bute hate to do the work to earn them. I don't wear any merit badges. Over the last few years since our father died, I don't look for badges or medals, I look for cliffs to climb, and set up shop on.
         Your house is beautiful at night, you put up christmas decorations, even though you are the best atheist I know. He plugged them all in before he left for work, I bet. The icicle lights are dangling from your second floor balcony. Your lamp-post has a red ribbon slithering up it, the azalea bushes have white lights twinkling in them. While I sit on the grass, next to one of the bushes, I think: What I wouldn't give for a Salvation Army - Army. His SUV pulls up in the driveway, his music up loud. He drums on the side of the dash as he waits for the garage door to open, and then barrels inside, the garage door lowering behind him. I have to admit, I don't know how I am going to do this. I've watched enough Law & Order that I think I can come up with something when I get in there. I wait a few minutes, until I see the glow of the television set from the bay windows, and then I go in. Of course he leaves the door unlocked. He's watching a show about a guy wrestling gators. He has a budlight longneck in his hands, his feet are propped up on the antique cherrywood coffee table our grandmother gave you on your wedding day. That was a really nice day, but your wedding cake was dry as shit. Nevermind.
       . .. I decide to turn around and go into the garage. The television is up so loud and he's so fucked up he doesn't hear the front door close behind him. This Denali you drive, that he's driving now, takes up most of your garage. Even if you wanted another car where the hell would you put it? His tools are stacked messily in the corner, near the front left headlights. I put on my latex gloves. Disabling a garage door is like knocking a bug off the wall. The mechanisms are already so delicate that a simple cut in the chain will make it so it will not raise. I then fold the other pin over so that it won't raise at all, even manually. The alert light is easy to kill, I zap the power right out.
        When I go back in to check on him, he now has three empty beers next to him, and he is nursing his fourth. He coughs and slowly heaves himself up to go use the bathroom once a commercial break comes. I replace my latex gloves with another. I take the bottle of Unisom from my pocket that you had brought in your overnight case from this house two weeks earlier. You usually needed it to sleep, but what the doctors gave you was ore than enough, and there was a heavy, full bottle left. Tiny, cerulean gel capsules of doxylamine. They burst open when I squeezed them above the rim of his beer bottle. I popped nine of them - he really needed to piss, he was in their for ten minutes. I turn to leave as I hear the toilet flush, and I watch his sillohuette sit back down in front of the bay windows from outside, crouched next to the white lighted bush. From my cell phone I call your house phone, after three rings, he answers, his words slurred.
Baby? It's me. I say.
You finally ready to fucking talk? he yells back.
Yes. Can you come and get me and the kids?
You at that bitch's house?
Yeah, I'll be waiting.
He hangs up, after burping over the phone. I know him well. He didn't leave your wedding reception until he has finished his beer. And he didn't leave his recliner until he finished his beer this time. When he did, I watched him rise from his chair and stumble towards the garage door in the back of the kitchen. From the bush, I hear his engine turn over. I hear his music start up. I watch where the bottom edge of the garage door hits the concrete of your driveway. It doesn't raise, and he doesn't make an effort to raise it. His music or his engine doesn't stop blaring, and I start to smell car exhaust.
        I dart from the bush and use the shadows to get to the playground two blocks from your house where I parked my car. It's a busy playground, other sedans just like mine are crammed into the parking lot, dozens of family's watching a kid's soccer game. I drive quickly to my friend Janelle's house a few miles away. There really was a baby shower I needed to go to, I even bought her a customized Bouncy Seat for her new son coming into the world. I spend over an hour there and hit the supermarket on my way home, picking up Aven's birthday cake for his party tomorrow. I'm grateful that him and Miri are both asleep when I get home - one of them had done the dishes. You raised good kids.
        The cops came after Aven's party, about twenty minutes after I gave them both money to go see a movie with some friends. You told them that the garage door had been having problems, and that you both used unisom to sleep sometimes - having two pre-teens was stressful after all. The call did come from my cell phone, but that was because you didn't have one, and land lines were a waste of money - it was the only phone in the house. In your medicated stupor, you got guilty and wanted to reconcile, you waited on him for a few hours until you took another dosage and passed out for the night. No, you didn't call him today because you just assume he was being an asshole as usual, trying to teach you a lesson on waiting on people. And you were distracted, it was your only son's birthday, so much had to get done so it was a decent one. The cops totally believed it. While they were out at the movies, we went to identify his body. The medication didn't give you much of a leash to express any sadness, but you cried quietly in the hallways while we waited for the administrator to come bring you some papers to sign.
        I was thinking about eating the rest of Aven's birthday cake. You went back to sleep, after telling me that you loved me and that you didn't know what you'd do without me. I shrugged, and told you that we were both good liars. I hadn't even told you what I had done to him - you just knew and went with it, completely improvising in front of the cops. You tell me that you'll tell the kids tomorrow, and take them to the funeral home. I leave the rest of Aven's cake in the fridge, it could be dessert for the next few days.
    I feel fine.