One For All, All For One

ONE FOR ALL, AND ALL FOR ONE

“I can’t believe you believed that!” Sam snorted. “Even I knew it wasn’t true, and I’m the youngest.”

Aaron looked at his brother, eyebrows furrowed.

“How the hell was I supposed to know that you guys were liars?”

Dev started to laugh. “Because we’re triplets, you moron. Didn’t you notice that we all look exactly alike?”

“Not when I was seven, I didn’t.”

“Dude!” said Dev, “Did you really think that Mom and Dad wanted another kid because having two at once wasn’t enough?

Dev and Sam started to laugh again.

“I was seven!” said Aaron. “And you guys are dicks!”

*****

“What do you mean, I’m adopted?” asked Aaron, his eyes wide.

Sam looked at him. “When Mom and Dad were leaving the hospital with me and Dev, the nurses asked if they would take you home because you didn’t have any parents. They said okay because they felt sorry for you.”

Arron could feel the tears welling up in his eyes.

“Yeah, the nurse said you had the same birthday as us, so it was okay.”

“But who are my parents?” whispered Aaron.

Sam and Dev looked at each other. 

“You don’t have parents. You were left at the hospital. No one knows who your parents are. They asked everybody, but no one knew. It was very sad.” Sam tried to look sad.

“That’s right,” said Dev, “But you can’t tell Mom and Dad that you know, because then they’ll have to give you back, and you’ll have to live in an orphanage, because you don’t have any parents.”

Aaron was crying now, hot tears sliding down his cheeks. He sat on the ground and put his head between his legs and sobbed.

He didn’t want to be adopted, he wanted to be a real part of the family, not an extra part.  

His mother found him still crying twenty minutes later after she asked Sam and Dev where Aaron was.  

“Aaron, sweetheart, what’s the matter?” She knelt down beside him and rubbed his back.

“Nothing.”

“Then why are you crying?”

“I can’t tell you, or they’ll take me away!” he bawled.

“What do you mean ‘take you away’? Who will take you away?” she asked, concerned.

Aaron had tried not to tell Mom, but she coaxed it out of him. The story poured out of him.

“Oh, sweetie, you’re not adopted. You’re our child, your Dad and me. And Devon and Sam are your real brothers. Real brothers who are in a lot of trouble right now, but still your real brothers. You’re identical triplets. There’s no way you could belong to anyone but us. Come-on, I’ll show you your birth certificate, and we can look at all the baby pictures.”

*****

“Man,” said Sam. “Did we ever get in trouble. Wow. I still remember it. I don’t think Mom had ever been that mad at us. And Dad, too.”

“Yeah,” said Dev. “She made us apologize to you.”

“She should have sent you to military school,” said Aaron. “Then I would have been an only child.”  

He sighed.

Dev shrugged his shoulders. “You were born first so you were an only child for, what, eighteen minutes?

“That’s right,” said Aaron. “I look back on that day, often, wondering what it would have been like growing up without you two jokers making my life miserable.” He chuckled.

“You would have missed us,” said Sam.

“You can’t miss what you don’t have,” said Aaron.

“Ha. Ha. Ha,” said Sam. “Besides, you weren’t the only one who got punked. Do you remember when we were building that tree fort we had in the back forest? You took the ladder away, and left me there? What were we? Ten? You guys went in for dinner, and left me there, stranded in the tree, until Dad came to get me.”

*****

Summer was in full swing, and the boys were pretty much free-range ten-year-olds. Their parents, who were school teachers, and home for the summer, urged them to go out and play, so they did.

Over the last few weeks they had been swiping old pieces of wood, tools, and nails, because they were building a fort. Not just any fort, a tree fort. They raided the garage and back shed and found old pieces of two-by-fours, pieces of posts their dad had trimmed off the fence, plywood — any scraps of wood were considered primo. There was a new subdivision being built not too far from their home, and they would ride over on their bikes looking for building scraps. Any deadfall trees they found in the forest were added to their pile of supplies. They were sure they had struck gold when they found an old, decaying lean-to farther back in the woods — it had been made of two pieces of plywood that they could use for the floor and roof.  

July was drawing to a close, and the whole family was supposed to go to their grandma’s cottage the next week, so the boys needed to finish their tree fort. They had been working on it for almost three weeks. In their eyes the fort was an architectural wonder; to anyone over the age of ten, it was a death trap.

Sam had picked out the tree, an old oak a little ways into the forest.  

“This is perfect!” he declared, looking up at the giant oak. 

It was perfect, with a spot about six feet up where three lower branches were growing out from the trunk — a perfect spot for their fort.  They had “borrowed” their dad’s big aluminum ladder so that they could climb up into the fort — it had taken all three of them to drag it back into the woods and lean it against the tree. They started with the floor — the plywood would be perfect. Only being ten, and the piece of plywood being four feet by eight feet, getting it into the tree had been difficult. One time they dropped it, and it went knifing down into the ground, just missing Dev, who fell off the bottom rung of the ladder — startled, but not hurt.  Working together they had hauled up that first piece of plywood. They were so proud — they had a fort.

After three weeks, they had a really tippy floor, some rails, and they had tried, mostly unsuccessfully, to attach the roof — the other sheet of old, warped plywood — to an upper limb, but needed to use a deadfall to hold up one side. Today was the day that they were going to attach the climbers. They had a number of short pieces of wood that they were going to hammer into the trunk of the tree so that they could climb up without using the ladder. So far their dad hadn’t realized his ladder was AWOL, but they needed to take it back before he did.  

They leaned the ladder against the edge of the plywood platform — that was the the only way get into the fort. Sam was the first up the ladder. Aaron and Dev were getting ready to climb up when Sam held the ladder away from the side of the fort.  

He declared, “This is my tree fort. It was my idea, so it’s mine.”

“No way!” said Aaron. “Not fair!”

“We all built it, so it all ours” said Dev.

“I called it. It’s mine.” Sam shook his head, looking down at his brothers. His brothers looked up at him, annoyed and a bit angry.

“Don’t be stupid, Sam,” said Aaron. “You can’t own it just because you say so.”

“Yeah,” said Dev, “It’s not yours.”

“It is so,” said Sam, holding the ladder out. “You have to have my permission to come up here. I’m the boss.”

“No way!” said Dev. He was getting mad at his stupid brother. “You are not the boss.”

“My idea, my tree fort!” Sam said. “Stamped it, black magic!”

That was what they said to make something real.

“Take-backs!” yelled Aaron.

“No take-backs!” Sam yelled back.

“Fine!” said Dev. “Then we’ll take away the ladder.”

“Yeah,” said Aaron. “The ladder’s ours. Stamped it, black magic. No take-backs!”

With that Aaron and Dev pulled the ladder away from the edge of fort floor. Only problem was that Sam was still holding on. He yelped, let go, and fell back on his butt on the floor of the fort, instead of head-first into the forest floor. The ladder crashed to the ground.

Dev and Aaron ran away, leaving the ladder where it lay, and poor Sam up in the tree. Now, the way that the boys had built the fort, there was no way out of the tree without the ladder — the plywood hung out too far from the trunk. They would have found that out when they put the wood ladder pieces up — you couldn’t get into the fort unless you cut a hole in the floor. So, Sam was stuck.  

He started to yell.

“Hey! You guys! I was kidding! We all own the fort! Come back! Let me down!”

He yelled and he yelled and he yelled. But there was no one to hear him. Aaron and Dev were already home.

Because it was summer, it was still light out when his Dad came to get him. It was only about half an hour later, but Sam was sure that he’d been up there for hours, was going to starve to death, or get eaten by bears and wolves.

He was laying back on the floor, looking up into the branches overhead, trying not to cry, when he heard footsteps in the woods. His heart started beating, sure that it was a murderer coming for him.

“Sam?” said the voice.

“Dad?” said Sam, sticking his his head over the edge of the fort, his fingers curled over the edge of the plywood.

“Hey, Buddy. I see you’ve got yourself in a bit of a bind, right now.”

“Yeah. Arron and Dev knocked the ladder down, and ran away.”

“Why’d they do that?”

“I dunno.”

“That’s not what they say, but we’ll talk about it when we get home.”

His dad had lifted the ladder up, and Sam had scampered down, never so glad to be on terra firma.

*****

“Do you remember the lecture? How we’re all we have, and we need to be nice to each other? That we can’t go abandoning each other because we’re mad?” asked Aaron.

“I do,” said Sam, looking from Aaron to Dev. “But it was still a shitty thing to do — strand me in a tree with no way to get down.”

Dev snorted and shrugged. “Maybe you should have (a) thought your strategy out a bit better. Declare yourself king after the wood climbers were attached to the tree, not before so you could have a way down. And (b) stop being a tyrant. You always wanted to be in charge of everything.”

“True,” said Aaron. “You always told us what to do. I think it was youngest child syndrome.”

They all laughed. There had been exactly forty-three minutes between the birth of Aaron and Sam.

“I loved that fort,” said Dev. “Too bad we had to tear it down.”

Aaron looked at him. “It was a death trap.”

“Yeah, but it was our death trap,” lamented Dev.

“I could have broken my neck, if I’d fallen out of it,” said Sam. He looked at Dev. “Like when you broke your arm.”

Dev unconsciously rubbed his shoulder. “Whose stupid idea was it to play roof tag?”

“Uh, yours,” said Aaron.

“That’s right!” said Sam. “What were we? Twelve? Thirteen?”

“Twelve,” said Dev. “It was right before Hallowe’en. Remember? I had a cast? Mom made me a Hulk costume with with two giant arms so no one would know I had a broken arm?”

“I remember!” said Sam. “We were all super heroes. You were the Hulk, I was Batman, and you were Superman,” he said, pointing at Aaron.

“I remember that I had to carry his candy!” said Aaron, rolling his eyes.

*****

“Okay, so do you wanna play?” asked Dev.

“It sounds like a stupid game,” said Sam.

“And if we get caught we’ll for sure be grounded. We might not even be able to go out for Hallowe’en,” said Aaron.  

“Yeah, Mom’s been all about us thinking before we do stupid things,” said Dev. “But this isn’t stupid. It’s fun.”

He looked at his brothers. “So, do you want to play roof tag, or are you chicken?”

“I’m not chicken,” said Sam. “It’s a stupid game.”

“I’ll play,” said Aaron, “but you’re it.”

“Fine,” said Sam, “I’ll play. But if we get caught, I’m telling Mom it was your stupid idea.”

“We won’t get caught,” said Dev, running towards the shed, where the same aluminum ladder was still hooked on the back wall.

They lifted it off its hooks, and leaned it against the the peak of the garage roof. It was getting dark, and the roof was in shadow when hey climbed onto the roof.

“You’re it!” yelled Sam and Aaron, and they ran to the other end of garage roof.

Now the garage was pretty big — it was a triple garage with a storage area in the loft, and their Dad’s workshop at the back. The pitch was steep enough to ensure that snow would slide off in the winter, but not too steep for three twelve-year-olds wearing sneakers.  

Dev ran after is brothers, but they were both able to evade him, over and over again. He was getting frustrated.

“That’s not fair. You guys are cheaters!” He stomped his foot.

Unfortunately, there were wet leaves on the roof, and Dev lost his balance. His foot flew up, and he fell backwards, sliding down the roof, head first on his back. Both Sam and Aaron made a grab for him. Aaron got a hold of his pant leg, which slowed him down, and Dev was able to grab the gutter before he went over the edge, slowing himself down. He was able to his legs around towards the ground. But he was still four feet above the ground, and he couldn’t hold on. As he fell, he twisted, and landed on his arm, breaking it.

Dev screamed in pain. Aaron and Sam bolted down the ladder, and ran to get their parents, who had rushed the whole family to the hospital.

After they realized that Dev was going to be okay, all three boys got another lecture from their mom.

*****

“Yup,” said Dev, looking at Sam, “It was a stupid game. Mom was right. We were idiots.”

All three men laughed.

“But we were superheroes that year!” said Aaron.

“Dude!” said Sam. “You’re still a superhero. That’s why we’re here right now.”

*****

Aaron had been riding his bike home from his summer job. He was working at the local Cineplex, and had been on the late shift. 

It was after midnight, and he was pedalling hard to get home. He could have used the car, but he wanted to get in shape for football season, so he rode. He was almost home when he saw the flames and smoke at the Dickenson place. He rode up the driveway. The house was in flames. He dropped his bike, dialled 9-1-1, then rushed into the house.  

He knew that Mrs. Dickenson and her two kids lived there — Mr. Dickenson had died the year before. He found Mrs. Dickenson first, collapsed at the foot of the stairs, and dragged her out. He went back in for the kids. He found Brent, terrified, under his bed. He dragged him out. He went back in for Matilda. He couldn’t find her. Finally, he found her in her closet, unconscious. He dragged her out last. 

He had saved the family. But, he had also inhaled far too much smoke. By the time the EMTs arrived on the scene, Aaron could barely breathe. He had damaged his lungs, irreparably. And now they were failing him. 

*****

There was a light knock on the door, and Aaron’s surgeon entered the room. Aaron looked at the doctor, expectantly, sitting up straighter in his bed.

“Good news, Gentlemen — you’re both a match for Aaron. Your lung nodes are the best match we are likely to get, ever.”

“That’s fantastic news,” said Sam.

“When do we do the surgery?” asked Dev. 

When they found out that Aaron needed a lung node transplant, Dev and Sam had volunteered without a second thought. They had both done all the pre-op testing ahead of time because they were so sure they were going to be compatible. And now, because they were a match, they would go ahead with the living-donor lobar lung transplantation.

“How about Wednesday, two days from now? I’ve booked the operating room for 9:00 a.m.”

“Let’s do this thing!” said Dev, high-fiving Sam.  

Then he looked at Aaron. “We’ve got you, bro!”

*****

Aaron’s was walking almost five miles a day, now. He was feeling a thousand percent better. The lung node transplant had been successful, and he and his brothers were healing quickly — they were young and strong. 

Sitting with his brothers in their parents’ kitchen, he felt overwhelmed with gratitude. He looked at his brothers. 

“You guys saved my life. I wouldn’t be here without you. I don’t know what to say, other than I’m really glad I wasn’t adopted, and that you really are my brothers.”