Only Child

I have three siblings, but I am an only child. People are always surprised to hear about them, the three curious souls who grew up alongside me and are now nowhere to be seen. Perhaps, people are more surprised to hear I’m the youngest of the four, and the first to have a child of my own. If my older brother and his wife had been more careful, I may have been the only one brave enough to pursue parenthood; though, that’s not to say we’re not grateful. I do love my nephew, from a distance.

Distance, that’s the word. That’s what stands between all of us. It is probably what stood between us all along. And if I’m being honest, I don’t remember much about what happened to make things how they are now. How had we, the rotting apples, all fallen so far from our withered, leaning tree? I have some idea, but it’s blurry. One of my brothers, the younger one, always tell me that I remember things wrong, that I make up things that happened to me, that what I say means nothing. This is usually his response to me tattling on him, but he says it enough that I start to believe it.

I remember bits and pieces. More feelings than actual images; more like a tune stuck in your head you can’t quite put your finger on. It buzzes in your ear continuously all day long, like an annoying bug you learn to ignore.

So, when someone tells me to write from memory, it can only ever be an approximation, told in glimpses, of what I think happened (but please don’t tell my brother I’m claiming it to be true).

I remember the linen closet at the end of the hallway. The carpet feeds in through the door, and I am there, curled up into a ball, squished between the bottom shelf and the floor. It’s dark, and I’m scared, but it’s only for a little while, so I try to be brave. Weren’t we playing hide-and-seek? Weren’t they coming back for me? Or am I hiding from them, seeking safety in a dark closet, hoping they won’t find me? In my dream, it is never clear.

I remember my life depending on a star. If I couldn’t draw one, I’d be alone, stuck outside of my brothers’ room, while they listen to Red Hot Chili Peppers and laugh at how desperately I want to be with them. “You can’t draw the one with the lines in the middle. It has to be just the outline. And don’t ask Mom for help.” Of course, this only gives me the idea, so I find her on the couch, on the phone or occupied with something else. She draws one for me dismissively, and when I present it to my brothers, they get angry and snicker before I eventually declare defeat and go off on my own.

My older brother is a quiet one, but he yells in my face on the drive home from the store. I have a very minor speech impediment at this age that makes me say the words “girl” and “pearl” funny. “Stop saying it like that! It’s girl, not gull!” I don’t think I’ve ever heard him be so loud, and it scares the childish accent right out of me. I never say the words wrong again.

At some point, my parents read a story I wrote about a sister who poisons her brother, whispering into his ear something about payback. It’s fiction, of course, but my parents know who’s in the casket. “Was any of it true?” my mother asks; she’s referring to the tape recorder the brother slips under his sister’s pillow when she’s eight or nine, threatening to kill her. Still, to this day, I hear that voice a lot. There is so much conviction, so much anger, I am convinced I might not wake in the morning. The next week, I tell my mom I’m ready for my own room and move downstairs, paint it purple, and hope I’ll be able to hear my brother if he comes for me in the middle of the night. I’ll never kill my brother, but I often think about the AR-15 displayed in his apartment and wonder who will.

The funny thing is my parents claim to have had me to “even things out,” so my younger brother could have a “friend.” Logically, this makes sense, since my sister, the oldest, and my older brother are fifteen months apart, while the boys have about three years between them. Twenty months after my younger brother comes along, I come along, but to this day, my parents can’t agree why.

“She was a surprise,” my mother tells my father.

“No, she wasn’t. We had her so he wouldn’t be alone,” my father insists.

I watch them argue this from my hospital bed while I wait for my own child to come into the world. Truth, then, is not concrete. I am not the only one dipping in and out of reality like a dream, plucking the string of time and hitting the right note.

I tell them about the time they left me behind and went to Costco. I am there, waiting on the rock beside our driveway, staring down the street. I know they’ll come back, and they do, but my father is plucking a different string, hearing the same song in a different key: “That’s not what happened. We never left you.”

I’m still waiting there when he tells me, “This is what really happened: we shut the front door on you when we were loading the groceries inside. You knocked on it, and when I opened it, you put your hands on your hips and said, ‘If you didn’t want me, then why did you have me?’” He laughs, proud that, even at just four-years-old, I can already see what’s really going on.

So, I go ahead, and I bring my daughter into the world. I’m twenty-four, because I can’t wait any longer to see what this is going to be like. Will parenthood be like how I hear it, playing with dolls alone in my bedroom, or will it sing some other unmanageable melody? I soon find out it's the latter, and when my daughter doesn’t sleep, when she doesn’t stop crying, I ask my mother, “Tell me your story. What was it like for you?” Help me.

She looks at me with a puzzled glare, like, how should I know? But she says, “Oh, I was so depressed, I don’t remember anything. I used to just lock myself in my bedroom and let you guys figure it out.”

Another time, on Instagram, I see a post: “Study Finds Siblings Have More Influence on Child Development than Parents.” Maybe fake news, maybe scientifically unsound, but it’s the truth. I know this because I remember. I remember how loudly I am told to be quiet, to never speak, that my voice doesn’t matter. And when I become an adult, the idea that someone might actually want to hear what I have to say is foreign and terrifying. I mumble. I speak quietly. I am asked to repeat myself several times, to speak up. I listen to how many times I say “um” when I speak, like spacers, habitually built-in breaks for my brothers to berate me.

Where is my sister, you wonder? She is six years beyond me, or she is six feet below. I wear her clothes when they don’t fit her anymore, and she braids my hair while we watch TV in her room. If she yells at me, she apologizes, and I hear that voice sometimes, too. One day, she goes on Myspace and meets a boy, and soon my father is tracking her car and kicking her out of the house. We plan to be friends when we are older. She promises to pick me up in her car, take me to the nail salon, and we’ll buy two-piece bathing suits together; but she cancels after my father reveals her secret: a ten-year affair with heroin. I don’t think we can hangout anymore.

At my daughter’s first birthday party, someone asks me, “When are you going to have another?”

Someone else grips my arm, eyes bulging out of their sockets: “You can’t just have one!”

Years later, I hear a mom of three say, “It is really hard, but you know, I’m giving them the best gift of all, the gift of siblings.”

I wonder what bedroom she must be locking herself in the middle of the day.

If you believe in them, I pull up my birth chart one day while my daughter sleeps. My chiron, or deep wound, is family. It tells me it would be a mistake for me to become a mother. It tells me I might try to correct my wound by having too many children and self-destructing. I'm too scared to tell my husband this, but he goes ahead and has a vasectomy before he turns thirty anyways; something about how his sister pushed him into a rose bush and made him play "puppy" for too long when he was little, and he never got over it.

My daughter sometimes asks where her siblings are, more than she asks about her uncles and her aunt. I become close with the other single-child parents at her school, and thank the woman who assured me, “Of course, it’s okay to just have one.”

I learn, then, it is okay to not be what others tell you to be, that their reality is not yours, their melody is different. I learn then to believe in birth charts. I find myself obsessing over other people's chirons. I have to know how they will ruin their children, so I won't feel so bad that I am ruining mine just by being myself.

At Christmas, my mother requests that we all be there, even my sister. She is missing what she missed when we were younger. I call her on Thanksgiving, and my brother is yelling, “You suck!” in the background. We’re in our thirties, when will this stop? I lie on the floor for the rest of the day, weighing the future against my past. The decision – who to disappoint, my mother or my daughter (who will only have a fraction of me if we go) – is paralyzing. Inevitably, we cancel the December trip because I can’t stop the urge to cry for several days.

When I see my mother next, I can’t fault her for being angry. She doesn’t understand. She isn’t there, and she wants me to stop being there, too. I try to explain: “I don’t know them, Mom. I don’t know them, and it makes me anxious.”

My mother, a Marriage and Family Therapist of all things, blames me for our estrangement: “Well, it takes time to get to know people.”

I have pictures of all that time, a family of six whose ashes are now spread across this country, playing silent tag with each other, occasionally checking to see if some of us are still breathing. My daughter understands this version of siblings, like phantom fingers in the wind, stinging your cheek every once in a while. Now and again, she pretends to have siblings. She tells me she is Harry Potter’s sister, Hermione’s and Ron’s, too. Other times, she creates someone new, a sister named Loveheart or Lucy or Paloma; I hear her talking in her room, saying sweet things, playing nicely, getting along. When I ask her who she’s talking to, she giggles, as if she’s been caught doing something wrong. She tells me, “Nobody!” and I have a strange sense she is protecting me from seeing her with something I never had.