When Ethan was three, he spent two nights in the hospital with a respiratory infection that got scary for about thirty-six hours. He was completely fine. He grew up playing three sports and never so much as wheezed again. But those two nights became the founding myth of our family. Ethan needs. Ethan needs attention. Ethan needs encouragement. Ethan needs one-on-one time.
I was the other kid, the quiet one, the one who read at the dinner table until she learned not to. Who kept movie stubs and birthday cards in a shoe box under her bed, who noticed things and wrote them down because noticing was the only thing nobody could take off her plate and hand to Ethan.
Keep that shoe box in mind. It matters later.
The first June it happened, I was eight. Mom dragged the blue suitcase with the broken wheel out of the hall closet and packed it before my last day of second grade. My clothes folded in neat stacks like she was doing me a favor. Dad printed one plane ticket, mine. Destination: Aunt Linda’s house in Western Colorado. Then the three of them left for Disney World.I remember standing at gate C at Phoenix Sky Harbor with a plastic sleeve hanging around my neck, big block letters: unaccompanied minor. A flight attendant with kind eyes held my hand down the jet bridge and told me how brave I was. I remember thinking that was a strange thing to say because nobody had asked me to be brave. Nobody had asked me anything.
The excuse that first year almost made sense. Ethan had been sick that spring, an ear infection thing, two doctor visits, nothing serious, but mom said it in the hospital voice.
“Your brother needs one-on-one family time,” she told me, smoothing a shirt into the suitcase. “Just this once, you understand.”One-on-one with both parents. I was eight and even I could count to three. But I understood, or I performed understanding, which in my house was the same thing.
And Aunt Linda’s ranch was genuinely wonderful. That has to be said because Linda is the reason I came out of this whole thing a person instead of a crater. She hung my report cards on her refrigerator like they were art. She let me name the barn cats. That first summer, she found me crying behind the hay shed on the Fourth of July. And she took my face in both of her hands and said the sentence she would say to me every single summer for nine years.
“None of this is your fault, baby.”
I flew home in August to a snow globe of Cinderella’s castle, and a story about how Ethan cried when they left the park. There was a new magnet on our fridge. There would be a new magnet every year, a whole growing museum of places I had never been, hanging on a fridge that never once held a single one of my drawings.
I told myself it was one time, a special thing for Ethan. I told myself that for exactly one year.
