Cape May

Little Sister

With my mother and Holly gone, we found ourselves alone again.

"Hey, let's walk a little."

I needed to stretch out and move my body to try and diminish the effects of the alcohol. The moon was now up in all its glory giving the garden a soft romantic glow.

"Hey, that was pretty cool, that Mary Ann thing. Is that something you've been thinking about for a while or did you just make it up on the spot?"

She laughed, "nahh, I just made it up. It sounded real though, like it coulda happened. Didn't it."

"Which part, my doing her in mommy's bed or you blackmailing me?"

She laughed again, turned on herself and now facing me started walking backwards in front of me. She smiled. Suddenly she was fifteen again. I had to blink several times to focus.

"We were crazy weren't we Bobby. You know, I've wondered all these years, what made you do it. Like what came over you to all of a sudden do something so crazy like that."

I took a few steps in silence, then laughed nervously because although it was seventeen years ago, I remembered the moment as clear as if it was just yesterday. And I laughed because I had no precise answer. What happened was just one of those things in life that happens, and one has no reason or rhyme for it.

"Gaby, I can't really tell you what happened that day. I really had no control over what I did. I didn't wake up that morning thinking I was going to do that, nor did it cross my mind when we went to the beach. It definitely was the last thing on my mind when you punched me in the stomach."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hit you so hard, but, but I was just so angry with you."

"You mean jealous." I teased.

"Ok, jealous. You made me jealous Robert Joel, and I didn't know why. That's why I was so angry with you, cause I didn't know why, but I did know that I felt like I was competing with that fucking Patty. I don't know why."

"You had the hots for me. You wanted your own brother Gaby. How sick is that?"

"Shaddup Bobby."

"You know how beautiful you looked when you're angry Gabby? You were really looking so enticing, lying there in the sand and I gotta tell you, when you were angry, it just made you so irresistible."

"Oh, really," she smiled

"Tell me I was wrong. Tell me that I never should have done it."

"Oh Bobby, I could never tell you that."

"Perhaps I did it because I was just another stupid boy just like all the others."

"You weren't stupid Bobby. You could never be stupid. I just used to say those things to bother you. Oh my God Bobby, I must have been such a pain in your butt." She squealed bringing her hands up to cover her mouth as she realized what a nightmare she must have been to me growing up.

"Well......." I left it at that.

"Whaddyya mean well? You're supposed to say, "no Gaby, you were never a pain in my butt. You were the sweetest little sister a guy could ask for."

"If you say so." I smiled. Then added. "But I wouldn't have traded you for anything in the world."

She stopped walking. We were dangerously close.

"Really, you mean that Bobby or are you just saying that?"

She always had a way of asking that question as if she was an eternal child, with all the innocence of wanting to hear me tell her that it was all true the things I said about how much I cared for her, how she was the most beautiful girl in the world, that I would always be there to look after her. Perhaps all her teasing and making my life difficult was just her way of getting my attention so that I'd never ignore her, and she would always be the center of my life.

Seeing her there in the soft glow of the sunset, no matter how much I blinked, she became that fifteen-year old girl who so many years ago would enter my bedroom in the dark of night and ask me that same question, time after time.

A sadness crept over me as I wondered how the years had passed, and how I let them pass without my Gabby.