This Life of Mine (Nonfiction)

Impact

            I was eight years old the first time I discovered that I was capable of violently inflicting intentional pain. My five-year-old nephew was my hapless victim.

        I often felt more like a stand-in mother than a playmate for Garrett. I was mature and independent, so I was often left to babysit my younger nephew. I acted like a miniature adult, always reading, but Garrett wanted to play. He was full of boyish energy and juvenile rebellion and mischievous curiosity. He didn’t obey me well when I said to stop doing something, and it drove me crazy. On this day, like many others, he was poking me and tickling me and pulling my hair as boys do. Frustrated, I lashed out. I flattened my palm as hard as I could against his thigh, and a perfect tiny pink handprint bloomed on his olive skin.

        He didn’t cry. He just looked at me with wide, startled eyes like the first time a child learns that things break and people die.

            We both understood that I was broken.

            I remember pulling him to me, kissing his head, crying into his curly, messy hair, and begging his forgiveness.

            “I’m so, so sorry,” I whispered. “I didn’t mean it.”

            In a gesture I could never return, Garrett wrapped his arms around me and said, “It’s okay. I’m okay. Please don’t cry.”

***

            I remember waiting impatiently in the waiting room of the hospital on the day he was born, and I remember holding him ever-so-carefully on my lap on the day she brought him home. I sat back against the plush cushion of our couch, my legs stretched out in front of me, my feet just dangling off the edge of the seat. She placed his plump little body in my lap, and I cradled his head atop the crook of my elbow, pulling his side tight against my stomach with my too-small hand, desperately afraid he’d roll away down the slope of my thighs. His pink-tinged skin, his dusting of dark brown hair, his chubby cheeks, his stubby fingers that clutched at my long, curly hair, and his big chocolate eyes stole my heart.

        Three years separated us, and Garrett became my little brother in all the ways that mattered; from that moment, his life was inextricably bound with my own.

***

            My sister Jeanna was always the one to take me and my nephew fun places. My parents were older when they had me and thought they were finished raising children. But my sister was young, with two kids of her own; I showed up after the first and before the second. Though the oldest of her children lived with his father, she and her youngest child, Garrett, lived with my parents and me. She took on the role of a second mother, always carting Garrett and me around to the park in Cedartown with the big horizontal tire swings, to The Jumping Gym in Rome with the plastic-ball pit and the frozen coke, and to matinees at the Triple Martin Theater to see the latest Disney or Marvel movie.

            I remember one of these glorious days spent at The Jumping Gym. Jeanna sat on one of the benches along the far wall provided for parents. Garrett and I romped through the plastic tunnels that smelled of sweat and heat and sugar left by sticky hands. I chased him up the rope wall, down the curling slides, across the pit of plastic air-filled balls to the trampoline that waved and contorted with the pounding weight of too many bouncy children. Our hair stuck to our faces and our laughter echoed through the plastic jungle as I clutched at your t-shirt, frustrated that your shorter legs could carry you so much faster than my fumbling steps.

            When our legs disintegrated to jelly and we couldn’t walk across the spongy floor without feeling as though we were still bouncing, Jeanna called us over to the refreshments counter and bought us frozen cokes. The cups filled both of our hands and turned our fingers red with the cold. We sipped until the coke flavor had been drained from the icy sludge, and then we used the spoon end of the straw to dig out the parts of the ice that looked dark enough that they might still have a bit of coke left.