and patted my arm.
“How was practice?” She looked me over, eyes catching on the dried blood on my knees. “You’re bleeding. Did you fall?”
“Yeah. This entire week has been shit.”
“Language, Larken,” she warned, unable to keep the exhaustion from her voice.
Well, it was. She couldn’t even argue differently.
“I love you, Mom. It’ll be okay. You’ll find something you love.”
“I hope you’re right.”
“I’m going to go shower.” I trudged upstairs.
“I have homework,” Kes said, following me up to our bedrooms. He ducked inside mine and healed my palms and knees. “Wear Band-Aids in case she notices.”
Before Kes even left my room my cuts were gone, as was the stinging, but I wasn’t sure I’d ever get used to the feeling of being healed. Of my body being injured one minute and repaired the next. Not that it didn’t come in handy like it had this evening. Without Kes, Mom would be worrying about unemployment and a pile of medical bills. Broken bones required a lot of attention.
So, despite the twinge of guilt that always rose when I thought it, I was glad Kes had come into our lives.
I learned that there was much more to this world than what met the eye at the ripe age of ten, when my fraternal twin brother disappeared and no one noticed but me.
Kestrel collapsed at school during recess. A ring of children quickly formed around him on the playground, while others screamed and ran for the nearest supervising teacher. A classmate of ours saw him falter and raced to get me from where I swung on the monkey bars.
I ran faster than I ever had to get to him, but it wasn’t fast enough to help him. He wasn’t breathing when I fell to my knees and begged the teachers to help him, to do something, anything. They did the only thing they could. They called 9-1-1 and ushered the children inside so they wouldn’t bear witness to the tragedy unfolding before us all.
I refused to budge, staying as close as I could to my brother.
Less than five minutes later, an ambulance screeched to a stop in front of the school. We heard its siren across town, getting louder as it rushed through the cross-hatched streets with its lights flashing. The paramedics quickly assessed him and then started CPR. Breaths alternated with chest compressions. For several long minutes, they tried. But exhaustion set in and nothing seemed to work.
One pushed on his chest so hard, one of his ribs cracked.
I’ll never forget the splintering sound.
But no matter how much air they forced into his lungs, my brother, who looked so much like me, never stirred. Never took another breath.
His chest was still.
So terrifyingly still.
It was all I could stare at as he lay there.
My teacher held me as they lifted him onto a gurney and loaded him into the ambulance, and then the sirens blared as Kestrel was whisked away. Dad picked me up and we met Mom at the hospital, arriving just in time for them to usher us into a small, private room where a weary doctor stepped in. He said he was sorry, but there was nothing they could do to revive him. Kestrel had died before he even arrived at the hospital; he had likely died the instant he collapsed on the playground.
Another sound I’ll never forget? My mother’s wail. It sounded like she’d been cleaved in two.
Dad’s shoulders shook as he held her and I remember sitting in a cushioned chair stunned and unable to wrap my ten-year-old mind around what the doctor said. My brother couldn’t possibly have died on the playground. This couldn’t happen. It just couldn’t.
And yet I’d seen him lying there, his chest unmoving and broken.
Then, what felt like hours later, after my tears stopped and our mother’s wails had turned to soft hiccoughs and sobs, my father sat down next to me, hugging me to his side, and a miracle happened… Kestrel began to breathe. His heartbeat returned. He was alive, and not only that, he was perfectly healthy. He was thriving. It was nothing short of a miracle and beyond anything anyone at the hospital had ever witnessed.
Upon hearing the news, Mom bawled. My strong-as-steel dad held her and cried along with her, and my tears started up again because I couldn’t fathom how it was possible.
I saw him lying there. I heard them break his body.
I heard the sadness in the nurse’s voice when she offered to reach out to the chaplain