Things That Should Stay Buried - Casey L. Bond Page 0,4
for us.
I listened mutely as the doctor struggled to find words to compassionately break the news no parent, no sister, wanted to hear.
But he was alive, they said. And the three of us cried again.
The tears we shed after the miraculous recovery weren’t those of grief, but unbridled relief.
Only, Kestrel did die that afternoon and it wasn’t him who returned to his body.
Something else did.
I knew it the moment I walked into his hospital room. As the nurses and doctors buzzed around, observing him and checking his vitals, celebrating the miracle of his resurrection, he observed me.
Kestrel was quiet. Too quiet. And no one noticed or wondered why.
With corn silk hair and silver-blue eyes, my brother looked like a cherub, but from birth had acted like an absolute demon. Kestrel was always sick, and he used that excuse to get out of everything from trouble to homework.
Throughout our childhood, he was always suffering from some malady. The flu, asthma, pneumonia, stomach virus, unexplained fevers. Yet no pediatrician could explain why he was ill so often. Mom had sought opinion after opinion; a laundry list of specialists ran every test they could think of, even for the most obscure diseases and ailments. According to them, his immune system wasn’t to blame. Since there was no medical explanation, they brushed it off as bad luck and the result of being exposed to germs at school.
Beyond his random mild illnesses and even on the best of his days, Kestrel was sensitive. Things bothered him. He didn’t like food or drink that was too hot or too cold. He hated to have his arms covered, so he lived in tank tops, refusing to wear jackets even in the dead of winter. He slept with four specific stuffed animals. God help us if one of them was misplaced. He would rage and cry and tear the house apart at the seams to find it, and we would help him just so he would stop screaming.
He hated it when anyone spoke in the car and insisted on taking his shower precisely at seven p.m., or else he refused to take one at all. He hated the dark and demanded that every light in the house between his room and Mom and Dad’s blaze all day and night.
I would close my door to drown myself in darkness and escape the incessant light so I could rest. It drove him crazy that I didn’t give in to everything he wanted.
I can honestly say that my brother hated me, but it wasn’t something he learned over time. He hated me from the moment we were born. As toddlers, if I walked into the room he was in, he wailed until I left it. As a young boy, he threw rocks at me until I ran inside. He tried to shove me down the stairs a few times. That ended when I threw his favorite blanket in the fireplace and watched it burn. I got in trouble, of course, but it was worth it. He didn’t try to break my neck again.
The night before he died, Dad called us downstairs for dinner.
Kestrel was already seated in his spot in the corner of the nook when I sat across from him. Without doing anything more than sitting down to eat with the family, he looked at me and told me he hated me. They were the first words he’d directly spoken to me in months, and they were the last he would ever say to me.
Mom scolded him and told him that it wasn’t true, but he looked me in the eye, a promise lingering inside their icy depths that said it was. I never even figured out what prompted it – if anything did. Kestrel didn’t need a reason to hate me. He just did. And that was that.
For my part, I didn’t hate Kestrel. I didn’t understand him, but I knew the moment I saw him lying lifeless on the ground that I loved him.
I would’ve taken his place if I could have, but that wasn’t the hand we were dealt.
Things were drastically different after Kes came home, wearing my brother’s skin. The passionate hatred Kestrel held for me evaporated like water on the road after a summer afternoon storm. I began calling him Kes, aloud and in my mind. He wasn’t Kestrel, no matter how often our mother said his name. No matter how closely the impostor looked like him.