by Susan St. Aubin
(07/29/09)

In all those years we were apart, I remembered you as a lover, the salt taste of your cock, an uncut rarity, in my mouth, my tongue sliding the skin up and down over its head.

You were once my brother, except we both knew you weren't. You were eight years old when you came to our suburban house one summer night at dinner time with everything you owned in a Sears shopping bag -- a few faded T-shirts and pants, a new Catholic School uniform, and a worn paper bag of marbles. Your jeans had holes in the knees; you plucked at the frayed sleeves of your brown corduroy jacket. Your dark hair fell over your eyes.

When you sat down to eat, you picked up a spoon. I thought you didn't know what a fork was for, but later you told me you'd been afraid you'd be tempted to defend yourself if you picked up a fork or a knife -- if I laughed, you'd throw the knife at me; if my father tried to hit you, you'd stick a fork in his eye. You'd done such things before. You had a reputation, but my father liked a challenge. He taught high school math in Detroit, and found life on the cusp of danger to be a refuge from boredom.

I was seven then, and had just cut off my long blond braids with my mother's sewing scissors. She agreed with my father that it was time I had a sibling, an older brother, someone who would stop me from becoming a little tyrant. Already I was telling my mother, not asking, what clothes I would wear to school. I ordered my father to make room in the garage for my two doll houses, full of miniature people and furniture he'd carved, because I was running out of space in my bedroom. I heard them use the word "spoiled." I heard my father say he knew of a boy who needed a home. They would send us both to Catholic School, where the required uniform would squash my desire for strawberry red jumpers or orange blouses. I was rotten.

You wouldn't play with me. Instead, you fondled your marbles by the hour, dumping them on your bed in groups by size and color.

"Give him time," my father, now our father, said. "He hasn't had an easy life."

You wouldn't call him "Dad" as he asked. You couldn't get beyond Mr. and Mrs. Powell. Me you ignored.

"Hey, pass me the salt," you'd say at dinner.

"Hey, goodnight," you'd say at bedtime when my mother told him that in our family, we said goodnight to each other before bed, and good morning when we got up.

"My name's not Hey," I told you. "Say Nancy. Say Nan."

But you wouldn't obey me. Instead, you threatened to stab the teddy bears on my bed, tear the pictures out of my books, and pull the arms off my dolls.

You poured gasoline on one of my doll houses in the garage while I was playing with it. I leaped back when you tossed a match on the roof. The little dolls, their beds, the blankets and rugs my mother had knit, all went up in flames. Then the wall behind it ignited, burning our camping tent, our sleeping bags, and melting the plastic picnic plates. My heart pounded and my knees felt weak. It was worth the loss to see that awesome fire.

We ran when we heard the sirens.

"Let's burn my other one later," I said.

You seemed excited, even proud, that I wasn't upset. "All right, Nan," you said.

Our father explained that you were a very disturbed little boy but it wasn't your fault, so we should be understanding. He took you to a therapist, someone for you to talk to, he said. Someone who would understand. He wanted you to be normal; He wanted you to be his son. I think my mother had doubts, but she kept quiet.

I got you to help me carry the remaining doll house out to a far corner of the yard. Together we tied the mother and father dolls to their bed. Then I put the little boy doll on top of the little girl doll in her bed and squirted barbeque lighter fluid all over them, and the roof of the house. My heart quivering, I lit the match this time and the whole house went up with a thump that seemed to echo from between my legs all the way through the top of my head.

You told me we should never do this again. You said we should bury the ashes so my parents would never know. Your therapist was teaching you to be normal. When we heard fire engines, we'd follow them on our bikes, and if there were flames, we'd hold hands and watch. But we never set fires again.

The summer I was twelve and you were thirteen, we built a fort on top of the doll house's grave. Dad -- you called him Dad now that your adoption was final -- gave us some extra wood he no longer needed, and some cement to mix up for a floor. You were called Michael now, the name you came with relegated to the middle: Michael Joseph Powell. We wrote our initials in the wet concrete: MJP N5P like a license plate. To be mysterious, I'd made the S like a 5 so I'd be Nancy Five Powell instead of plain Nancy Sharon. Beneath that, we wrote, Our House. Keep Out. You already had a tree fort with the neighborhood boys, so this place was just for us. As a final touch, you took out your bag of marbles and pushed them one by one into the wet cement around the perimeter of the floor.

When we were done with the floor, we were covered with blobs of hardening concrete we picked off each other's skin. You dug some out of my navel as carefully as you could, but it stung and bled a little so you licked it with your tongue.

"Saliva is like an antibiotic," you told me. "When cats and dogs lick their wounds, they don't get infected."

You kissed my navel, then told me to get to work building the walls. When the walls were up, Dad helped us put on a roof covered in tar paper, and Mom hung an old curtain in the doorway. Now we had a private den where we could read comic books and draw pictures of buildings in flame, which we carefully burned in an old hibachi. You told me it wasn't really setting fires to burn things in a barbeque grill. You hugged me when the flames leapt up, and told me to bury the ashes in the garden when it was over. "To help the plants grow," you explained.

When you graduated from St. Anne's elementary and entered the local public high school, you started to work around the neighborhood on weekends and afternoons, mowing lawns, weeding and planting gardens. Everyone said you had a way with flowers, a real green thumb, but I still saw your thumbs gray with the ashes we used to spread around our yard. You bought yourself a black leather jacket, grew your hair long, and abandoned our fort. In spite of the way you continued to transform the neighbors' yards, people whispered that you were headed for trouble in that jacket. Now you were a tough guy called Mike. I smiled when Dad started to talk to you about college, about your future, while you gazed at the wall behind him.

While you gardened, I spent lonely afternoons in our old fort reading and drawing pictures of fires I burned alone in the hibachi. On the walls I made large charcoal drawings for you: a boy kissing a girl whose hair was bursting into flame, and a woman with a lighted candle sliding from between her thighs. I hoped you'd find my personal icons.

I know you were the one who burned our fort with a fire so fierce the marbles melted into the concrete. Our parents, believing you were beyond such acts of destruction, suspected a neighbor boy who was known to have set fires before and had even scorched a cat's tail.

"Sick pictures, Nan," you muttered to me with a smirk. "Good thing Dad never found them."

I was pleased you saw them and saved me.

When I was a freshman, you asked me to your sophomore dance.

"Who's sick now?" I said to hide my excitement. "We can't date, you're my brother."

I knew this wasn't true, so I didn't mind your scornful laugh.

"Can he invite me to a dance?" I asked Dad.

"Of course not," he said. "Who goes to a dance with their brother?"

"Anyway, you're too young to date," Mom chimed in.

Once at school you grabbed me in the hall, pressed my back into the lockers, and kissed me quick on the mouth, your tongue slivering in and out. Everyone saw but nobody noticed. You were my brother.

When did the kissing start? When we were little, thunder was the only thing that scared me. I'd climb into your bed at night and you'd hold me until I was calm, kissing the tears that ran down my face, but that was nothing. You kissed my navel that time we were building our fort, but that was just to make it feel better after you picked out the cement. The hand-holding, the hugging at fires? That was just excitement.

Then in high school, when Mom and Dad were out for the evening, a summer storm might blow in, and you'd come to my bed asking if I was still scared. I wasn't but I let you in anyway. You'd kiss me on the mouth, your hard knees and elbows pressed against me. You moved your hips on my leg while sucking on my neck, and sighed when your hips went still.

From listening to the girls who smoked in the bathroom at school, I knew the words for that solid piece between your legs that went limp when you were still: Dick. Prick. Cock. Thing. I knew why your pajamas were sticky wet in front when you left my bed. I knew what girls did on dates in cars:

"I pulled his thing and it squirted all over my good velvet dress. I poured white wine on it to take out the stain, but then I had to tell my mother I'd been drinking."

They all laughed, coughing from the smoke of their cigarettes. Grounded for two weeks for drinking because a guy's sperm on a dress was far more dangerous than alcohol. What would the punishment have been for such a stain?

I learned from them. One sunny afternoon when our parents were at work, I went into your room and lay beside you on your bed. I unbuttoned your Levis and reached in, searching for something hard, and in a second, there it was, poking through the slit of your blue boxers. I moved my fingers up and down the shaft like the girls said they did, then took your thing in my mouth and drank you down so you wouldn't stain me. We never drank wine in the afternoon, just each other. You told me I'd never get pregnant that way.

In spite of your bad boy reputation, I never heard the girls in the bathroom say anything about you, even when I hid in the stalls so they wouldn't know I was there. They bragged about other boys, friends of yours, but never you. Still, nice girls wouldn't talk to you and boys with crew cuts and loafers wouldn't hang out with you.

I was the nice girl everyone called poor Nancy. "How embarrassing it must be to have a brother like him," they said. Nobody knew you weren't my brother. Nobody knew anything. We never went anywhere together and rarely spoke at school, just a nod in the hall, a brother and sister reluctantly acknowledging each other's existence.

How did it end? You graduated. You didn't want to go to college so you joined the Navy instead. You were sent to Vietnam. You disappeared: Perhaps dead, perhaps taken prisoner. No one knew. Dad died, distraught at not-knowing, his heart attacking him like an enemy. Mom seemed relieved. She said you'd always made her nervous. She was glad she'd never actually had a son, glad that strange little boy had really been a stranger.

"Imagine giving birth to someone like him," she said. "I know he always set fires; I know he burned down your fort, even if your father denied it. I know our yard is filled with buried ashes. We're just lucky he didn't burn our house down."

I bit my tongue, remembering the taste of yours. We were close enough for me to know you were still somewhere in the world. My life after you left was typical: I went away to the University of Michigan; demonstrated against the war, bragging that I'd lost my brother in Vietnam; graduated, then moved to San Francisco after my mother died, got married, had two children, got divorced, taught third grade. All those years I was bored, missing you.

After my children grew up and left home, a postcard came from Sweden: "I've been watching you." It wasn't signed, but I knew it was from you, and waited for the next one.

What came wasn't a card, but you at my door, bald, gray-bearded, thick through the middle, but still wearing jeans and a black leather motorcycle jacket. Our mouths found each other without a word, our clothes dissolved, and for the first time, your cock was probing deep inside me to force our lives back to the surface. I felt your throb and felt my pulsing answer; I screamed, I cried, there was no longer any reason to hide.

"Where were you all those years?" I asked.

"Here," you said. "Off and on. I was a deserter, but I kept track of you from underground."

Oh, heartless sailor. You married a woman in Sweden, had a son, deserted again, traveled with the aid of various false passports, stood on the corner watching my house, once gave my hitch-hiking son a ride to school.

"You picked him up?" My heart pounded at the outrageousness of you, the most beloved and dangerous man in my life, driving my child.

With a smile you hung your head in a perfect imitation of shame. "Yes. I confess. But I did warn him how dangerous it could be to hitch rides with strange men."

We were naked on my couch, your hand on my breast.

"I left to find out who I was," you told me. "I had to be sure I wasn't your brother."

"How could you doubt that? You remember coming to our house."

"I always felt like I was returning, what with Dad saying, 'Welcome home," and Mom acting as though I'd come back from the dead, like someone she was afraid to see again. I had to leave. And to make Mike Powell finally disappear, I had to jump ship, make my way to Australia, to South Africa, to Sweden. With side trips to check on you."

A kiss deep and wet, your hand on my cunt, a finger slipping in me.

"I was a fugitive and still could be, though I think there's amnesty for that old war. Now that we've got a new one going, previous desertions no longer matter."

"And your wife in Sweden?"

"We stay in touch. She divorced me and married again. I took our son to live with my mother in Brooklyn when he was in high school. He's back in Sweden now, working for some Internet company, doing something I don't even want to understand."

"You birth mother?"

"Oh, yes, I found her. The underground world has resources you couldn't imagine. How do you think I was able to travel the world and keep track of you? I found my real birth certificate, too, so all my papers say Joseph Guzman, perfectly legal. Michael Powell is gone. Did you know my mother's Mexican? She was crazy in her youth; my father could have been any of a number of people so I gave up looking for him." You winked at me. "She's from Detroit, says our Dad was her math teacher, the first year he taught. She's never hinted at a closer relationship, but maybe she's just not saying. She often says how glad she is that I ended up with him. Perhaps we can never be sure."

Your finger moved faster in me, your thumb pulsing my clit, until I growled deep in my throat while my cunt quivered, loving the danger of us, together again.

"I never came with my husband," I whispered. "Not with anyone but you."

"Not even with yourself?"

"Well...only when thinking of you."

Smack! The slap of your hand on my butt. "Liar," you whispered. "Pants on fire." Then you said, "Remember my marbles? My mother told me she gave them to me when I was three, when I went to my first foster home. Said they'd been my father's. Your Dad said he'd had some just like them when he was a boy."

"Oh, what kid didn't have marbles?"

"You didn't. He didn't, anymore. Only I had them."

We went out to dinner. When we came back, flames were licking from the windows of my house while sirens cut through the night. I felt the old excitement in my shaking knees, my trembling hands as I grabbed your leather jacket, pulling on the epaulets. When we'd left, you'd gone back inside to get your cigarettes, leaving me on the front porch. Now my life was going up in smoke, the children's baby pictures, clothes, furniture, discarded toys and sports equipment, the golf clubs and wine rack my ex-husband never came back for. I jumped up and down, hugging you like a mad woman.

"We need a fresh start," you said.

We fucked that night on the singed living room carpet, breathing a healing smoke deep into our lungs. The next day I rescued what I could: one untouched photo album filled with pictures of us as children, the last few pages devoted to pictures of my children; a few smoky books; some dishes, my mother's silverware, the cracked remnants of my grandmother's tea set. I couldn't remember what else I might want. You were already planning our new house, taking measurements and deciding which walls, what wood might still be good.

"We're saved," you said as we collapsed on a chaise lounge in the back yard, your cock inside me like a peg, grounding me as I rode you home.

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