It was because of Alex that my own obsession with her, one that I could call my own and not his, grew, because when he watched Donna the way he did I wanted to know what it was about her, and so I watched her, too, and I watched him watching her—the way he found somewhere on her body and focused on that spot, then moved his gaze all along her height and width—and then I watched her to see where he was looking—the rhythmic back-and-forth of her hips as she washed our dishes in the sink; the roll of her shoulder under that thread- bare shirt, its wide neck opening to reveal her collarbone and her skin, almost translucent, spread thin over it; and that little red tag on the back pocket of her jeans waving at us as she scrubbed. Her socks, dirty white; her eyes in purple shadows. Sometimes she tapped her toe, sometimes she pushed her hair behind her ear with her whole palm, gracelessly, where it never stayed and she didn’t seem to notice or mind. Her eyelashes were so long that her blinking didn’t go unnoticed, and at times it appeared as if she were trying to blink away the freckle under her right eye, as if it were a spot of dirt that she sensed and flittered at. Hair back over her eye, palm up again, elbow pointed out as she sponged our plates. Alex watched her and I watched him and then I watched her and then we began all over again until I knew his line of sight and almost everything she did and every way she moved and every part of her body, and I saw her through him but I also saw her through me only, and soon enough a shadow of her existed inside me and me only and I held it tight. Alex, I knew, was the same. We must have seemed like two strange children to her, quiet and fixated, sitting at the kitchen table while she moved about, feeding us and cleaning up our dishes while we watched and we looked and we watched again. We must have seemed like good kids.I was. I was good, Alex was not. The only person he ever behaved for was Donna, and the reason for that was that he was probably in love with her—childishly, sure, but in love nonetheless. When she wasn’t near him he bared his anger freely, especially toward our parents, who could hardly move around his wide circle without intruding on his ever-growing boundaries. I think he was born thinking they had done something to him, or maybe they had actually done something to him, I wasn’t sure, but I couldn’t think of what it would be. “All of your problems are your own,” my father said quite a bit when Alex had caused trouble, and maybe this was enough to bitter his blood, thinking that his issues were ours, too, not his alone, and it was true that Alex’s problems seemed to come from somewhere else—I couldn’t reconcile who he was with how much disorder he caused. For our teachers (Alex was held back a grade and I had moved forward, he and I were in the same class) he was clever, funny even, and charming, which left them tired at the end of the day whether they found him amusing or not. Our music teacher, Mrs. Weller, who came only once a week for our lessons, loathed him in the most exasperated way. He often incorporated her bristly husband, who everyone knew because he worked at the meat counter at the local grocery store, into the songs in a way I found endearing and also hilarious. Mrs. Weller did not agree—she’d put her fingers on the bridge of her nose and sigh loudly while her other hand comically (although unintentionally) banged a bass note on the piano, then, in a quiver, she’d demand that he leave and sit in the hallway until we were done with our lesson. <em>Get out</em>, she’d say, pointing at the door with her long, piano-charming finger. Our gym teacher was rough with him because Alex was capable of competently finishing all the drills and races and games but never followed the rules, like when he ran the half-mile backwards, and while Mr. Kott was never truly angry with him, he would playfully trip Alex and push him and make him carry the equipment, and sometimes Alex would have a bruise on his shin from where Mr. Kott kicked a ball at him and told him it was his fault he didn’t dodge it in time. He made our homeroom teacher laugh out loud sometimes, which she didn’t mean to do but couldn’t help, and she laughed in the intimate way that close adults do when they have a joke to share between them—that helpless, head-thrown-back, whole-body bursting that passed quickly. She muffled her laughter with her hand when she knew it wasn’t appropriate, like when Alex sang a high falsetto song about sausages and Mrs. Weller festered on her little bench. She moved him to the back of the classroom and forbade us from looking at him when he made noises or threw things at us, and at first only I disobeyed, not intentionally (I only meant to tell him to stop, but I’d see him back there where he had done something like take his gym pants and his shoes, stuff them with paper and make it appear as if he had closed his desk lid on a person, and I’d laugh, and Mrs. Freeman would look back too and she’d tell Alex to stop but she couldn’t help but laugh also, and then the whole class would be laughing alongside us, all of us disobeying the order not to look back). Adults, even those who didn’t know him, seemed as if they had been granted permission to abuse him. Once, our neighbor pushed him to the ground and kicked him in the stomach for waking his newborn during a nap, which Alex hadn’t meant to do; and another time, at the grocery store, an elderly woman ran her cart into the backs of Alex’s ankles because he was marveling at the lobsters in their tanks (he was apparently in her way), and he bled through his socks on the way home. I could see how he felt abandoned, then, when he was told his problems were his and his alone.“How come your brother doesn’t get grades like yours?” It was Mr. Kott who always asked, right in front of Alex as if he were talking to him instead of me, and I didn’t know how he knew I got such good grades, considering he was only the gym teacher. Alex’s were awful, I couldn’t even fathom getting marks so low; it was almost as if he were trying just as hard but for a different outcome— they were the bottom of the bottom of the bottom, sludgy and foul, and I was terrified of falling down there with him where the muck of an F would swallow me whole. <em>Why don’t you try as hard as your sister? Be as quiet as your sister? Lis- ten like your sister, study with your, be like, do as </em>. . . I only received praise, it seemed, by way of Alex’s insults, as if each of us unfairly existed through the complicated lens of the other, a misaligned focal point that left us both distorted and backlit. “Put them up,” my parents said every night at the dinner table, inspecting our fingernails to make sure we had washed our hands, and some nights I tried to keep mine dirty so Alex’s wouldn’t look so bad. At night, I wet the head of his toothbrush when I noticed it was still dry, and I was the one who got out the carpet cleaner when he tracked dirt through the living room.We were probably old enough to not need a sitter, or to not need one who watched us so closely (Mrs. Milligan, our neighbor whose yard shared a border with ours, was always looking over at us anyway, ready to call an ambulance if we needed it or our father if she thought Alex had done something to deserve punishment, or, in her more generous moments, to invite us over for a snack), but my parents were worried that Alex couldn’t manage himself and I was worried someone would try to hurt him if they knew we were alone. “She needs the money, anyhow,” I heard them saying, and it was true that Donna did need the money, but I’m sure she would have made a higher wage by bagging groceries or making sandwiches or working the phones at an office. But Donna, my parents knew, wouldn’t have gotten a job in town, not if it required paperwork and a car.“We should paint today,” Donna said one afternoon, and we got out ourlittle yellow tubes of old fingerpaints we had as kids—some were dried up, some still worked—and dipped our fingers into it to smear over white computer paper. Donna painted the sun with multi-colored rays spreading over an ocean of blue-and-green swirled waves, and Alex and I, thinking we were just doing it for fun, became more serious when we saw hers and began to paint flowers, grass, a house instead of abstract lines and shapes. In her next one, she painted a sunflower standing tall in a meadow with mountains in the backdrop and that wonderful sun again, alternating rays of this time powder blue and pink. The sunflower was right in the center of the paper, and she knew to mix her yellow petals with a dab of orange to make little eddies of a darker shade, and she blotted the space above the meadow with puffs of white to be the cotton floating in the sunshine. “Shoot,” she said when we were finished, looking into the lap of her jeans, covered in stains the same vivid colors as her sunset. “I got it all over me.” We went to her place so she could change.Donna lived down the street from us, just far enough around the single bend in the road to be out of view from our house. She and her five brothers and sisters (“real” ones, we called them, as in, “Is she your real sister?) and a rotating number of foster siblings were loosely homeschooled, mostly unseen and unaccounted for, though they were home all day. They were homesteaders (a term my parents used), but everything they homesteaded seemed only half cared for—the chickens in their coop wandered about their back yard, looking thin and languid, often mauled by a fox or coyote because of a hole in the corner of their fence that was never repaired but rather covered with a loose piece of siding, and their garden, overrun with weeds, was occasionally poked at by a child, who, without luck, was looking for something edible. They placed a tarp over the roof whenit began to leak, a measure that for any other family would have been temporary but for them became a part of the landscape of their home, that electric blue square weighted at the corners with bricks, sometimes waving when the wind picked up, its flapping mouth giving us a rough hello as we drove past.“Come in,” she said, and held her front door open for us while we peered past into the dark interior. It was the first time either Alex or I had been in her house, and it was one of the first times I acquired that particular feeling that someone else’s life can be frightening, though Donna and her siblings seemed to occupy it so casually. We were greeted immediately with the acidic smell of old melon peels and moss and rot, and, once we were led to the front of the foyer, we could see into the living room, where the water stains on the walls mimicked the mountain ranges in a child’s drawing, leaving the wood paneling boated and warped toward the bottom. The brown shag carpet was worn to the cross-hatched backing in places, and a lone diaper on the floor appeared to have been abandoned mid-crawl, while a dog, thin and jittery, sat and contemplated us, warily. To our right and up the stairs was a kitchen, and jars, hundreds of them, all creeping with an interior blue mold, lined the homemade shelves nailed crudely to the wall. We stood in the foyer not wanting to move for fear of waking one of the many sleeping beings (the mother on the couch; the naked toddler on the floor near the aquarium that encased something reptilian, but what I couldn’t tell; or the feeling that someone, a father or an older brother, was dozing in one of the back rooms) as Donna disappeared down the dark, silent halway. Through two greasy windows the leaves of the oaks, drenched in yellow sunlight and alive in the early-spring wind, promised us the neighborhood was still intact.Every day after school, as Alex and I rounded the corner after getting off the bus that dropped us off three streets away, Donna would be sitting and waiting for us on our front porch, no book in hand and nothing to do, and we didn’t know and never thought to ask how long she had been there. “Look,” she said one day, and pointed to a thin spider’s web that was strung between two of the beams, an intricate and imperfect pattern threaded across an entire third of our front porch. Alex reached up his hand to swat at it but Donna caught him just in time, grabbing his wrist on his backswing. “Don’t. Leave him be.” We looked at her, wondering why anyone would want to save a spider instead of kill it, or why she wouldn’t want to destroy such a web. “You’ll ruin his home,” she said. She named him Zeus, and instead of going inside, we looked around for dead bugs to feed to him, throwing them at the web and hoping they would stick (we learned that Zeus preferred his food alive, and when Alex said we should go down to the pond to slap lightly at the horseflies that swarmed us, keeping them alive just enough to give to Zeus, Donna said no, that the horseflies deserved to live without our disruption. “Zeus, I guess, will have to be on his own”). She made Alex take his homemade mousetrap out from under the porch and throw it away, and one spring day, we spent several hours looking for baby toads in our yard and carrying them to the tall grass near the pond where they would be safe from the lawnmower. She told us not to touch the salamanders in our window wells because our scent would stay on them and they wouldn’t be able to mate or be loved, and she said something similar about butterflies and baby bunnies (she called our fingerprints our “dust.” “Don’t get your dust on them.”). When we walked into town, we stepped around the anthills that gathered in the cracks of the sidewalks, each with a trail of red or brown ants surrounding the lip, looking to me like some infestation that Alex and I normally would have stamped with the soles of our shoes. Every Friday she stayed into the evening while our parents met their friends for dinner, and, in the summer, after sundown, we’d walk to the pond to sit on the dock and listen to the bullfrogs or look for turtles floating in the light of the moon, the willow trees timidly dipping their tips in the water, rippling the black surface. She left the porch light on so when we returned we could count the moths, and we’d look up at their brilliant little wings holding them afloat, the pensive flapping that we could hear if we were quiet, along with the dim buzz of the light bulb.“Hello, pup,” Alex said one day, and I looked out my bedroom window and saw the same mutt we had seen on Donna’s living room floor limping into our yard. Alex was holding a stick and I could tell he thought briefly of throwing it at him, but didn’t. Instead, he went inside and took a piece of leftover chicken out of the refrigerator, cut it up and put it in a bowl and brought it out to the dog, who ate it helplessly. Alex took him inside and gave him a bath in our laun- dry tub using an old bottle of baby shampoo he found in the bathroom cabinet, then spent all evening combing the knots out of his hair while the dog looked blankly out over our back yard, yipping when he had the energy to tell Alex to be more gentle, and Alex obliged.They were together a lot, Donna and Alex, when I was upstairs doing my homework. She had halfheartedly remarked once that traditional school was a prison, which Alex took as a pass to not have to work on anything while she was watching us, and she didn’t force him to even try. They went to the pond most afternoons to look for baby tadpoles swimming near the dock, and Alex said there were so many of them that he cupped his hand underwater and watched them all swim into it. They said there was a malicious squirrel who waited in a tree and threw hickory nuts at them when they walked under it, so they had to make a new path to get around to the beach on the far side. She taught Alex how to build a fire and they built one on the beach and Donna used it to light a cigarette she had stolen from somewhere and she didn’t offer any to Alex, and they stayed until the sky darkened and the fire dwindled to embers. He told me about the fire and the cigarette, he told me about everything they did, hoping I would come along, which I did sometimes because it seemed like too much to miss, but I always felt behind when I was with them, like I had a lot of catching up to do to meet them in their sunny reverie. It felt like the two of them were in a dream—one with long, side-stepping paths, confusing rituals, destinations that didn’t matter or, once spoken, would be forgotten—and I was the one trying to wake them up.“Do you see that cloud?” Donna asked. We were lying on our backs on the hill next to the pond.“I see it,” Alex replied, but I didn’t notice anything. The sky above, from what I could see, was completely blank, a bright blue plain that was so un- touched it hurt my eyes.“What do you think it is?”“A bunch of grapes,” Alex replied. “A dog,” I said, turning on my side. “How many grapes?”“More than a hundred.”Sometimes, it was clear they were intentionally leaving me out. “Can I have a bite of your gum?” Donna would ask, and Alex would take an imaginary piece of gum out of his mouth, mimic the motion of splitting it in two, and hand one piece to Donna. “Can I have a bite?” I’d ask, to which Alex would reply that he wasn’t chewing any gum, and him and Donna would share a look of confusion cut with a smirk.I wanted Donna to come live with us for good. She could share a bedroom with me or sleep on a cot in our back office, and we would give her her own drawer in the bathroom. We could take her out of that disgusting house she lived in, and in return, she could fix Alex.“Do you think about her a lot?” I asked him once, just as we rounded the corner and could see her on our front stoop, her head resting on her palm, dirt stains smattering the knees of her jeans.“Who, Donna?” he asked, though he knew who I meant. “Yeah.”“No. Do you?”“All the time,” I replied.The humiliation was immediate, and the embarrassment for having admitted something so personal stayed with me for years. I tried not to think about it, but sometimes it came anyway, unannounced, that Alex knew something so secret about me, something so infused with sharp desire, stinging and acidic. It bothered me only a little that he couldn’t admit the same, because for years I was confused; I assumed he was telling the truth, which meant that everything I thought about him and Donna was wrong, it meant that I was alone the whole time. Or, worse, he just had more restraint than I did, he knew when to stay quiet, he knew what to admit and what to keep private. He was an adult, a grownup, a big kid. And I was an animal. A runt.The door to my bedroom didn’t go all the way to the ground, and at night I could see a sliver of light coming through the bottom that had traveled from the living room where my parents were—they often stayed up late into the evening listening to music and drinking, my mother a vodka martini that she sloppily refilled, and my father a tumbler filled to the brim with bourbon. One night when I was lying awake in bed, I swore I saw my mother’s toes poking in from under my door. I knew they were her toes because the nails were painted a glistening red, reflecting the streetlamp that cut through my lace curtains and flooded my room. I listened but didn’t hear anything, not the television or the sink running or my mother telling me what she was doing.“Mom?” I asked, quietly. “Yes?”“What are you doing?”As if to wave hello, she wiggled her toes at me. I sat up in bed and slowly pulled the covers off; my legs looked dark against my white sheets, and, not knowing what I was doing, I stepped off my bed and stood. I couldn’t think of anything stranger. Where was my father? Was she trying to get into my room, or was she just being playful? I must have been dreaming, I thought.“Go back to sleep,” she said, not knowing that I hadn’t been sleeping.I don’t know if something happened between the two of them. Maybe Alex had touched her, or maybe he had tried to kiss her, or maybe he had told her he loved her. Perhaps he had shown his typical misbehaved side to her, which would have surprised her, or maybe she found out about his grades and she wanted to punish him. Or maybe she had done something to him, like she had touched him and she needed something to hold over him so he wouldn’t tell. Or maybe nothing had happened, or maybe something had been happening all along and I just hadn’t noticed. One morning Donna told us she had found something down by the pond, and, despite the drizzle which would later turn to rain, we left with our jackets on to walk to the place Donna had in mind, she in front and Alex close behind, then me. The sun was just barely leaking a pale yellow into the gray domain of the storm clouds overhead and the colors—Donna’s blue boots, her yellow jacket, the freshly mowed grass in our yard, and, in the distance, the blonde, rhythmic wheat, blowing in waves across the fields beyond the pond—looked more alive against the dark sky. She chose to cut through the tall reeds instead of walking the beaten path, and her trail cut like a soft scar on the skin of the field. A flock of black birds flittered from the ground and landed on the one tree that stretched its sinewy, dead branches outward in a beckoning.When the wind picked up, misty drops of rain blew into my eyes, and soon the clouds coated the sun in smears of black and gray. Somewhere well beyond the pond, far in the distance, a highway cut across the horizon, and semis drove quietly along, stitching a path into and then quickly out of our lives, a mo- mentary intersection with men who could look at that very moment out their windows, over their sunburnt forearms, and see two children and a teenager, cloaked in yellow, cutting through the reeds in a trail that took aim at them like a laser. The surface of the pond was alive with the tapping of the rain and a bloated bullfrog occasionally moaned, and when we reached a mound near the lip of the lake, Donna parted the grass and pointed to a hole in the dirt. Inside, a mother groundhog, or perhaps an otter (or maybe a raccoon or a giant rat without a tail or maybe a beaver), was nursing a troop of little pink babies, each sucking at one of her teats. Quietly, Donna bent over them, her head right next to the opening of the den. When she stood up again, she looked at Alex, her face pale and serious, her uncooperative hair blowing across her forehead.“Kill it,” she said.No furrow in her brow or smile or frown, just that freckle and her eyes, unblinking. <em>Kill it</em>. Alex let out a small laugh, something between a huff and a chortle, then looked away.“Kill one,” she spoke again.“Kill what?”“The babies. Kill one of them.”“I don’t want to.”She was joking, surely. <em>She’s kidding, Alex, it’s just a joke</em>.Donna leaned forward and plucked one of the babies from the mother’s nipple and held it in her hand, coldly. It opened its mouth but no sound came out, its little eyes remained shut. The mother, who stayed where she was, wailed weakly in a noise I had never heard before and would never hear again, a furious and scratching plea that was mostly silent but filled with pain and an animal desperation—it seemed to me then the cruelest curse to be given little lungs and no language. Donna was holding the animal far away from her, and she took hold of Alex’s hand, held it out, and put it in his, where the pup squirmed like a snake caught under the blade of a shovel.“Just close your fist around it,” she said.“Why?”“Because. It doesn’t matter why, just do it because I say.”He hesitantly drew his fingers closer to his palm, lightly cupping the tiny pink body, then pulled them back.“I don’t think I want to,” he said, looking up at her.She didn’t say anything. Alex’s hair was damp with rain but it still flapped over his forehead in the light breeze, streaks of his bangs crisscrossing one another in what seemed like a fight to grab at something in the distance. I wanted Donna to look at me, because if she did, I thought, she’d see this was not a nice thing to be doing, and I could tell her with my eyes that it was time to call it off. <em>Call it, Donna.</em><em> Don’t make him do it. </em>But right now she was in some sort of evil reverie, and Alex would not be able to break it. He looked down at his palm again, and with one flicker of his eyes, a flexing of his forearm, he quickly snapped his hand shut into a white-knuckled fist. When he pulled his fingers back, the little suckling was lifeless on the bed of his palm. Dead. I knew then and Alex knew then the difference between being alive and not being alive, and how nothing else that exists is so far from its own opposite which it relies upon entirely, like how the ocean and the sky share the blue that passes between them. One minute you are writhing and the next you have an empty lake inside you, heavy as a bag of bricks and deep as the deepest well. In the distance, those truckers cut a thin line between the blonde of the fields and the wide, gray vault overhead, sailing on their way past the pond where we were standing; past our neighborhood and the wheat and tall reeds and the new condominiums that were still under construction, the clear tarpaulins over the wooden skeletons swelling marvelously in the wind; past the industrial park with its white, windowless buildings that sat like pristine giants under the gaze of the water tower; past the town and the next and the next and past the big city and into the expanse of flickering rows of sunlit corn and into the night where a single, highway-house light shone weakly against the dense, crisp black of the sky; and then maybe, perhaps, stopping at a run-down motel with carpet worn thin and a bedspread dotted with intimate stains that greasily announced rough encounters, and an old television that bleated and bleated and cried without respite until the new morning. Donna grabbed the baby animal out of Alex’s palm and threw it in the water, where it plunked like a stone or a small sack of beans. We didn’t wait to see if it floated or sank. She turned toward the amateur path we had carved on our way there, now healed except for a thin trace on the surface, and Alex and I stood in place for a moment before we followed her back to our house, which, I remember telling myself that afternoon, was not her house.<br />
