How Blessed I Am to Have You as My Brother

When I was ten, my parents died in a car crash. They were on their way to pick my brother up from prison. At the wake, I stared at the man kneeling before their caskets, his forehead pressed to the floor. It was my brother, Cole, freshly released after a five-year sentence. I ran at him, shoving him with all my might. “This is your fault! If you hadn’t been in prison, they wouldn’t have gone to get you! They would still be alive!” Cole staggered from the force of my push but didn’t look up. He just pressed his head harder against the cold floor. From that day on, I never called him brother again. 1 My mother kept her treasures in a small metal box. As a child, my curiosity was a force of nature. I waited until the house was empty and pried it open. Inside, there was only a single, yellowed ultrasound report. The report read: [Cord Blood Match Successful. Donor: Fetus. Recipient: Cole Anderson (Firstborn Son)] Cole was my brother, fifteen years my senior. For as long as I could remember, he had been in prison. My parents never spoke of his crime. But every time they came back from a visit, my mother’s eyes were swollen shut, and my father would chain-smoke on the porch all night, enveloped in a silent, suffocating cloud. Before I turned ten, my entire concept of my brother was a blurry name, a stranger who made my parents weep, and the sole reason for my existence. Yes, I knew. I wasn’t a child born of my parents’ love; I was proof of their love for him. My mother had a weak constitution. She risked a late-in-life pregnancy for one reason: Cole had leukemia, and the only thing that could save him was the cord blood of a newborn sibling. The day I was born, my brother’s transplant was a success. And I became a “useful tool” in our family’s home. But fate has a twisted sense of humor. The golden child, wrapped in all my parents’ devotion, committed a crime so terrible it landed him in prison. I was five years old. I have no memory of what he did. It didn’t matter. What mattered was that I was finally promoted from “tool” to their one and only child. That bliss didn’t last. The year I turned ten, Cole was released. My parents left early that morning, their faces bright with hope, ready to give their son a new beginning. Then the call came. A truck with failed brakes had slammed into their sedan. My father died on impact. My mother held on until she got to the hospital, where she used her last breath to tell me one thing: “Anna, sweetie, take care of your brother.” I didn’t understand. Why was I, a child, being asked to care for him? I was the one who needed to be taken care of. Before I could argue, her eyes fluttered shut for the last time. At the funeral home, I looked from the stiff smiles on my parents’ black-and-white portraits to the strange man kneeling before their coffins—the brother I hadn’t seen in five years. He knocked his head against the concrete, a rhythmic, sickening thud. Blood seeped from his forehead, mixing with his tears. Relatives whispered behind their hands, their pitying glances like needles on my skin. “Poor thing, an orphan at her age…” “And now she has to live with a killer. What kind of life will that be?” I balled my fists, my nails digging into my palms. That’s when I charged him. “This is your fault! If you hadn’t been in prison, they wouldn’t have been driving to get you! They wouldn’t be dead!” Cole swayed but didn’t look up. He just knocked his head harder against the unforgiving floor. The night after the burial, Cole found me sitting in the dark living room. He wore my father’s old, ill-fitting clothes. His eyes were sunken, making him look like a walking skeleton. “Anna,” he said, his voice a dry rasp. He reached out to touch my hair. I flinched away. “Don’t touch me,” I said. His hand froze in midair, then slowly fell to his side. 2 We lived in a small town where secrets were a foreign concept. Everyone’s business was everyone else’s entertainment. Soon, the whole town knew the story: Cole Anderson was back from prison. A murderer. Not only a degenerate but a bad omen who’d gotten his own parents killed. And his little sister, Anna, was now stuck with him. When I went back to school, my homeroom teacher paused during roll call, her eyes lingering on me. “Anna, I know things are difficult at home. If you need anything, please talk to me.” Every head in the classroom swiveled to stare at me. During recess, a group of boys surrounded my desk, smirking. “Hey Anna, did your brother really kill someone?” “How’d he do it? With a knife or a rope?” “Are you gonna kill someone too?” I buried my head in my arms and pretended I couldn’t hear them. On the way home, girls from the next class over pointed at me. “That’s her. The one whose brother was in jail.” “Stay away from her. The sister of a killer can’t be any good.” I ran home and threw my backpack on the floor. Cole was in the kitchen, fumbling with an egg, wearing one of our mom’s old aprons. “You’re back?” He turned, forcing a smile. “Dinner’s almost ready. I made your favorite, noodle soup with an egg.” I stared at his face, which looked so much like our father’s, and something inside me snapped. “Why did you come back?! Why didn’t you just die in there?! Do you have any idea what people are saying about me? They call me the murderer’s sister!” The water in the pot boiled over, hissing on the stove. Steam blurred his face. He turned off the heat, his back to me, his shoulders trembling slightly. After a long time, he finally spoke. “…I’m sorry.” That night, I heard him crying in the living room. It was a suppressed, wounded sound, like an animal caught in a trap. I didn’t go out. I hugged my mother’s pillow and told myself: I hate him. I owed him no understanding, no sympathy. If it weren’t for him, my parents would be alive. If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t be the town freak. He was the one who needed my blood to live, and this was how he repaid me, by dragging my life through the mud. I was done with him. I hated him. 3 Cole started working. He hauled bricks on a construction site during the day and bussed tables at a diner at night. After that, he’d come home and glue cardboard boxes for a local factory until dawn. His health was poor, likely a side effect of his transplant. He coughed constantly, and his face was always pale. But every cent he earned, he spent on me: a new backpack, new clothes, even the expensive novels I’d mentioned offhand. I had to admit, he was taking good care of me. But the world I lived in was still a swamp. In eighth grade, I placed first in my class. For the parent-teacher conference, he borrowed a decent shirt and combed his hair neatly. The moment he walked into the classroom, the whispering started. “Is that Anna Anderson’s brother?” “He looks so quiet. You’d never guess…” “It’s not like they have ‘murderer’ tattooed on their foreheads.” He kept his head down the entire time, his hands clenched tightly on his knees. On the way home, I walked behind him, watching his slightly stooped back. “We should move,” I said suddenly. He stopped but didn’t turn around. “Where?” “Anywhere,” I said. “Anywhere but here, where everyone knows what you are.” He was silent for a long time. “Okay.” A month later, we moved to the state capital, three hundred miles away. Cole used all his savings to rent a tiny one-room apartment with a bunk bed. He found a job at an electronics factory, working rotating shifts on the assembly line. The first night, I lay on the unfamiliar top bunk, staring at the cracks in the ceiling. “Hey,” I said into the darkness. A rustle from below. “Yeah?” “Why did you really go to prison?” Silence. A long, suffocating silence. Just when I thought he wouldn’t answer, he spoke, his voice low. “…I did something wrong.” “What did you do?” “Something terrible,” his voice was as soft as a sigh. “Anna, don’t ask.” “All you need to know is that I’m sorry. For what I did to you, to Mom and Dad… that’s enough.” I rolled over, facing the wall. Always the same. Always. I was never entitled to the truth. 4 Turns out, fairy tales can come true. After about six months at the factory, Cole caught the eye of the owner’s daughter. Her name was Valerie. She was five years younger than Cole, a recent college graduate sent by her father to learn the family business. They said the first time she saw Cole on the assembly line, she was completely captivated. I had to admit, Cole was handsome. Even malnourished and perpetually exhausted, he’d inherited the best of our parents’ features: deep-set eyes, a straight nose, and a kind of broken beauty in his silence. Valerie’s pursuit of him was the talk of the factory. She brought him lunch, bought him medicine, and even stayed with him through his late-night overtime shifts. His coworkers all nudged him. “Come on, Cole! She’s the boss’s daughter! Marry her and you can skip twenty years of hard labor!” Cole always just shook his head. “I’m not good enough for her.” It went on like this until Valerie’s father, Mr. Hayes, the factory owner, asked to speak with him personally. Cole came home very late that night. He sat in the dark living room, smoking one cigarette after another. He never smoked. “What’s wrong?” I finally asked. He stubbed out the cigarette, his voice hoarse. “Mr. Hayes… he knows I was in prison.” My stomach dropped. Of course. The background check. It was over. He would lose his job, and we would have to run again. “He asked me what happened back then,” Cole continued. “I told him everything.” I closed my eyes in despair. “And then what?” “And then…” Cole looked up, his eyes gleaming unnaturally in the dark. “He said there’s an auspicious date next month, and he asked if I wanted a traditional wedding or a modern one.” I stared at him. He’s lost his mind. That was my first thought. Mr. Hayes had to be insane to want a murderer for a son-in-law. Good, he’s insane. That was my second thought. After all, the Hayes family was rich. Who wouldn’t want to latch onto a family tree like that?

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