29 Nobody Wants a Baby Brother
Nobody Wants a Baby Brother
My first and only Mother’s Day present is an afterthought.
Meredith is eight and has learned all the months of the year, keeping a meticulous calendar and celebrating every obscure holiday she can find.
She celebrates some with solemnity, learning about the traditions of Beltane and gobbling down any scrap of information about the pagan gods that she can get her hands on.
Others she celebrates with more giddy facetiousness.
Zara and I learn more about mosquito biology than we ever cared to know on World Mosquito Day.
Meredith spends Christmas Day carting around a thesaurus, speaking in stilted words, refusing to use the letter L.
“Because it’s Alphabet Day,” she claims.
“Alphabet has an l in it,” Zara points out.
“But ‘Fuck off, Zara’ doesn’t,” Meredith sneers.
Mother’s Day, something we’ve never celebrated, I expect her to gloss over with some other obscure holiday.
But no. Meredith decorates a little clay pot, painstakingly painting little flowers.
Sealing it with waterproofing spray. Unlike Zara and me, she’s got an artistic streak a mile wide.
Add two stubborn and persistent older sisters willing to go to bat for her, so she gets to add far more arts to her curriculum.
She’s neither the heir, nor the spare, so she gets away with things that Zara and I never did.
Zara is ignored unless she makes a mistake.
Half the time Adele treats me like I’m no more than a coworker she has forgotten to fire.
The rest of the time I’m as vital as an extra limb, and she wields the Gauntlet as naturally as if my arm belonged to her.
Adele may be a hands-off mother when it comes to actual parenting, but even she lets the baby of the family get away with anything.
Occasionally, a brief pang of jealousy I thought long dead and buried pokes its face above the dirt when Adele looks at Meredith.
I sometimes think Adele might actually love Meredith.
It’s hard not to, and trust me, I’ve tried.
Yet that still doesn’t prevent her from quashing Meredith’s soul.
The cactus itself comes straight from the desert.
Meredith pried it out of the parched and compacted soil with a trowel she bullied her tutor into ordering, along with various other seeds and gardening soil and supplies.
I’m frankly shocked the tutor isn’t fired after I saw him in Adele’s office trying to justify all the purchases.
Then again, hiring a tutor is a lengthy endeavor.
Meredith is sweaty from her exertion in the heat of a desert spring, a smear of potting soil muddy on her forehead.
She’s not crying, but there are tear tracks down her cheeks when I find her in her room, the cactus tossed in a pile of dirt on the floor.
The little flowered pot is in her hand, arm hefted high, and she looks like she’s debating throwing it at the wall.
Clearly, Adele doesn’t value thoughtfulness.
Not surprising; it’s always been the finished product, not the effort that matters.
“I don’t know what you expected,” I say, plucking the pot from between her hands and holding it up, light refracting from my metal-encased arm. We both look at the rainbow spray of painted flowers. They’re surprisingly well done—deliberate abstract pointillism rather than sloppy childish painting.
Meredith looks at me warily. Her eyes shutter, and she draws herself up, sticks out her chin, as if ready to defiantly take more criticism.
She doesn’t appear upset any longer. On the contrary, it looks like she’s ready to fight back.
She’s always been this way. It’s why I chose her.
A bright bolt of pride streaks through me.
“We both know Adele doesn’t have any taste. Have you seen her room?” I say, shaking my head in disgust.
Meredith blinks, her chin quivering. For a second, I think she’s about to cry again.
“Can I have it?” I ask. “Please?”
Meredith nods.
“Can I have the cactus too?” I say, grabbing a dirty sock from the floor and gingerly reaching for the succulent with the sock, aiming for the bald patches where some spines have broken off and using the metal of my gauntleted arm for protection.
Meredith snorts with laughter. “Sure. I want my sock back, though.”
My sleep is interrupted first by the flashes of lightning and booming of thunder.
Adele is messing with the weather again.
Some people’s mothers take up crocheting or scrapbooking for an eccentric hobby.
Mine does weather manipulation. Pilates, reading, gardening—anything would be better.
Why can’t she be normal? I think jealously of the sitcom teenagers complaining about their embarrassing mothers.
They don’t know how good they have it in their make-believe worlds.
My mother’s favorite hobbies ruin any sliver of peace I carve out for myself.
I clench my fingers, long to feel anything besides metal against the skin of my hand.
Push her in, let her go, I try to convince myself.
But I imagine her dragging me down alongside her, cold hand in cold hand, and grudgingly tether her here.
Just as I’m contemplating all the ways Adele has made my life hell, her most disruptive hobbies appear at my door: Zara and Meredith.
Zara, rushing, sheepish and scared—even at fifteen, she’s terrified of the lightning.
Or rather, she’s terrified of Adele, but they’re one and the same on these stormy nights.
Zara is shuffling under the covers, pushing against me, pulling the blankets up under her chin, before I can even invite her in.
Meredith follows behind, with a recognizable if unrefined swagger.
Apparently, she’s been watching me more closely than I realized.
She revels in the storm’s wildness out of spite, refusing to be cowed by our mother.
Despite our complaints, she climbs right over Zara and me to snuggle into my other side.
“Sing,” Meredith demands, imperious as always.
Zara groans, but I sing Meredith’s favorite lullaby. The morbid words have long lost their meaning, a well-worn groove in a record now. Ladybird, ladybird.
“I hate her,” Zara says, venom dripping from her words.
“Me too,” Meredith says cheerfully.
“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I say.
“I’m not stupid,” Zara says scathingly.
“She’s not even related to us, actually. I don’t get why we’re supposed to love her,” Meredith says.
Zara and I share a look, reading each other’s expression in the flashes of lightning.
We both knew this already. You can’t handpick your baby sister from a litter of infants without realizing that hard truth.
But neither of us knew Meredith had figured it out.
Some kids leave Santa and the Tooth Fairy behind with their childhood, discarded among the outgrown toys and too-small socks.
I guess we grow out of secrets in this family.
The only one of us with no one to keep an origin myth for them, with no one to say exactly why I exist, is me.
I have kept it from Zara and Meredith that Adele has let slip that I do share her blood.
I’m afraid they would look at me and see a shadow of Adele, see all the ways we are the same.
“We’re family,” I say firmly. “The three of us, we’re sisters. We love each other.”
“I think Adele’s looking for something else from us, not love,” Zara says. It’s the first time I realize she’s started saying “Adele,” like I usually do, instead of “Mom.”
“I can’t change Adele. But I promise we’ll always be family, the three of us a team, a unit, even if it’s a fucked-up, warped version.”
“Let’s make a blood pact,” Meredith says.
“Ew, Meredith, that’s how you get diseases,” Zara says.
“Maybe a tad extreme,” I say, ruffling Meredith’s hair fondly.
“I’m serious,” Meredith says. “Then we’ll be family by blood.”
“Listen, I love you, but I don’t even want to share drinks with you,” says Zara. “And I’m serious too. It’s not safe. There are diseases and I don’t know our blood types and if we mix it, our blood could clot and kill us both. Or we could be patient zeros in an outbreak of some exotic disease.”
“We couldn’t both be patient zeros—that isn’t how numbers work,” Meredith replies.
“Compromise,” I cut in before they get further from the rails as this argument devolves more. “Let’s make an oath. We can pinky promise on it or something, but no open wounds.”
Meredith and Zara both find this reasonable enough.
It becomes an oddly solemn occasion. I’m only twenty-five, and I’ve been an adult for at least fifteen of those years, but for a minute I’m a child again, playing make-believe with my sisters.
The three of us, sitting in a circle, tucked under the covers of my bed with a flashlight.
We make the oath threefold, a piece for each of us.
Though, in the end, we all promise the same thing.
Meredith makes us vow to love each other no matter what. We’ll be a family until the day we’re all dead. Even after death, she says, my cheerfully morbid little sister.
Zara says we will always be on each other’s side. We will always choose each other first over Adele. Never first, always-overlooked Zara, quintessential middle child.
I have to think for a while. What do I know about love and family?
Besides creation of progeny for survival of the species, a necessity, why does family even matter?
Why do my sisters and I exist? Are we just the whims of a cruel and bored woman?
I think about the babies. The ones I didn’t choose, the extra ones.
Four of them who haunt me. Babies whose fates rest squarely at my feet.
And the two babies I chose, lying here years later, looking at me, asking me to tell them what’s important about life.
I doomed them to a different fate, but I doomed them all the same.
I remember my plans to run. My plans that failed again and again.
How I almost left Zara behind. How I tried not to love Meredith.
Adele telling me she’d see them dead before she let me take them with me.
I wouldn’t put it past her to track us if we managed to escape.
And the worst thought that still creeps into my head anytime I’m especially frustrated: I could leave alone.
Finally, I say, “We should vow to never leave each other behind. We might not be related, but we are family. And we’ll be each other’s most important thing.”
Sealed with a pinky promise and whispered cryptic reminders.
Remember the most important thing.
“Come down to the dungeon,” Adele says without preamble one morning.
“Why?” I question warily. She hasn’t locked me inside since—I cut off that painful train of thought. But either way, I’m suspicious.
“I found one of the creatures I’ve been searching for. And I want Zara shadowing you. It’s time she took on more responsibility. It’s nearly time.”
Her excitement sets me on edge.
The strangest déjà vu washes over me when we reach the back of the dungeon, stopping in front of a cage with impenetrable walls, marred only by the gouges a werewolf left there once upon a time. But this occupant is so much smaller.
There’s a baby in the cage. I mentally flick through my memories of Zara and Meredith for a comparison.
He’s maybe eighteen months or thereabouts.
He crouches on all fours, only mistakable for human until you take a second look.
His skin flickers colors, doing a remarkable job of camouflage one minute, flashing what feels like a warning in violent reds and poisonous blues the next.
I hear Zara’s gasp, and she opens her mouth to speak. With Adele between us and the mask on my face, all I can do is twitch my head in warning. Luckily, Zara shuts up.
“We don’t need a brother,” I say acidly.
“I didn’t get you one,” Adele says. “It’s a Chupacabra. Supposedly. I want you to find out if there are others here with it.”
“‘Here’?”
“Earth, obviously. Find out if there are more. And where? How did they get here? When? Are more on the way? Everything, I need to know everything. Use any means necessary for this beast,” she says, her voice eager, almost hungry.
The baby creature snarls. He bares his fangs at Adele, though his eyes are wide and fearful.
The Gauntlet rises to press against the cage. Adele’s necessary means. I shift uncomfortably. Zara looks at my gloved arm with a mixture of disgust and fear.
“You want us to hurt a baby?” Zara says, unable to keep the horror out of her voice.
“It isn’t a baby,” Adele says. “Look at it. It’s a monster. No better than a beast.” She leans forward, hissing insults at him. Even for Adele, the ire in her voice is extreme. She hates this creature.
The boy growls, crashes into the glass, then retreats. He seems panicked, alternating between shows of attempted intimidation and barely disguised terror.
“No,” Zara says flatly.
“Then I’ll lock you in there with it,” Adele says.
Zara blanches.
“I have an idea for a more reliable method of controlling it,” I say.
“I’ll take Zara and familiarize her with the basics in the lab first. She needs background filled in unless you want her to be more than useless and interfere with my work.
Remember, the most important thing,” I say with emphasis, trying to get the message across to Zara, “is that we don’t squander this opportunity with only one test subject available. ”
They both turn to stare at me intently. I have eyes only for the boy and pace the cage’s perimeter like a predator hunting for a way in. It’s the show Adele is looking for. He looks less and less dangerous the longer I stare. But Adele only sees what she wants to see.
“Besides, Zara might have blood-borne diseases transmissible to that creature if he bites her,” I say. “We carefully control the environment in any experiment involving living subjects.”
Zara inclines her head the smallest bit; she understands me and will go along with whatever I’m planning. I only want to shield her.
Adele lets out a small noise of distaste at my tone but lets me get away with it.
“The collars,” I say to Adele, “something like that would be a more reliable method to control a creature like this. Using pain is primitive and imprecise.”
Adele’s eyes bore into me, as if she were trying to see straight through my mask. A bead of sweat rolls down my forehead, stinging my eyes.
When Adele finally leaves us alone to work, Zara asks me, “Reggie, what are we going to do?”
“We aren’t doing anything. I’ll take care of it.”