My Brother, Samuel
Ilana Ellis

Whenever I remember my brother, I don’t think of the fights or the door slamming or those nights that he never came home. Or those nights when he walked in at three in the morning, tramping up the stairs so that I, ever the fitful sleeper, would be startled into wakefulness, drowsily sure that something was wrong. Nor do I think of our childhood. The days we spent clambering around on the great rocks near our house, trapped in some imagination game, just seem too distant to associate with now. The ten year old Samuel with the dimples and the bright golden smile is like a different person from the Samuel I remember most vividly, and I just can’t seem to place the two of them in the same thought, much less associate one with the other. What I do think about is one day. It was a day that was nondescript in almost every way, and yet is somehow imprinted so vividly in my mind that it overpowers all the fights and the screaming that contaminated our house up until recently, and that I really ought to be remembering, but don’t.
It was around the time he had blown all his money on a car. It was an old car, blue, with a bent bumper. The engine would purr like a disgruntled cat so that I would be afraid it would simply fall to pieces and the car would blow up. Samuel didn’t care. He loved it. Our mother didn’t. She refused to allow him to park it in our driveway. “How could you have spent all your money on this piece of junk?” she screamed when he came home with it. “That money was for your college education, Sammie!” Samuel just shrugged with the blank, angry look on his face that he always got when Mother called him ‘Sammie.’ He parked it on the street, two houses down, and ignored the pointed looks Mother gave him whenever he drove it.
It was late summer and everything was tepid and limp. My brother came into the kitchen that morning to find me sitting at the table, drinking milk. “Hi, Susie,” he said when he saw me.
“Hi,” I said. I almost never saw him in the mornings. He usually slept late. I gulped down the rest of the milk.
“Do you want to go for a ride?” he asked me. I shrugged and stood up, flattered to be asked. We rarely spent time together anymore. When we were younger we used to be together constantly. “You two are like Siamese twins,” Mother told us, laughing. It didn’t matter that Samuel was two years older and a boy besides. We clambered all over the place so that the bottoms of our feet were black and our knees were scraped ragged. But Samuel smiled his golden smile and we laughed at the stupidest things together and only came inside when we had to. We told each other everything. I only ever told Samuel about how I wanted to be a pilot. I was too afraid to talk about it to anyone else. I thought they would laugh. And I was to only one Samuel told, in a whisper, about how the neighbor’s dog had attacked him one day when he was coming home from school. And then one summer it all stopped. Suddenly Samuel had his own things to be doing, and his own circle of friends that didn’t include me. And so now, even though I hated that car and I should have been doing my summer reading, I said yes.  
We drove aimlessly for a while. Inside the car, the rattling of the engine was much less noticeable and I soon stopped thinking about it. We didn’t speak, but the silence was nice. The smell of his cigarettes and the sound of the symphony orchestra wafted over me. You’d think, by looking at my brother, that he would be a fan of rock or maybe oldies or something like that. He can’t stand the stuff. “This is real music,” he would always say to me, putting on Bach or Handel or one of Mozart’s operas. “Not that junk you listen to.” I would shrug. I didn’t much like classical music, but that day I didn’t mind it. I even enjoyed it, in a way.
“Let’s stop,” he said after a while, and pulled off into the next exit. It ended up leading to a wide open space, like a vacant lot, but without any cars or houses. We parked and got out. The absence of the music made the silence ring, and I nearly jumped out of my skin when the doors slammed. They sounded like twin gun shots. Abruptly Samuel spun around, his arms open wide, embracing the open sky. “You try,” he told me, and since there was no one around to watch me I did. We spun around like drunken idiots, laughing our heads off, the gravel scraping beneath our feet. Finally we stopped, panting, and staggered back against the slanted trunk of the little blue car. I was so dizzy the world seemed to rock. Samuel lit another cigarette and stared up at the racing sky.
“I haven’t done that since I was a kid,” Samuel said, laughing his rasp of a laugh.
“You still are a kid,” I told him. He just shrugged.
“Maybe,” he said. “Possibly.” I could tell he didn’t consider himself to be one so I snorted. He made a face at me and I giggled.
“You still want to be a pilot, Susie?” he asked me. I was surprised he remembered. I had been eight when I told him. We had been sitting behind the blackberry bush. “I’ll tell you a secret, Sammie, but you can’t tell anyone ever, promise?” He nodded at me solemnly. “Cross my heart and all the rest, I won’t.” So I told him, in a whisper, breaking off pieces of the dead blackberry branch from the bottom of the bush as I did so. He hadn’t laughed.
I cleared my throat. “Yeah, I do,” I said. After a short pause I went on. “Not an airplane pilot. I want to fly a helicopter.”
“I see,” Samuel said, blowing out a cloud of smoke. He smiled. It wasn’t a golden smile, not anymore. It was more of a russet smile. “My sister, the helicopter pilot.” But he wasn’t laughing at me as he said it.
“What do you want to be?” I took a risk at asking him. You never could tell how Samuel would react to a question about his future. Usually he got angry. Most of his fights with Mother were about his future. Not that I really blamed her. Samuel could be rather infuriating. He still hadn’t picked out any colleges yet, and he wouldn’t go visit any either, even when Mother planned to make a nice little vacation out of it. “I guess you’ll be going to the community college then,” Mother said with a flat sort of finality. “I’m not going to community college,” Samuel said equally flatly. They had gotten into one of their biggest fights over it. But I felt sure that he wouldn’t be like that now. And he wasn’t, not really. He was simply very vague.
“Dunno,” he said, and I knew better than to press him. I didn’t want the day to be ruined.
The metal of the trunk was warm beneath my shirt but it never got too hot to be uncomfortable. We studied the clouds, pointing out the more absurd shapes that formed in front of that soaring expanse of blue. It was windy, so no shape lasted more than a few scant seconds. The most elaborate shape that I found was an elephant, complete with a trunk. Samuel swore he saw a pirate with a peg leg, but I don’t believe him. I think what he was really seeing was my mutated elephant. Eventually we stopped, and simply lay there against the dented blue trunk, not speaking for the longest time. Samuel stubbed out his cigarette against the bumper and turned to look at me. “You do know that I love you, Susie, don’t you?” he asked. “I mean, you’re my sister, of course I love you.” I nodded, but didn’t take my eyes from the white film of clouds and the iridescent blue. Samuel pushed himself off from the trunk and walked around to the front of the car. He got in, slamming the door jerkily. I followed.
Two months later he was gone. We knew it was for real because half the stuff from his room had disappeared with him and his car was gone. In some ways it was a relief. The constant fighting – fights with my mother over his grades, his future, pulling himself together, fights with the neighbors over blasting The Marriage of Figaro in his bedroom, fights with his friends, and fights with the school – had suddenly, blessedly ended. The tension that had filled the house and which I hadn’t even been aware of because I was so used to it was gone. But with that peace came an emptiness as well, a gnawing emptiness that ached. And so whenever I think of my brother, rather than dwelling on all that nastiness, I remember our day together. I don’t even know why I remember it so clearly. It was a nothing day, nothing exciting happened at all. But for some reason for me it defines my brother.