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One The phone rang at four o’clock in the morning. Someone on the other end said that Lucky was dead. And just like that I was big brotherless. I didn’t cry. Life without my brother had never even occurred to me. Not once. Sure, I’d become accustomed to little pieces of him disappearing: the tip of his finger to a rock-climbing rope; a chunk of his calf to a baby shark; a front tooth to a ski slope. Lucky’s body was a road map of scars. Even his face was covered in nicks and healed-over cuts and faint pinkish railroad tracks from long-gone stitches. That was all fine with me, exciting even, because to me he was indestructible, and because he always came home eventually with more stories and more scars. He always came home until now. The day before the phone call, I was thinking about how every Christmas I would put a fresh box of Band-Aids in his stocking. He always laughed on Christmas morning when he tore the wrapping paper off the little box. I got him Simpsons Band-Aids one year and Scooby-Doo another; Popeye; Cowboys; Spider Man. There was already a box of Flintstones Band-Aids stashed away in my closet for the coming Christmas and I know just what he would say if he were around to open it: “Yabba, dabba, doo!” and then he’d toss it on the pile with the rest of the gear Santa would always bring him. That’s how it was: Lucky got gear. I got books. I went digging through Lucky’s things that day, the day we got the news, and I found seven unused boxes of Band-Aids lined up in a neat row in a shoebox under his bed. I still didn’t cry. My own scars are different. My body is a desert of soft white skin embellished with small smoothed-over cuts and tears and burns. I don’t remember how all of them got there, but the ones I do remember make me wince with embarrassment. I’m the opposite of Lucky. I was born without the thrill-seeking gene. I stick close to home. Heights make me dizzy; the ocean, in my mind, can’t be trusted; I despise polar fleece, and I can’t see a thing without my contacts in. Some might think Lucky would have been the one my parents worried about, but that wasn’t the case. They never seemed to worry about him. It’s always been me. Even now, years later, they still look at me with worry in their eyes. Lucky, on the other hand, had an effortless star quality that made my parents want to be near him. My mom laughed like a teenager when he was around and my dad started making ambitious plans again. There was always stuff everywhere when Lucky was home: camping gear, surfboards, bikes, skateboards, wet suits hanging on the line. There was a happy buzz in our house. Anyone could see that Lucky was my mom and dad’s favorite, and I didn’t even mind. He was my favorite too. My brother squeezed his big world into our tiny house and made everything seem more exciting, but for me it was more than that. The thing I loved most about Lucky was that he made me feel normal. Lucky never had much regard for time zones, and besides, it was understood that no matter what time it was or where he was, he should call if there was trouble. The phone ringing in the dead of night was a pretty common occurrence at our house. This time it was different though. Through the wall I could hear the muffled sound of my mom answering, alert even though she’d been asleep for hours. I heard her say “No No No” and then I heard her shake my dad awake. I knew it was bad. She’d never done that before. My dad has to be at the oyster farm by seven. “My baby!” my mom wailed. The sound was horrible. My heart thumped in my chest but I was paralyzed. I stayed there in my bed, listening. I heard my dad take the phone. “What is it? What’s happened?” he asked. Lucky had drowned while surfing in Australia at a place called Kirra Beach in Coolangatta in Queensland. I heard my dad talking to them, getting all the details. Then he hung up the phone and started to sob. Lucky was twenty-two when he died. I’d known him for seventeen years.
