Mercilessly Mine

Luke

I was seven the day they brought him home.

I stood at the top of the stairs in my socks and watched my mother lead a boy through the front door, already checking her watch before he'd even set his bag down.

"Luke," she said, not looking up from her phone. "Come say hello to your brother."

He looked two years older than me, tall for his age, holding a duffel bag with both hands, knuckles white. He didn't smile.

"I'm Mike," he said finally, because someone had to say something.

"Luke," I said back. My father was already on a call in his study, and my mother had already turned to check her reflection in the hallway mirror, satisfied that the introduction had been made and her part in the day was done. We ate dinner that first night in near silence, the four of us at a table built for twelve.

My father asked Mike two polite questions about his old school and didn't wait long enough for real answers. "Do you play any sports?" he asked

"Soccer," Mike said. "Sometimes basketball."

"Good, good," my father said, already looking back at his phone.

Afterward, once the adults had disappeared into their separate corners of the house, Mike found me in the living room, still in his travel clothes. "Do they always leave like that?" he asked, sitting down on the far end of the couch.

"Every night," I said.

"Okay," he said, and turned on the TV to something neither of us cared about, and stayed until I fell asleep sitting up.

That night there was a storm, the kind that rattled the windows in their frames. I lay in bed with the blanket pulled to my chin, too proud to call out for anyone, telling myself I wasn't scared. When the thunder cracked hard enough to shake the house, I finally got up to get a glass of water I didn't need. Mike was sitting on the floor outside my door. Back against the wall, knees pulled up. "You don't have to do that," I told him, embarrassed he'd caught me running out.

"I know," he said, but he didn't move.

"You don't even like me yet," I said, which was as close as a seven-year-old gets to asking why.

"Doesn't matter," he said. "You're mine to look after now. That's how it works."

I went back to bed. I heard him settle in against the door a few minutes later. I fell asleep to the thought of him behind my door, and something in my chest that had been clenched since the moment they told me I had a brother finally let go. Our parents traveled constantly. My father ran companies in two countries and treated home like a hotel between flights.

My mother sat on charity boards and attended galas she couldn't have named the causes of if you'd asked her. Some months I saw them for four or five days total, and Mike saw them even less, because he wasn't theirs by blood, and some part of them never let him forget it, not cruelly, just carelessly. So Mike raised himself. And then, without anyone deciding it out loud, Mike raised me.

He learned to make eggs because the housekeeper only came twice a week and I refused to eat cereal for dinner. He sat with me at the kitchen table every night doing homework he'd already finished years ago, just so the light would stay on a little longer. He walked me to school even after we were both old enough that it embarrassed me.

"I don't need you to walk me," I told him once, twelve years old me, hating how it felt to have him there in front of my friends.

"I know you don't need it," he said. "I'm doing it anyway."

"You don't have to keep doing all this," I told him another time, watching him iron my shirt for a school photo our parents wouldn't be attending.

"I want to," he said, not looking up. "Someone has to."

"Do you ever wish they'd never adopted you?" I asked. "Like, wish you'd stayed wherever you were before?"

He set the iron down and looked at me. "No," he said. "Because then I wouldn't have you." I didn't understand, at eleven, why that answer settled into my chest so heavily warm and permanent at once, a decision I hadn't been asked to vote on.

By the time I was thirteen, I already understood one thing about myself I had no language for yet. When Mike was in the room, I could breathe. When he wasn't, something in my chest sealed shut and stayed that way until he came back.

"You get weird when I leave the house," Mike said once, he'd caught me watching the driveway from the window after he'd said he was going to a friend's house for a few hours.

"I don't get weird, you're just imagining it" I said.

"You do. You get quiet for like an hour before, and then you stand at the window."

"Maybe I just like knowing where you are."

"That's a normal-brother thing to say," he said, grinning, " you're watching out for me aren't you." He laughed and gave me a pat on the head like I was still seven.

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't give one. He went to his friend's house anyway. I stood at the window anyway. He came home late that night, past when he'd said he would, and I was already at the door when his key turned in the lock.

"You waited up," he said, surprised, shrugging off his jacket.

"You said nine. It's almost eleven."

"We lost track of time. Sorry, I should've called."

"You should have," I said, and knew how much weight I'd put behind three ordinary words, more than the moment could reasonably hold.

"Are you actually mad?" he asked, studying my face in a way that made me realize I'd let something show in a way I hadn't meant to.

"No," I said, arranging my face back into something easier to read. "Just tired. Glad you're home."

"Me too," he said, and clapped my shoulder on his way past, already forgetting it, the way he forgot almost everything I let slip in those years, because he had no reason to suspect his younger brother. I didn't have a name for any of this yet.

By the time I did, it was already just how things were between us. I decided, without ever framing it as a decision, that I would organize the rest of my life around never finding out what it felt like to lose him for good. I didn't know yet how far I'd go to make sure I never had to.