The Hawk

There is a ghost in the attic. I hear it, late at night, scuffling around up there with the rats and the sheltering birds. I hear it howling like the wind, something mournful and terribly human, too human. It (the psychics and priests and exorcists all tell me to call it ‘it’, tell me that it is no longer any kind of human soul) has been haunting me for years. Sometimes I go up in the morning and look at the damage it’s done, the boxes upturned, the old books and action figures flung wildly about the rafters. Sometimes, it is still there, in the shadows, watching me, waiting to see what I do in the face of its infinite, deathless rage.

When my brother was alive, he was such a small thing, but he was huge to me – he was always so big. There was this picture, framed in dark, heavy-grained wood, on a low shelf in his room, filmy with age, but you could still see us there within it: the day I was born; here he is, this half-formed boy cradling me like I’m the most delicate, important thing in the world. People talk of it all the time – the way a sibling is this irreplaceable being in your life, the way it’s such a fragile thing, loving someone like that, loving someone so singular and so mortal.

He was never exceptionally cruel, not like most boys, not to me. He was so carefully kind. I remember when we were just little things in the summer when the world was wide open and nothing was impossible, he and his friends would chase each other around the neighborhood shooting harmless steel pellets at each other, at the animals, at the car tires where they sat nestled against the desert curbs. I was only eight or nine, but I’d run after him, consistent as his shadow.

One of these days, his friend, Luke, shot a hawk – metal straight through the eye like it was intentional. We all watched it fall, this suddenly limp thing on a dead dive down to the earth and I thought it was so strange, how it fell, how it landed almost noiselessly on our freshly-mowed lawn. And we all stood there and stared at it because here was the truth – they had shot so many things before, but everything had always limped away, wide-eyed and scared and with a wound to nurse for the rest of their lives, an immortal fear of little boys with little guns. Luke was poking the hawk with the toe of his shoes, lips twisted in morbid enchantment, and I was just staring at the thing, where its eye was a crater of soft inner parts, beak parted, tongue out, and I was thinking I have never seen a hawk’s tongue, that little pink thing like a worm crawling out of its dead mouth. We were all standing there trying to decide how to feel, and my brother stepped in front of me, turned me around by the shoulders and told me to go home.

I don’t know what they did to it, where they put it, but he brought it up at dinner that night, all wild hand gestures and bright eyes, saying “Its feathers were the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen” and “It was huge” talking about the wingspan with his hands as measuring tools, and I was sitting there next to him, watching my parents hang on to his every word and I realized he was glad Luke shot it, he was glad it fell, if only because it meant he could see it, touch it, this thing that was so far removed from him when it was alive.

I tried to remember the feathers, that vast wingspan, but all I remembered was its tongue.

He was different when he got older, I think. He was my best friend in the world, and so I noticed how he stopped being so shy, how his eyes stopped darting around when he was worried about whether what he was doing was right or wrong. He was more confident, more solid, bigger, and the world loved him more for it.

I grew different, as well; I was just a twiggy thing, only bones and pale skin, like one of those sickly city trees made human. I was still shyly shadowing my brother around everywhere, quiet and translucent, but you don’t need to be substantial to be eaten by the world. Men look at girls the same, no matter how much there is to see.

Still, my brother was always there for me – it was like my fragility made him all the more stronger. We played princess and knight in the off days, when he had all this pent up energy from the end of whatever sports season he had just vanquished. I wore this winter blue dress, soft and clingy and making me look more ghost than girl, and he had carved cardboard armor. We pretended there were assassins, wars, great extravagant balls in the wild overgrown prairie grass of the wasteyard behind our house. I think it made him feel good to be my protector, like he would always be important to me because I would always need him.

And he was always protecting me.

One summer, when my legs had stopped growing, we spent a whole day at the pool. We were all still kids, then, but barely. Luke was growing a beard, this wiry thing, and when I kissed him on the tennis courts next to the pool while everyone else was buying hot dogs around the corner, his stupid beard brushed my cheek. It felt like the fur of a terrier.

I wanted to ask him about the hawk, but it was so long ago, and I was scared of what he would say. His eyes were beady planets beneath his eyebrows and I couldn’t tell if they looked more like the bullet or the crater.

It was a week later when my brother came into my room, all stormy anger, rumbling thunder. He said he knew Luke kissed me. The sky was black in my window, and I felt stripped bare. I couldn’t understand why he was angry. He said he’d take care of it and that he wasn’t mad at me, he was mad at Luke. His voice got softer the more he talked, but he didn’t get any less upset. I figured he wanted to feel like a knight again, cardboard armor and assassins to defeat.

I didn’t see Luke for the rest of the summer, and none of my brother’s friends mentioned him. When school started, Luke didn’t talk to me, didn’t even look at me. I tried to be mad at my brother, I did. I told my parents and my friends and my brother’s friends and they all smiled warmly and said “He just cares about you, he just cares so much.”

And it was such a small thing, I let it go.

I never grew into my skin very well – I was always sinewy and barely there. Even when I got older and my face got thinner and my fingers longer, I could have easily been elegant or willowy, but I was scary, haunting. The mirror reflected my eyes like black holes in my skull, and all the light in every room was devoured by my face.

Somehow, my ugliness made my brother love me more, like it made me more fragile, something misshapen and abnormal, and necessary to protect because the world loved nothing more than to sink its fangs into what it didn’t find pretty.

I was 15 and I was crying behind the gym, big sweater enveloping my brittle arms, and he came around the corner and gave me one of those big slices of greasy pizza from the cafeteria. We sat there for the rest of the day, skipped all our classes and watched the flocks of migrating geese fly through the nude blue sky.

He was my best friend; he was my knight. I was still wiping snot from my nose when we went home. I said, “Promise you’ll never leave me,” and he kissed the side of my head and said “I love you,” like it meant “I will never hurt you.”

“Promise,” I whispered.

He said “I promise. I will never leave you.”

I wonder if he regrets that.

I was 16 when the hottest summer on record hit our little desert town. I was wearing a cropped baby blue tank top with sequins on the neckline and ribbing down the sides. I thought it looked so cute; I thought maybe I could be something close to beautiful in it.

He was mad about it, my brother, and I couldn’t understand why. He pulled me into his room. I don’t remember many things, but I do remember how comforting the cool dark of his drawn windows felt, how he had a fan running loud and fast in one corner, how he still had his old action figures lined up on his window sill, little sentimental treasures. I remember he was grabbing me harder than he ever had before, how his fingers were dangerous things, how he held me down and

There are some things I don’t remember, but many more that I do.

He was always so carefully kind to me, and in the dark of that room, his eyes were bullets.

Everyone talks about the way you love your sibling like it is this untouchable thing, like its power is both a weapon and a balm, like it is the same everywhere – that a brother is always a knight. They would rather me be a liar than for this myth to fall apart.

I’m older now, and I’ve grown heavy into my bones. I am a wraith, not a ghost. My parents couldn’t stay in this house, with all the grief it held, but I will be here all my life. I will be here whether I move out, whether I die. I will always be in that room; his hands will always be on me.

This house is old, and the summers are hot. The hawks circle safely around the tall, slender trees, only diving down to the earth to eat. My room is warm and bright, and there is a ghost in the attic.

I hear him, up there, crying. They tell me I’m lying, they tell me my brother is gone, but I know better. He told me himself, he would never leave. Sometimes I go up in the morning and look at the damage he’s done, the boxes upturned, the old books and action figures flung wildly about the rafters. Sometimes, he is still there, hiding in the shadows, watching me, waiting to see what I do in the face of his infinite, deathless rage.

Sometimes, though, I think he hides because he is still scared of me, even in death.

Sometimes, I place an empty little bottle on the upturned boxes – belladonna, beautiful woman – and he flinches, this ghost, like I can still hurt him.

Sometimes, I sit there and tell him the story, how he died, why he died. I sit there and ask, did he like it? Did he like it when he couldn’t choose? When the poison fell past his lips against his consent?

Beautiful women, I say against the darkness of the attic every morning. How was I to know it would kill you? Me and the little bottle, sisters in arms. It seemed so easy for you to take what you can’t have.

And he curls into the shadows of the rafters like a cornered beast and I laugh because it is funny, really, it is.

He finally knows what it’s like to be haunted.