Although my brother’s seizures came without a pattern of frequency—sometimes two in a month and sometimes once a year—they always came at night. Mama would wake me after she had placed Cary in the passenger seat, guide me quickly to the car, open the back door, and say, fiercely, “Don’t look.” It would be years before I’d see his eyes roll back and body stiffen (the tonic phase) and then his entire body contract and release like a giant heart (the clonic phase). I’d sit in waiting rooms until Mama came to say he was okay. Doctors gave Cary a strong dose of Phenobarbital, so by the time I saw him, he had stopped convulsing, had peed his pants, and was in the midst of the stupor. Mama would explain that he was “out of it,” but we could take him home.
I didn’t know that a seizure could kill him. I knew his body shook, but I didn’t worry about his breath and his heart.
Other than the seizures, life with Cary back then was pretty simple—at least for me. Mama, still hoping Cary would eventually talk, continued giving him speech lessons. He spent hours in his room on his knees with his eyes inches from his matchbox cars, lining up the little, metal Corvettes and Ford trucks as close to each other as possible without letting fenders and bumpers touch. When he got bored, he followed Mama around the house or sat staring at her, his face as close to hers as it had been to his tiny cars. He tapped her shoulder in a heartbeat’s rhythm. Mama was usually busy looking over medical articles or Cary’s latest blood levels, reading my school progress reports, fastening Velcro to Cary’s shoes and pants, talking to potential babysitters on the phone, or figuring bills so she could afford my latest dance recital costume.
To keep Cary busy, she found garbage and asked him to throw it away. She’d tear junk-mail flyers into pieces and send him on twenty trips to the trashcan. Cary balled each piece up tight, pushed it deep into the can with the other garbage, and wiped his hands together: all clean. Then Mama would silently hold up another piece.
She fought battles I didn’t know about then. She constantly searched for ways to improve his life and ability to communicate—better doctors, new studies, or new devices like electronic language boards that were too expensive. After a teacher punished Cary for wetting his pants by tying him to a toilet, she got the teacher fired, tried to organize a lawsuit, and stopped trusting any adult to care for him.
Life with Cary got more complicated during one Sunday afternoon movie. We went to see E.T. When the alien said his first words, Cary jumped to his feet, clapped, and let out a loud ah like someone watching fireworks. The people in the theater shushed him. Mama reached across Cary, slapped my knee, and whispered, “No one’s ever told him to shut up before.”
As he usually did while watching TV, he sucked on his first three fingers and stared at the screen. Then, one of the boys found E.T., pasty and pale, face down in the shallow stream. My brother’s forehead scrunched, but he stayed calm until Elliot got sick, too. Then he jumped up and bit his fingers. In the dark theater, when he bit into his fingers with his big, back teeth, I squeezed my eyes shut and bit my lip. Before Mama could reach over and touch him, he plowed through the row of legs, shrieking the whole time, until he was in the aisle. Mama had to run to catch him. I stood in the crowded theater, but no one told me to move or sit down. They stared. One woman lifted her upper body off the seat beside her where a child huddled with his head between his knees. The monster was gone now. The coast was clear.
I found Mama and Cary in the lobby. She kneeled with her arms wrapped around him. He was calm, his eyes dazed. Saliva shined on his chin. His knuckles bled. Mama stroked his hair, and my shoulders relaxed. A teenage employee kept his distance and said, quietly, “I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
Mama kept one hand on my brother’s chest as she stood up. She held her other hand out to me, and I took it. As we left, I watched her glare at the teenager. I studied her unblinking eyes, her raised chin and brows, and her slight grin that must have made him feel small. I would use this look when a group of kids mimicked my brother’s swelling sounds or flapping hands, and I wish I could forget how Cary waved to them, linked his two pointer fingers together in the sign for friend, and stuttered the first letter of the word.
The night we returned from seeing E. T., I sat on the back porch while Mama tucked Cary into bed.
He’d never run screaming like that. He’d never seemed so wild.
I sat in the darkness, and although I couldn’t fit a finger between the freckles on my face, if I closed one eye, I could fit a hand between two stars. I thought about how Elliot could feel E.T.’s feelings. I thought about an extraterrestrial from the sky connected to a child, the space between them so slight nothing else could fit.
Libbie Searcy is an Associate Professor at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona beach, FL. She earned an M.F.A. in Fiction from Bowling Green State University and a Ph.D. in English from Western Michigan University. Her work recently appeared in The Branches.
