Lucky Boy

Theodore, my brother, drowned when he was a boy. Nobody saw him do it so nobody knew how long he’d been dead when I found him. I saw him floating, white skin in black water with his curly hair limp, a red matted halo barely moving in the lake like the rest of his body was barely moving, rocked only in the wake of a passing boat, people moving on to happy without seeing his pale body suspended, face down, forgetting life. But the doctors said he was a lucky boy because the water was so cold and because the woman in the campsite next to us knew CPR and even though some of the family said he was never quite right after that, other people, who didn’t know he’d been dead for a while, didn’t really notice that he was a little bit off.

When Theo was seventeen, he came home from his summer job, cleaning out grease pits at the steel mill, and said, “I’m getting married tomorrow.”

“To whom might I ask?” Mother still had a smile on her face at this point.

“Julie Best.”

“Julie Best? Martin and Lynnette’s daughter? That’s a fine catch Theodore,” she was still laughing.

Neither my mother nor my father were laughing the next afternoon when Theo and Julie arrived home, dressed in their Sunday clothes – Julie, wearing a thin golden wedding band and her belly just beginning to show through with a baby.

Theo came over and looked at me for a long time, the way we used to look at each other when we were kids, playing the Stare Game, who would break first – not me! Not me!

“You’re a lucky boy,” I said.

And he smiled and everything was ok.

Theo had one more year of high school left which he decided he would skip, the baby was more important. So he took a full-time job at the steel mill and that was that. He worked shifts and he worked over-time and he worked holidays and he had insurance and he had benefits and every single chance she got, Julie screamed into his face that he wasn’t quite right, that he was off – more than a little bit.

When the baby was born Julie wouldn’t hold him and refused to see him, Theo too wasn’t allowed to visit. The doctor moved her to another floor, a special ward for troubled new mothers and everyday, to ease her pain, the nurses would express milk from Julie’s full, aching breasts and would bring the milk to Theo who sat waiting in a tiny room, no bigger than a closet and there – he fed his son – breast milk from a bottle. On more than one occasion, when I was there to see my brother feeding his newborn son I heard him whisper, “I’m a lucky boy.”