Four Pieces of Nonfiction
Pane
I was home alone, somewhere just north of my 11th birthday. Armed with the remote and a snack, I circled outfits on the dog-eared pages of the Sears catalog while watching Facts of Life, Diff”rent Strokes, and Family Ties. I have a vague memory of staring into the bottom of a bag of Doritos and realizing I’d eaten the whole thing while watching Alex P. Keaton loosen his tie, talk about money, and bounce his eyebrows up and down. I was bone thin and lonely and had no idea yet that my oddities could not be cured by a purple boatneck sweater and a feathered hairdo.
My parents left me alone without hesitation. I was not a likely troublemaker: I had few friends, read Shakespeare for fun, and was already receiving applications for military academies under assumed names. At that time, my alias was Alexandra Duvet. It would be years before I realized I had named myself after a comforter cover.
I guess my parents didn’t mind letting my brother loose on the town at 14. Or, more likely, they assumed he was where he claimed to be: sleeping over at a friend’s house. But he was not.
The back door slammed open, shattering the mundane jingle of a commercial break. Before I turned to look, Matthew was through the door, up the stairs, and in the bathroom. I sat in my recliner, dumbly wondering what I should do. Then I heard him through the ceiling. It was a sound that was part cry, part moan, part curse.
I took the stairs carefully, like a character in a horror story. Knock knock knock. I heard him breathing on the other side of the door.
“What’s wrong?”
“Forget it.”
“You okay?”
“Go away.”
“No.”
My protest detonated between us, the tiniest bomb.
“I cut my foot pretty bad.”
“I’ll help.”
“You’ll tell.”
“I won’t.”
The glass knob turned and the door swung open from its own weight. My brother sat with one black hi-top still on, the other leg held straight out in front of him with a pool of blood collecting under it. I couldn’t see the wound. He’d tied a bloody tube sock around his ankle.
I held my hands over his foot as if warming them near a fire. “What happened?”
“I was at a party. The cops came. We ran out the back door, and I stepped through some storm windows covered with leaves. I think I cut my heel off.”
“We have to call Mom and Dad.”
“No.” He looked me in the eyes. It is the only feature we had in common: dark brown eyes with black rims circling the iris.
“I’ll call Ginger,” I said. She was a nurse and a friend of the family. She’d tell Mom and Dad, but they would hear about it second hand, after coming home from the bar half-lit to find my brother resting in bed, reading his skateboarding magazines.
Ginger took one look at the pond of blood collecting on the tile floor and began to fill the tub with warm water. I watched as she held his foot under, the red-brown tube sock sagging like a near-dead fish. Matthew’s eyes rolled into the back of his head. He still wore his black leather motorcycle jacket and his “Alfalfa” haircut: a shaved head with one small lock of hair that stood straight up like a toothpick from the center of his hairline. I never did see his foot again, but I know he lost a good chunk of that heel.
Years later, the story of the heel and the panes of glass bubbled up through my sleep. I woke in the cold night in my bed in Montana and wondered if I dreamed the whole thing. I called and asked my brother if it had really happened.
“Yes,” he said. The line crackled between us. My brother’s breathing broke the radio silence, coming in clear from all the way down in Georgia.
