Page 68 of Strange Lights

It’s the first time she tells me she’s proud of me.

29

Nobody Wants a Baby Brother

My first and only Mother’s Day present is an afterthought. Meredith is eight and has learned all the months of the year, keeping a meticulous calendar and celebrating every obscure holiday she can find. She celebrates some with solemnity, learning about the traditions of Beltane and gobbling down any scrap of information about the pagan gods that she can get her hands on. Others she celebrates with more giddy facetiousness. Zara and I learn more about mosquito biology than we ever cared to know on World Mosquito Day. Meredith spends Christmas Day carting around a thesaurus, speaking in stilted words, refusing to use the letter L.

“Because it’s Alphabet Day,” she claims.

“Alphabet has an l in it,” Zara points out.

“But ‘Fuck off, Zara’ doesn’t,” Meredith sneers.

Mother’s Day, something we’ve never celebrated, I expect her to gloss over with some other obscure holiday. But no. Meredith decorates a little clay pot, painstakingly painting little flowers. Sealing it with waterproofing spray. Unlike Zara and me, she’s got an artistic streak a mile wide. Add two stubborn and persistent older sisters willing to go to bat for her, so she gets to add far more arts to her curriculum. She’s neither the heir, nor the spare, so she gets away with things that Zara and I never did. Zara is ignored unless she makes a mistake. Half the time Adele treats me like I’m no more than a coworker she has forgotten to fire. The rest of the time I’m as vital as an extra limb, and she wields the Gauntlet as naturally as if my arm belonged to her.

Adele may be a hands-off mother when it comes to actual parenting, but even she lets the baby of the family get away with anything. Occasionally, a brief pang of jealousy I thought long dead and buried pokes its face above the dirt when Adele looks at Meredith. I sometimes think Adele might actually love Meredith. It’s hard not to, and trust me, I’ve tried. Yet that still doesn’t prevent her from quashing Meredith’s soul.

The cactus itself comes straight from the desert. Meredith pried it out of the parched and compacted soil with a trowel she bullied her tutor into ordering, along with various other seeds and gardening soil and supplies. I’m frankly shocked the tutor isn’t fired after I saw him in Adele’s office trying to justify all the purchases. Then again, hiring a tutor is a lengthy endeavor.

Meredith is sweaty from her exertion in the heat of a desert spring, a smear of potting soil muddy on her forehead. She’s not crying, but there are tear tracks down her cheeks when I find her in her room, the cactus tossed in a pile of dirt on the floor. The little flowered pot is in her hand, arm hefted high, and she looks like she’s debating throwing it at the wall. Clearly, Adele doesn’t value thoughtfulness. Not surprising; it’s always been the finished product, not the effort that matters.

“I don’t know what you expected,” I say, plucking the pot from between her hands and holding it up, light refracting from my metal-encased arm. We both look at the rainbow spray of painted flowers. They’re surprisingly well done⁠—deliberate abstract pointillism rather than sloppy childish painting.

Meredith looks at me warily. Her eyes shutter, and she draws herself up, sticks out her chin, as if ready to defiantly take more criticism. She doesn’t appear upset any longer. On the contrary, it looks like she’s ready to fight back. She’s always been this way. It’s why I chose her. A bright bolt of pride streaks through me.

“We both know Adele doesn’t have any taste. Have you seen her room?” I say, shaking my head in disgust.

Meredith blinks, her chin quivering. For a second, I think she’s about to cry again.

“Can I have it?” I ask. “Please?”

Meredith nods.

“Can I have the cactus too?” I say, grabbing a dirty sock from the floor and gingerly reaching for the succulent with the sock, aiming for the bald patches where some spines have broken off and using the metal of my gauntleted arm for protection.

Meredith snorts with laughter. “Sure. I want my sock back, though.”

My sleep is interrupted first by the flashes of lightning and booming of thunder. Adele is messing with the weather again. Some people’s mothers take up crocheting or scrapbooking for an eccentric hobby. Mine does weather manipulation. Pilates, reading, gardening⁠—anything would be better. Why can’t she be normal? I think jealously of the sitcom teenagers complaining about their embarrassing mothers. They don’t know how good they have it in their make-believe worlds. My mother’s favorite hobbies ruin any sliver of peace I carve out for myself. I clench my fingers, long to feel anything besides metal against the skin of my hand. Push her in, let her go, I try to convince myself. But I imagine her dragging me down alongside her, cold hand in cold hand, and grudgingly tether her here.

Just as I’m contemplating all the ways Adele has made my life hell, her most disruptive hobbies appear at my door: Zara and Meredith. Zara, rushing, sheepish and scared⁠—even at fifteen, she’s terrified of the lightning. Or rather, she’s terrified of Adele, but they’re one and the same on these stormy nights. Zara is shuffling under the covers, pushing against me, pulling the blankets up under her chin, before I can even invite her in.

Meredith follows behind, with a recognizable if unrefined swagger. Apparently, she’s been watching me more closely than I realized. She revels in the storm’s wildness out of spite, refusing to be cowed by our mother. Despite our complaints, she climbs right over Zara and me to snuggle into my other side.

“Sing,” Meredith demands, imperious as always.

Zara groans, but I sing Meredith’s favorite lullaby. The morbid words have long lost their meaning, a well-worn groove in a record now. Ladybird, ladybird.

“I hate her,” Zara says, venom dripping from her words.

“Me too,” Meredith says cheerfully.

“Don’t let her hear you say that,” I say.

“I’m not stupid,” Zara says scathingly.

“She’s not even related to us, actually. I don’t get why we’re supposed to love her,” Meredith says.

Zara and I share a look, reading each other’s expression in the flashes of lightning. We both knew this already. You can’t handpick your baby sister from a litter of infants without realizing that hard truth. But neither of us knew Meredith had figured it out. Some kids leave Santa and the Tooth Fairy behind with their childhood, discarded among the outgrown toys and too-small socks. I guess we grow out of secrets in this family. The only one of us with no one to keep an origin myth for them, with no one to say exactly why I exist, is me. I have kept it from Zara and Meredith that Adele has let slip that I do share her blood. I’m afraid they would look at me and see a shadow of Adele, see all the ways we are the same.