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I’d wished for those times over the years, but I always ended up stuck in the same loop.
After the oil rig accident mangled his hand, Dad drove trucks, gone for long stints. Nash and I were little at the time, bouncing around to different babysitters so Mama could work. I didn’t know anything different until I was somewhere around ten and overheard a conversation between my parents, a pile of bills on the kitchen table between them. The oil company had fucked him over when he was injured on the job, but he hadn’t had anyone to advise him. He had no other trades, no skills to lean on that didn’t involve labor, and with one hand, his options were limited. Even driving trucks, he couldn’t take certain jobs, but he worked his ass off despite his bad hand only rudimentarily functioning
Mama worked in the elementary school cafeteria, raised me and Nash half alone, which would have been hard enough on its own. But Nash was a handful—the polite word everyone used over trouble. He had enough energy to power a city block, his brain moving a million times a minute. When he was little, he came with two gears: pure, absolute joy, and complete, total fury. When he started school, it became clear that he was going to struggle, his ability to concentrate or stay on task almost nonexistent.
Mama was in the principal’s office regularly for him. Fights weren’t uncommon. Destruction of property was a favorite, everything from bending up the cafeteria cutlery to setting a fire in a trashcan behind the school in the second grade. With Dad gone and Mama so overwhelmed, there was nothing for me to do but help where I could. I did my best to watch over him, to guide him. To be a good example, to encourage him. Tutored him, tried to get him to focus all that energy into sports. Did my best to be his friend and to make sure he knew he was loved.
But all I did was fail over and over, and in the end, abandoned him completely for my own gain.
What nobody tells you about kids with ADHD is the excess energy, the lack of impulse control, and the subsequent trouble they get in comes with layers of shame, anxiety, and depression that can cut a struggling child off at the knees. Twice as a young teen, Nash attempted suicide, though thank God the damage was superficial. We didn’t have access to mental health care or even general health care beyond the most basic line of defense. So Mama had to do her best to help him with only the support of the school counselor and a handful of pills that seemed to make no difference for him.
My first semester at Harvard, Nash flunked out of school. I wanted to come home then, but between seeing what trouble he’d gotten into during Christmas break and my inability to leave Poppy again, I wasn’t sure what to do. Mama said there was nothing I could do about Nash and impressed on me the importance of giving school a real chance before making a decision, so I didn’t come home.
I’d regretted it ever since.
When we were teens, Nash self-medicated with alcohol, and when I left, he turned to drugs. After he was arrested with weed in his truck at seventeen, I got him a good job on a rig he could start the second he turned eighteen, thanks to a high school friend. But he couldn’t pass the drug test. So he left town. Every once in a while, Nash would show up needing some kind of help and would be off again before any of us had even gotten a good look at him. For years, I sent him money regularly, did my best to keep track of him, but if he didn’t want to be found, that was that. Sometimes, it would be months before I could find him, and when he turned up again, the relief was a tidal wave, crashing against the rocks and wiping everything clean behind it.
Five years ago, I saw him for the last time. Nash blew through town, but this time, he took my parents’ savings with him. It was in part their fault for keeping that much cash in the house rather than leaving it in the bank. But Nash had never stolen like that before, and they didn’t suspect it could happen until it was too late.
None of us had heard from him since. I’d done my best to track him down, but he didn’t want to be found, so that was that.
He’d turn up again like he always did. I only hoped he wouldn’t leave destruction in his wake. That, and I hoped I wasn’t here when he showed up. Because I loved my brother, but after stealing like he did, I wouldn’t hesitate to turn his face inside out.
