Indiana and the littlest were inseparable as soon as school ended. Their mother never had to ask who would take the baby for the day; Indiana just volunteered. While it was endearing to her, their father was suspicious.
“What do they do all day together, out there in the neighborhood? I ain’t heard him talk about doing those weirdo things no more.” He mused grumpily one evening shortly after school ended.
“Oh, just boy things. Maybe they’re catchin’ bugs and teasin’ the girls with them,” she said as she darned a hole in a pair of jeans that started out as her husband’s but now belonged to one of the twins. Her scissors snicked loudly as crickets chirped outside. She looked up. “Oh, it’s getting dark.” Her brows furrowed together, and she set down her mending to look up at the clock above the TV.
“Indiana ain’t no child, Dora. He ain’t catchin’ no bugs. I remember being nearly eighteen and he’s more interested in the girls than them bugs,” her husband said, sipping on a can of beer as he stared blindly at the TV. He belched and crossed his legs at the knee. “Jay’s workin’ the garage tonight?” he asked.
“That’s what he told me.” She stuck her needle in her mouth as she finished the mending. “It’s nearly eight o’clock…” she said to herself.
She paced slowly before the front door for a moment and then turned toward the kitchen. She absently washed a pot from dinner that had been soaking and chewed the inside of her cheek, thinking. Their father had forbidden any children home during the day, sticking to his personal motto that fresh air made boys into men.
Five minutes later, the twins could be heard laughing as they dumped their bicycles against the house. They entered in a flurry of dirty teenage sweat, fresh from their first shifts with the labor agency. Dora ushered them to the bathroom to wash up for the night and waited for the rest of her children.
Dark was just kissing the kitchen, forcing her to turn on the overhead light when her two youngest children came home. Indie looked pale and his eyes were too bright. The baby looked shy and guilty.
“Sorry we’re late, Momma,” he said sweetly and skirted by his mother and into the hallway. Indie tried to do the same and she grabbed his arm.
“What’s wrong with you?” she demanded, not bothering to mask her worry. Indie just shrugged and attempted to untangle his arm from her grip.
“Nothin’, Momma. Just tired from running after Ratty,” he lied. But his eyes were hollow and haunted, and her mother’s instincts were sharp.
“Out with it, Indiana, unless you wanna be doing laundry and dishes for a week.” He swallowed hard and glanced over his shoulder quickly toward the living room where his father was sitting. He weighed his options and while he did not want to say anything to get his little brother in trouble, he also could not tell his mother the entire truth without scaring her. He decided that the youngster would probably forgive him faster than his mother.
“Just Rat being…Rat,” he pretended to confide. Her eyes held his and he continued. “Momma, he’s doing it around the other kids again.”
Anger flashed on his mother’s face, but Indie wasn’t sure if she was mad at catching him in a lie or at his brother for doing tricks and he felt guilt icing up his insides. At least he hadn’t had to tell her about the man following them in the trees near the road on the way home. He had been careful to avoid letting his brother see the figure as he rushed them home.
“Momma, he’s fine, really. I’m just tired of him embarrassing me, is all. Leave him be. I’ll talk to him.” He broke her grasp and hurried out of the kitchen to find his brother. He had only partially lied to his mother by omitting the shadowy menace that stalked them.
Indie shut the bathroom door behind him quietly and put his finger to lips as he looked at his brother, bare chested at the sink.
“Momma might talk to you soon, but this time it ain’t my fault, ok?” he put his hands on his hips and looked down at his half-naked brother. “You gotta stop just doing it out of nowhere and you gotta stop doing it in front of other kids. I felt so sick, I almost fainted again. I’m not so scared when you tell me first but when you do it, my head feels so light and I can’t breathe.” The color was slowly returning to his cheeks as he got more annoyed. He felt his irritation strengthening him from the inside out and relaxed a little.
“I did warn you, Indie.” The boy reminded him. He picked up the bar of soap on the side of the sink and lathered up a pile of bubbles to scrub his face and arms with. “I said I was gonna make the girls laugh. And they did laugh. Did you see Ella’s eyes light up?” The boy’s own eyes sparkled when he thought about the tricks he did for the girls. Indie blushed, thinking about Ella’s cerulean eyes.
“I saw ‘em, yeah.” He admitted fondly. “She was pretty surprised, I guess.” Indie put the toilet seat and lid down and sat down near his brother so he could whisper. “But you have to stop, please. I wish I could tell you how it feels when you do it.”
“Like someone tooked all the air from you and then put your head in ice,” the child said as he lifted the handful of bubbles to his face and blew them gently. “It’s how I used to feel when I was thinkin’ about doin’ it but not sure how to do it. I ain’t never fainted, though.” He smirked mischievously at his beloved brother.
“Well I did, and I will again if you don’t stop.” Indie insisted.
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“Nah, you won’t. You’ll get better and better and maybe one day you’re gonna see what I see and do what I do then we can make lots of people smile, together.” He blew more bubbles out of his hands, directly at Indie’s face. His confidence startled Indie and made him frown.
“What makes you so sure, Rat?”
“I dunno. Same way I’m sure that Momma’s mad at Daddy right now and that you’re so scared you could pee your pants but you’re trying real hard to be a big man and—” Indie’s hand shot up and covered his brother’s mouth, pressing hard enough to hurt.
“Stop it, Rat. You’re making me sick and I hate it. My heart is racing and I’m going to faint again.” He glowered at the little boy who looked frightened himself. He pushed his brother’s cold hand off his face.
“I told you not to be afraid of me, Indie. Why are you so afraid of me?” His query sounded forceful and not a little angry. He felt the question being asked inside his mind, but in his brother’s voice. Indie saw black around the edges of his vision.
“Rat…” he implored weakly and then toppled off the toilet seat, face first, into the ceramic tiles of the bathroom floor. The boy gasped and then covered his mouth with a soapy hand. He rinsed his hands haphazardly and stood, dripping noisily on the floor, over his brother’s figure. He bent and reached his hand out, felt his back, felt the rise and fall of his breathing and the quick, birdlike fluttering of his heart. The child squinted his eyes closed and reached out with another part of him that wasn’t tangible. He poured his warmth into his brother and prayed desperately.
“Let him be ok, let him be ok. Let him wake up and for Momma not to come in and see him.” He felt his brother’s breathing slow but deepen and then felt his heartbeat slow and even out. Indie stirred on the cold floor and turned his face toward his little brother’s shivering body beside him.
“I…told you.” He gasped aloud. He looked at his brother’s face which was wide-eyed with panic. “What?” he demanded, feeling his strength coming back.
“Your eyebrow…” the little boy said just as blood trickled into Indie’s eye. He sat up slowly and touched his forehead and felt a sharp sting and a large split in his flesh. Suddenly, the boy reached out to touch the wound.
“Stop it,” Indie said, rocking his head away and out of his reach. It made the world around him wobble as though he was in a giant fish bowl filled with water.
“Sit still.” Demanded his baby brother and something in his voice made Indie do just that. The child reached up and slowly closed his eyes. He felt the darkness creeping on the edges of his vision and sucked in his breath.
“Rat, no…” he began. He stopped when he felt a tingling near the wound, not unlike pins and needles after sitting on your foot for too long. Then a sharp, but quick zip. The darkness around his eyes receded as the boy’s eyes opened.
“I did it…” he breathed in shock. “I thought I could, but I ain’t never tried it before.” An enormous smile burst onto his face. “Indie, I fixed it.” Indie reached a hand up slowly and ran his fingers across his brow. Where he had had a bleeding two-inch gash moments before, he now only had a smooth, sticky patch of skin. He pulled his hand away and inspected it. It was covered in blood that was already starting to dry and thicken. He touched his head again. Perfectly smooth.
“Think of all the good things I could do, Indie. Think of the people I could help.” The tiny boy’s face, always a picture of contentment, now looked supremely blissful.
“What the hell is going on?” breathed Indie. “Get dressed, Rat. We gotta clean this blood up before Momma sees it.”
Indie pulled out a washcloth from the small linen cupboard beside the bathroom door and investigated his reflection in the mirror. Where there should have been a wound requiring several stitches was simply a blank, but shiny swath of flesh surrounded by dark blood. It would be a bruise the next day. A dried trickle was tracking down his temple and he was sure that he felt bone before. It wasn’t an inconsequential injury and Indie knew that he had wandered into a dream, or a nightmare, which one he did not know. He did know, however, that his brother’s gifts were something that needed close guarding. Memories of Jay using him to place bets, or to impress a girl flooded him. The worst was remembering Jay selling him as a freak and making people pay a dollar to have him guess things they were thinking.
While his older brother washed his face clean of blood, the little one pulled on his dirty shirt, his face left unwashed. He looked at the floor and saw a small reddish black pool near the wall where Indie’s face had landed. He motioned for Indie to give him the cloth and he bent to wipe it up. Just as he was scrubbing the last of the dried blood from the floor, he gasped.
“Momma’s comin’” he squealed at Indie and stuffed the bloodied cloth into the back of his jeans. He looked up at Indie and saw resolve in his brother’s eyes. He looked like he had come to a decision, like he had been riddled with anxiety but now that anxiety was taken from him. Indie smiled at the little boy and nodded back. They opened the door just as their mother had her hand on the doorknob.
“Squared him away, did you?” his mother demanded as she let the littlest one by and stopped Indie.
“Yes, Momma. We ain’t gotta be worried about him no more.” The confidence in Indiana’s voice was shocking and Indie saw her narrow her eyes in suspicion.
“Why not?” she demanded.
“I told you I would talk to him. I did," insisted the teen. He made to move past his mother, but she blocked him.
“What do you boys get up to during the day? What are you doing to him?” she demanded angrily. “Are you making him show off?” The accusation was so close to what he had just been remembering Jay doing that it stung to hear his mother fling it at him.
“I ain’t Jay, Momma.” He said fiercely between his teeth. “I would never hurt him.” His mother’s face crumpled in dejection. Indie questioned if his mother knew about Jay using Rat.
“I know I don’t make it easy for you boys to understand, but he needs to be taken care of by all of us. He will break if we ain’t careful to protect him. He ain’t right, but he ain’t wrong either, you hear me?”
“Momma,” Indie said, his anger deflated. “Momma, I’m with you. I agree and I promise you I ain’t gonna hurt him. No one is gonna hurt him anymore.” He reassured his mother and when he saw her shoulders relax, he gave her a tiny, embarrassed hug. “I understand, Momma.”
“You’re a good boy, Indie. You’re gonna be alright, I think.” She had to look up to see his face, but she touched his cheek and brushed his hair off his forehead. Indie saw something dark pass in his mother’s eyes but she blinked, and it was gone. He wondered if she was thinking about Jay and the shadowy rage that lurked in him.