HERE’S WHAT I REMEMBER FROM OUR JOURNEY TO THE United States: Sobbing during the flight because the pressure hurts my ears. The whirring sound of pumped air, the cold snap of the seat belt buckle that Eddie shows us how to open and close, the musty smell of the blue fabric seats. My brother huddled against the window seat, pulling the oval plastic shade up a crack to see the white-blue sky, then down to plunge us into darkness.
I’m in the middle. Eddie sits next to me, his prosthetic leg jutting into the aisle. Christopher is in the seat a row across. Eddie tries to whisper questions to his brother, but Christopher keeps his baseball cap pulled low over his eyes and folds his arms. I peek across Eddie at the massive form that is Christopher King. I can see nothing but the rim of his cap and the bottom of his beard as his chest moves up and down with the slow breaths of sleep. Even in slumber, Christopher is a force.
MY BROTHER REMEMBERS THIS FROM OUR ARRIVAL: THE scratching sound of Eddie’s key in his own front door while he turns it to no avail. Johanna has changed the lock. From inside the house, her voice is muffled, but he can tell that she’s shouting. Furious.
Eddie carries me over one shoulder, a duffel bag slung across his other.
“Jo, just meet them,” says Eddie. “They’re good kids.”
My brother knows enough English after weeks with our new guardian that he can piece it together. At six, he has a backpack all his own filled with new stories: The Legend of Paul Bunyan. The Tale of Johnny Appleseed. American heroes. Christopher—now Uncle Christopher—marveled at what he could procure through the embassy in Munich, where we waited until the official papers came from home that made it no longer our home.
“Learn about these men,” he said, pointing to the drawings. A brawny giant with an axe. A tall giant with a sack. “This is your history now.”
It’s dark, late. We’d flown eleven hours to Chicago, then rented a car for the six-hour trip to Eddie’s house in Thebes. Christopher has dropped the three of us off before continuing to the other side of town where he and Evelyn live. My brother says I slept in the back seat next to him the entire drive while he looked out the window at the endlessly long, flat stretches of road, unlike anything he’d ever seen in the mountains we were from.
Johanna is throwing things inside the house. Thud. Crack. Thud again.
“Fuck you for doing this to me, Edward!” Not so muffled.
“Let’s talk calmly,” Eddie says, leaning against the door. “They can hear you.”
“So what? You go away for seven months and come back with this? A telegram arrives telling me—not asking me—telling me you’re adopting two orphans from Bosnia?”
“I couldn’t take them out of the country without making it legal. I had to bring them here. Let me in and I can explain.”
Silence from the house. The rustle of strange leaves on strange trees all around.
HERE’S WHAT WE BOTH REMEMBER: JOHANNA HAS LEFT. We’re living alone with Eddie. His kind eyes are hooded, his mouth downturned. We sit at the kitchen table after our dinner of franks and beans, heated up right in the red-and-white can in a saucepan of boiling water. Eddie calls it army cooking.
His stump from the Gulf War hurts all the time now. His artificial lower leg stays in the corner of the living room; he no longer puts it on at home.
He keeps a bottle of small blue pills on the counter over the kitchen sink. We fetch it for him and count out the pills. At first, it’s two a day. Then four. More bottles appear on the windowsill like magic.
WAS IT A WEEK? WAS IT TWO? MY NEXT MEMORY IS THE afternoon my brother comes home from his new school to find me shaking under the living room sofa and Eddie unconscious. Christopher arrives to scoop us up, imposing and fearsome as ever.
We become Paul and Antonia King.
My brother is named for Uncle Christopher’s brawny hero with the axe. No longer a folk song boy or a bearded dragon. I’m named for a fictional girl from Eastern Europe who migrated to the Midwest: a character in a novel Aunt Evelyn loves that I’m too little to read.
New names for our new life.
This is our history now.