IN THE YEARS OF TREES

My brother is a tree. He wasn’t always a tree. When I was seven, my mom was pregnant and my brother was inside her. I had been asking for a brother for years and years and years, and now I was finally going to have one. But the night before my eighth birthday, my brother came out too soon. He was half-grown, unfinished. There was nothing the doctors could do. He was already dead. We hadn’t even named him yet.

I should have known my brother would be born too soon, because a brother being born is a Big Event. The doctors had predicted my brother wouldn’t be born until months after my eighth birthday, but that never could have happened. Big Events only happen on years that you’re a prime. A prime is a number that’s divisible only by one and itself—the primes I’ve been are two, three, five, seven, and eleven. When I was two, our dog got hit by a truck. When I was three, our kitchen caught on fire. When I was five, I broke my leg, I skipped a grade, and our dog got pregnant and we had to give away the puppies. When I was seven, my mom got pregnant and my brother was born and died. When I turned eleven, my dad got fired from the factory where he built cars and moved to the Upper Peninsula to work at my uncle’s repair shop and was never home and we had to give away our dog because we couldn’t afford to feed her. Nothing like that happens years that I’m not a prime. That year that my brother died I was seven and my mom was forty-one and my dad was forty-three. All of us were primes. My brother never had a chance.

After my brother died, my parents said we would plant a tree so we would remember him always, and they drove away (like they had before, to the hospital, when everything had gone wrong) and drove back again with a tree roped to the car—a pine, a sapling, just barely younger than me in the years of trees. After we had buried my brother in the dirt at the edge of our backyard, beyond the swing set he could not climb on and the sandbox he could not play in, we sat on the deck drinking lemonade. I was so happy to have a brother again. My parents never talked about him after that, but I understood that he wasn’t dead anymore—that instead he had become this other thing.

During the years that followed, a dog snapped at me in the woods and I got a white scar on my hand, and my dad tripped into me in the garage and I got a white scar on my knee, and birds pecked at my brother with their beaks and scarred my brother’s branches, and my dad bumped into my brother with a wheelbarrow and scarred my brother’s trunk, and my brother kept my knife in the crook of his branches and my socks sometimes hanging from his twigs and my shoes at his roots, and I kept his pinecones on my windowsill and fistfuls of his needles on my dresser and his sap in a jar in my room in the house where he could not go, and in this way we grew together. I told him everything.