At the hospital, a doctor reset Marko’s ankle, which had been dislocated from Derekah parking her wheelchair on it. Prior to this, Marko was x-rayed extensively. The doctor treating Marko noticed a problem with Marko’s bones completely unrelated to the ankle injury: the curvature of his spine. Marko had been told in the past that his poor posture resulted from a combination of his spinal injury being so low on his back and a bad case of congenital scoliosis. The consequence—that as he grew, he grew more bent over rather than taller—was life-threatening, according to this new doctor.
There was good news, bad news, and more bad news. The good news was that there was a surgery that might be able to correct his curving spine. The bad news: it was major spine surgery that was very risky and that he might not live through. And if he did live through it, there was a chance it either wouldn’t work or that it could make him more paralyzed than he already was. The surgery consisted of cutting Marko open through the back and the chest and reinforcing his spine with metal rods to straighten it. The more bad news: he would die within a few years if he didn’t have the surgery because the way he was growing would interfere with his circulation, his digestion, and his ability to breathe.
The silence in the room following the news was a quiet uproar. Marko brimmed with murky, colliding shapes and numbers, unable to make sense of the feelings. Sometimes, the signal of his own feelings was interrupted by his mom’s feelings; then they all mixed and muddled together inside him. Finally the silence gave way to a barrage of questions from Kali. What kind of metal were the rods? Would it lead to more or less pain? Would Marko keep use of his arms? What about his heart? At one point during the questioning, his mom and grandma started arguing about getting a second opinion.
While Marko’s mom and grandma argued and talked at length with the doctor, Marko felt eerily calm. Eventually, he asked if he could leave the room and let them talk. Instead, they left the room. Left alone with his iPad, Marko read his mom’s diary.
Because my father was gone so often, my mom would take my brother and me and drop us off at her mother’s house. My grandmother was not a warm woman. She did no parenting. She basically ignored us. If we sought attention from her, she put us to work on this or that chore—wash the dishes, sweep the floor, clean out the ice box, boil the potatoes, knead the dough. My younger brother was my passive playmate. He let me exercise my wildest imaginings on him. Because when I was young, I thought I would have wanted a younger sister much more than a younger brother, I would outfit Marko in wigs and dresses and put makeup on him and call him Ellie.
I remember one day, I dressed him this way at my grandmother’s house. While we were playing, Marko grew tired and fell asleep in a chair. I left him there to go fix myself something to eat in the kitchen. When I came back with cheese and bread, my grandmother stood at the threshold to the attic room where Marko—dressed as Ellie—slept. Marko’s hands were palms-up on his lap and his fingers were making slight movements, as if he were trying to grasp something in his sleep. His mouth was agape and his upturned face had the loudest snore emitting from it that it sounded like something motorized.
“What is this?” my grandmother asked when she saw me.
I took a bite of cheese and with my mouth full answered, “This is Ellie.”
She scowled at me with her mouth open, a look that I’d imagine her giving me if I said every terrible curse word to her in a fast string. I stopped chewing and held the food in my mouth.
“What are you thinking, doing this to him?” she asked, the pitch of her voice spiking each word to barb me.
“He likes it.”
Her face settled into resolute disgust then, like any hope or respect she had for me in her body had just been flushed out with three short syllables. I wanted to reach into the air and snatch the syllables back and swallow them and never say anything again. I swallowed the food in my mouth instead, which suddenly tasted sour. This was when I realized that speech can be as destructive as it is creative.
“Wake him up and undo this immediately. Get him dressed properly; then both of you get downstairs. I have work for you to do.”
With that, she turned around and left. Her footsteps retreating down the wooden stairs, the clacking of her heels across the hard lower floor, and the lingering smell of her rose soap all combined to keep me frozen in place. It wasn’t until I felt my heart beating in my throat that I realized I’d been holding my breath.
I woke Marko up and made him take everything off. I scrubbed the makeup off his face with a washcloth while he cried.
“Why are you crying?” I asked brusquely.
“Because I want to be Ellie,” he said, whimpering. I felt irritated. I stopped scrubbing his face and looked at the red-stained washcloth and then at his face. His cheeks were ruddy without the rouge and his eyes were beginning to puff. I felt the hardness of my grandmother in me about to strike. I didn’t want to be like that. My grandmother was brutality shrink-wrapped in skin. I gave him a hug and let him cry until he was finished.
“When is Mommy coming back?” he asked me.
“She should be back soon,” I lied. But then I decided that she might be back soon, and that she would come back more quickly if we watched for her and wished it. So I got Marko dressed in his proper boy clothes and took him downstairs where we sat on the windowsill and stared out the window, waiting for my mother to come.
At some point I heard my grandmother walk into the room and I braced myself to reject her when she asked for something from us—some chore to perform. But she didn’t ask. She simply retreated, more quietly than she had entered. Marko looked dejectedly out the window and showed no signs of comprehension. Eventually, we both fell asleep there. When I woke up, my arm was asleep, crushed under Marko’s weight, and my neck was stiff. I dragged him upstairs and made him pee before getting into bed. We slept clinging to each other, back to front.
I could not have known that night while we slept, taking comfort in each other’s company, that I would be taken from there by my parents to go to the Russian school, while Marko would be left behind with my grandmother to go to the boys’ school near her. I didn’t know that it would drain the life from him, those years. And I didn’t know that at seventeen, Marko would have to get on a train to go to a military base where he would be trained for a war that would never come. I could not have known that sweet night that I would go to visit him by a six-hour train to that desert town to see him for a short, one-hour window of time that he was allowed visitors and that I would cry because he was malnourished with lice and skin lesions and scabies. They took my brother to this deprivation camp and held him prisoner for eighteen months because they thought the Americans were coming to invade Bulgaria. What would Americans want with us? We had no oil, no goods of any real value. They had already taken all of our finest minds. I knew they weren’t coming. But even if they had, my brother would never have been of use to them for killing anybody. Once, my brother accidentally stepped on a small toad at night in my grandmother’s driveway. When he lifted his shoe and found the carcass there, he sobbed. He fell to the ground and wailed. That hour I visited my brother in the desert was the last time I saw him alive.