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It is a grey September morning when Jean-Yves leaves me. We’re eating breakfast, he always made me breakfast. Just yesterday he’d stitched my favorite dress up and distracted me with made up stories while our parents screamed at each other across the house, his face lit up with a flashlight and without a hint of concern. I fell asleep tucked against his side.
Now he's being wrenched away from me, and neither mother nor father is moving to help him. I'm frozen for a moment, and when the realization sets in I lunge forward and grab his arm and refuse to let go. That is when mother and father descend upon me, and it dissolves into a chaotic fray of screaming and tangled limbs as we fight to hold on to each other. He screams over and over that he will not let go, as a gun is waved in the air, as mother’s backhand catches the right side of my face, her wedding ring tearing the skin there. Jean-Yves’ arms are still around me as I crumple to the floor, and then there is another clap like thunder and they are gone.
When the world comes back into focus he is being dragged, kicking and screaming, out of the house. I scramble to get on my feet. But father is there in a heartbeat, calloused hands pinning me down and shoving my face against cold tile. I manage to look up at Jean-Yves one last time, struggling to break free from the grip of a man who looks more bear than human. His nose is bleeding, eyes wide as saucers, face pale like a ghost. For the first time I can remember, my big brother looks very, very small. My face is slammed back down onto the floor.
He is still calling out to me as car doors are slammed shut. Gravel crunches underneath tires, rubber skids against asphalt. And then he is gone. Father’s weight is gone for a moment before it is replaced with hard fists against my skin. I curl up into a ball and cry out for my brother, who does not come to save me.
The house is silent for an eternity afterwards. I am still lying on the cool tile floor. I cannot stop looking out the doorway at the spot where the car was, willing myself to believe it will reappear any second and that my brother will come back to me.
He doesn't. The next morning I wake up alone. My whole body aches and throbs. Tears spill over my cheeks, but not because of the pain. I don't know how to sew. I don't know how to cook breakfast. I don't know how to fix a cut or bruise. It feels like my heart has been ripped from my chest, and that I will die any second.
But I don’t. A year later I am still breathing. I know how to sew, I cook myself breakfast, and patch up every scrape and cut I receive. I look at the gravel in the yard and think about the face of a ghost and a car peeling out of the driveway.
In the afternoons my mother’s face is flushed and a glass of wine is in her hand. She says I'm lucky to be here, and how good of a mother she is for keeping me alive, keeping me around. Once, I spit back that Jean-Yves was better to me than she ever has been. I hear glass shatter, and when I open my eyes I'm on the floor, my vision spinning. I touch my face and my fingers come back bloody. Mother is looming over me, her lips curled in a vicious smile.
“Jean-Yves was a rotten, good for nothing child. It's his fault we had to beat you when he left, remember? He didn't even love you enough to behave. That’s why we sent him away. You're fucking lucky I don't kill you right now for saying that shit, you know that? You should be grateful. And clean up that glass, since you made me break it” she adds the last part between swigs from the wine bottle, and watches until I have cleaned all of the glass and blood from the floor. I don't talk about Jean-Yves anymore, but mother seems to remember our conversation whenever she’s two or three glasses deep.
I cannot help but hate him a little for leaving me. I begin to doubt if he ever loved me at all. Maybe mother is right. But still his face is etched into my mind, the terror frozen there as he fought to get back to me.
But I, too, must have become too much for my mother and father, because before another year has gone I am being wrenched away from the house and through the gravel and into a stranger’s car. This time, no one puts up a fight. I turn back to look at my mother, but she is already pouring herself another glass of wine.
I wonder to myself as the car drives further from Marseille if I am going where Jean-Yves went. Will he want to see me? Has he thought of me? What does he look like now, two years older? I have entirely convinced myself that I will see him when we pull up to a dingy apartment complex and I am brought to a door with faded, peeling red paint.
The man who answers smells of cigarettes and has stains on his unbuttoned polo shirt. He looks me up and down, and it makes my skin crawl, but I do not pull away as he grabs my arm and yanks me to his side. I can smell liquor on his breath. He tells me he is an arms dealer, and that he is my father now, and that I must do what he says.
He is every bit as mean as my father was, and half as sober. Perhaps two weeks after I have begun living with him he says he wants to teach me something, that it would be better to learn from him than someone else. He moves to undo his belt, and I think he is going to strike me with it.
I am wrong.
I wash for so long afterwards that my skin burns. I want to cut all of my hair off so he cannot grab it. For a long time, I feel very far away from my body, from the earth. I'm not sure if I ever fully come back. But I tell myself the lesson is finished, and the worst of it is over.
I am wrong again.
Jean-Yves does not live with him. He is not in the warehouse where my “new father” has me working either, and when I muster up the courage to ask where my brother is, father has no idea who I am talking about.
The months blur together. ‘Lessons’ from father or strange men visiting the apartment or the warehouse. Tense days and nights spent evading the police or whomever is after father, and bodies left lying in pools of their own blood. I learn to use a pistol. I start learning English to help with overseas transactions. My father gives me pills to swallow once, before one of his lessons. They dull the pain. Now I take them nearly every day, my mind a constant fuzz and time passing in a haze. I sneak drinks of his alcohol when I can, a pleasant numbness settling over my senses. Those become my favorite moments of respite from whatever hell life is meant to be. In those moments I can almost smell the Marseille coast or linen sheets, almost forget the emptiness settled deep inside my heart.
I am not as sober as I should be when gunshots ring out in the warehouse. This has happened before, on the streets when father is buying pills or running from the police. But never inside the warehouse. I hide behind a stack of ammo-filled crates with my pistol loaded, breathing as lightly as I can, willing my hands to stop shaking. Every shot fired has my ears ringing, and despite the fog in my mind there is a dread settled in my gut. When the gunshots have seemed to cease, I move from behind the crates and sprint for the exit. Halfway to the doors I hear more shots fired, and a pain like a thousand fires rips through my abdomen.
But somehow I can still run. I turn a corner, whipping back for a moment to fire my pistol, and a scream from behind me tells me I landed the shot. I can see the exit doors, and then I see father waiting for me, peeking around the doorway, and I smile with relief. I'm going to make it.
Another shot is fired. The world comes to a standstill. I've stopped running. I look down and a crimson red is blossoming from my chest. I stumble forwards, reach out wordlessly for father, but he's gone. The doors are shut. My vision goes white.
I think of my brother’s face, pale and afraid and bleeding, and I fall to the earth.
I hope wherever I am going, he is there waiting for me.