Chapter Text
It was a small, devastating but not uncommon tragedy. Its damage should have been, like so many others, self-limiting. But long after the act itself had passed, the slow, rippling aftershock neither lost momentum nor gathered speed as the years pulled further away. Instead, it continued to impact further lives over the years, both those of the witnesses to the original event and those who would eventually become their victims.
~ooOoo~
Maddie was appropriately sad when Daniel died; she had liked him a lot. He had been sweet and smart, and undeniably her parents' favorite, a fact glaringly obvious even to her as a small child. The warmth and attention from her mother and father fell away almost overnight. While she could barely remember them bringing her tiny new brother home from the hospital, the sudden shift in their affection was a memory burned deep into her budding psyche.
For the next few years of her life, she stood on the sidelines of her family. She had no true understanding of why things had changed, but she instinctively knew that they had. She harbored no ill will toward Daniel, only an ever-increasing feeling of detachment as he and her parents drifted further away from her. She watched, she waited, and she absorbed everything she saw: the intricate interplay of her family, the tight thread tangled securely around her parents and Daniel, and the looser, unspooling tether between them all and herself.
And then Daniel got sick, and everything unraveled.
Leukemia. His only real chance was a bone marrow transplant, and no one in the family was a match.
By then, Maddie was old enough to remember every painful detail of her mother’s subsequent pregnancy: the constant visits to the doctor, her mother’s suffocating fear, and her father’s agitation growing right along with her mother’s burgeoning belly.
But her newest brother was perfect. Maddie took one look at the small, red-faced bundle lying in the plastic bassinet at the end of her mother’s hospital bed and the thought rose unguarded and without effort; Mine. She loved him the exact moment she set eyes on him.
"What’s his name?" she asked, looking up at her parents huddled together on the hospital bed.
They blinked wearily at her, then looked at each other. Her mother sniffed, rubbing her nose. "We haven’t chosen a name yet. We wanted to make sure he got here in one piece." She gazed at Maddie with red, hollow eyes before falling silent.
Her father cleared his throat roughly. "I know, Maddie, why don’t you choose a name? Would you like that?"
Maddie looked up in surprise, tearing her eyes away from her new brother. She knew the gesture for exactly what it was: her parents' complete lack of interest in this new baby as anything more than a means to an end, and a cheap scrap of family bonding tossed to their daughter as if it would release them from any further emotional effort.
She looked back down at the baby. For the first time, she noticed the splodge of red above his eyebrow, extending down over his little, scrunched-up eyelid. She couldn’t help the small gasp of delight that escaped her lips. He was too precious for words.
Glancing back up, she saw her parents huddled together again, whispering. She understood then, with every fiber of her being, that they did not deserve the child they had conspired to bring into the world. Without realizing it, they had just given her the greatest gift she could have ever imagined. Her heart beat a little faster. Her choice. He was hers to name, and hers to keep forever.
They kept whispering on the bed, a two-headed monster of grief, already looking past this newborn toward the sterile rooms of the oncology ward where their there once only son Daniel lay fading slowly out of existence. Maddie had wanted to ask him what it was like. She wanted to know how it felt to slip, bit by bit, across the boundary between life and death. But she hadn't been able to find the right words for a dying boy to understand, and their parents would never have allowed the question anyway. Her visits to Daniel's bedside were always short and perfunctory, their mother constantly fussing over any minor exertion or stress on her favourite child. Daniel's looming mortality had only pulled him further away, drifting into a realm completely detached from Maddie’s own experience.
She would not allow that to happen to her new brother.
Maddie thought of her best friend from kindergarten. His name had been Evan. They had been inseparable for that entire school year, a quiet, serious child with dark curls and big bright eyes. He had always been so kind, ready to share whatever he had, whether it was his toys or his snacks. They would giggle together at recess, and he would always stand resolutely between her and some of their more rambunctious classmates. He had moved away at the beginning of the first grade, breaking Maddie’s six-year-old heart.
"Evan," Maddie said aloud, staring down at the fragile new life before her.
Her father glanced up, his eyes tired and bloodshot. "What was that, Maddie?"
"His name is Evan," she said.
She turned her head to give them a small, perfectly practiced, innocent smile. It was the same sweet smile that made her teachers trust her with collecting classroom registers, handing out supplies, and delivering notes to the front office. It was the smile that occasionally prompted her parents to sigh and tell her what a good, mature big sister she was.
"Evan," her mother repeated listlessly, not even looking toward the bassinet. "Fine. Evan is fine, Maddie. Go tell the nurse."
Maddie turned her back on them, returning all her attention to her brother. The red mark on his eyelid fluttered as he opened his sleepy, unfocused eyes and gazed up at her. For just a second, she saw something in the shockingly clear blue she had never seen in anyone else before. A small chill coiled up her spine as she recognized what those ridiculously new eyes held: the promise of unconditional love. It seemed impossible for a newborn, but she knew it to be true. In that quiet hospital room, she was entirely helpless against it, surrendering to a love that filled every corner of her young body and mind.
As his eyes closed again, she leaned down until her breath stirred the fine, pale blond hair at his temple.
"Evan," she whispered against his ear, a low, secret vow meant only for the two of them. "You're mine. I will always look after you."
~ooOoo~
To Maddie's surprise and her parents slowly unfurling hope, Daniel lived for almost another year after the treatment provided by her new brother. Throughout that time, she stayed close to Evan and, as she had fully expected, her mother let her. Margaret directed all her energy toward Daniel's recovery. Evan was bottle-fed, slept in Maddie's room, her mother doing as little as was acceptable and, to no one's surprise, his first word at around ten months was "Maddie."
Daniel died eleven and a half months after Evan was born, and his last words to his sister were, "I'm glad you have someone just for you, Maddie."