Back to You

March 1989
Michael sat on his knees at the dinner table, pushing his green beans around on his plate with the hopes of making it look like he’d eaten some.
“Is it time for birthday cake yet?” he asked, thinking of the triple chocolate cake his mother had baked for him.
“Not until those green be his combination locka, glancing up at himans are gone,” his mother called from the kitchen where she was loading the dishwasher.
“Come on buddy, a couple of bites,” his father said from behind him, rubbing his hand over the back of Michael’s head before he walked around the table and sat down next to Aaron.
“Are you excited for your party this weekend?” his brother asked, and Michael grinned and nodded. It was the first party he’d be having with his friends from school, and his mother had booked Jumpin’ Beans gymnasium. It had been the talk of his class for the past few weeks.
“You should be. You’re a big man now. Five years old is a whole hand.” Aaron held up his hand, and Michael leaned forward to slap him high five. Aaron laughed, and Michael grinned proudly as he ate another one of his green beans. Nothing made him happier than when his brother thought he was cool.
“Okay, so what are you working on?” their father asked as he looked over Aaron’s shoulder to see the homework assignment.
“Science, but I don’t know if I’m doing this right.”
“Well, I’ll do my best, but seventh-grade science might be beyond my scope of memory,” he said with a laugh, turning the notebook on the table so he could get a better look. “Oh, hey wait, I think I remember this stuff. Punting Squares, right?”
Aaron laughed. “Punnett Squares.”
“Same difference,” his dad said, playfully punching him on the shoulder, and Michael forced another green bean into his mouth as he watched them.
“We’re doing eye color,” Aaron said. “I have to figure out the possible offspring of two hybrids and two purebreds.”
“Yeah, I remember this,” his father said with a nod. “The dominant gene is represented by a capital letter, and the recessive is lowercase, right?”
“I think,” Aaron said, squinting at his notebook.
“Here,” his father said. “Let’s do the purebred. We’ll use two blue-eyed people. So put two lowercase b’s there, and two more over there,” he added, pointing to the square on Aaron’s page. “Right. Now cross them, and see what you get.”
“Are you done with those green beans yet?” Michael’s mother called from the kitchen.
“Almost,” Michael lied, looking down as he pushed a few more around his plate.
“There, you did it,” his dad said.
“Yeah, but that can’t be right.”
“Why not?”
“‘Cause it says that two blue-eyed people can’t have a brown-eyed baby.”
“Right,” his father said.
“But you and Mom have blue eyes, and look at Michael.”
The sudden silence was what Michael remembered the most. It was so abrupt that he looked up from his plate, because to him it seemed like everyone in the room suddenly disappeared.
And then he saw his brother’s face, and he was suddenly afraid without understanding why. It was the same face Aaron wore when he’d accidentally ridden his bike too close to their mother’s new car in the driveway and scratched the side: a pathetic mixture of fear and guilt.
Michael only remembered bits and pieces after that, partly because he’d blocked it out, and partly because he didn’t understand how the p, and he smiled his trademark grin., leieces fit together.
He remembered Aaron dragging him upstairs when the yelling started. The voices were so loud and strained that he didn’t even recognize them as his parents’. He remembered hearing words he knew were bad even though he didn’t know what some of them meant. And he remembered the shrill sound of his mother crying.
But above all, he remembered hearing his name over and over, interspersed with sorry and please. His mother kept saying, “He meant nothing,” and Michael wondered if she was talking about him.
Did he mean nothing? Had he been bad? He tried to remember something that he could have done to cause this, but he couldn’t think.
The yelling transitioned into the sound of things being thrown, and he cupped his hands over his ears.
He didn’t understand any of this.
Aaron sat next to him on the floor of his bedroom, holding him and telling him that everything was okay, even though Michael could hear in his brother’s voice that it wasn’t. And that’s how he fell asleep that night: curled against his brother’s side as Aaron continued to talk to him in an attempt to drown out the sounds of what was happening below.
The next morning Michael woke up hoping everything would be okay. Everyone would say they were sorry, and maybe they could have his birthday cake for breakfast.
Instead, his mother was locked in her bedroom, and his father was standing in the living room with a bunch of suitcases. He wanted to ask him where he was going. He wanted to ask if he could come. But the words stuck in his throat, and he kept looking to his brother, wanting him to say the words that he couldn’t.
But Aaron’s head was bowed, his eyes sad, and that’s when Michael knew that whatever this was, it was bad.
His father spoke to Aaron and promised him he would still see him, just not everyday.
And then he left without saying a word to Michael.
In the days that followed, he did come back. But only for Aaron, and only a few times. Each time he showed up, a screaming match would ensue between his parents that mirrored the first one, and eventually his father started calling Aaron instead of coming over.
And a month later, he moved away. Michael remembered asking his teacher where California was, and she said he’d have to take a plane to get there.
He knew better than to ask his mother about anything that happened that night, or anything pertaining to his father at all, for that matter. The one time he tried, his mother yelled at him and told him she didn’t want to talk about Daddy anymore.
It was more than her just being angry with Michael. She was mean to him. She’d become mean in general after that night, but especially to him. And eventually he just found it easier and safer to keep his distance from her.
In a matter of a few weeks, he’d lost his father and managed to make his mother extremely mad, and he didn’t understand how or why.
So Michael did the only thing that made sense; he clung to his big brother, the only sense of normalcy left for him, the only shred that remained of his former life.
For a long time, he didn’t dare talk with his brother about what happened. Aaron never brought it up, and Michael was afraid to do so for fear of losing him, for fear of making Aaron angry the way he made his father and his mother angry.
But one night after Aaron got off the phone with their father, and Michael’s hopes that his dadLauren shook her head"> shoulder might ask to speak to him were once again crushed, he finally broke and asked his brother what he’d done wrong.
“You didn’t do anything wrong,” he said quietly, walking into his bedroom, and Michael followed.
“But Daddy’s mad at me.”
“No, he’s not. He’s mad at Mommy,” Aaron said, walking over to his shelf and grabbing his Walkman.
“But why won’t he talk to me anymore?” Michael asked, and his own voice sounded funny to him, like it was shaking.
Aaron looked up from his cassette tapes, his expression pained, but he didn’t answer.
“Does he still love me?” Michael asked, and this time his voice squeaked, and his eyes felt hot.
“Yes,” Aaron promised. “He still loves you. He just…he just forgot that he does,” he added softly.
Michael didn’t want to cry in front of his big brother. He wanted to be a big man. But he felt his face contort as a little sob escaped his lips, and he dropped his head, trying to hide.
Aaron was up in a second, putting his arm around Michael as he walked him over to the bed. “It’s okay, Mike,” he said. “You didn’t do anything wrong. Mommy and Daddy are mad at each other. But they love you, and I love you.”
“But what if you forget that you love me, like Daddy did?” Michael said through his tears, and Aaron shook his head.
“Never. I’ll never forget.”
“Even if you get mad?” he hiccupped.
“Even if I get mad. I promise, I won’t ever forget that I love you.”
And with that, Michael buried his face in his big brother’s shirt and sobbed.
It was the last time he ever allowed himself to cry.
After that he ignored the pain and the confusion, the feelings of rejection from both his mother and his father. He had his big brother, and that was all that mattered.
That was all he needed.
Eventually, Michael got used to harboring questions he knew would never be answered. It just became a part of who he was, and he became very good at ignoring his feelings.
It wasn’t until eight years later, sitting in the middle of Miss McCarthy’s third-period science class, that he finally understood.
They were learning about Punnett Squares.
And suddenly he knew why the man he thought was his father left him when he was five, and why he never wanted to see Michael again. Just like that, after all the years spent wondering, it was suddenly crystal clear why his family had fallen apart.
It was all his fault.