“So, like, hands in his pockets, but really shoved in there. And his eyes aren’t exactly . . . furtive, but I can see them trying to take in the whole room, all at once. He doesn’t like to be touched or anything. I think ‘bristles’ is the word you could use for what he does when anyone tries to touch him. Yeah, ‘bristles at contact.’ That’s definitely something I read in some file of his somewhere. And. Um. What are . . . Callie’s? Fits like?”
“They’re . . . well . . . I guess it depends. The one that I took her to the hospital for the last time I saw you was weird. A lot of the time, she’ll just start making fists, really tight ones, with her fingers digging into her palms. And then she’ll hit her thighs while kicking at the air or whatever is around, and sometimes she falls down, and her mouth is open. I used to think it was her version of a scream, but without any sound. But now it’s more like . . . I think it’s like she’s trying to get something out. Or something’s trying to get out of her, but I don’t know which. And I don’t know what, and I don’t know why. A few weeks ago, she was out gardening, and I found her out there with her hands in the ground, just trying to dig herself a hole. But her eyes were almost rolling up in her head, and her mouth was shut, like she was trying to keep it that way, or like something had tripped a trap.”
“Tripped a trap?” Stan says.
“Yeah, like a bear trap or something. Like something came along—whether it should or shouldn’t have, I don’t know—and her mouth was a trap, and she had to snap it shut and keep it that way so whatever came along couldn’t get out. That’s what it looked like to me, anyway. But then the other day, I was up in my room and I heard this noise from downstairs, so I go downstairs, and there’s Callie, my sister, on the ground, her eyes wide open, her legs curled up into her chest while her arms flail at the air, like she’s digging her way through the air. And she was making sounds like nothing I’ve ever heard from her before. And then suddenly she was up on her feet and just . . . shaking. Like she was being shaken. And I almost feel like if that last part hadn’t happened, where she stood up, I might not have been able to get her in the car to the hospital.”
“Seems scary.”
“It was. I’d never seen her like that before.”
After a pause Stan says, “Ted runs into things. We’ve got punching bags in basically every room at this point. Dad’s tried to get him to run at them on purpose, and it sometimes works. The only thing that actually helps is if I can get him in a nelson. You know, with my arms coming up under his shoulders from behind, and I grab around the back of his neck, and then I try to . . . sit on him, more or less. Immobilizing him seems to help—calm him down, I mean. Not just get him to stop moving. But it always has to be me that does it, I think, for it to work. Dad used to try, and he could never calm him. Mom tried once, and he thrashed so hard he broke her nose. His arms sort of thrash around, and he just finds something to run into. His jaw goes all slack when he does it. Like he’s hypnotized. And I don’t know if he’d stop if I didn’t stop him. I came home once to Mom sitting at the top of the stairs, watching him. ‘It’s been four hours,’ she said. Then she said it again. Then she stood up. Then I had to wrestle him to the ground, and Dad came home and took us to the hospital.
“Ted,” Stan said, sighing, “isn’t the easiest little brother in the whole world.”
“Our Icelings seem pretty different,” I say stupidly.
“Icelings?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. So that’s a word I made up. Like a portmanteau of ‘ice’ and ‘sibling.’ It just . . . seemed better than calling my sister a capital-O Orphan, you know?”
“Yeah, I do.” Then a pause. “It’s still not very . . . humanizing, though, is it?”
“No,” I admit. “It isn’t.”
“That’s probably right,” he says quietly.
And something in me sings out, because this is it. This is the thought I have but that I ignore all the time, because I don’t ever know what to do with it. And because I don’t know that I’ll ever be okay speaking that thought aloud, I just say this: “Not that they’re not human! Just that . . . I mean, something must have happened, right? And we can never understand it or know it, because we don’t know what it’s like to think or do anything without language to do it with. We have parents we know are ours, who’ve been talking to us since before we were born. And we go to school, and most of the time we learn things, and when people talk to us we have some idea of what to do or say in response. And for the most part, we know what’s expected of us.” I stop for a second, making sure he’s still there and that it’s safe to go on. “And they don’t. Not at all. They don’t, and we have to see that every day. And they have to see whatever they’re seeing every day. And know that all we can do is try to be, like, mediators between them and the world. But nobody can be careful enough to do this job right.”
“Yup. Pretty much Suck City.”