Page 19 of Near Miss

Maybe she just really didn’t want to see my Gatorade commercial.

“Why?” Nathaniel practically hisses, leaning forward and dropping his voice to a whisper. “She’s scary.”

“She can’t fucking hear you, man.” I widen my eyes, kicking the ball up again and catching it. “And she’s not scary. Or mean. She’s prickly at best.”

“Prickly? Prickly?!” His voice goes higher the second time. He shakes his head. “I can think of ten residents off the top of my head that she’s made cry.”

I lob the ball to my brother, who snatches it from the air with more finesse than he’s been managing all evening. “That doesn’t really sound like her.”

Something that’s half like a scoff, half like a snort comes from him, and he clutches the ball to his chest. “She’s brilliant. She’s an incredible surgeon, but she’s fucking terrifying. You can ask anyone. I talked to her for, like, ten minutes last week when she was scrubbing after surgery, and it was the scariest ten minutes of my life.”

“And was she mean to you?” I hold out my hand for the ball again, but he clutches it tighter to his chest. “Or prickly?”

Nathaniel narrows his eyes before passing me the ball. “No. She wasn’t what I would call friendly, but she wasn’t that bad. I don’t know how to explain it, sometimes she’s just short. And it comes out of nowhere. Or like, in the OR, apparently she won’t let anyone change the song or touch her playlist. She preferswhen people don’t speak if she’s concentrating. She’s weird about shit like that.”

“Huh.” I shrug. She definitely left abruptly the other night. I’m about to cock my arm back to toss him the ball again when our dad calls us over. It’s almost like a scene from an idyllic childhood—wholesome, endearing. Two brothers passing a football back and forth while their proud father watches on, their mother and sister huddled together whispering secrets.

Ours didn’t look like that. Our parents were never here. Or if they were, it was just one of them and they were trading off shifts with Sarah at the hospital. Whoever was home, slept. I made all of Nathaniel’s food, I picked up after him because my parents were on a hair trigger more often than not, and I practiced calculus equations with him even though I had no fucking idea what I was doing or saying.

On the rare nights both our parents were home, they were usually alone in their room because one of them was crying.

If Sarah was here—if we were all home—we certainly weren’t sitting outside, because it was too cold for her and she got tired too easily.

I came out here sometimes after everyone went to bed, running routes by myself or lobbing a ball up as high as I could to practice catching it from different parts of the yard.

My dad smiles broadly at us, and he looks significantly happier than he did back when all those sad, lonely things happened during our childhood. A happier man, lines around the eyes but ones that tell stories of how much he has to smile about, not all the ways life started carving chunks out of him before his time. A fuller stomach from nights out here, acting like the dad he never really got to be.

I look at him, and I smile, because it is a nice sight—my father, healed and whole. My entire family, healed and whole.

But sometimes, when I look in the mirror, I see this person who’s probably just a shell of someone he was expected to be, not actually who he was, and I wonder if it all came too late.

He reaches forward and messes up Nathaniel’s hair, like he’s still a child running around the house. I know what’s coming before it happens—he’s going to reach out and punch me in the shoulder.

He does that sometimes. Treats us like we’re still children in these odd, affectionate ways.

It used to be my thigh, like a fatherly attempt at a charley horse, but he stopped doing that when my legs started making millions and solving years of family debt brought on by childhood cancer.

His fist connects with my shoulder, and I only have it in me to raise my eyebrows before I duck into the chair my sister pulled out for me.

Sarah smiles up at me, wide and big and beautiful. I can’t help it, but I reach out and mess up her hair, too.

She likes it when I do that, I think, even though she’s twenty-six; she’s in love and trying to have a baby, like the fully-fledged adult she is.

But she never got to be a child whose older brother tugged on and cut her hair when she wasn’t looking or stuck gum in it.

I spent a disproportionate amount of time making sure whatever hair she had, or her wigs, were in pristine condition.

Sarah blinks, leaning into my hand for a minute before she sits back, wrapping the blanket tighter around herself. “How’s work going this week?”

“You’re the second person within a few days to refer to it as a job.” I say, voice dry.

She cocks her head to the side and studies me. Like she sees right through me, and I’m not always sure how that could be,when to me, for better or worse, she’s stuck in time as this little girl who needs me to be something for her.

But she looks at me like she wants to be something for me, and I don’t know what to do with that.

“It is your job,” Sarah whispers softly, lips tugging up. She stares for a moment longer before she scrunches her nose and turns back to the table, eyeing our brother. “How’s the hospital?”

Nathaniel raises one brow, leaning back in his chair and looking a bit to me like a kid trapped in time, too.

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