The Half Brother by Holly Lecraw

wet-combed hair. She was still there. I was going to look up. Her eyes would be dark blue and I looked up and they were dark blue, hemispheres of ocean and sky, and I was sailing over them using only the old knowledge of the stars.
    YEARS LATER, MAY SAYS, “Do you remember that?”
    “Of course I do,” I say.
    “I thought I was going to die.”
    “It was a mistake. I wasn’t trying to send some signal,” I say.
    “I know.”
    “I wouldn’t do that.”
    “I know.”
    “Not on purpose.”
    She smiles. “I know.”

Five
    When I was born, my mother brought me home to a small apartment in a complex near the public city hospital, where she worked as a nurse. She’d come up to Atlanta, already pregnant, from her hometown, deep in south Georgia. The apartment was a run-down place in a run-down neighborhood, and I remember it only because we drove by it once, years later, and she pointed it out to me. “I didn’t know any better,” she said, half to herself, and shook her head. “I was lucky to get any job at all.”
    I usually understood her non sequiturs. In this case she meant that the luck of a job, in her condition, had made this place near the hospital both inevitable and an afterthought.
    But then she found the “good” side of Atlanta—the north side, the white side—got a job at a different hospital, and found the first home I truly remember. Technically, it was a guesthouse, although its parent wasn’t a mansion, or at least what would have been thought of as a mansion in Buckhead. It was, instead, a comfortable colonial, gracefully ordinary, owned by the McClatcheys, a nice family with a mother and a father and a son and a daughter. The guesthouse, which my mother rented, was down at the end of the steep driveway, cantilevered over a little ravine—suspended in the trees, a dream of green. Two tiny bedrooms, a kitchen, a living room. It was a womb, a cradle, out of time.
    From my earliest memory I felt layers to life that I didn’t understand. Atlanta seemed to me a place that had recently been a small town; a miasma of familiarity was in the air. The ghosts were thick. We lived in an established, old-Atlanta neighborhood, but the lots were large and nature barely held at bay, and in the trees around our house I could feel many eyes, benign mostly, layer upon layer of creatures who knew the land as though their own bones were the limbs of the tulip poplar trees, their fingers redbud branches, their blood made from red clay, creatures at home.
    There were other houses visible through the trees but the little valley behind us was a serene and quiet bowl. The area was dotted with historical markers documenting every move of the troops during the Battle of Atlanta, on that very soil; there was one at the corner of our street. It was easy to picture blue and gray flung down behind the ridges and hillocks, easy to hear in my mind the contrast of birdsong and gunfire, and even to go farther back and imagine the Creeks and Cherokees before they’d been hounded away. But now the land felt so gentle. The tree canopy was high, and little creeks, and big ones, ran everywhere, and it wasn’t hard to find a waterfall or a fallen log crossing a stream.
    Up the hill the McClatchey kids were teenagers, and I could see the son playing basketball with his friends in the driveway, and the daughter having car doors opened for her by her dates. The McClatcheys had a patio in the back and we could hear their dinner parties and barbeques and laughter when it was warm out. Down the hill, my mother and I never had parties, but I think we both drew some kind of vicarious satisfaction from all the activity and jollity.
    Hugh—Hugh Satterthwaite, Mrs. McClatchey’s brother—went to our Episcopal church (or we went to his), and starting when I was eight or nine he often dropped by on weekends to say hello to my mother and me. He wasn’t married, although he was the same age as Mr. McClatchey; they had all grown up together