Vaughn shuts down pain in ways that can kill. I don’t trust him at all—not anymore—but heroes are tricky business. Hard to abandon. I once thought my big brother turned the world in his hands.

Master of Solitude

It’s mid-June, 1974, and my half-brother Vaughn’s second birthday’s coming up fast. Grandma McKinney wants to ask him what flavor cake, frosting, and ice cream he might like for the family party, so she wipes her bony gardener’s hands on her floral apron and approaches him. He’s seated on the creek bank, dangling tiny-tennis-shoed-feet over the edge and tossing loose rocks into low water. He reminds her of our father—the curly hair, the prominent nose, the tendency to play alone.

“Vaughn Lee,” she says, stooping down to meet him eye level, “somebody’s got a birthday pretty soon.”

Without lifting his eyes from his meticulous pebble dropping, he wipes that Robinson nose and says, “Fuck off, Grandma.”

She covers her mouth and runs to the house. She doesn’t want him to see how hard she’s laughing. He’s a child. Her only great-grandchild. He hears things, and there’s no harm in hearing.

Giant Brain

When our father and his first wife, Debbie (Vaughn’s mother), divorce in 1975, three-year-old Vaughn divides his time as he is told. Weekdays with Debbie and her boozing, much younger boyfriends, weekends with our father and the woman who will, ten years later, be my mother. But when my parents marry in 1976, Vaughn proposes an idea. “Why can’t we all live together?” he asks. “Why can’t we all just live in this house?”

Daddy and Mother and Debbie and the boyfriends, he means. More people at whom he can “Ping, ping!” fake pistols. More people to read bedtime stories, he figures (and he can convince them each to read three apiece before lights out). Later, he teaches me that it’s lips pursed loosely, roll the eyes upward until you feel the tears sting, then sigh like you’re trying for no one to hear it. I once got a pair of gleaming red patent dress shoes using exactly that technique.

Nobody has an answer for his question—nobody wants to tell him that they’d kill each other if they had to occupy the same space—so our father buys him tickets to Six Flags in St. Louis. Debbie lets him stay up late to watch The Wolf Man.

*

His mind comes up big in the story about the new shoes, too.

So Vaughn’s in first grade, slinging an empty backpack over his shoulders, running from the bus to Debbie’s townhouse with a Mississippi-wide smile. He’s wearing used-to-be-black dress shoes rubbed paper-thin at the heels, sporting holes in the toes, caked with recess dirt, laces fraying, soles tearing off.

“I just got you new shoes!” Debbie scolds, twisting him around to assess the damage from all angles. “What the hell did you do?”

Debbie calls my future parents, and when they arrive on scene, on the couch, the truth unfolds. No crying from Vaughn. He knows he shouldn’t be in trouble anyway. He got the other kicks from a friend at school, he says. Skinny black boy named Scotty Hardiman who lives out on State Street. They traded shoes on the playground. Scotty’s family, Vaughn says proudly, “doesn’t have no money” (later, he tells me, “If you’ve got enough, why not just share?”).

And so comes the second late-night showing of The Wolf Man, complete with popcorn and root beers, and my parents spend the night. Everybody under one roof. The dream.

Meditations

Vaughn likes my mother and calls her “Shirl” and sometimes “Shirley Magee.” She takes him mudding on the four-wheeler when Daddy’s busy coaching Babe Ruth League. They sing Michael Jackson songs into hairbrushes and practice his moves in front of the hall mirror, and when they tire of that, he plays He-Man to her She-Ra. When he’s got homework, she checks it. When he’s got respiratory infections (common in our family), she plugs in the humidifier and makes tents out of blankets and afghans to trap the moisture and open his lungs.

When I’m two or three or so, Vaughn tells me that my mother’s got guts, and when I ask why and what "guts" means, he tells me about the time the two of them spent in the McDonald’s drive-thru box. For a while (and maybe still, in some places) McDonald’s had a section of pavement marked square with yellow paint, and they called that "the box." You parked your car there if your order was large-ish and the line behind you considerably long, and after no more than five to ten minutes, someone would bring your food straight to you.

On one special occasion in 1983, five to ten minutes becomes twenty-five to thirty. Greasy fried hamburgers don’t warrant a half-hour wait then or now, and after fiddling impatiently with the air conditioning knob and turning down the shrieks of Motley Crue (Vaughn’s second favorite band after KISS), Mother says something to the effect of, “I’m givin’ ‘em one more minute.”

Vaughn’s interest is sparked. He wants to see Shirl yell at somebody.

He gets his wish. Mother exits the car, her purse thumping her back as she speed-walks, and Vaughn’s an arm’s length behind her, his eyes glowing. They reach the counter. Mother demands her food, but the teenage boy manning the cash register blames rush hour and asks that she wait in “the box.” Mother says, “Oh, we’ve been in the box. We’re done with the box.”

“But ma’am,” the boy says, and Mother says, “I’ll take the food or the money. Your choice.”

After a second, much more strained “Ma’am” from the gangly youth, Mother smacks the countertop with an open palm and shouts in a register only dogs should hear, “The food or the money!”

They leave with a bag of six burgers (twice what they’d ordered).

Vaughn takes this fierceness to heart without hesitation and studies it. Nine-year-olds are impressionable, and this impression’s probably worth keeping.

*

When Vaughn is in the fifth grade, Debbie (then Meeks) packs as many of his things as she can fit in his school backpack and a spare suitcase and heaves both bags to the sidewalk outside their home. It’s a gorgeous yellow-lit day, but chilly, and Debbie wraps her arms across her stomach and shakes her head over and over while her son watches her face. "I can’t deal with you," she says. He’s come home with another black eye (this time for punching some kid named Tommy for saying, "Robinson runs with the niggers."). She says again, "I can’t deal with you anymore."

Our father and my mother take Vaughn on full time, and he doesn’t speak a word of how he feels about the arrangement.

Days-Long Daydreamer

By the time middle school hits, straight A’s don’t have the same appeal. Too many journals, Vaughn says, about feelings. His sixth grade English teacher, Mrs. Doughty, makes the class write personal reflections about their home lives every Monday morning. What would he have written? Everybody works, my stuff’s always in duffel bags, mom’s an alcoholic and got raped in the Laundromat by a guy with a knife who said he knew my name and what time I got off the bus, Dad quit baseball because mom asked him to even though he had a chance to play for the Pirates and now they’re not even together, I have to sit here when I’d rather be dead. The end.

He starts skipping classes. Teachers send notes home: Vaughn is rarely prepared for class. Vaughn asked to be excused to the restroom and never came back. Vaughn is exhibiting a hostile attitude toward me and my colleagues. Vaughn’s grades are slipping. Vaughn no longer seems interested. To that last one, our father asks, his hands clasped in his lap, “Interested in what?” Mrs. Doughty lets her glasses hang from their chain and says, “Anything, Mr. Robinson. He isn’t interested in anything.”

But that’s not true. He likes KISS and Star Wars and growing his hair out long in the back because it makes people notice him.

Super Strength (My Hero)

From my birth in 1985 until I am three-and-a-half, Vaughn visits Debbie only on the weekends she invites him. She does not like his friends, but I think Teddy Thompson and Brian Doerner are gods walking. Neither as supreme as my brother, but deities of a secondary order all the same.

These boys teach me these things:

Darth Vader is far cooler than Luke Skywalker

Dipping sweet pickles in sour cream (or butter) isn’t half bad

Ordering a zombie-on-the-rocks at Darryl’s restaurant at age two will illicit laughter from the grown-ups

Dogs are better company than any person you’ll ever meet

How to whistle

How to snap

How to lie and keep a straight face

I teach these boys these things:

Tea parties are not girls-only

Parading through the house listening to Christmas cassette tapes, looped, helps pass the time any Saturday afternoon

Dancing can be spur-of-the-moment

Apple juice is king of beverages

I wasn’t running out of questions any time soon

*

Teddy even takes me out of my carseat if I ask.

My family treats me like I’m the center, the fabric, of their existence, so I milk that. When we arrive home from shopping or eating out or a doctor’s visit or a day at the Mesker Park Zoo, I select who carries me out of the car. I choose at random, and one day in the sunlit garage I see Teddy Thompson washing his father’s Pontiac with a giant blue sponge. He’s very tan and dressed in a bright orange tank top, and I have a crush on him, so I call out his name. “I want Teddy to get me out!” I cry. Mother’s and Daddy’s lines of reasoning for why this request is extreme fall on deaf ears. Vaughn removes his Gators baseball cap, scratches his head, and yells louder than I did, “Teddy! Get your ass over here and get this kid outta the car!”

My big brother never questions my spoiled-rottenness. He feeds it. He believes that your feelings are more important than the inconveniences they might create for somebody else.

*

I learn “ass” on the day Teddy carries me back to the house, and I learn “shit” shortly thereafter. Evidence of my learning this word happens on a rainy day in July ’88: I’m seated near the sliding glass door reciting by memory the story of Little Red Hen, Mother’s washing dishes nearby, and I ad-lib, saying in a sing-songy voice, “Not I said the duck, not I said the pig, and the cat said ‘Oh shit!’”

Mother lets a clean plate plunk back into sudsy water, walks to Vaughn’s bedroom door, and asks him if he taught me that, and I hear him say “Not on purpose.” I can tell that’s a sly maneuver. Vaughn doesn’t believe in bad language, and to this day, I don’t either.

*

These examples show the difference, according to my big brother, between a fib and a lie:

A lie: Vaughn’s accused of spray-painting some curse word on a school-owned building and says he didn’t do it.

A fib: Vaughn’s accused of spray-painting some curse word on a school-owned building and says he didn’t know the school owned it.

The fib, no doubt, lessens the duration of his grounding.

Another lie: Vaughn and I slip a raw egg in Mother’s dishwater just to see what happens, and when she crushes it and throws a fit, we say Daddy did it.

Another fib: Vaughn and I slip a raw egg in Mother’s dishwater just to see what happens, and when she crushes it and throws a fit, we say we must’ve dropped it in there accidentally when we were making breakfast.

The fib, in this case, makes my parents laugh. I learn fibs are like jokes. Everybody’s smiling.

*

Vaughn and I play memory games. We play the traditional memory game where you place face down cardboard squares labeled with koalas or picnic baskets or playground slides and then try to remember where each of them is hidden. Reading’s a game, and as he says the words, I stare at them. By age three, I have memorized verbatim twelve Golden Books. We also play a game with his Star Wars figurines, and in this one, he lines up Yoda and Obi-Wan and Luke and Chewbacca like soldiers and tells me their names while pointing to them. At the end of the line, it’s my turn to recite. I never miss even one.

I don’t think he lied when he said he wanted everyone to know I was special.

*

Some people say you can’t remember as far back as I can, in strong detail, but they’re wrong. I know all of my locker combinations throughout school, the name of every crayon in a 98-box of Crayolas, the sixteen digits on a plastic credit card that came with my toy cash register the Christmas I was six, every AKC-registered dog breed in alphabetical order and by group, the outfit my best friend Ashlee Huff wore for second grade picture day, the first and last names of each of my fourth grade classmates’ pen pals, and a hell of a lot more. In part thanks to Vaughn, I have a brain that takes permanent pictures. It’s not bragging. It’s conditioning.

I bring up this memory thing because I want you to know that I’m serious when I say I can still see Vaughn standing beside my crib when I’m just big enough to stand up in it. Red rims his large brown eyes, but I’m one-ish, so I don’t see this as indicative of pot-smoking. He takes my hand and rubs my fingers. He may say, "G’night, kiddo" or "Get some sleep, girlie". My memory’s not quite sharp enough for the dialogue, I guess. I’m hooked, though. I know that even then. He’s tall and imposing, but he smiles at me even when he won’t so much as look at anyone else, save to spin a story. He’s not my half-brother. He is the God, walking.

Dark is Edgy

At the start of Vaughn’s freshman year of high school, Mother gets pregnant with the twins and we move to a bigger house in Owensville, population 1200. Vaughn rarely sees Debbie and is not invited to attend her third wedding. He changes schools, and he quits baseball because Daddy wishes he’d practice more. He changes friends. And these are the charges brought against them, 1988-1989:

Constant truancy (the least of their worries)

Breaking and entering (three homes that we know of)

Theft (one television, one stereo system and speakers, contents of a liquor cabinet)

Vandalism (“Fuck You’s” graffitied on the walls of the Montgomery Township fire house)

Public intoxication (they’re minors, too)

Grand-theft auto (some old man’s Firebird)

Possession (of what I’ve never found out)

One night Vaughn and these new boys decide to run from the law with beer bottles still in their hands. No footage of this exists, of course, so I picture them long-armed and clumsy, wearing T-shirts, jeans, and sneakers, bolting in a clump from the oldest kid’s mother’s car. They head for the closest thing Owensville has to an alley, and over the wall they climb, giving each other boosts as needed. One boy rips his sleeve on the way down. Another half-laughs, half-curses and abandons the group for the safety of his two-story-plus-basement home three streets away. And then our town’s only two police vehicles block both paths out of this pinch; blue and red lights illuminate flushed faces forced into belligerent, alligator-like smiles. Officer-I-Wouldn’t-Know cuffs Vaughn. He takes a fistful of his long-in-back hair to shove him into the cop car’s backseat.

Clairvoyance—or Mind Control

Psychologists and psychiatrists at the Mulberry Center in Evansville can’t figure Vaughn out. At each appointment following the patients’ riot, my big brother sits, sometimes grinning and responsive, sometimes sullen and distracted. He has no nervous habits: chewing fingernails, drumming fingers incessantly, tapping his feet, whistling, humming. Troubled teens are supposed to show signs of something. When you persuade fellow juvenile detainees to storm nurses’ stations with raised fists and turn over cafeteria tables and demand civil rights, you’re supposed to show signs of lots of things.

One psychologist, whose name I will not disclose, sits on the edge of his desk one Friday morning and stares at Vaughn sitting quietly opposite him. “Do you think it’s time you went back to school, Mr. Robinson?” he asks, fidgeting with his tie. “Because only you know when the time is right.”

“When the time is right,” Vaughn repeats back, gazing out the double-paned east window to his left. He has a way of looking through things. Straight through them. People, too.

“Have you given it much thought, Mr. Robinson?”

“Much thought,” the doctor’s mimic sings back.

“Mr. Robinson, please. This is serious, you realize. Your parents are worried. Your teachers are worried.” The shrink is ruffled. He takes off his glasses and wipes them with his shirttail. “Aren’t you at all worried, Mr. Robinson?”

“No sir,” says Vaughn, flashing the gator grin. “School’s important shit. Wouldn’t wanna disappoint anybody.”

Mulberry calls my very pregnant mother to come pick up her stepson. They’re releasing him that afternoon on good behavior. As he walks past the check-out desk with his duffel bag over his shoulder, he says to no one in particular, “I came in here smarter than you, I’m leaving here smarter than you, and the saddest part is, you know it as well as I do.”

Time Traveling

I’m not sure when, chronologically, Vaughn starts trespassing on farmers’ property at night to raid anhydrous tanks for the production of homemade methamphetamines, but that’s because when Vaughn turns sixteen (five months after the twins arrive), he gets emancipated (with no protest from any parent but my mother) and takes a road trip with five friends to Washington state. He steals thousands of dollars he didn’t earn. No phone call. No note. For a while I think if I wish hard enough—if we all combine wishes or wish at the same exact time—he’ll come back, but he doesn’t. I become a realist at age four. I block out his absence and focus on the babies, one boy and one girl, who have taken his place as my siblings, full-blooded. I make it my mission to become their best teacher.

So the meth might start when he’s on the West Coast, then follow him back to Indiana like a shadow. He’s nineteen when he finds himself in corn country again, and he marries Lisa Greer (of the black Greers, not the white ones). My paternal grandfather spouts that it’s Lisa and “her people” who started Vaughn on this “drug thing.” Grandpa Dave never saw the red-rimmed eyes, I take it. My half-brother can pull Mulberry-tricks on anybody in the free world.

Immortality

It’s late November 1991, below freezing, and Vaughn’s knocking at the door cradling a squirming, pink-blanketed Genesis Nicole. Her skin is like silky cocoa, and her nose is like ours. Like mine and my half-brother’s and our father’s and our father’s mother’s.

My parents only let him inside because he’s got the baby and it’s cold. We sit on the couch. He asks if I want to hold my niece. I’m six years old. I’m not going to say no.

When they leave and the back door clicks closed, my three-year-old sister says, “Daddy, who was that man?”

*

When I’m eight and press my mother for details about Vaughn’s latest arrest, I learn that he has antisocial disorder (he was hastily diagnosed during his stint at the Mulberry Center), and this doesn’t mean he hates crowds or tends toward introversion, like me. My mother says that it means he has trouble distinguishing between right and wrong in the way that most people can. That his conscience is skewed, if not somewhat absent in select situations, and always has been. He craves immediate satisfaction of all his desires. Things should happen like they’re supposed to. Consequences are theoretical and don’t apply to him. High is high, low is low. All in between is myth.

Villainy—or is it?

When you’ve stolen money from your parents that wasn’t set aside for you to begin with, you become the family pariah. When you drink more Budweiser than a body can rightly hold and then slide behind the wheel of a buddy’s SUV and decide red lights are for the timid, the law revokes your license and locks you up for as many nights as it takes for some Robinson or Meeks to bring your bail. When you hustle like a little boy on Christmas morning to make your own meth in the two-car garage after dropping your daughters off at Brumfield Elementary, you can expect to lose teeth eventually. And when you believe in your own invincibility, it lands you in prison, no chance for bail for a very long time.

In my parents’ house, on holidays, no one mentions Vaughn. We assemble, put away inordinate amounts of pie, watch football (the guys) or talk about how much we hate football (the girls), hand wash the dishes, reminisce as I assume all families do when gathered as units. For them, the picture’s complete: father, mother, eldest daughter (valedictorian; the example), the twins (very smart; surely going places), grandmother, one aunt, two uncles, three cousins of several (our athletes). It’s the picture I know best, so I say nothing. But I don’t want to give up on him.

*

Vaughn’s Grandpa Elam dies in August 2007, and as I read the obituary, it hits me that I remember him. Bald, wheelchair-bound, and incomprehensible thanks to two strokes. He’s the only person in this world I ever let call me "Sam". I buy a pale blue sympathy card from the Dollar Tree and mail it to Vaughn L. Robinson, Inmate 187, c.o. Gibson County Jail, 207 W. State Street, Princeton, Indiana, 47670.

“This came in the mail for you,” my roommate Ann Marie says, tossing a sloppily-closed, too-long envelope onto my bed in our Forrer Hall dorm room in Lexington, Kentucky. She says nothing about the warning label stamped next to the return address: Gibson County Jail is not responsible for the contents of this correspondence. What do they think inmates send their half-sisters?

The letter reads:

Samantha

Hey there well I sure didn’t expect to hear from you thank you for the card. I miss you too I know it’s been a long time since I saw you and hey it wasn’t the best of circumstances anyway but I do miss you. The girls are fine Lisa’s working at Toyota Gen’s on the basketball team and man is she good Kennedie’s a pistol what can I say. I think it runs in the family. These are some pictures of our house and the girls and our dog he’s a miniature pincher I know you like dogs you always have.

Between you and me I’m sick of this drug stuff. It messes you up and I know that I always did know that and this jail thing makes me feel old I just feel so old. I’m done with this. You’ve always been the smartest girl I know so keep doing good in school I never was any good in school but I know you won’t make my mistakes. I cut out news about you and the kids in the paper and I’ve got them here with me with the girls’ pictures and stuff you’ve done real good. I’m proud of you it’s Dad I don’t understand because he never goes to any of Gen’s ball games and I don’t know why.

Listen I get out Tuesday September 7 and I’m going back to Evansville with Lisa and the girls you should call the home phone and we should get together sometime. I’ll buy you lunch. Write me back if you have any free time I know you’re at school so put that first.

Love ya, Vaughn

I’m wiping at tears just as fast as they fall, but all I can think is that his rotten sense of punctuation hasn’t changed a bit.

*

In January 2009 I draft a letter to Vaughn telling him about my boyfriend David. I have an overwhelming sense that big brothers—even the absent kind—need to know when their baby sisters are in love with someone.

I put the pen down and picture the wedding I imagine I’ll have. No lacy veil, no preacher presiding, no stained glass windows, no doves, no feeding one another square-cut bites of a cake that costs money I’d rather send to the ASPCA. I want family there. I want to see faces I know when I promise, to the best of my ability, to meld my life with someone else’s. Inviting Vaughn would hurt our father, shock my cousins, set my mother to sobbing for good and for bad. I have no idea what to do about that, but I do make this deal with myself: I’ll mail him my letter if I have any stamps. Turns out I had several left over from Christmas.

Invisibility

I have 2002 newspaper photo of my orange-jumpsuit-clad half-brother (his second possession charge of the new millennium) tucked in my billfold just in case I don’t recognize him. We’re set to meet at the McDonald’s on Richland Drive in Princeton. I don’t have a license (they say it’s too dangerous with my anxiety disorder), so Mother drives me to the parking lot, silent. Still seated on the passenger’s side, I keep looking in my purse to make sure I’ve packed my cell phone. I check at least six times.

“So you’ll call me when you’re done?” Mother asks, her hands tapping the wheel in no particular rhythm.

“Yeah,” I say. “Probably won’t be long. We’re just grabbing burgers and catching up.”

But we’re not catching up, and I know that before I step out onto the blacktop and scan the lot for cars inside which I think my half-brother might look normal. He already knows I’m an English major and a sort-of-socialist and that I cry at Humane Society commercials. I already know he’s got two gorgeous daughters with Lisa and a two-year-old daughter with a woman I’ve never met and that he’s gained twenty-odd pounds since they put him away for possession and resisting arrest in Texas in ’05. We’re not catching up at all. We’re just seeing each other. We’re just reminding ourselves that we’ve got the same nose and the same sense of humor and the same ability to lie to people point blank, straight-faced, if the situation warrants it.

But today I can’t do it.

I’ll call Lisa’s home number later and say something came up. "Family emergency" won’t sound good, though, I realize, so it’s back to the drawing board as I sit stiff in the passenger’s seat and stare out the window at rows of green corn flashing by. He, in part, taught me this kind of story-spinning, after all, so leaving without word and lying without remorse is kind of like an ode or an offering to a great master. And maybe great masters—our gods—are better off invisible.