Deadly Prayers

Be careful what you wish for—a lesson that almost killed my brother.

At 14 years old, I was already sixty pounds overweight. Running was hard, so I invented a trick where I imagined Nutella dangling from a fishing pole in front of me for motivation. One Thursday afternoon, I ran home chasing a jar. Maman, Laurent, and I were going to the Bois de Boulogne, the smaller Parisian equivalent of Central Park. We’d never done that before. Our nanny would usually take us to ballet, karate, or other after-school activities.

But today, we were getting Mom at her best: she could be spontaneous, creative, and surprising. She didn’t bring it often, but when she did, it was delicious. On that day, we were going to picnic and row a boat around the lake. 

Laurent was three years older, and our relationship was complicated. As a mama’s boy, he went along with her plans, always choosing to court her approval.

One night, it was just the two of us at the house. I’d been grounded — as I often was — which meant my TV privileges were revoked. 

“You won’t tell if I come to watch with you, right?” I asked, as a formality, certain he’d let me.

“You heard them,” he said, locking himself in the TV room. “No television.”

For hours, I sat on the floor, on the other side of the wall, trying to hear the TV, wishing I could trade him in for a different brother. 

His need to please my mother went beyond her being in the room to witness his loyalty. If a son performs like a good boy in the forest, and his mother is not there to witness it, does he still get to be loved more than his sister?

Laurent didn’t want us to be partners in crime; he liked the dynamic of the three of them against the one of me. When our parents came back from being out and asked if he’d done a good job supervising, he wanted to be able to say, “Oui.” He figured that complying would buy him their love; I figured not complying would get me their attention.

It took me years—actually, until my daughter, Leah, became a teenager—to realize how difficult it must have been for my parents to deal with me. Every time I met someone who knew Leah, all I heard was how reliable, kind, smart, efficient, and punctual she was. Encounters concerning me as a teenager, however, were about all the ways I was a fuck-up.

Not my brother. He was a little prince; the prefect son. He played golf, just like her; I was all about horseback riding. He dated models and I, losers. It was easy to buy clothes for him, and as we know, not so much for me. My dad was traveling a lot, and since my brother was such a handsome young man, he made a good plus one for Mom. I wonder if that compounded the already existing blurring of lines problem we had in this family.  

I still have nightmares about this thing he used to do to me when we were kids. He would hide behind a door while I called out his name for way too long. “I’m done! Please come out.” I would say, begging him to stop. He would wait some more. I would beg some more. Stress would rise as I walked around the house, not knowing from behind which door he was going to jump. At some point, I would switch from begging to playing it cool, hoping he would think he had lost his power over me. My nervous system expanded to a new level of angst every time we played that “game.”

He was nice about something once, but for the life of me, I can’t remember what it was. So, I hated him. I had dreams of waking up to find out he’d died.

On the day of our planned picnic at the lake, I reached our building, coughing up a lung from my run trying to catch my Nutella jar, only to find Mr. Kaiser standing outside.

“Your mother’s been waiting for you,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “We’re going to the lake.”

“No, Laurent had an accident at school. Your mother is waiting to take you to the hospital.”

I didn’t take the time to buy my Nutella, running right upstairs. Note to self: “Make sure to buy some later. I can tell I’m going to need some tonight.”

On our way to the hospital, I negotiated with God. Bargained. Begged. Apologized. Cried, even.

“I know I wanted him dead, but I didn’t mean it,” I said softly, under my breath, wanting my mom not to hear it was all my fault.

That day has since been earmarked as the first time in my life I tasted guilt. And power. I’d formulated a wish, and it came true: my brother had fallen down the staircase at school. That’s all we knew. Mom had bought apricots for the picnic on the boat; I downed all of them in the car.

The minute we arrived at the hospital, they took me aside so mom could speak privately with the doctors. They sent a nurse to distract me. I pretended to pay attention to her, but I could still hear what the doctors were saying.

“Coma, tumor, edema. Lungs, for sure. Brain, maybe.”

I could feel the gravity of the situation. They said he was in room 504 but wouldn’t let us see him. I asked if I could go to the bathroom.

“No, thank you, I don’t need to be accompanied,” I said. “Yes, I can find my way back.”

I ran down the hallway, room 507. 506. 505. There, 504. Nobody was in sight; nobody saw this little girl open the heavy door of room 504. I got inside fast and acclimated to the darkness.

I will never un-see what I saw behind that door. There he was, inhaling in one tube, exhaling out another. Moaning. Snorting. Wheezing. Needles planted everywhere. He was hooked to machines with green graphs and beeps. One of the machines looked like R2D2.

It snapped me out of hating him to see him all broken. I didn’t actually hate him; I hated not being him.

I threw up the apricots, some in the trash, some on the floor. I composed myself, and my legs took me back to Mom. No one could know that I saw what I saw. She didn’t ask where I’d been, and I didn’t tell what I’d seen. We went home. She hadn’t gone to his room, but I had — that gave me a one-up on her, and that felt weirdly good.

I deliberately left my backpack in the car so I had an excuse to go back down to buy my fix. On the way home, I stopped praying for Laurent and started praying the Kaiser’s would still be open. Thank God they were. I remember thinking that without the apricots, there’d be room for the real deal.  

I sat in the dark, back in my room, whispering in a loop: “Do not take him.” Spoonful of Nutella. “Do not take him.” Spoonful of Nutella. Until I reached the bottom of the second jar.

Dad was on a business trip to China, and Mom had decided not to tell him about the accident. A few days later, we went to pick him up at the airport. Mom told him then. Laurent was mostly out of the woods. Dad’s grimace, when he found out we had lied by omission, was a face I’d never seen on him. All blood was gone. I noticed that his right leg was trembling. In silence, on the way to the car, he punched a wall with his fist. I wondered if punching that wall was a substitute for punching Mom.

Ironically, this ridiculous rule was his: don’t tell the absent that something bad has happened - to protect them from worrying. I hated this rule, and when I moved to LA, I made them promise “on my brother’s life” to tell me if some tragedy was underway. Without that promise, I would be in a permanent state of anxiety, wondering if one was, and they were hiding it.

Dad now was with us in the car, and we went straight to the hospital. I could tell he felt like an outsider the minute he walked into room 504. He wasn’t in the trenches with us when Laurent was between life and death. No chance for him to be the hero. I can’t imagine he liked that.

Turns out Laurent had edemas in his brain and lungs that dissolved on their own. He recovered completely and returned to school a few weeks later.

I liked Laurent more after his accident. Until then, our lives were set up to be enemies. I thought he had it easy. Turns out, he didn’t. His life became complicated. For a boy voted most likely to succeed, life can be a bitch. Expectations fly high, and living up to them isn’t easy. Pleasing other people becomes more natural than pleasing yourself. Your choices are not your own, and neither is your life.

There is an implicit agreement that if you’re the favorite child, you accept being a puppet on a string. You’re being groomed to follow the approved format, the right job, the right house, the right wife. And you’d better comply.

The invoice for this would come later.

Laurent moved to Hong Kong for a couple of years when I was twenty. There was a loophole with the payphone right outside our parents’ building. He’d call collect at a pre-determined time, and I would pick up and accept. That way, a call that should have cost two dollars a minute was free. It took the city two years to realize, making it impossible for pay phones to accept collect calls. The very two years Laurent lived abroad — lucky us.

Those free calls gave us space to talk openly for hours. There was something clandestine about these conversations; no one knew we were having them. It was our first attempt to unpack the story of our family. I’d started therapy. He’d started his war of independence. Neither flew well in our house. The very fact that he’d accepted this job in HK. To this day, our mom still refers to this period as “the time he let us down.”

The job was for Club Med. His primary function was to fly in helicopters over the South Pacific to identify remote islands as locations to build future resorts while dating models and taking them on motorboat trips around the bay. I refer to this period as, “the time of his life.”

We started disturbing the order of things, questioning the status quo. When he came back, we were a unit. If the TV grounding episode had happened then, I’m pretty sure he would have let me watch; perhaps he would have even enjoyed lying to them about it on my behalf.

From that time, our bond continued to fortify. The more secrets revealed, the closer we got. Maybe closer than most siblings, as if we had to make up for lost time. I had thought that at best, we might be able to be in the same room without going for each other’s jugular. Instead, we became the accomplices I’d secretly dreamt we would.

Our parents didn’t see that coming. Left to our own devices, with no parental static on the line, my brother and I became siblings. Real ones. Kind ones.

I am so glad he didn’t die.