Joshua

At first glance, I hardly recognized him. He was standing across the street under the awning of a dusty gas station, skinnier than I’d ever seen him. He had his hands in the pockets of his pullover, his long black hair hanging in greasy strands in front of his face.

I thought I was seeing things again, a supposed familiar face in the crowd, but his eyes were the same. A sister always knows.

I felt the hysteria bubble in my chest as I waited for the light to change, like he would dissipate into thin air. “Joshua,” I called out to him.

He blinked slowly and turned to face me. It was the first time I’d seen my brother’s face since he went missing nine years ago. He didn’t move as I powered through the crosswalk, transfixed in place.

“Joshua, my god,” On last leg of the crosswalk, I broke into a run, weaving through the other midday pedestrians.

When he saw me coming near, he bolted, turning to run, full-tilt in the opposite direction. From this close, I could see his red Chucks were in tatters, the soles separating from the canvas as he ran.

“Joshua!” I shouldered past the downtown foot traffic, ignoring the angry cries. My eyes followed his bouncing black hood through the crowd, further up ahead.

I suddenly remembered running after Joshua when he was eight, picking him up after school with his Power Rangers backpack slung over my shoulder. I would chase after him down the sidewalk in our neighborhood, making sure he didn’t run into the street. I remembered the strings of his little knit hat flapping in the wind.

He peeled into a small parking lot, sending a cloud of feeding pigeons into the sky. Dirty feathers rained down as I closed the distance between Joshua and I. Reaching out, I grabbed at his wrist, pulling him to me.

He struggled wildly; from this close I could see the whites of his eyes.

“Joshua, shh, it’s me, it’s me,” I said it over and over again until he stopped struggling. He went slack in my grip.

I stared at the wood grain of the booth behind Joshua’s shoulder, letting my eyes lose focus. Doing it this way transformed every burl and vein into an agonized face. The diner was playing motown on the old PA system, which was drowned out by the salsa streaming out of the kitchen we sat by.

Joshua scarfed scalding hot fries off his plate, licking the salt from his fingers as he deposited them into his mouth. When he was done with the fries, he captured the crumbs from his eaten chicken fingers and licked those from his fingers, too.

His weight had scared me enough, but now with his sleeves rolled up, some of my worst fears had been confirmed. Small halos of dark pink skin littered his forearms. My stomach lurched at the sight, wondering if the cigarette burns had been self-inflicted or given.

“Joshua,” I said carefully, coaxing, “You want to tell me where you’ve been?”

He shrugged, but after swallowing a half-chewed mouthful and wincing, he followed up with, “After leaving Mom and Dad’s I went to a halfway home where they set you up with jobs.”

I nodded, my heart falling. Since he’d been fifteen, he was in and out of homes like these, and they never boded well.

“I was working odd jobs until some of us were offered a long-term gig. Graveyard shift cleaning out foreclosed houses.” He made a falling down gesture, licking sticky ketchup from the heel of his palm when he noticed it was there. “We piled into a van the first night and started to work on this house. The guy offered us beers and next thing you know we all woke up in a basement.”

I could start to feel my chest rise shallowly, my toes growing numb with dread.

He didn’t look at me, stirring his soda around with a straw. “Some of the bigger kids were chained up. The smaller ones got free reign, but none of us could get the shackles off of them. There were five of us altogether.”

“How long?” Was all I could manage to say.

“Seven, maybe eight years. Maybe more. We lost count.”

I remembered the look on my mother’s ragged face during the news interviews. Exhausted and bereft, but there was a guilt that sat there, too, in her eyes. She blamed herself for his disappearance, for telling him to leave home and expecting him to come back, better.

Instead, he never came back home. Police closed his case, writing him off as another strung-out runaway. After year five, we buried an empty casket. Dad left shortly after, and I think he blamed her, too.

I started community college and became the girl with the missing brother. After a year, I transferred and went away to a school where no one knew my name. I dated, I got an Associate’s, and started to forget the pain, little by little.

Sometimes at Christmas it felt like I’d been an only child all along, the house so scrubbed of Joshua’s presence it was like he’d never existed at all. My resentment faded. Joshua faded.

Red clay dust sat in the folds of his pullover, and also crusted in his dark, glued-together eyelashes. It made a line of rust debris over the bottle-green of his iries. They looked ghostly, set into the gaunt lines of his drawn face. It almost looked like his his skin was attempting to pull away from his skull. He looked–for lack of a better word–awful.

“Should I, I dunno, bring you to mom’s?” I asked.

“Mom’s?” there was a touch of alarm in his voice.

“Yeah, so she can see you’re–” I stopped myself.

“No. Not right now,” he said, scooting back, putting distance between us.

I honestly couldn’t say that I blamed him. Mom had wanted him gone. And a little part of all of us did, too. After so many years of lying, detention centers, group homes, the family had just reached a critical mass. Part of me had always feared that we had wished him away. One morning we woke up, and he was gone.

And after all of it, there was always me, waiting for someone to take notice. Even after the funeral, sometimes it seemed like the ghost haunting the family wasn’t the memory of Joshua, but me. After years of therapy and trawling through online support groups, I had come to swallow the bitter pill that the kid who goes missing will always be more wanted than the people left behind. Mom was never the same. There would always be a Joshua-sized hole in my family that I could never fill, and mourning the fact was pointless.

But even after a decade of living in the shadow of my missing baby brother, here he was. I didn’t know whether to cry out of relief or mounting dread.

He finally met my gaze and I immediately felt guilty when he recognized the trepidation in my face. “No mom and dad. At least not right now,” he said, almost plaintively.

“Alright,” I said, caving into guilt. He was vulnerable, had been kidnapped, and quite obviously abused, who the hell was I to worry about my own personal peace right now? “Where will you go?”

He looked at me and said nothing.

Rainstorms in Arizona were rare, but when they came, they came with flash floods. Torrential sheets of rain washed over the gravel path to my apartment building, soaking through my denim jacket like a spill through a napkin. Joshua had come and brought the rain with him, along with the flood of emotions I thought I’d buried with his empty casket.

There was fear, uncertainty as to whether he was telling the truth, uncertainty if he was using again, unsure if I let him in my house again, if I’d wake up with any of my credit cards. There were the questions about his burns, his decimated body. He looked like the hikers they airlifted every summer out of Saguaro Park, hollowed-out and starving, their matted hair clotted with dirt. I thought about the others, if any of them were still alive, still down there. I shivered.

He was slow to come in from the rain, but quick to agree to a shower. I bundled soft towels into his arms and left him to his own devices in the bathroom, not wanting to hang over him or make him feel trapped.

Too drained from the day’s events to wait up, I dressed the couch with sheets and a blanket, and trudged back to my own bed to sink into the fortress of pillows. I hurt all over.

Lightning made daylight of sky outside my window, casting bright white shadows that sliced a line up the far wall. I turned away from the window and counted silently until my breath began to slow. I was just beginning to become lulled into the pull of sleep when I heard the bedroom door click, and feet on the carpet. My eyes opened, adjusting to the dark.

The other side of the bed dipped, springs creaking softly. I shifted my arm away from my side and felt him slip himself against me. Wet strings of hair dampened the front of my sleep shirt as he tucked his head under my chin, smelling like an infant. I breathed in and felt a swell of sadness overtake me. Instead of crying, I swung my arm over his back. After each lightning strike, I squeezed his razor-thin shoulders to soothe his trembling.

I dreamt about the night I’d picked him up from the nightclub. I’d been at home studying for midterms when I got a call from the manager. He’d taken something and gotten sick after using a fake ID to get in.

Joshua’s friends had left him there, scared of being pinched by cops. When I’d gotten there, the bouncer helped me get his limp body into the passenger seat as I sobbed and buckled him in–his shirtfront soaked in vomit and his eyes bobbing back into his head like apples in a carnival game. I’d been convinced then, that Joshua was dead.

It was that moment, I think, when I made peace with losing him, before the news crews, the investigation, the not knowing. All the helplessness I’d felt that night slammed into several cubic feet in the car, compacted. I’d been unable then, to keep my brother from ripping himself to shreds, useless at looking out for him.

Mom had told me once, when she was pregnant, that she was naming him after the peace she felt hiking in Joshua Tree, that she wanted that for him.

I’d parked in front of our house that night, holding his limp, clammy hand and cried into the steering wheel.

The birds chattering in the gnarled trees outside woke me. Morning sun in the too-bright sky left me disoriented until my vision focused, seeing Joshua’s eyes transfixed on me, like I was an algebra equation he was trying to work out.

I kept very still, trying to will my spooked heart to stop racing in my chest, convinced that this close, he’d be able to hear it. “Morning,” I said.

“Do you have a razor?” he asked, his voice scratchy from disuse, “So I can get rid of some of this stubble?”

I sat up, to get a little more personal space on the bed. “I don’t,” I said, trying to work out the kink in my neck that I’d earned by cradling Joshua all night. “But my ex left behind a buzzer, if you’re interested.”

He considered it for a moment before nodding. I shuffled out of the bed and dug the kit from a box of odds and ends I’d stuffed into the back of my closet. He took the bag and disappeared back into the bathroom, closing the door.

Suddenly alone in the room, I looked out my window, to survey the damage from last night’s storm. The mud was beginning to dry and crack in the baking sun. A newspaper blew down the street in lieu of a tumbleweed, spreading out in the wind and getting snarled in a tree. The street was barren of any further signs of life.

“Shit,” I cursed, remembering that Joshua might need to charge the buzzer. I stooped down to the floor of the closet, pulling the box all the way out. I rummaged through the box of cast-offs, shaking my head when I failed to find the cable. My fingers hit something waxy at the bottom of the box, and I paused, pushing the other junk out of the way.

Stuck halfway under the bottom flap of the cardboard box was a stack of old photos, shots from our family trip to Disney World in ’01. A young Joshua in the teacups ride with my mother, a family shot by a fountain, a portrait of Joshua smiling wide, with his front tooth missing. I was about to call to him to come see when something stood out to me about the photo. Tiny Joshua, with his gap-toothed smile, stared at me from the photo with big, brown eyes.

Feeling dizzy, I steadied myself on bed. A sound behind me made me turn. He stood, holding the buzzer with the dead battery. He looked at the photo in my hand, frozen in the doorway.

My mouth opened, closed, not able to form the words that I wanted to say.

The man that was not Joshua reached out his hand, and my stomach flipped, sick with the memory of the weight of his body against mine in my bed. I tried desperately to scan him, to see what it was I’d seen in him that had reminded me so much of my baby brother.

That was exactly the problem with people, with their fallible minds and fickle memories.

We see what we want to.