Arlo

I grew up in a backwater smear of a town in New England with two loving parents, a Dalmatian named Norfolk and, for eight years, a brother named Arlo. He was older than me by six years, but in those days it might as well have been twenty. I idolized him. On rainy days I would follow him around wearing one of his big button down shirts, in a comical attempt to match the way he strutted about the house. He had an old soul feeling about him, like he had just stepped out of an antique photo and into modern life with dust clinging to his edges.

He had jet black hair that he kept long and wild, and bright blue eyes that always seemed to be looking past you. He was beautiful to me, and at night when I was alone in my room I would close my eyes as tight as they could go and pray that in the morning my brown curls would have descended into blackness. One morning after waking to the grim reality of a brown haired existence, I snuck into my father’s office and stole a bottle of India ink from his desk. I slipped quietly into the bathroom and held the unscrewed bottle high over my head. I watched myself in the mirror as my hair changed from a silky brown into clotted tendrils of dripping ink. I dunked my head into the sink and turned on the water. It was cold and it stole my breath away. I scrubbed at my hair with my hands, staining them black. I looked up into the mirror and gazed at the crying, ink stained wreck that I had become.

Arlo found me in the bathroom, my head deep in the sink with black water streaming over the sides. He laughed his bright laugh and scooped me into his arms. Some of the ink fell from my hair onto his shirt, staining his shirt, but he didn’t care. Smiling, he plopped me down onto the toilet seat and grabbed a towel from the rack on the door. The towel was warm on my cold head, and as he dried me off, he asked what I had been thinking. I was still crying as I told him how I wished every night for black hair.

“Just like yours,” I said through clacking teeth.

He laughed and cupped my face in his hands. “Abby, I’m surprised. Why would you want my plain old black hair when you have gorgeous brown like that? Why, if anything, I should be the one wishing for your hair, not the other way around.” He hugged me then, like only a brother can, and I burrowed my stained hair deep into arms.

Arlo and I used to play outside every day during our summers together. Tag was always my favorite game, and no matter what we were playing, it would always evolve into tag. I loved being “it”. I would always run as hard as I could with fire in my lungs, my eyes fixed on a fleeing Arlo. I was fast, but Arlo was always a little bit faster. He would lead me on a winding chase, through our backyards, into brambles and, inevitably into our neighbor’s expansive overgrown field. He wouldn’t let me catch him, not until my legs felt as if they were about to fall off from exhaustion. When it looked as if I had reached the end of my energy stores, he would feign a trip and fall, or he would slow down enough so that I could get a handful of cotton. We would tumble to the ground and lay there, staring up at the clouds and picking out shapes as they floated by.

The day my brother died I was up in my room playing with a porcelain doll Arlo had given me on my eight birthday two months before. She had light brown hair that came down to her shoulders, just like mine, and she would close her eyes if you tilted her just right. When I heard the screen door bang, I assumed it was Arlo coming back from a trip he had made into town for milk, but the footsteps were too heavy and the voice was too deep. The stranger’s voice slithered up the stairs and into my room in sloppy bits and pieces.

“An accident…never saw him…I’m sorry.”

I heard a sob catch in my mother’s throat as she fell to the floor. The next couple of days were a blur. My mother told me later that I didn’t cry when I heard about his passing. She told me that I had been too young to understand. I’m older now, old enough where it is hard to remember his face anymore. I see him sometimes, in my dreams, his slender body cutting a path through the tall grass as I chase him; arms outstretched in front of me, trying to get a hold on something, anything. He never slows down and he never stops, not even after my legs have carried me as far as they can go. I watch him disappear into the grass, his black hair bouncing in time with his steps until he’s gone.