My Sister’s Monster

Irish twins. Or, more accurately, Chippewa twins. My sister and I. Josie. March 6 1990 & May 22 1988. Respectively. Big brother, little sister. And for 77 days a year we are outwardly closer in age than we appear. My parents got pregnant with me. Then split up. Then got back together. Then got pregnant with Josie. Then split up. For good.

The three of us, my sister and I and our mom, lived with our grandparents for a bit. Then my mom got on Section 8 and we had our own apartment. The three of us were inseparable. Until one morning I went into my Mom’s room and saw a man sharing her waterbed. It was 1992. I was 4.

I hated Bobby from the very beginning.

Then one day we were packing everything up and moving to a single-wide trailer from before Reagan was in office on a dairy farm in rural Colorado. You entered through one of two doors. One, the more common, was by way of a carport with a dirt floor and a wooden staircase to the battered door. The second was a door that faced the yard, ditch, and dirt road that ran in front of the house, and incidentally, all the windows. The kitchen was at the front, then the living room, a hallway ran the length and you passed, my sister’s room, my room, the bathroom and entry space, then my mom and Bobby’s room. Throughout my childhood we wouldn’t have food, our clothes were always dirty, my mom would forget to fill out our free lunch forms and not have gas to come do it so we would go hungry for a few days before the school would relent. Child services came. We almost got taken away. I have a vivid memory of going into the kitchen one morning when everyone was asleep and cleaning a dead mouse out of the sink so I could make a giant pot of rice. I remember pouring cinnamon and sugar all over it, grabbing a jug of Manischewitz (it said CONCORD GRAPE on the label) into the culvert our driveway ran across and eating it where nobody could find me and take it away. I remember cleaning my room and finding a nest of baby mice under my bed; how Bobby made me throw it into the trash pit. How horrible it sounded. There was always money for Bobby to get cigarettes, to go bowling, and if I was on his nerves he would send me to his parent’s house.

I never called him dad.

Not once.

In 28 years.

Everything that happened next was avoidable. Everything that happened next was truly one person’s fault.

Mine.

Josie and I were attached at the hip. Everywhere we went, we went together. Once, at her birthday, I cried because she got rollerblades and I’d have to wait two months to be able to play in the street with her. So my grandpa took me to Bigg’s and bought me a Darth Maul skateboard. In the middle of the party.

Because I was older than her by just enough, I was in school before her and our dad came to take her to Minnesota to see our family for a long time in my mind. Because that’s the first time it happened. The first time I was molested.

It went on for years, sometimes just weird baths at Bobby’s parents house, sometimes his dad, Al would be in the bath and have us come into the bathroom. I remember every room in their house too. Even the basement. Especially the pantry. When I’d been to unruly or wouldn’t comply with either Mae or Al I would be locked in the pantry with the light off. I remember the smells. I remember Bobby hitting me when my mom found out I’d touched Josie. I remember that Sunday.

Every weekend we would go to our grandparents house so that my mom, Bob, and our half brother Johnny could have time together without us. We’d go to church on Sunday, and afterward, the whole family would go to my Nana’s for breakfast and spend the day together. One Sunday we were in the car, Bobby was driving, my mother was turned around to talk to me, Johnny was in the middle, and Josie was behind Bobby. We couldn’t have been more than a minute from my Nana’s and my mom asked me, “did something happen with you and Josie and Danny at the Super Bowl party?” And as I started to speak my mother hit me. For the first and only time I truly remember.

Because the truth is disgusting. I was going to tell the truth at 10 or 11 and it was slapped out of my mouth. I had touched my sister, for a long time. Because I was being touched. Since I was 5. And was told to touch her while they would watch from outside the room. And if I behaved I wasn’t locked in the pantry. Or thrown into a wall. Or punched. Or beaten with a switch.

When I was 18 my cousin told a therapist. His mom told my family. It was a singular afternoon that nobody in my family remembers or refuses to talk about. My family can’t say the word.

I started acting out violently at 11. I ran away with a knife I had cut myself with naked into a barley field. I spent a month in a psych ward. My mom told me one day that I, “couldn’t do that anymore or there was going to be serious trouble, you hurt Josie. That’s why we had to go to the doctor.”

By the time I was 12, Josie and I were living on a reservation in the north woods of Minnesota with our dad. By 14 I had come out of the closet and was summarily ejected first from his house and then my mom’s. Josie stayed with on the Rez.

I’ve never talked about this. This reason my sister hates me. She’s homophobic, sure, but she doesn’t know my side of it. Because it doesn’t matter. Because I’m the villain. Because I should have been beaten and locked up and hit a million times instead of hurting my sister.

I can list every time I’ve seen Josie since October 11, 2002. Each worst than the last. I doubt she’ll read this. Or forgive me. Which is fair. But I couldn’t sit with this any longer. Because though I can accept my sister or you seeing me as her monster even after you’ve read this, I know I’m not.