The Secret Place

I hadn’t seen the rusted gate behind the old warehouse in ten years. Ivy had begun to claim it for its own, wild and wiry. The path was overgrown as well with weeds that snagged my jeans as I brushed by them on my way to the secret place. It was cold and my footsteps crunched loudly on hard-packed earth in the silent morning. I didn’t want to meet this way but I had no choice. My brother was going to keep calling until I gave him the audience he wanted and I didn’t have the energy to keep pretending he didn’t exist. When the warehouse shut down fifteen years ago I thought the town would survive it. I thought our family would survive it. I was wrong.

He was late. I had walked the winding path past the old tool shed where I had gotten tetanus when I was eight in a thrilling game of hide-and-seek where nobody ever found me. After six hours I crawled out bloody from under old, forgotten machinery and looked for them. I found my brother and the other workers' kids getting yelled at by my father because my mother thought I was missing. Nobody played with me for a week.

I followed the path through a thicket of trees until I reached the small pond we found as kids and named the secret place. My brother and I would sneak here during the summer when mother was busy with her secretary work. Our father ran the warehouse with a firm hand and would pile her desk with invoices while glaring at us to disappear, annoyed that she had to bring us. We were not allowed on the warehouse floor but we could play outside as long as we didn’t go too far. We found the pond while exploring farther behind the tool shed boundary our parents had set and spent our summer sticking our feet in it or trying to fish with homemade poles.

Today the pond was frozen over, with large jagged cracks in the ice like lightning strikes. Bare tree limbs hung like skeletal arms around the pond and I sat waiting on a rock for my brother. I could see in the trees where we had carved our names with various crushes of our youth, this clearing acting as a living diary to our adolescence. I had forgotten how it felt to be here in the space where my brother and I were still friends and our family was still whole.

“Hey, stranger.” His voice startled a bird behind me and the fluttering of wings breaking through the bush nearly stopped my heart. My brother stood above me in sweatpants and a worn jacket, looking tired and worried. He had aged hard, the gray taking over what hair was left on his balding head and the lines of laughter and worry drawing roadmaps on a face I hadn’t seen since my father’s funeral three years ago. His hands were in his pockets and he leaned back on his heels in that nonchalant way that used to get him out of trouble when we were young and always annoyed the heck out of me.

“You’re late,” I said. “What could be so important we had to meet here?” I drew circles in the dirt with a stick and avoided his eyes. I didn’t want to be here. I didn’t want to be reminded that my father was dead after years of being miserable. Once the warehouse shut down unexpectedly, we lost everything. Mother fought to keep our Father motivated but his depression was too severe. His career was everything to him. “A man is measured by how he provides for his family,” he used to say. Once he felt he couldn’t provide anymore, he was a broken man. Our mother got a second job cleaning houses around town, which embarrassed him further. Father began to drink. It was the drink that killed him. If I looked at my brother I would see father’s sallow face reaching for his whiskey and mother’s gnarled fingers worn by typing and cleaning chemicals. I would see my shame.

“I knew you would come if I asked you to come here. You would know it was important.” Unlike me, he was staring directly at me as if he had only just met me. He looked intently at my face searching for something. “Do you have the watch Daddy gave you?” He always called our father daddy, even when we grew up. I had let go of that a long time ago. I couldn’t call the man who drank and yelled and ruined everything daddy. That’s not what daddy’s do.

“I always do. It was the only thing I wanted.” Where was this going? I stood up abruptly to face him. “What is this about? What do you need with Dad’s watch?” I huffed. It was the only thing I had received when he died. An old-fashioned pocket watch that had been passed down from my father’s father and his father before him and was engraved with our family name. My brother received my parents' house since our mother had died a year before our father from exhaustion. I was surprised my father held on that extra year without her.

“I have been looking through mommy and daddy’s papers in the house so I could organize and clean things out. I found something surprising hidden in their records.” A shadow fell through the clearing as clouds rolled across the sun and the temperature seemed to drop by ten degrees. He reached into the pocket of his sweatpants and handed me folded papers yellowed with age. I hesitated. What is he trying to tell me? When I finally grabbed for them the knot in my stomach traveled up to my throat and I knew in my heart what they would say. I looked passively at the adoption papers and tried to absorb what they meant. My brother was not my brother. My mother was not my mother. My father was not my father. Suddenly all of the distance I felt from my father made sense. All of the trauma of my youth was now placed in a different framework, lit by a different light, and I could see my mother fawning over me and my father’s coldness for what it was. I wasn’t theirs but hers.

“So. So we’re not brothers anymore? These papers are all it takes?” The knot was growing. The warehouse looming behind him like a monster with its gaping broken windows stood mocking me. Its boarded-up doors looked like eyes watching this revelation. When the warehouse closed people began to move away from the town looking for work. I lost friends and swore I would leave as soon as I possibly could. My brother was caught up in taking care of my parents’ failing egos in the wake of the warehouse closing. I couldn’t stand watching my father get worse and my mother getting sadder. I left them all and I felt my brother’s resentment as cold as the frozen pond behind me.

“You haven’t been a brother to me for years. This just makes it real.” He nodded to me. “ You haven’t wanted to be a part of this family for a long time so I think you would be relieved that you’re not. I just think you should give back the piece of our family you have.” My jaw clenched as I tried to swallow the knot that was sitting heavily in my throat throbbing with rage. Not only was I angry at this bomb he dropped on me but that his accusations might be right. I did want to separate myself but I was chosen. I deserved something. How dare he begrudge me my piece of my dead parents!

I held the watch up. "This is what you want?" I screamed into the icy morning. He stepped towards me as if ready to grab it from my hands. I stepped back, turned, and threw the watch as hard as I could into the pond. His mouth dropped open in shock. I let out a sigh of relief. It was as if I had released all my anger at my parents and my brother in that one impulsive decision and now I was free. I left him standing at the edge of the pond, staring out over the ice searching for the entry hole of my flash of anger. "Goodbye, brother." I put him, our secret place, and the warehouse behind me and forgave myself for leaving all those years ago.