My Brother and What Comes From Wreckage

“Just five minutes, please,” I beg Ermilo, the man who picks us up from the bus stop when my mother can’t. I’m a good convincer, so he agrees to take us to the bridge. I like to look over the whole blank space of where the bridge used to be, from one green hill over the wide barranca to another green hill. It collapsed. All that’s left are two messy metal ends, gaping like mouths. We haven’t lived in Mexico City very long. But every once in a while, we come here. As we stand near the edge, toeing at weeds, I hold my younger brother Peter’s sweaty hand.

He wants to edge toward the disaster.

The metal maws glimmer under the hot sun. From here, I can see the tiny horses and the tiny stable in the valley bottom. Did it hurt the horses below when it fell? I ask Ermilo. No, he says. Did people die? I don’t know, he says. What about the trees, did they break? I don’t know, he says. Then I ask him about his daughter, who is probably about my age. As he mumbles, I nod and say Si, si in all the right places. Eventually he realizes that I’m just a girl and silence swoops in. I shake my head and cluck: the poor poor horses, and what about the people below, and what about the cars. When the earthquake hit and the bridge crumbled, did they plummet from the sky, flipping and falling? For now, I decide that an earthquake was the cause, because kids who are placeless decide on stories. My family moves every two years or so. No, not military. Our father speaks a few languages and works for a soap company. My two brothers and I don’t mind. When you have no home base, your siblings—the smell of them, the look of them, the knowing of that body near yours—well, that becomes your home.

Peter fidgets, trying to loose himself from my steady grip. He would like to march his Velcro sneakers right to that edge.

“You could fall,” I scold and yank him back to me, the responsible eight-year-old sister. A body can be ruined because a body is a place too, its own ecosystem—though I don’t know that word yet, or the fact that one day I’ll learn about other things that can get ruined, other things you can’t even touch.

He flashes me a big toothy grin, unmistakably his, a little brother who is well versed at poking and pinching and teasing. He would hurl himself over this cliff to be in the horror below. He wants to be in it, because already, as a little boy, he has learned that being a hero requires the presence of blood and guts and action.

When my mother calls to tell me that Peter has been deployed to Iraq, I am a college graduate living in a trailer and working at a boarding school. I hang up. Unsure of what to do, I lean against the paper-thin walls of this structure. Outside, juniper and piñon bushes emit the constant static sound of a dry, high, red desert. Do I pray? How is it possible that we are allowed to know that he and the 173rd Airborne Division are about to parachute into northern Iraq under the cover of darkness? That should be top-secret, even though the whole world knows that Turkey has finally opened air space for the United States. Peter, who has grown into a formal sort of man, was allowed one phone call beforehand. I close my eyes to imagine all the other folks receiving calls from their brothers, husbands, fathers, as if a thread connects those of us left behind for now, a thin gray cotton thread, trailing from state to state, from closet to closet, from living room to living room. I am not overcome with emotion. I am not sad. I am not even proud. I am at...