Dai Stihó

I watch as he wraps his hand around my index finger, the tiny fingers blindly grasping at something that his eyes can’t see yet. I whisper that I love him because mommy tells me to and I see the little crinkle of a smile, though it couldn’t be from my words. After all, he can’t understand me yet, can he? I am eight, and I ask this question to the doctor-lady, who just smiles and says that everyone understands love.

This is my brother and he is beautiful. He is pink, round, soft, and despite what my friends tell me about how to treat small, cute things, I find that I love him dearly and would do anything to protect him. I shake my head when my mommy asks me if I want to hold him, because, well, what if I drop him?

He is beautiful, my brother, and we will be best friends, playing games and growing up together, and we will have no secrets from each other.

-

By the time he is three, we know there's something wrong. He did the normal amount of crying when he was a baby, but he doesn’t speak, not even the nonsense babbling that all my friend’s little brothers and sisters have done. He hasn't spoken full words; my parents do not hear ‘mama’ or ‘papa’ and no matter how much I try, I can’t get him to call me ‘brother’. Mom laughs less nowadays, and dad has been talking about going to the doctor for more tests.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with him, though he's kind of quiet. Sometimes he’ll just look off into the distance, no matter how many times I call his name, and when I point at the train and the superhero and go “Crash! Boom!” he doesn’t smile, or respond. He doesn’t play with me, and it makes me sad.

But it's okay, because my parents tell me that he’s just a late developing child, and he'll able to play with me when he gets older. Mom says that after all, there are 12% of babies or something that are late speakers. Mom’s been using a lot of numbers lately.

-

He starts speaking when he’s six years old. It has taken doctors, specialists, and the efforts of friends that have autistic children more than two years to get us to this point, but we do.

I am at home, sitting in one of the chairs next to him while the psychologist leads us through the program, trying to help him with this ‘applied behavioral analysis’, when he connects the dots, making the association between the pictures of families, him, and his family.

And then turns, and says, loudly and clearly, making eye contact with me, “Brother!”

-

By the time that I am eighteen, I know all about autism and what it is. I’ve been to support groups with my parents, I try to read everything that the Mayo Clinic and others put out, and I stay up to date on new studies. I appreciate now the sacrifices that my parents have made for my brother, that his tantrums and special classes and many doctors and various pills have been something that no parent wishes for, and I do my best to help them.

Truthfully, though, I get tired of my brother as well. My friends all look at each other awkwardly when I ask them to come over because they do not know how to react when my brother starts talking, endlessly, about something they don’t care about… or worse, when he insults them carelessly and casually, saying, “Oh, you’ve gotten fat lately, Susan”. Our neighbors are less than understanding; there was an anonymous message in our mailbox telling us to ‘keep the monster inside’ after a particularly bad episode where he went out to the street and screamed for ten minutes.

Sometimes, we are all so worn that even when he makes progress in his various behavioral programs, I can only think of how much farther he has to go, and how much I or any normal child would have accomplished in less than a fraction of time it takes him.

-

We’re at the mall together, shopping for clothes and games, and he asks to go get a coke. I let him go, pick up a new video game for him, and wander towards the food court.

He’s stopped by a table where a couple of teenagers are sitting, and I find a seat at a nearby table behind him to listen in. It’s a social interaction, one that he might have trouble with, but he’s fourteen and needs to learn to deal with it on his own.

It starts out well – does he go to their school, what grade he’s in, stuff like that. I think that he might have found a couple new friends, in fact. Then one of the guys asks him where he goes to school and he gives a proud answer – Skoan, he says, a school for special students. And in one line, they start getting nasty, asking whether the crazies go there, whether the students wear diapers. The undertone is unmistakable – and stops being an undertone when one of the guys asks him whether or not he’s retarded.

I get up, ready to beat the goddamn daylights of these fucking pricks, and stalk over toward them.

As I approach the table, fists clenched, my brother says, simply, “I’m worth more than you are,” and turns away, seeing me. I falter for a moment, unsure of what to do, and he says something else.

“Let’s go, brother.”

-

My brother will never be the President of the United States, a rocket scientist, or a CEO. I do not know if he’ll achieve his dream of helping out those that are like him, a dream that he only recently told me. But I do know that I celebrate each success that he has in functioning with society. Making eye contact and calling a family member by their name or learning how to walk away from a conflict may seem like incredibly small steps to others — and often they remind me of how much further he has to go — but they are solid, beautiful moments.

Though we have never shared a conversation on politics and the future of the country or talked about girlfriends and love, I will be there for him for the rest of our lives, for all of the moments that will happen in the future.

//

A/N: This is a work of fiction, though I have based the events on interactions with a family friend.