It's a mile walk from the elementary school bus stop to the house. Today the afternoon is warm so Jaime and I linger in the barren flax fields near our home. The land rests thick with snow, three feet on the average, for seven months out of the twelve.
I climb a pine tree and scout Jaime's position. He stomps through the crisp powder, his cheeks flaming pink. He makes an outline of a house in the snow, like he always does on warm days like this when the snow is soft and wet.
The house is oblong with many rooms, small and box shaped. "This room is for you, Cersei," he says.
Mine is always bigger than the rest.
"See? And your closet like so."
He indicates the closet space, spreads his hands out into the air. Although he was born only two minutes after me, Jaime seems much, much younger. He wears a smile on his lips even after the worst of Mother's beatings, even after we are sick off homemade moonshine we find under the kitchen cabinets.
I swing my legs from the highest branch in the tree. "Won't you have a wife then, stupid? Where will she sleep?"
"You'll be my wife," he says. He marks our names in the snow with an ungloved index finger, then turns to stare up at me with a shiver and grin.
"Do you like killing?" I ask Mother. It is evening and she has finished her daily routine of stripping the small game she finds and cutting the limp bodies into strips. Three medium sized rabbit furs rest along the wall near the side of the room.
"I'm going into town tomorrow," she says.
"Us too?"
Mother shakes her head, waving her fork. Strips of browned rabbits' meat linger on the points. "You know how I feel about that."
Our mother, six feet tall and heavy with broad muscle, shoulders that need wedging through doors, her hair long and tangled as the pelts she collects, fears everything but the snow fields and animals that linger there.
Jaime eyes me. I kick him under the table. He kicks back, wanting me to ask again, but I know better.
"Mrs. Thompson," I transition, referring to my fifth grade teacher, "said North Dakota has the fourth lowest population density in the country. Did you know that, Mother?"
She chews the fat off a strip of rabbit. Her eyes are unfocused, as they always are after drinking, and I imagine the beating that will inevitably come later tonight.
Jaime meets my gaze. He gives me a smile to show he is listening. "That's cool," he says. "But what's population density?"
We eat trout the next night because Mother fails to find game. The rich smell of fish oil lingers in the small space, mingling with pine and the sharp smell of ice. Before handing me my plate, Jaime strips the bones from the fish's thin, silvery body.
"Stop that," Mother says, upon seeing him. Her skin appears glazed, like the sheen of ice over the lake out back. "You don't cater to her. She's not your wife."
He sticks his chin out, puffing up his chest. He smells of fish oil and smoke from the wood stove. Like burning pine trees. "I wasn't."
I laugh. "Stupid. You don't even know what cater means."
Mother's palm connects sharply with the base of my skull. Pain. My face hits the dinner plate, splitting my cheek. My deboned fish falls onto the table.
"Goddammit," I say. "Christ."
Mother points to the bedroom Jaime and I share. I stand, moving slowly. Blood lingers, hot, on my cheek. I can see the skin already swelling from the corner of my vision.
Jaime stares at me. His eyes well up while mine stay dry. I throw my napkin on the table. Leave the fish on the floor. Its eyes stare up at me from the rough wood planks. So sad. I feel bad that the fish had to die for nothing.
Several seconds after I've shut the bedroom door behind me, their utensils begin clinking again.
I lie on Jaime's bed, rest my head against a pillow that smells of him. When he enters, he lies down next to me. We rest on our sides, eyes open in the darkness. His hands find my own.
"I don't really think you're stupid," I say.
We lay like that for a while.
Jaime makes up stories about the future—we have our own house, much better and bigger than this one. He builds it himself. We go to fancy dinners in town and I work predicting the weather at the Bismarck news station. He coaches football at the high school. People like us, respect us. No one tells us what to do. It's just me and him and we are happy.
Sleep whispers at the edges of my vision when I hear Mother cursing from behind the door. I jerk upright. She bursts through the door. Her face twists upon seeing us together. "Wretched children," she growls.
Mother takes Jaime and bends him over her knee. He jerks to the side, but she holds him there. She hits him. Once, twice, three times. But he grits his teeth and stays quiet. Sweat beads on his forehead.
I watch his face closely.
After several lashes, she pushes him to the floor and takes me instead. I smell the stink of animal fur on her, the reek of old blood.
I watch my brother through dry eyes, as his lips pinch in the middle. His eyes cloud. He winces.
After a few more hits he starts to cry and begs Mother to stop.
Jaime and I go to the high school several miles away, on the outskirts of town. I join the track team in the fall and he does, too. He throws discus and I compete in the high jump. "Dang," he shouts at me during practice, usually after I've completed a jump. "Wouldja lookit that!"
He talks to me but it's not the same anymore. He no longer says anything about making me his wife. He smiles less in the thoughtful, sweet way that he used to. Now his smile is longer, leaner. Like a feral animal gritting its teeth.
In the locker room, the track girls tell me how cute Jaime is. They titter in uniforms that stick to their skinny thighs, their stick looking arms. My body, lithe but riddled with the curves of a grown woman, is barely contained by the uniforms provided.
"Is Jaime free?" a girl named Vanessa asks. Her hair is long, honey colored, and she competes in the hundred yard dash.
"How do you mean?"
"Like," she giggles, "is he going out with anyone?"
I stand, ringed by tiny girls. "Maybe," I say. "It's not really your business."
It is hard to forget the elementary aged Jaime that stood in the fields, yelling his love for me at the top of his lungs, our soon to be home outlined in his small footprints. Jaime's place is at home with me, standing in front of the wood stove with the embers sparking and popping.
Vanessa draws close to me, smelling of lilac and something fake, something found in the downtown stores Jaime and I sometimes sneak off to when Mother is on overnight hunting trips. "Your name's Cersei, right?"
"Yeah."
"You tell him I like his smile, okay Cersei?"
She walks off, her stink branching out, encompassing the other girls who follow her.
I don't tell Jaime what she said. Instead I stuff Vanessa in her locker the next morning and steal her perfume bottle. I put it on and reapply it throughout the day. When Jaime smells it on me during the walk home, he leans in close and says, "You smell like a girl."
"I am a girl," I reply.
He looks at me for a moment, squinting, then stops.
"What?"
His eyes cloud. Clear. He shakes his head and winks at me. "Nothing. Let's go." His voice is light, joking. But something in his gaze feels different.
Jaime and I graduate in June. But while he leaves for a college in Grand Forks two months later, I stay to participate in an internship in town, working to design environmentally friendly spray foam with a local warehouse.
That first night of Jaime's absence, Mother beats me so hard my blood seeps out onto the floor, mixing with the carnage of a freshly killed beaver, his hairs still sticking to the uneven wood planks.
"Who will cook now?" she cries, long into the night.
"I can cook," I tell her. "I can do anything. You'll see."
Mother laughs but it is a low, angry laugh. She reeks of moonshine and the outdoors, the stink of dirt and rotting leaves. "Child," she says, "you can't even smile without breaking your face."
When he returns near Christmas, Jaime is larger and more muscled than I've ever seen him. His biceps blanch from his skin, his back like the rise and fall of interloping hills. He smells thickly of the fake perfume they sell for men in town and cigars or something like them.
He holds me in his old bed, his hand smoothing over the skin on my back, now callused and scarred from Mother's beatings. "I met a girl," he says. "She's amazing, Cersei. You need to meet her."
"You smell different."
"It's cologne," he says. And softer, "cigarettes, too. Don't tell Mother."
"You smoke?"
"Just a little. Shae… she had some in her pocket when she spent the night. I fished them out when she was sleeping."
I look up at him. Moonlight illuminates his beautiful face and for a brief moment, anger swells within me. "She spent the night? Did you fuck her, Jaime?"
"Shut up," he says. "It's normal."
"Mother said—"
"Mother's wrong. About a lot of things."
I shift, letting my breath whisper over his neck. "Give me some cigarettes," I demand. "Leave me a pack or I tell."
I graduate from high school and begin at UND on full academic scholarship in September. I am given a small studio three blocks down from a sport focused biomechanics research lab where I work almost full time as an assistant.
I return home exhausted every night.
Jaime comes over two or three times a week when he's finished track practice. Always after dark. He texts me that he's arrived and then waits ten minutes to make sure nobody sees.
"Why do you do that?" I ask. "You're my brother. There's nothing wrong with visiting me."
He cooks dinner. After pulling the drapes closed tight, we settle together onto the small sofa bed I have in the kitchen, and his fingers curl around the raised scars on my back.
"Was it bad with Mother? After I left, I mean."
I wrap my arms around his neck, smelling his perfumed hair. "Yes," I say.
He shifts, clinging to me. "Are you going to get a boyfriend? Like how I have Shae?"
"Maybe."
"I don't think I'd like that very much."
I twist a loop of his short hair around my fingertip and he arches his neck so his gaze falls directly on me. It is so different from the way he looked at me as a child. Now it is hard, cold. It's the same way I feel when I look at him. "You should've thought about that before," I say. "Before you started fucking that stupid girl."
Jaime breaks up with Shae and meets a girl named Roslin a semester later. She looks an awful lot like the honey haired girl from high school, except her mane is a bit thicker, a darker, redder color that looks like embers. She is much younger than us, not in college, but comes to our graduation ceremony.
I graduate with honors, with a BS in biomechanical engineering.
Jaime obtains a degree in sports management, having barely passed most of his classes.
"Everything you've done," I tell Jaime on his wedding eve, an hour before his bachelor's party, "I've done it better."
He laughs. He smells strongly of the fake scent. No longer of snow and fire from the stove, the smell of fish oil. Mother is sick with cirrhosis and refuses to come to the city for the pre-wedding festivities. "They want to get me a stripper," he says, touching my hand. "You think I should have a stripper?"
A smirk worms its way across my lips. I've just told him about the two boys from med school I fucked last month. The foreign exchange girl from Greenland. "You won't. You don't have it in you."
He laughs again but his gaze grows dark. "No," he says. "You're right, Cersei. I don't."
I obtain a job with a prosthetics manufacturing company in Bismarck. Jaime moves there with Roslin about a month later and buys a house three blocks down from my apartment building. We drive to work together in the mornings in my small Ford. The heater works well but sometimes the seats and steering wheel grow so cold they burn my bare flesh like frostbite.
"I can't afford the one with heated seats," I complain one morning.
Jaime says, "You will. Just be patient."
During our second winter there, Roslin births a girl, Myrcella, and two years later a boy, Tommy. They look like my side of the family with their sunflower hair and ice grey eyes. I spend my afternoons after work at the house, with one or both of them on my knee.
After Myrcella is born, Roslin starts returning from work near seven pm and locking herself in her room until the next morning. One night she comes back near nine thirty and slams the bedroom door behind her. It rattles the baby bottles on the kitchen counter. One falls and spurts across the tiles.
"She reminds me of Mother," I say from the living room couch. Tommy is asleep in my arms, a string of drool itching at my bare shoulder.
Jaime scrubs at the kitchen stove with an old sock, removing burnt Mac and Cheese from the grills. "Shut up," he mutters.
"I was only kidding."
"You weren't."
"Jaime. Relax."
Jaime stops scrubbing, rubs his chin with one hand. He folds the sock and pushes it up against the crook of the wall. Then he turns to where I sit, his eyes wide, muscles bulging. "At least she's nothing like you," he says.
He disappears down a darkened hall.
I watch him go, feeling a tremble in my upper lip. Adrenaline sparks, then wanes. I pick a fleck of lint off Tommy's Batman nighties. He giggles, burbles in my arms. I press my forehead to his, feeling the warmth of his skin, and close my eyes.
When I open them again, Jaime kneels in front of me. His eyes meet mine. His hands come to rest on my knees, palms warm but dry, his gaze dropping over his sleeping son. "I'm sorry," he says. "You're so good with them. They need you."
He says he loves me and brushes his lips across my own.
When Myrcella starts preschool, Roslin gets worse. She spends the night in bars, wasting money. Sometimes she doesn't return until the next day. She loses her job and leaves the children entirely to Jaime's forgetful care.
I find myself spending the night more and more in the guest bedroom, reading the kids stories until they fall asleep and dropping them off at school and daycare in the morning before work.
"She's always around," Roslin says one night after Myrcella starts kindergarten. Her voice echoes into the guest bedroom from the kitchen where she and Jaime have been fighting for the past half hour. "It's not right."
"The kids need someone, don't they?"
My door swings open. Myrcella stands behind it, her hair disheveled, a small stuffed elephant in her arms. She stares at me from across the room for a moment before crawling into bed next to me. She presses her cheek to my chest. I hold her tight. "I wish you were my real mommy," Myrcella says. Her small fists clench around locks of my hair.
I could cry; she looks so much like me and my brother did when we were young.
Roslin threatens to return to her hometown in Rapid Falls. Around the same time, I break lease and move my things into the guest bedroom of Jaime's house so I can be closer to the kids.
"If you want them," I tell her one night, a small cotton towel wrapped around my body, hair still sopping wet with shower water, "then fight for them."
"Fight who?" she asks. She's cornered me in the hallway, her eyes dark and her sweat pebbling above her upper lip. "You?"
"Me?" I laugh but my voice sounds hoarse. "You've always tickled me, Roslin."
She glares at me. The light from the overhead bulb lightens her eyes, making them look almost grey, and I realize then how much we resemble one another. She's smaller, less busty, but the hair is the same length and cut. She dresses a bit like me. Her tongue is sharp.
But Roslin is weak.
"Sign them over to me," I tell her. "I have the papers. Don't you know what could happen to them if the state decided to take them away?"
Roslin opens her mouth.
"Can you imagine what people would say about you if the kids had to move into some stranger's home? Sign the papers, Roslin. They're on the kitchen table."
She stays quiet, her lower lip trembling. I'm about to go at her again, when Jaime saunters down the hall, his hair slicked back, shirt partly open at the top. He smells of spices and laundry detergent. His eyes fall over my partially exposed body just for a second.
Roslin is gone the next morning.
The papers are still on the table. Signed.
Mother dies.
I visit her shortly before it happens. She lies in bed, skin yellow and waxy, her once well defined muscles nothing more than limp rope. Her hair lacks the gust and gloss it used to swim in. She looks weak, scared, lonely.
"My brother," she asks in a rasping voice. "Did you call him?"
"He's not coming, Mother."
"Did you tell him it was me?"
I pour her a glass of water and turn out the lights in her bedroom, open a window in the corner to let in the cool breeze of a fading summer. "I'll come back tomorrow," I promise.
Tomorrow arrives and Mother is dead. An old pelt from a fox hangs in the corner of the cabin, the only remnant of her former, vivacious life. The rest of the room looks cluttered, neglected. A fine line of dust coats the mantle over the fireplace. The stove runs black with char.
I take a bottle of moonshine out from beneath the kitchen counter and drink until I black out.
It's funny: the two people Mother loved most in her life were her brother and her son, yet I am the only one around to see that she is buried.
One evening when Myrcella and Tommy are in elementary, I get home from work late and find Jaime with Myrcella bent over his knee, whipping her with a belt as Mother so often did with me.
"Jaime!"
I grab Myrcella by the back of her trousers and set her on the floor, pushing her in the direction of her room where her brother waits, with lips trembling, full of tears.
Jaime stares up at me. Hands empty, he looks much gentler. Older. Lines crease his face. His skin sags now slightly, and the strips under his eyes have grown dark.
A bead of sweat rolls down his forehead. I stop the trickle with my finger. "Don't do that," I tell him. "Ever again."
"She says things. He says things, too."
"They're kids, Jaime."
"We were kids, too."
A sick feeling gathers in my gut. I shift. My knees hurt from standing all day. I need a shower. My hair falls limply down my back. I need a drink. "They won't be like us. I promise. They won't."
Jaime sways in his seat. He smells of gasoline and coconut. His hands fall to either side of my waist and he leans in, pressing his forehead to my stomach. "It's never gonna feel the same with anyone else," he says. "Is it, Cersei?"
At work I get several promotions quickly, but when it comes to the senior managerial position, my bosses refuse. "You're just not a people person, Cersei."
"I know the work. I'm good at it."
He looks at me. He's young, only a few years older than I am. I remember him graduating from UND right before I began. He was the "it" boy, the one all the professors loved because he was so sharp. He had lush, pearly looking blonde hair. Now it's thinned out, waif-like and yellowed. "It's not just about the work."
"So you'd rather some dumbass from HR take over?"
His lips pucker like he's going to kiss me. "Take a fifteen percent raise and a bonus, Cersei. Take it."
He waits, rubbing the inside of his lip with his tongue. His nose is large, squat. I laugh and brush by him, ignoring his outstretched hand.
"Don't love a boy," I tell Myrcella as we sit at a picnic table in the park. The kids have moved into middle school; Myrcella is working on a five paragraph essay about the origins of medieval weaponry. I sip sweet tea and gin from a plastic cup, nibbling on celery coated with cream cheese. I haven't eaten meat in six years.
The smell of it now makes me sick.
"Be smart," I continue. Jaime and Tommy stand at the hot dog counter to our left. "Go to college. Maybe not here, but… never love a boy."
"I don't love a boy," she tells me. And whispers a beat later, "You mean like you love Daddy?"
"Yes. Like I love Daddy."
She touches my cheek with her fingertips. Myrcella loves to touch my cheeks, my face. Prodding. Examining all the ways we are the same. Sometimes she'll ask me to stand in front of the mirror with her and she stares. Nose to nose, eyes to eyes, chin to chin. "You're sure I'm not yours?" she'll ask.
I tell her she's as good as mine. But she's not really, and that's what bothers me the most.
Work moves slowly. I do the same calculations over and over again. I draw designs. I review lists of materials, budgets. My computer screen stares back at me through the hours, my eyes growing tired. I am so good at what I do but it matters less than I thought it would as a child.
In the summer, a young intern named Snow from another department asks me on a date. He is nearing twenty two with large brown eyes and muscles like those that Jaime had his first few years of college. He wears polo shirts and the synthetic smelling cologne.
He curls a lock of my hair behind my ear. "You're very pretty," he says.
"Very pretty," I mock, smirking. "I'm very smart. And very good at my job."
"That's true," he says. "Do you have kids?"
"Why?"
He smiles and leans into me. He doesn't wear any wrinkles near his eyes, like Jaime and I do. "You always look worried," he says. "Like you're preoccupied with something."
I fuck him but feel nothing.
Afterwards I walk the streets of Bismarck at three o'clock in the morning, my coat loose over my shoulders. I see Mother's shadows on the sidewalk, wagging her finger in my face. "Wretched children," she says. "Spoiled, wretched. You always will be."
"I like a boy," Myrcella tells me her freshman year of high school. We are back at the picnic tables in the park while Jaime and Tommy buy hotdogs.
I sip a cup full of gin and orange juice. I tilt the liquid back, letting it warm my insides. The sun, blazing in the rare heat of an early summer, stains my skin dark. I am a restless in a drunken heat. "A boy?" I say.
"I only like him. Don't freak out. It's not love or anything."
"What's his name?"
Myrcella smiles. "Tristan," she says. "It's nice, don't you think? He's in the school band. He plays the drums."
I look at her lips, her teeth. When she smiles the whole world seems to blossom and grow. She likes writing and geography in school, not math and engineering like I did. "Take it easy," I say. "You have your whole life to like somebody."
When the boys return, Jaime sits so close the smell of the hotdog meat churns my stomach.
I push him away with my leg beneath the table. He knocks my knee in response. His legs are still muscular, even though he doesn't lift weights before work like he used to. The heat of his body bleeds through his pants and onto my bare legs. He smiles.
"Beautiful family," an older woman quips from my right. Her gaze falls over Tommy and Myrcella before resting on me and my brother. "You kids look just like your mom and dad."
Tommy sniggers.
Beside me, I feel Jaime stiffen. All the openness, the heat, drains from his body. I know I should lean into him, reassure him, tell him that it doesn't matter. Mother isn't here anymore. No one can hurt us.
But I don't.
Wretched, a voice whispers in my ear.
Behind my sunglasses, my eyes fog with tears.
Myrcella thanks the woman politely. A swish of grass and the four of us are alone again. Only then does Jaime's arm sneak around my waist.
I lean forward, resting my head in my hands with my elbows on the table. I think about work. About the kids. I remember the internship and how I used to think I'd have a big house and my name would be in the papers. How silly to think that people would know me, respect me.
"Wait in the car," Jaime orders the kids.
They leave and I dissolve in sobs.
"Myrcella got a scholarship to USD," I tell Jaime a year later. We lie in bed together with our fingers entwined, his thumb rubbing over my knuckles. "She's going to study animal science, I think."
"You smell like lemon," Jaime says. "Like fresh grass."
"I was outside."
"I always liked the way you smell."
I touch his chest. His skin is slick with sweat and fever, the cancer turning his skin grey and waxy. I kiss his eyelid. "You should build me a house," I tell him. "Remember how you used to make them? With my walk in closets and the kitchens twice as large as the living rooms."
"I did that?" he asks, smiling.
I cluck my tongue at him. "Well," I say, "Maybe it was someone else. I do remember that boy being much cuter than you."
He looks at me and his hand falls through my hair. He curls it around his fist before bringing it to his nose and inhaling deeply. Then he lets it go, watching as it unspools along my shoulder. "You wish we moved south or something? Somewhere warmer?"
"No."
He laughs. "Liar."
We settle; I rest my head back against the pillow. The drapes to the bedroom are open and from here I can see the apartment building where I once lived. It seems much smaller now, short and squat looking. The bricks are dirty, tinted a shade dark.
Jaime kisses my cheek. He smells of menthol, of medicine syrupy sweet.
When my brother dies, a part of me drops away with him.
I move with Tommy to Sioux City, about forty miles east of Vermillion where Myrcella attends college. I go to track meets on the weekend. When Myrcella visits she always does the laundry. If Tommy forgets, she'll shovel, too, and in the summer when she's here for good, she tends to the vegetable garden without me having to ask.
I pass through the motions, the routines.
Clean the house, do the dishes. Go to work.
One of Jaime's shirts lingers in my closet. It is black and blue striped flannel, much too big for me. I wear to bed for a long time but eventually the smell of him fades. The threads thin out, grow grey.
In the fall, I bring it to a shelter with a bunch of the kids' old things and some of my own. They sit in black trash bags, smelling thickly of fresh plastic.
When it comes time to hand over the bag with Jaime's shirt, my hands clench up. My fingers crease, white around the knuckles. I keep thinking of the house outlined in snow, the way he whispered in excitement about the future, how revered I'd be, how sure he was that we'd be happy together.
I force myself to let go. Promise not to remember.
But I always do.