My Protector, My Sister

                                 

My Protector, My Sister
            When I was four and she was seven, Emma, my older sister, plopped me on top of her pink and baby blue two wheel bike and said Ride it, Sadie, ride it. Just like that, she put a hand on my back, pushing me down the long dirt hill out back, and I couldn’t do anything but put my bare feet on the pedals and pedal. Eventually I stopped. Well, more like I crashed…into the neighbor’s car, and broke my right arm in three different places.

            Emma ran down the hill after me, once she saw me crash. I was just sitting there, with her newly wrecked pink and baby blue two wheel bike lying across my lap.

“Are you okay, are you okay?” She asked me over and over and I  knew that she thought it was her fault. I could see the tears forming in her eyes. I’ve always hated seeing Emma upset.

“It’s okay, Emm.” I told her, putting off the intense pain radiating from my right arm. I stood and wrapped my left arm around her, trying not to cry when she squeezed as she hugged back. We both pulled the totaled bike over and up onto our porch, running inside to tell our mother.

After Emma went back outside, I remember saying, “Mom. I need to go to the doctor. I hurt my arm.”

She said “let me see,” and I told her that I couldn’t move it. She went to the side of me and let out an “Oh my gosh” when she saw the bone pressing up against my skin.

I made our Mom drop Emma off at her friend’s house so she wouldn’t know, and then Mom drove me to the hospital where they put me to sleep; I woke up with a big purple cast on my arm. When Emma asked told her that I fell, and I honestly hoped that she didn’t connect the two. For the record, I don’t think she ever did.

 I always looked up to my sister, always listened to her, always respected her, even as I grew older, but after ‘the incident’ I never showed any pain in the presence of anyone ever again after the look on her face as I sat there with her bike on my lap was too much. The person that caused me to being hiding myself was the only person that eventually learned to read me; Emma. I never liked her to see, though we messed each other up pretty good over the years playing ‘the game.’  I think I viewed showing pain as me being weak. Most people just thought that petite little blonde Sadie couldn’t take anything. I couldn’t do anything to myself worse than a paper-cut without having a million people asking if I was okay. I hated it.

 My freshman year of high school was defined by the word ‘senior.’ Senior is what Emma was. We kept up our usual good natured and mostly painful game of tormenting each other in the halls and in the sociology class we had together. Until the day we were chasing each other and I managed to flip Emmers over the railing of the steps that led out from the backdoor of the high school to the trailer classes.

Needless to say, that did not go over well. The day Emm got back from the hospital with a broken ankle was the only time I’ve ever been truly, truly afraid of my sister. She can be the nicest, funniest person in the world, but she can also make your life miserable. Instead of avoiding her like I probably should have, I stuck to her like glue. I figured that if I didn’t go away, she’d kill me quickly, even if there was no chance of going painlessly.

The whole time she had her crutches, I was walking on ice around her, I was her legs, her voice, her eyes. When she wanted something, I got it. I left all of my classes five minutes early to get Emma’s books and walk her to her classes, even when we had class on opposite sides and floors of our five story high school. I remember sitting on the floor of our room in the middle of the night listening to her calm breaths as she slept, when I was afraid to sleep due to nightmares centered on the fact that I came way too close to actually killing my sister.

Emma was back to normal, if slightly less tolerant, by the middle of the year. I am still thankful that she didn’t have to graduate with her cast. That would not have been pretty.

After that we went back to our usual of just outright torturing each other on a daily basis, our old game, although never again near stairs. The old out-pain game-the first person to give loses. It was spawned a few years after “the incident,” and Emma won first, since she had just turned twelve and I was barely nine. We had been playing one round for nearly four years, not even Emmers’ ankle made her give, and even though I never even meant to do it, it had to count. After she fell onto the concrete, she looked up at me leaning over the railing, and before telling me to go get the nurse, she said, laughing, “Sadie, you’ve gotta do better than that to beat me; but you might not wanna sleep tonight.” She was smiling, meaning she was kidding…although that was never definite. I grinned and ran off to get the nurse.

After she graduated, Emma wanted to be behind the camera. After I graduated, I wanted to write but still have a job and go to school. We both ended up going to the same college, her for photography and journalism, me in journalism and creative writing. My freshman year of college was also defined by the word ‘senior.’ After graduating and bouncing around jobs between smaller stations in the city for a year, we both ended up at INK23, the biggest news station in the city. Emma was shooting with the camera, I was the one who wrote the reports, though I would actually jump in front of the camera for certain stories I didn’t want to give up.

Oh, and let’s not forget the freaks that come with plastering your face on the evening news.

In my 3 years on that particular job, I managed to get robbed 4 times, almost stabbed, ran off the road a good 25 times, and the best one yet: chased across a bridge downtown at gunpoint at two in the morning during a tropical storm while trying to record a story live. I owe Emm one for that, she did try to run him over in the INK23 van.

 In the end she chased him all the way to where the cops were posted by the 46^th street bridge, with the cameras still rolling. That one is definitely a favorite to watch in the DVD player, my older sister chasing a creep in a news van through downtown at two in the morning, in a tropical storm, all the while cursing him out and threatening to castrate him if she caught him, all at the top of her lungs and with the camera going, though they weren’t live, thankfully. Our boss was not so happy about that one, though it did make him laugh.

 About a year after that, Emma and I had different jobs at rival stations, making for good natured debates on which station was actually better. Emma moved in the same housing complex as me, and we ended up living across the courtyard from each other.

            A few months later Emma started seeing a guy from my station, a Greek reporter I had worked with a few times named Aros. After a few weeks I started noticing bruises along her arms and legs. I asked her about it, and she said something about the new camera she was working with, and I gave her the benefit of the doubt; her personality hadn’t changed any. For weeks after that, she started wearing out of season clothes, three quarter pants and long sleeve shirts, even though it was May and almost 80 degrees every day. The doors and windows of Emma’s townhouse were always shut, which was distinctly unlike my sister. I learned a few days later from a mutual friend of ours that Aros had moved in with Emma.  After piecing the information together, I came to a conclusion: Aros was abusing my sister.

 Deciding not to jump in and ruin a potentially good relationship without the facts, I kept a close eye on him at work, and even went so far as to get my work section moved near his, and I started eating at Emma’s a few times a week, and inviting Aros and Emma to dinner at my place on the other days, carefully observing him and how he acted towards my sister and me. I started to recognize a pattern of scratches on his wrists that corresponded to Emma’s broken, missing, and sometimes bloody nails. She was fighting back. With every passing day I began to suspect him more and more, and I started to hate him more with every discolored patch of skin I saw on my sister.

One night I came home from work late, and had to park down the street because all the spots were taken. I went around the back to go in, since it was closer. Once I got into the courtyard, I saw Emma’s back door was ajar. Sensing that something was wrong, I walked towards the door and when I got there, I called my sister’s name. When there was no answer, I forced the locked screen door open, and then shut the door behind me. I crossed the first floor and went up the stairs to the second floor where the bedroom was. Peeking around the corner of the stairs, the first thing I saw through the open bedroom door was the shadows of two people, one sitting, one standing, splayed on the wall in front of me. I heard was a loud thud, followed by a strangled cry from my sister. I came around the corner to the sight of my sister, crumpled in the corner, wearing nothing but an oversized t-shirt, with Aros standing above her with his face flushed and his hand raised and a lump in his pocket that looked suspiciously like a gun.

 I spun around the corner, grabbing the first solid thing I could find, a snow globe of New York City, and bashed him in the head with it. “Get your hands off of my sister,” I growled at him in a low, serious voice that was teeming with anger. Emma looked up, her green eyes full of tears caught mine, and I saw five distinctive bruises forming on her face. I told her to go downstairs and cover her eyes and ears. She ran without a second thought, and a moment later I heard the closet door shut downstairs.

            Aros stood up with a fierce look on his face, and lunged at me, knocking me to the floor, where he pinned me to the ground by my throat. I pulled my knee up into his stomach, rolled over on top of him, and punched him in the mouth. He slipped a hand down towards his gun and pushed me backwards off of him, sending me out into the hallway where I collided with Emma’s dirty clothes basket. I ripped a piece of clothing away from my face and looked up to see the barrel of the gun pointed at me. I shot up off of the basket and lunged at him around the waist. He shot and missed, and instead he met me, causing both of us to roll into the hallway, where I wrestled the gun from him and kicked him hard in the private.

He started to fall down the stairs. He grabbed my left arm and held tight as he fell, and I grabbed onto the banister and held on as not to go tumbling down. After a moment, his grip on my wrist slipped and he went crashing down the flight of stairs to the landing, ripping my shoulder out of socket in the process. Ignoring immense pain in my arm for the second time in my life, I went down about half of the flight of stairs, and when Aros stood and looked up at me, with pure hatred and defiance in his eyes, I raised his gun with my right arm and fired five shots into his chest. One for every bruise I had just seen on my sister’s face.

 I don’t remember much after that, but I do remember stepping over his lifeless body and going and getting Emma out of the closet and hugging her close as she cried and babbled, not even caring that my arm felt like if had been cut off and Emma was hurting me. I remember Emma popping my arm back into socket once she realized it was dislocated, and I remember never even making a face as she moved it around for minutes before successfully putting it back.

I remember calling 911 and sending them to our address, and I remember Emma crying, and I remember both of us sitting in the back of a police car on the way to the station.

I remember being asked if I wanted an attorney, and I remember a lawyer. I remember us being separated into different rooms for questioning, and Emma breaking down so bad they had to bring us back into the same room.

I remember being given a glass of water, and telling them that if they wanted my DNA they could just ask, and I remember the lawyer Emma must have called telling them I would plead guilty to a charge of voluntary manslaughter.

I remember waking up alone in a cell while Emma sold our more expensive belonging to post my $15,000 bail, and I remember Emma driving me home, which must have been at least two days later.

After I got back home, we broke the leases on mine and Emma’s townhouses, and moved into a two bedroom townhouse together. We figured that I’d be in jail soon anyway, so why waste money? Emma seemed different after I posted bail. Until every one of the bruises were gone, she was distant, but after they were gone, we were back to our old game, though she steered clear of my left arm, and I her face.

            Two months later, I was in court. The voir dire process must have been interesting for the defense, because I swear I got the jury from hell. My representation was good though, and we managed to cut my sentence down a lot with a plea bargain. I ended up with a 4-year sentence, with the possibility of parole, for the voluntary manslaughter of Aros Constantinos. 

None of it matters though. I am content to know that everytime I look at my sister's eyes, no longer swamped in tears, or her skin, no longer marred with bruises, and her voice, no longer small and weak, but back to the same confident voice I know and love, I don’t regret what I did.           I would do it again in a heartbeat, even if I knew that I would undoubtedly get a death sentence. I can sleep at night, regardless of the fact that it's on a prison bed, and I don’t have a changed outlook on life like a lot of people think about people sent to jail. I can live with the fact that I took someone's life to protect someone else’s. I wouldn’t make a habit of it, but I will never regret it, ever. I love her.

My name is Sadie McCallister, I am 27 years old, and I am a murderer.

 

Author's Note

I found this buried in my documents, the part up to high school was written in Jan. 09, the rest in March. Emma and Sadie are products of a few experimental character sketches for another project, and I felt that I should tell their story first.
I hope you guys enjoy this.
Don't forget to revew! =)
I should be back up fully in a few weeks.
--poetic-raven2012, --Jenn

Reviews

[Lexi Nicole]

Great piece. The characters are so real, and I love Sadie's narration. I like how you went through Sadie and Emma's background, how they used to go around hurting each other and trying to make one another give in, and then you turn it around when Sadie has to stop someone else from hurting her sister. There's a lot of powerful emotions in this, you've got a lot of skill as a writer. Keep it up!

-Howl

[V. Lucien Maier]

Well done over all. Although the story jumps around a bit at first.
There is a lot of very interesting back ground, But that may serve the piece better if it were dispersed throughout a bit more. But over all a good story with a good build.

[Marie Anzalone]

I really liked this piece as well, because your story rang of truth. Please write more.

[Ahmad Alhour]

Its too good to be buried between documents :d lol
No, actually it pretty nice.

Keep it up.

[Jo]

This was such a good read. It seemed so realistic to me and when I started reading, I couldn't pull myself away, despite such a sad story. You wrote this beautifully and the ending is very intriguing. You did well on this story and I enjoyed reading about their story. Great write!

[We are young.]

THIS WAS SO AWESOME GREAT WRITTING SKILLS!!! Sister love is a great thing to write about.

[Becca*Type2012]

Nice story! I liked how the relationship basically stayed the same after Sadie went to jail for protecting her sister, and I also like that she is semi-proud of going to jail and saving her sister's life. Nice story. Interesting ending. Perfectly Jenn!

[D Kupisiewicz]

I'm not really into sad tragic stories, but this is well written.
Pat yourself on the back.
Only small suggeston would be quotation marks for the dialouge.
Thanks for the cool read.
David