king, he says. He’d grab her up and twist her wrist and start spanking her hard till she stopped crying. She tells him to go to his room and stay there till he can come out and say he understands. He says he can’t understand, he’ll never understand. She’s just a brat and everybody should know it. He’s slapped and pulled to his room by his hand. She’s got a hole in her throat. He learns a new word, tracheotomy. He learns another new word, trachea, but this one he forgets fast. He learns other new words: windpipe and bronchial tubes and larynx, but the last two he quickly forgets what they mean too and how to say them. Bronchee, monkey, long key. It’s an ugly hole in her neck, pink and full of wet flesh like a fingertip gash, with a little dribbling like spit coming out of it sometimes. He doesn’t know when the hole’s uglier, with the tube in or out. She has it in her when she comes home after each operation. It makes his mother sick when she has to clean it or use it to suction the gook out of her neck right past the hole. He can’t wait for the tube to come out for good and the hole to close. It never does all the way but gets smaller and smaller till after a while it’s about as big as a little asshole when it’s closed and he can look at it for a short time without turning away. Sometimes, though, and he doesn’t know why now and not then, he has to excuse himself quick and run to the bathroom because his stomach’s getting sick. He begins feeling sorry for her. No more yelling at her, she wasn’t a brat and he can see it was something else doing it to her. She’s in a hospital bed at home and doesn’t look like the same girl that left. Skin’s yellow and black marks under her eyes, cheeks are deep and lips are chapped and cracked, and something about her hair and eyeballs. Came home on a stretcher carried by two men. Ambulance outside with its roof light turning and a few people on the sidewalk bending down to look past the building’s vestibule all the way back to the apartment’s foyer. “It’s my sister. She had a bad operation at the hospital that almost killed her, but she’ll be getting better at home.” “I’m glad,” someone says. “You be a good brother and take good care of her.” “That’s what I’m doing. I’m trying to keep the street quiet for her, because she’s right in that front room. Anyone beeps a horn too much, I’m running over to say something.” He tells his mother how he feels and she says it’s about time. Then she says she’s sorry for saying that and pats his head and says it’s wonderful he feels that way and she hopes he means it deeply because it’s much better for Vera that he does. “If she thought you didn’t want to look at her or hated her the way she is or just didn’t like her, you never know what could happen. She could just give up and die.” Later she says it could never come to what she said it could. It would just mean a lot to Vera and no doubt help her get well faster if he showed her the kind of nice attention they all know he’s capable of. She’s in bed in the hospital after her second operation. That would make him around eleven. Bar above her bed to hold on to or pull herself up with when she gets stronger. Flowers and cards all over the room. Toys, fruits, boxes and tins of candy. Lots of tubes and hanging bottles near her. A new radio she doesn’t want played and dolls and stuffed animals she wants taken home or turned away from her. That same sick face again, arms black and blue, scrawny. She hardly says a word to anyone but his mother and usually so quietly his mother has to put her ear to Vera’s lips. “What? What? Don’t repeat if it’s too hard to.” Her head never leaves the pillow and mostly faces up. Something’s been drilled into the top of her skull. Someone calls it a sinker and he thinks of fish. Another new word, traction, which he almost never understood but could see what it was doing. Each time she moves her head even a little he thinks her scalp’s going to be pulled off. The weight attached to the cable seems heavy enough to give him some trouble lifting. She doesn’t seem to be in pain but he doesn’t see how unless she’s being drugged. He wonders how the sinker will come out without another operation. He asks and someone says don’t worry, it’s like a tooth. He thinks of his own teeth, which fell out while he was eating or came out with a little jiggling, and thinks that might not be it but he’s satisfied with it. He hopes she doesn’t come home with it in and the pulley and weight and his mother says she’s going to be in the hospital that long just so she won’t. A visiting nurse comes for two hours a day at home to relieve his mother and do the harder chores. Vera won’t let anyone do the suctioning but his mother. She says it hurts too much when anyone else does it. His mother pleads with her that she doesn’t do a good job sometimes and maybe just this once it should be done properly, but Vera squinches her eyes and pounds her thighs with her fists and shakes her head violently. He has trouble looking at her in the hospital bed from one side because of the urine bag hanging off it. Sometimes it’s so full and the tube to it is still dripping that he thinks it’s going to burst all over the floor or else go back inside her without bursting and kill her. He sees her body filling up with urine till it leaks out of the neck tube, and he has to shake the thought off. But he’s also drawn to the bag, often checking how high the urine is, and occasionally tells people it’s filled or that the bag’s very dirty and she needs a new one, but they always say it has a little ways to go yet or that the bag can be used a couple of more days. There’s a big party for her sixth birthday. Friends of his parents, cousins and uncles and aunts, kids from the block who don’t even know her and a few who seem too old to be there. The room’s decorated with streamers, flowers and balloons, all the kids have party hats and noisemakers, folding chairs and a special long table have been rented, lights have been set up around the table for a movie a man’s been hired to make of the party. There’s mixed drinks and catered canapés and things for the adults, hamburgers and hotdogs and potato salad and different sodas for the kids, a huge ice cream cake is brought in by two waitresses, three musicians play the kind of music he once heard at a wedding, a clown pulls rings and bracelets and money and a baby rabbit out of Vera’s ears and mouth and gives her the jewelry. She’s very shy through it all and won’t look at the camera whenever she’s asked to. She blows out the candles after several tries and with some help from his parents and everyone cheers and claps and sings “Stand up and show us your beautiful face,” and his father lifts her to his shoulder and walks around the apartment with her and lots of the older people kiss her fingers and knees and shoes. He asks his mother why such a large party for her and she says it was so much fun and everyone had such a good time and it was so wonderful seeing so many of her family and friends together for once that maybe she’ll give them like this for all her children from now on. His mother wants him to read to Vera a half-hour a day. It’ll take her mind off things, she says, and her eyesight’s gone bad and she refuses to be examined for glasses. Whatever he chooses to read she doesn’t like and she can’t think of a book she wants him to read. She doesn’t like any books, she says. There’s nothing in them that ever means anything to her and someone reading one to her would make what’s bad even longer. He says hell read fast, she’ll see, so pick a subject she’s interested in and he’ll go to the library and get a bunch of books on it. If they don’t have it, their mother’s said he can buy any book she wants at a bookstore and as many as two a week. She says “Nothing,” then she says “Pottery.” He says all right, he’ll get them, even if they won’t be very interesting reading for him. What is pottery? she says. She’s heard the word and liked the sound of it. He says at her age she doesn’t know what pottery is? Maybe that’s why she should be reading books more. But she must be kidding him, and she says she is but he can see she’s not. He ends up reading her