On the Night Train

This is an essay I wrote about four years ago for a class back in Davis.

By car the drive from Martinez to Chico is about three hours long. By train the trip takes considerably longer. There are the frequent stops, of course, and then there are the unexpected delays that pop up almost regularly. It was during 1997 that I took the Amtrak to visit my older brother Brandon. We didn’t always get along growing up, but now that he was on his own in another city, our relationship was much calmer. I was a senior in high school at the time. Brandon was twenty-one. As the train rumbled along the tracks I thought about how we had evolved over the years in our intense, love-hate relationship.
He is two and a half years my senior—cocky, overbearing, and not a little bit manipulative. He loves to push my buttons. I remember feeling so frustrated with him one day that I stabbed him in the back with a fork. I can’t recall exactly why. He taunted and teased me mercilessly, then mocked me shamelessly when I would call for help. “Daddy!” became a symbol of my weakness. He loved to whittle me down to nothing, always emotionally and frequently physically as well. He stands six feet tall and weighs a solid 200 pounds. Our parents were continually reminding him that he didn’t know his own strength.
But that was when we were younger. As we got older we fought less frequently, regarding each other more as comrades and confidantes than enemies. If he went away for the weekend he would offer me the key to his room, a mark of how much he trusted me as well as an acknowledgment of my need for solitude. Although I had my own room, his was separate from the house and served as a welcome refuge from the everyday buzz of inside noises. He thought me a fabulous pianist (which I am not), loved to gloat about my achievements to his friends, and never hesitated to stand up for me.
This was most evident in 1993, the only year we were together during high school. I was a freshman and he was a senior, so naturally I looked up to him and thought him very cool. He was always surrounded by his football friends, most of whom were goofy and good-looking. While all the other girls my age were swooning over the whole pack, I was hanging out with them in the backyard or playing video games with them in the living room after school. I was the collective little sister. I knew Brandon was proud of me that year, proud that I belonged to him, and it was fun to be part of the gang. Everyone on campus knew I was Brandon Dayley’s little sister, which offered me instant status.
One day after a classmate insulted me at school, Brandon sought him on the football field, clasped him by the hand, and head-butted him with all his might. Richie received a gash on the forehead that required a total of seventeen stitches. He never talked to me again, except with the utmost care and respect, and then as little as possible. Brandon escaped legal action, not having yet reached the age of eighteen, but he was suspended from school, including all recreational activities. As a result our football team lost the final game, thereby losing their bid for the state championship. Brandon watched the game from the sidelines, something he had never done in four years.
I smiled to myself as I remembered his infatuation with his physique. The year he head-butted Richie Nakano was also the year he ritualistically measured his biceps every day in front of my mirrored closet doors. Each afternoon, without fail, Brandon would bring the tailor’s tape in from our mom’s sewing closet, flex his muscles, and ask with absolute sincerity, “do my biceps look any bigger?” I always laughed at him as he admired himself in my room.
The train continued on through the night and I saw tiny lights out the window dotting the landscape. They glimmered faintly, offering little illumination. The sky was black. I yawned and stretched, irritated that the train was running late. Something about Amtrak not owning the tracks, having to stop and let other trains pass by . . . ? I was too tired to think about it, and since I wasn’t scheduled to arrive until midnight anyway, I decided to take a nap.
Always an insomniac, I twisted and turned in my seat restlessly. Other passengers snored loudly, prompting me to put my fingers in my ears, to no avail. My mind started to wander. My father had moved to Chico at the beginning of my junior year of high school. He and my mother were still happily married and this was their solution to his finishing school without moving the entire family. He came home most weekends. Brandon moved in with him when I was a senior. I was eager to see them both, but it was Brandon who invited me to come spend the weekend with him. Hanging out with my big brother was sure to be fun, just like old times.
Little did I know that in a year’s time our world would be completely different. How could I know that he would survive a terrible car crash and suffer permanent brain damage? Of course I couldn’t, but as I look back at that carefree weekend trip I wish I had hugged him just a little more tightly, written his smile into my memory more deeply.
It’s different now, his smile. Everything is different. The ‘old Brandon’ was full of charisma. He exuded energy and charm. He could get anything he wanted out of anyone. I always knew when he wanted something from me because he would come up from behind me and start massaging my shoulders, offering compliments like candy. He certainly knew how to flatter.
Now he’s full of insecurities, and suddenly I’m the big sister. He looks up to me, admires and respects me, comes to me frequently for advice. Is this the Brandon I knew? That question is unanswerable, for Brandon is still there, lurking inside, and yet he’s gone. I will never know if he would have been different later in life. People change, after all. Perhaps he would ask my advice anyway—part of it seems to be my status as a parent, a spouse, a college graduate, things he has not yet attained. But perhaps not. It is one of the things I have to let go of.
On the train I slept poorly, the lilting motion affecting my dreams. In them I was crouching on a hillside amongst tall pines and great boulders, being chased by a tiger, hiding in fear. It was dark outside and I shivered with cold. I awoke in a panic. The train was running two or three hours late by now and I knew the station in Chico wasn’t in the best part of town. The plan was to call Brandon from the station when I arrived and he would come get me, but in an unfamiliar place in the middle of the night I feared for my safety. I was nervous as I prepared to exit the train, but when the doors slid open there was Brandon, standing under a street lamp with his arms folded across his chest, waiting patiently. A feeling of utter relief swept over me. I felt so safe as he hugged me tightly. He grinned and wrapped his arm protectively around my shoulders as we walked together toward his car.