“You’re welcome. Think we could talk now?”
“Yeah, all right.” I pulled up a wooden step ladder and sat down on it.
“I missed you,” Santi said. “I’m glad you’re back,”
“For a little while. I enlisted in the United Forces. We both did.”
“Wow, Joshua. You and Cipher both? What made you decide to do that?”
I didn’t want to get into what happened in Promised Land, so I told him the other reason, “I want to study medicine.”
“That’s great. You’ll be really good at that, already are. And Cipher? What’s he want to do?”
“He doesn’t know yet.”
“He didn’t want you to go it alone,” Santiago said, and it wasn’t a question.
I sat up a little straighter. “We’re a team,” I told him while wondering what he thought about that.
“You’re a good team,” he said at last. “Listen, I know you’re probably still mad at me for what happened to him. I think about it every day, what I could have done differently to keep him from being bitten.”
“You could have not left him behind,” I said.
He nodded, lowering his head. “Like I left you behind?”
I rubbed my lips together and stared out at the yard where the goats had their snouts buried deep in the fresh green grass. “You left meandMom behind.”
“I know. And I regret that too. I was a coward.”
“And I had to watch her slowly get worse, not knowing what to do, being left alone to make that decision. If Cipher and the others hadn’t come…” I didn’t need to guess at what would have happened. My mother would have turned Rabid and I likely would have gone the same way. It’s not like I would have ever been able to kill her myself. “You had to have known what would happen,” I said, eying him coldly.
“I was in survival mode, Joshua, my own survival. All I knew is that I couldn’t stay here.”
“And you didn’t want me to slow you down,” I said. We’d talked about this in Atlanta. I thought I was over it. Apparently not. But Cipher had never treated me like a burden. Well, maybe in the beginning, but he came around quickly.
“I always intended to come back,” Santi said.
“Come back to what?” I took a deep breath, exhaled, and tried to let go of the pain and hurt I’d been harboring toward him since last summer. “You expect me to be the same, to follow you blindly, forgive you without question, but I’m not the same little kid you left behind.”
“I know. You’ve grown a lot since then. We’ve both been through some shit.”
“Yeah, we have,” I agreed, shutting down the part of my mind that always went there.
“Want to talk about it?” he asked.
I shook my head. “No, not yet. Maybe not ever.”
He nodded and laid a hand on my shoulder. “I respect that. I’d like to try again with you, if you’ll let me. I haven’t been a good big brother, but I’d like to try to be better.”
Of course I’d give him another chance, a million chances to be honest. Because the same man who had abandoned me last summer had also taught me how to fight, how to ride a bike, how to stand up for myself against bullies, how to tie a fishing hook and cast a line, and so many other skills. I wasn’t going to throw him away because a piece of him was broken, though I did hope he’d work on himself. Besides, I’d made a ton of mistakes myself.
“You can try again,” I said quietly.
He stood and pulled me into a hug. I tried to hold back the tears because there was part of me that still didn’t want him to think I was a baby.
“I’d like to try too,” I said, “to let it all go and start fresh.”
“You’ll always be my brother, and I’m so grateful you’re still here,” he said in a voice thick with emotion. “And I’m really proud of all that you and the others have been able to accomplish. Maybe part of me is jealous of how successful you’ve been.”
