The house was warm all winter, that winter, and there was steam on the windows that I was not allowed to swipe through, which was ice in the morning and blue, and orange when the sun was up. Dad carried in wood and stacked it high by the cook stove and on the porch.  Sometimes I helped.

            Seemed like all Russell did was cry.  But there were times when Russell was not crying and he was sleeping.  I wasn’t allowed near him because I had a lot of childhood diseases in me like measles and mumps that he could catch and make him more sick, but I still snuck in a lot and looked at his head and his foot, but most of all I looked at his hands, to see if they had opened up yet.  Sometimes Russell was awake and not crying and he just lay there quiet, his eyes rolled back up a little, as if he was looking at his head too, as if he was wondering what to do with all the mucous I could hear up there, wondering when the egg would hatch, as if it was a problem and he was planning a solution, a way to make it go away, and he was trying so hard that it made his hands fists.

            I woke up once.

            It was spring I think by then.  The river was high, and Russell was crying and I was surprised that he was crying just the same way that I had been surprised by his crying when he first got home in the winter, and then I wondered if my brother had always been crying and if I just didn’t hear him anymore or if he had stopped for a while, for days, weeks, and then started up again.  My brother’s cries were like the sound the pipes made when you turned on the water in the bathtub, that sound, and then the sound like the pipes were singing high, off tune.  Sometimes the pipes didn’t make that sound, but mostly they did, and sometimes I didn’t hear them when they did, and only remembered that they had made that sound when it was over.