The word addiction comes from Latin. It means to surrender. A drug addict is a person who has given over his or her life to a substance, who has given drugs the helm.
            The first time my brother went to rehab, he was fifteen and I was six. I was in the living room when a thunderbolt hit our front door. That’s what it sounded like. Then it happened again. Dad’s wood chopping ax, left behind when he moved out a few months before, broke through. Then a hand reached in and unlocked the deadbolt.
            Mom yelled for me to hide, so I shimmied under the couch, which I knew from playing was just enough space to shimmy under. In my haste, one sandal slipped off, toe pointing toward my location like an X on a pirate’s map. From there I watched my brother chase Mom through the house, ax raised.
            In the decades since, I’ve forgotten if the ax incident occurred before or after my brother bought me the Strawberry Shortcake game for his Atari, before or after he picked the pieces of my broken plastic headband out of the backyard and superglued them back together, before or after he made a box of brownies, cut it into quarters and shared it with me three to one, before or after his girlfriend dumped her cosmetics onto the kitchen table and painted my eyelids blue.
When my brother was twenty and I was eleven, Mom and I flew across the country to visit him at Yosemite, where he had work washing dishes. We camped, hiked, and admired Half Dome, but it was the pine trees I couldn’t get over. We had pine trees in New Hampshire, but the ones in Yosemite were different. Narrow while ours were bushy, sparse while ours were dense. My brother was happy. All three of us were.
            Over the next decade, my brother made the local news when he tried to drown someone in the YMCA pool. Later, showed his friends how to climb the fire escape into Dad’s apartment. He stole Mom’s car and drove it to New York. He also wrote me a step eight letter, that one where you make all the amends.
            My brother came to my wedding when he was thirty-one and I was twenty-three. I was living in Washington State by then, while he’d been back east for a decade. It was a long time since I’d seen him. He looked well-scrubbed and healthy. Because he couldn’t get a driver’s license, he told me he walked several miles every day back and forth to the restaurant where he was a server. It took hours, along rutted back roads, but he didn’t mind because it gave him time to think. His girlfriend was beautiful, their baby was adorable, and in that moment of new beginnings I allowed myself to imagine once again that his good times might last.
            When my brother was fifty-one and I was forty-two, he landed in the hospital, which is where he usually turned up after a period of MIA. Only this time Mom was not allowed to visit him, and couldn’t even stand outside with balloons like people did in those days, because he was too sick to get up to see out the window. He was detoxing, plus COVID, plus his pacemaker. Mom texted me to keep my schedule open for a funeral.
            When my brother was fifty-six, I was forty-seven. I was visiting for a week. We had lunch with Mom’s wife in her memory care unit. My brother spooned squash into her mouth while Mom caught up on emails on her phone. Eighties rock blared from an enormous television. According to my brother, eighties rock was what they always played. It was meant to appeal to their elderly patients, nostalgic for their youth. This miscalculation made us chuckle, but in a morbid, won’t be long sort of way. At the beginning of each song there was a lag before the title and artist appeared onscreen. Maybe ten seconds, just the opening chords. And each time, my brother knew the song. Title and artist. Correct every time.
            Okay, maybe not every time. But a lot of times. Thinking about it now, three thousand miles away and half a year later, it felt like he knew every song. And he’s my brother, it’s my memory, and I want to remember it that way.
            This fall, my brother went to prison. He’s facing up to five years for distribution of narcotics.
            In February, Mom called to say she had written my nephew out of her will. It was one thing for my brother’s ex-girlfriend to block their son from seeing him. That was understandable, given his habits. But now, as an adult, for his child to maintain the estrangement? Unforgivable. Everything will now come to me, my brother having declined his inheritance years ago, explaining that receiving a lump sum of money would kill him.
            A drug addict is a person who has given their life over to a substance. At least, that’s how Mom explained it to me when I was six. But recently I’ve been thinking a better definition is that a drug addict allows a substance to dictate some of their life details. Because even my brother has good days. And who among us, sober or not, can really claim to hold all the power in their lives? I’ve been married and divorced. I’ve been passed over for promotions. I’ve planted gardens consumed by deer.
            Drifting toward a half-century of life, I have a hand on the rudder, but the water is choppy. The ocean is vast. Sometimes it feels like the only thing I can do is wave from afar at the people I love. Raise my arm up in greeting, once in a while, squinting at the horizon while their vessel passes by.

Alice Kinerk gave up keeping her house clean in order to devote more time to writing. She’s published in Colorado Review, North American Review, Terrain.org, and elsewhere. Read more at alicekinerk.com.