Human Sister

emotional attachment to me, his primary caregiver; and the worst kind of pain for him seemed to consist of the sensations he felt, and the interpretations he made, whenever that emotional attachment was threatened.
    He displayed this pain when I stopped holding him, when I left the room, when I stopped talking to him, when I expressed displeasure, or when a thousand different things I didn’t understand brought forth from him heart-breaking screams and staccato crying (“uh, uh, uh…”), his eyes pumping out tears that tasted like mine. At those times, those many exasperating times that he screamed and cried, I would take him in my arms and talk to him and caress him.
    In addition to his unique crying, Michael’s earliest vocalizations sounded like syllables consisting of only a vowel or a vowel and a consonant, such as “ee,” “ah,” and “da.” For a while, I felt that his first word was my name, for he often said “Ah-ah” when he reached for me, but Grandpa and Grandma weren’t convinced that those sounds amounted to a word or a name.
    He was nearly three months old when I first noticed his interest in a miniature pear tree in our hydroponic garden. By then he was able to crawl and to sit upright without assistance from me. For several weeks, he seemed fascinated with one of the pears as it ripened from green to light yellow to a darker yellow with brown spots.
    One day he looked at me, smiled—as he usually did when our eyes met—then pointed at the pear hanging heavily on the little tree, and said, “Pretty.” He pronounced the word without the r sound and with carefully delineated syllables, so that what he said sounded like “pi-ty.” This, I knew, was definitely a word and I hugged, kissed, and praised him whenever he used it. Soon I was “pi-ty,” Grandpa and Grandma were “pi-ty,” and everything appearing on the scenescreen was “pi-ty.” Grandpa counseled me that I should be more selective in my praises if I wanted Michael to have more than a one-word vocabulary. Grandma said she wasn’t sure it would be all that bad to live in a world where everything was pretty.
    Though encouraging new words into Michael’s vocabulary turned out not to be a significant problem, the ripening pear did. Michael continued to spend a lot of time watching it, sometimes for hours each day, and every few minutes he would turn to me, point at it, and say “pi-ty.” That pear definitely was not destined to be picked and eaten.
    As weeks passed, the little brown spots on the pear’s skin became big brown spots, and though nothing as large as an ant or a fly ever made it past the antoids and Gatekeeper 3, mold spores must have hitched a ride on my skin or hair, or on Grandpa’s or Grandma’s, for by the second week of December white filaments and clusters, some resembling small spider webs, began growing in the oldest patches of brown.
    Day after day as the brown patches merged and the mold grew, Michael watched ever more intently, still calling the whole thing “pi-ty.” Late one afternoon the pear fell, spewing its syrupy insides onto the ceramic floor. His scream brought me running from my studies. By the time I got to him, he’d already picked up what he could of the pear and was trying to reattach it to the tree. Seeing me, he held out the gooey mess imploringly and started to cry.
    The “uh, uh, uh’s” wouldn’t stop. Eventually, Grandma came to get me for dinner. After trying unsuccessfully for several minutes to calm Michael, she told me she’d seen something while out shopping a few days before that might help. She said she would be back soon and would send Grandpa in to help me. Grandpa came in, asked what had happened, then sat in his chair at the study table and watched. He’d often made it clear that it was important for Michael to be raised as exclusively as possible by me, and besides, he said, it was good for me to learn to struggle alone with “the messes and the weight of life.”
    By the time Grandma returned about an hour later, Michael hadn’t quieted a bit. She asked Grandpa to help her get something through Gatekeeper. When they returned, Grandma had what she said was a Christmas tree ornament in her hand. The ornament closely resembled the pear of a few weeks earlier, green with some areas of yellow highlighted with subareas of reddish tint, as though it had been mildly sunburned. There was even an artificial leaf extending from under the clasp at the