Half My Room

The baby was born in March, and the first thing he took — before sleep, before Sundays, before her parents’ undivided attention — was half of Myra’s room.

It had been the guest cupboard’s room too, technically, but it was hers: her posters, her desk by the window, the wall with eleven years of pencilled height-marks. Then one weekend the cupboard walked out, a crib walked in, and a rented changing table docked against her desk like an invading ship. “Just for a couple of years,” said Ma, in the bright voice adults use when they’ve decided something is not a discussion.

Myra was eleven. Everyone kept telling her what eleven meant.

Eleven meant you’re the big sister now — always announced like a promotion, though as far as Myra could tell it carried no salary and worse hours. Eleven meant you understand, na? — which translated to: your needs can wait, because you’re old enough to have the kind that can. The baby screamed, and screamed at night, and everyone’s tiredness rolled downhill, and when Nani visited it was to hold him; when neighbours came, the gifts were for him; and Myra floated around the edges of her own house like a former employee visiting the office.

Here is the part Myra told no one, because there was no one to tell it to who wouldn’t gasp: some nights, listening to him wail through the wall of what used to be entirely her room, she thought, with cold clarity, I wish they’d never brought you home.

And here is the other part, which confused everything: some afternoons, when he slept with his fists thrown up beside his head like a tiny surrendering bandit, she would stand by the crib for ten whole minutes, watching him breathe, ready to fight anything that came through the door.

Both. In the same week. Sometimes in the same hour, and she genuinely could not have told you which one was the real Myra — the one who wanted him gone, or the one on crib patrol. She assumed something was wrong with her. It did not occur to her, at eleven, that she had simply arrived early at one of the true facts about loving people: it doesn’t cancel the other feelings. It just outranks them, on most days, by a little.

The night that moved things was in June. The baby had what the doctor called colic and what the household called the sirens. It was somewhere past three; he’d been at it for an hour. Through the wall, Myra heard the rhythm of her parents cracking — Ma’s voice frayed to threads, Papa walking the hall in squeaking chappals, both of them so far past empty that they were arguing in whispers about whose turn it wasn’t.

Myra got up — to complain, she told herself. She stood in the doorway of her half-room and saw the state of them: Ma slumped on the bed’s edge with the baby howling on her shoulder, Papa mid-hallway, both looking at her with identical pre-emptive apology, braced for her - and rightly, she thought - to demand her sleep back.

“Give him,” said Myra.

Nobody moved.

“Give him to me and go lie down for twenty minutes. I know how to hold him, Ma, you’ve corrected me forty times, my elbow does the thing automatically now.”

She would think about it later — why that, why then. Some of it was mercy. Some of it, honestly, was superiority: a suspicion that she couldn’t do worse than two adults currently losing to a four-kilogram opponent. She took her brother — he transferred mid-scream, a furious hot parcel — and walked the length of her room, the old half and the stolen half, doing the bounce-sway she’d absorbed from months of watching, and told him, conversationally, since no one was awake to hear her style:

“Listen. That cupboard you evicted had my kite in it. The wall behind you is where I’ve been measured since before you were a rumour. You’ve taken the room, the year, and both parents, and you can’t even see yet. You’re the worst roommate in this building.” Bounce. Sway. “And I’m apparently your big sister, so I’m the one who stays up. That’s the arrangement. Nobody asked either of us.”

The baby, mid-wail, stopped.

Not gradually — all at once, the way a switch stops a fan. He gripped her one finger with his entire fist, with a strength that had no business in something so small, and stared up at her, and made a sound she had never heard him make: a short, opinionated hm, as if her terms were acceptable.

He was asleep in four minutes. Her parents found them at dawn — Myra cross-legged on the floor by the crib, dead asleep against the wall with the height-marks, one finger still in customs custody — and had the wisdom not to make a poster moment of it. But something in the household’s arithmetic shifted after that night. She wasn’t the displaced one anymore, or not only. She was the one who could sometimes do what nobody else could — the 3 a.m. hm, Papa called it — and that was not a chore and not a demotion. It was a portfolio.

The resentment didn’t vanish; this is an honest story. In August she screamed at Ma about the changing table and meant every word for at least an hour. The crib stayed in her room for two years, not a couple, exactly as she’d predicted to the ombudsman of nobody.

But on the wall with her eleven years of height-marks, there was a new one now, low down, in her handwriting, made the week he learned to stand by holding her desk:

Him. Month 11. Roommate.