“Do you still want a child?”
My brother exhaled, and the cigarette smoke slid down my throat. The car was saturated with his breath. From the passenger seat his fingers trembled, still remembering the moment they had circled my wife’s nipple. That day we idled in the hospital parking lot.
“We don’t need the baby.” His voice carried the rasp of a man who had quit smoking three years ago and just started again. I sat in the back, clutching the door handle. The sweat in my palm refused to erase the image of him burying his head in my wife’s breast.
My Brother’s Nipple
My sister-in-law was still under anesthesia. The baby, only four days old, had nuzzled at my wife’s nipple like a starving thing. My brother stared without focus, then suddenly bowed his head and took the nipple himself—instead of the infant. My wife’s eyes flared, but he would not let go. Through the glass I watched, holding my breath. As he suckled he whispered,
“This is mine. Don’t give it to the baby.”
A Child Still Longing to Be Loved
He lit another cigarette, cracking the window just enough to keep the smoke from escaping. The flare of the lighter revealed his face.
“You still want a child, don’t you?” I couldn’t answer. I was seventeen again, the summer I first stole a cigarette from his lips. Back then he had said, “Just between us. A secret for brothers only.” The secret did not end there. Sophomore year of college, the night he introduced his fiancée, I looked past her and saw the ring on his finger. Later he called me. “I can’t marry her without you.”
The Baby, or the Rival
This time, while nursing my wife’s nipple, he said,
“This child will be the end of me.” The baby devoured her body; breasts became its alone, belly its territory. My brother felt dispossessed. He saw the infant not as love but as obligation—an obligation that would kill the child inside him still begging to be loved.
Mr. Jin-woo, Mrs. Bo-ra, and the Third Case
Jin-woo, thirty-seven, design director at a conglomerate. His wife Bo-ra worked marketing for the same firm. After six years of marriage they were expecting their first child. One night, seven months in, Jin-woo came home drunk and said,
“You wanted the baby—you raise it. I’m not coming home.” From then on he arrived in a bathrobe, wept while stroking Bo-ra’s belly, and left again. Always the same cycle: touch, tears, disappearance. “He’s terrified,” Bo-ra told me. “He thinks the baby will kill him.”
Min-jung married Seong-jae; three months later she was pregnant. Seong-jae had never wanted children.
“We need more time—just the two of us.” When the test showed two lines he walked out and never returned. Min-jung attended prenatal visits alone, listening to the heartbeat. In the end she chose miscarriage. Seong-jae came back, embraced her flattened stomach, and whispered, “Now it’s just us again.”
My Brother and I, and the Child Never Born
My brother gave up the baby. My wife divorced him. The child was adopted. The family ended. My brother is no longer only my brother; he is someone’s ex-husband, a child’s absent father, a name at the frayed edge of our family story. I still remember that day—the clarity in his smoke-filled eyes. In them I saw another child: the one that could never be born between my brother and me. The night he tasted my wife’s nipple, I breathed the cigarette smoke in his eyes—and that smoke was the child we would never have.
A Final Question
Somewhere between love and duty, when did you choose yourself instead of the baby?