Tough Times Test Resolve of Devoted Brother

PLACENTIA —  Hulking and taciturn, the teenager slumped on the couch, watching his little brother draw with his only hand.

The younger one should have been in school, but the teenager was too tired to get up that early. The little apartment--and the little boy--needed cleaning, but it felt so hard to stir himself from the couch. There were telephone calls to make about their future, but those could wait a few more hours, or maybe a few more days.

All of this was so much more difficult than Juan Reyes, newly and suddenly graduated to adulthood, had imagined.

His little brother, Elfego, lost his arm in a car accident in September, as he was on his way to church with their mother. Micaela Reyes, 51, died in the crash.

After her death, Juan, barely 18, decided to raise his 10-year-old brother, who has Down syndrome. Juan dropped out of high school and slept on a mat by Elfego’s hospital bed every night. He would be the adult of the family and seek legal guardianship, and they would be together forever.

If only growing up were that easy.

Juan discovered, like many new parents, that love and good intentions fall far short of a child’s needs. He sat in the tiny apartment with Elfego, patient with his brother but without the energy to cook, clean and tackle all the paperwork and phone calls necessary to get their new lives in order.

“I was so sure I could do it all, like I thought, ‘How hard can it really be?’ ” Juan said. “I had no idea.”

By February, he had fallen in grave danger of losing his brother. A social worker already had murmured words of concern about the apartment, about Elfego’s schooling. Worried friends and relatives would call. Juan didn’t even answer the phone.

It took Elfego’s special education teacher to help Juan see that fatherhood entails much more than a romantic promise and dramatic action.

Before the accident, Juan might have seemed unlikely to learn such a lesson in maturity.

Not that he was an active troublemaker, but neither was he a help at home. A high school senior, he had his own life of friends and parties. He was more interested in sniffing out the hottest party, or scoring an illicit beer or two, than spending time with his baby brother, nearly eight years younger, slow and nothing like him.

So his mother did it without his aid. Micaela made just enough money as a seamstress to keep her sons off welfare. The boys’ father never lived with them, and Juan said he doesn’t know his whereabouts.

Micaela cooked and cleaned and made sure both boys went to school regularly and on time, walking Elfego to the bus stop every morning and meeting him every afternoon.

She took him everywhere she went, hand in hand. Elfego--chubby and giggly and quick to give hugs to strangers--would smile up at her at regular intervals as they strolled, happiest when his mom would reach down and pat his fuzzy hair.

And each year, Micaela would talk to special education teacher Sharon McCart about her big goal for Elfego: that he would learn to write his own name. Maybe this year he’ll learn to do it, his mother would say.

“I think about that almost every time I look at him,” McCart said. “It was a wish she always had for Fego.”

It was the last thing they talked about, at the school’s annual open house a few days before the accident.

On a Sunday morning last September, a friend picked up Micaela and Elfego for a drive to church.

They had not gone 30 feet before the driver suddenly lost control and smashed into a building. Police described it as a “freak accident” that left the driver severely injured, Micaela dead and Elfego crying for his mother, his arm nearly severed.

Suddenly, Juan’s carefree world shifted beneath him.

He made a series of swift decisions. He made complex arrangements for his mother’s funeral and burial in Mexico. He put high school on hold, living at his brother’s hospital for months, and he applied for welfare to keep them going. He vowed to take care of the little boy, to stay with him and make sure he got better. Elfego could have gone to live with their mother’s cousin, whom they had always considered an aunt. But Juan would not have it.

He would take on the parent’s role and seek guardianship of Elfego.

Just before Christmas, the brothers went home from the hospital. Juan let his brother stay home from school whenever he wanted--which came to several times a week. Juan cooked when he felt like it, cleaned even less often. He thought about making the calls to set up guardianship and obtain necessary papers but found himself procrastinating.

Juan isolated himself and his brother from almost everyone. It wasn’t a conscious thing, he said. It’s just that the phone rang constantly--friends and hundreds of strangers who had heard of the boys’ plight were always calling to offer help--and he didn’t want to hear about it. He didn’t want to talk about his mother or Elfego’s arm or answer questions about how he felt.

The big brother was diligent about some things, like changing Elfego’s colostomy bag and taking him to dozens of doctor’s appointments and physical therapy sessions. He helped Elfego learn how to get dressed using one arm and bought him shoes with Velcro straps instead of laces.

He also cleaned out his mother’s room and shut the door, having no intention of moving in there himself. He had always shared the second bedroom with Elfego. He continued to sleep next to him, on the floor. He still does.

“Juan, he was depressed and sad,” said cousin Rebecca Salgado. “We were worried about them both.”

So were social workers who had begun visiting in January, looking for any sign that Juan was unfit for his task. They found signs aplenty. When a Juvenile Court official expressed concern about his poor housekeeping in February, Juan was disturbed but not panicked.

At that point, it wasn’t kind offers that would help Juan. He needed something else: blunt honesty.

It came in March from Elfego’s teacher, who was haunted by Micaela’s wish for him to write his own name. With his poor school attendance, he would never make it.

“I told Juan he had to do better than this,” McCart said. “It didn’t look good. I said, ‘Elfego needs to be in school. They could take him away from you if you don’t do something.’ ”

The words shocked Juan into taking a look around him. And as he had after the accident, he responded to crisis with surprising will.

“He knows what he’s got to do, but sometimes he just needs a little budge,” said Salgado.

Once the truth hit him--that through minor, daily procrastination he might lose his brother--Juan got up and did it, starting right away. He cleaned house and made preparations for Elfego’s return to daily school life. And he has not wavered since.

Now, Juan pulls himself from bed each morning and gets Elfego washed and ready for school. He makes sure his brother eats his cereal and finishes his juice. He walks the boy, recently turned 11, to the bus every morning, as Micaela always did, with his arm around Elfego’s shoulders. Then he is back in the afternoon to meet the bus.

It’s become a daily ritual, the bus stop, along with a handful of other routines that Juan created and has stuck to over the past few months. They go to the park and eat pizza at least once every week.

Juan also began to connect to his wider family. He accepts all of his aunt’s invitations to dinners and visits. They hadn’t been as close before, he said, but now it feels like a real family. Every weekend now they stay at her house, where Elfego is happily surrounded by children and cousins, and Juan gets a break.

“They are like my boys too,” Bertha Salgado said. “I want to spoil them, because I am so proud of them.”

As for Juan, most of his free time is spent hanging out with his 18-year-old cousin Rebecca, who encouraged him to go back to school. Juan is now enrolled in an independent study program, which allows him to complete assignments on his own and earn a diploma from home.

Earlier this month, he was granted full legal guardianship of Elfego.

When he feels himself wearing out at times, Juan takes a mental inventory of his accomplishments. Then he reminds himself of the things he has yet to do, like buy a car and find a job, one that will allow him to work around Elfego’s schedule. He wants to get off welfare, recalling his mother’s pride in supporting her family.

“It was so hard,” he said. “It’s still hard. I worry about stuff all the time, at night or whenever. I worry about [Elfego] like I’m his dad or something. Like I’ve always been his dad.”

Today Juan will be recognized as nothing less, in a Father’s Day tribute at his Garden Grove church, which he has started attending weekly and where he will be honored for bravely caring for his brother.

He most clearly sees the limits of what he can do in the way Elfego still keenly misses their mother.

What Juan can see is that as hard as he tries, he cannot take the place of a mother’s love. “My mom and Fego, they were close. You can’t just replace something like that. You can’t even try to.”

Still, there is no doubting that Juan has stepped fully into his new life now. Proof is everywhere: the way he absently wipes dirt off the little boy’s face, the way he smiles proudly when Elfego shows off his muscles or sinks a basket.

“My life is so different,” Juan said, sorting a basket of laundry on the family room floor. He stopped when he realized Elfego had put his shorts on backward, but then continued with his chore, following a newly acquired insight that all parents have, the one he suspects tells them not to sweat the small stuff.

“What are you going to do?” he wondered. Then, eyeing the shirts and towels in front of him, he sighed. “Man, I feel like I just did this.”