by Phoebe North
I could build a better fire, I thought, and then, suddenly, I felt inspired to do just that. I took another thick slug of wine and put the bottle back down on the table beside my brother. Then I shouldered past Neal.
“Watch it,” Neal said to me, but I ignored him as I started to add bigger and better fuel, snapping off the sticks in my hand. Behind me, I heard Neal go to my brother and murmur something.
“What’s that?” I called back, looking at them. The fire sparked and danced in Jamie’s eyes, but he didn’t say anything. Instead, Neal spoke for him.
“I said, How much trouble do you think you’ll get in if she goes home wasted tonight?” Neal’s smile was jagged. Dangerous. He was poking me. Picking on me. He didn’t want me here, and I could feel it. I looked at Jamie, waiting to see if he’d say anything. But he didn’t.
Once, twice, I blew into the fire, watching the flames lick the kindling before it caught. Then I sat back on my heels. “I don’t think you have to worry about that,” I told them. “Mom doesn’t care what I do. She never has. All she cares about is Jamie.”
Finally, a response from my brother. He rolled his eyes. “We don’t have to do this tonight, Annie,” he said.
I frowned. “Do what?”
“I know you hate me. You said so already.”
It was like a punch to my gut. I’d never said I hated Jamie. Had I felt it once or twice, in my anger and my grief? Of course I had. What sibling doesn’t? But I loved him, too, and I’d never expressed anything but love for him. I’d been careful. I’d been supportive. I’d never let any thick, dark feelings out.
Now, dizzy with wine, I stood up straight, shaking my head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“‘Just because you hate someone’s guts doesn’t mean you don’t love them, too.’ You said it. Don’t pretend like I didn’t know what you meant. I’m not stupid.”
“I know you’re not stupid. I was talking about Mom and Dad—”
Jamie waved a hand through the air at me and drank down the last long breath of the wine. “Like hell you were,” my brother said, scowling as he wiped his mouth against his sleeve. “I know how you feel about me. You can’t even stand to be in the same room as me most of the time. We never talk, not like we used to—”
“Oh, come on,” I said, rolling my eyes now, too. “‘Like we used to.’ Like we were even friends anymore when you left.”
“He didn’t leave,” Neal cut in. “He was kidnapped—”
But Jamie wasn’t listening to whatever it was Neal was saying, and I wasn’t, either. We were talking to each other. Finally. Now my brother’s words came swift and cutting.
“That was your choice,” he said. “Didn’t I try to come out here with you? To pretend that things were normal?”
I scowled, trying to remember the last time I had met him in the woods. Me and Jamie, locked in battle. Him screaming, Fight me, Annie. The fear and rage in his eyes when I refused. But the hurt, too. Sure, that had happened. I couldn’t deny that it had. But it wasn’t like he said. It was a lot more complicated than that.
“They weren’t normal,” I said fiercely—but my voice was tight when I said it. I was near tears already. “You can’t pretend that they were normal. Do you know what it felt like to be me, Jamie? Everyone was always so worried about you—”
“Jeez, Annie,” Neal interrupted me again, his words tromping right over mine, “how selfish can you get? After everything that’s happened to him?”
But Neal didn’t matter, not right now. He wasn’t me, and he wasn’t Jamie, and I wasn’t about to start pretending that he was. “I mean before that,” I said, slowly shaking my head. “For our whole lives before that. You were the golden child, Jamie. And I was no one.”
“That’s not true,” Jamie murmured.
“Damn it.” I looked down at the kindling in my hands. And in a flood of frustration, I snapped it between my two fists and chucked it into the flames. “It is true. Do you know what our mother said to me when I came out to her? When I brought my first girlfriend home? Not I love you, sweetie or It’s okay, I’ve always known. Nothing. She said nothing. Like it didn’t even matter to her. Even when you were dead, all of our lives revolved around you.”
There. I’d said it. Selfish and terrible and ugly, the truth hung in the spring air. The fire crackled. Neal, his eyes wide, grabbed another waiting bottle off the picnic table, and drank.
But my gaze was on Jamie. He was looking at me like his heart was breaking. Like I was breaking his heart.
“You mattered to me,” he said, in a terrible, soft voice. “I thought about you every single day.”
As he said the words, I knew they were true. I could tell from the look in his eyes, which were welling with tears. But even without his tears, I knew it was true anyway. My brother had thought about me on every ugly morning upon waking, and on every even uglier night. I knew it now because I’d known it then.
Still, I also knew it was false. And as much as it hurt him, and as much as it hurt me to say it, I needed him to hear it. Right then, right there, in the sacred space we’d once shared.
“Maybe you thought about your idea of me,” I told him. “But you hardly know me. You haven’t known a thing about me in years.”
Jamie was crying now. I was, too. It felt, in that moment, like we were irreparably broken. That we would never be whole. Not because of what was done to Jamie, but because of some deeper wound, one we’d acquired years before. One that had been with us since the beginning, along with the better, brighter magic.
Neal, beside him, could have scowled. He could have said something cruel and cutting or thrown a rock at me in some desperate attempt to help. He didn’t. He only held out the bottle to me. I climbed up on the picnic table beside Jamie and drank.
“It wasn’t easy to be me, either,” Jamie said softly, trembling beside me as the wine—this one flavored like those artificial peach rings we used to buy at the dollar store—somehow failed to make me feel any better. “Everyone watching me all the time like the whole world might break if I ever did the wrong thing. Do you think I wanted that? Even now, with Mom? If I screw up this court case, and he goes free, it’s over—” His breath caught.
I squeezed my eyes shut. “I know,” I whispered, because I did. I’d never wanted to be Jamie. I’d only ever wanted to not be me. “I know it was bad for you, too. I know it’s bad for you now.”
“Okay,” my brother said. He wiped his face against his sleeve again, but I don’t know that it really helped.
We were quiet for a long time in front of the fire, the three of us, watching the flames dance. Everything felt cold and empty and wrong. But then I noticed how Jamie was looking down at his hands in front of him. They were broad now, a man’s hands. He seemed to be puzzling over something. Fitting pieces together.
“Wait,” he said slowly, as a realization dawned on him. “You had a girlfriend? When? Who?”
I felt my stomach seize. For a moment, I said nothing. On Jamie’s other side, Neal let out spluttered laughter. I realized then that Neal must have known about me and Vidya. He was Miranda’s cousin. Our town was small. Word got around.
“Shit, Annie,” he said, still laughing. “You haven’t told him?”
I looked away from the fire and turned to face my brother. Took one last swig, swallowed, and, shaking, drew in a breath.
35
I’d memorized every inch of my therapist’s office: the carpet that could never decide if it was brown or gray, the big wicker basket of fidget toys on the floor, the cheap prints of ferns and wild lettuces framed on the wall. The single window to the outside world had thick tinted glass. The trees beyond always looked like they were being glimpsed through cloud cover, even on the brightest days. I’d watch them tremble, brown on darker brown, and pet the arm of the sofa and contemplate speaking. Some days I didn’t.
Some days—this day—I did.
“So you told your brother,” my therapist s
aid. Her name was Kit—a child’s name, a doll’s name. She was a vaguely hippieish woman in her midforties with narrow wrists and large glasses. Sometimes I thought she was amazing. Sometimes I couldn’t stand her. Most days, like today, I settled on a sort of benign indifference.
“Yup,” I said, the consonant popping on my lips. “I told him.”
“How did that feel for you?” she asked, which was how she often phrased things. Not How did it go? or What did he say? but How did that feel?
“Awful,” I said quickly, truthfully. I ran my thumbnail up and down the corduroy wales of the sofa. I was always truthful with Kit now, no matter how uncomfortable it felt. After all, now that I knew there was no Gumlea, what use was there in lying? I’d like to think it had opened a floodgate between us, this new, radical honesty.
But I’m not sure she’d even noticed. She still pushed her glasses up her nose with her forefinger, took notes in her pad, and regarded me with a knitted brow. Our essential interactions remained unchanged.
“Was he upset?” she asked mildly.
I closed my eyes. Nodded. I could feel an echo of his grief and his anger, even now. Or at least, I could feel what I had imagined to be his grief and his anger. Because honestly? Jamie hadn’t said a thing. He’d sat there, listening silently to the whole damned story about how I’d stolen his girlfriend—how I’d loved her, how I’d thought she’d loved me—and then he got up and left. I’d stumbled after him through the forest, half drunk, leaving Neal to polish off those stolen bottles without us. But when Jamie got to the house, to his room, he only shut his door behind him. He didn’t even slam it. Just closed it, quietly, calmly, and then I heard the lock slide into place.
It had been four days, and we hadn’t spoken since. In a way, it wasn’t really a change from how we spent our days before. I hadn’t been lying when I’d said we weren’t friends; what did it matter if we still weren’t? But it was different now. Changed. Before, I’d felt a crack in his wall. A slender beam of light shining through. Now he’d put every rock back into place. There was no light. No hope.
“It’s good you were honest with him,” Kit Hendricks was saying. “That must have been very difficult. Without honesty—”
“I wish I hadn’t said it,” I said quickly, because I couldn’t stand to hear my therapist talk about how, someday, maybe, me and Jamie could be healed. I didn’t want to hope for it. Not when everything felt so hopeless. “In fact, I wish—”
I stopped abruptly, holding my hands over my eyes. Didn’t want to say it. Couldn’t.
“You know, Annie,” Kit said, “I’m here for you. Not your mother or your father or your brother. Aside from the a few things I’d be obligated to share, legally . . .”
Silence stretched out between us. We both knew what she meant. She’d made that very clear when this all started. If I was a danger to myself or others, she’d have to tell my parents. I told her that was ridiculous, knife or no knife. It hadn’t been a lie.
“Otherwise,” Kit said, “what you say in this office stays between us.”
“It doesn’t,” I said wistfully. “If I say it, he’ll know.”
“You know that’s not true.”
It was, but it didn’t matter. Kit Hendricks was here for me. Why did I come for forty-five minutes twice a week if it wasn’t for some variation on catharsis? I no longer had the magic of Gumlea to set myself free, but I had this tiny sliver of space in a life that often had nothing to do with me. I let a breath of air bubble my cheeks for a second, then blew it out, and all my ugly feelings with it.
“I wish he hadn’t come back.”
She pushed her glasses up her nose. “It must have been hard for you to see him again.”
I petted the sofa, then switched to playing with the frayed denim around the hole in my favorite jeans. Kit reached down into her basket of fidget objects and handed me a Jacob’s ladder toy. I curled my fingers around the wood squares, then flopped the pieces over themselves. Clack click clack.
“It’s not that. It’s not seeing him. It’s not him.” Clickety clack click. “I mean. Okay. That sucks, too. I can’t look at him without thinking about what happened to him, and—”
“That’s very common,” she said, which was something she’d told me before.
“I know,” I said. Clack clack. “Secondary trauma. You hear enough about something awful and it’s almost like it happened to you. Okay, sure. But it’s not just that. It’s the rest of it, too. It’s my life.”
“Oh?” she said again, which was her standard line.
“When he left, my whole life fell apart. But lately it felt like it was finally becoming something. At school, and with Vidya. I felt like a normal person, or nearly one. Maybe my brother was dead, but I was still alive, you know? I was moving on. Now . . .” Clack clack. Click.
“Now the prodigal son has returned and your calf has been led to slaughter.”
From the faint smile on her lips, I suspected that she’d been saving that line for a long time. I didn’t understand the reference, but I shrugged. “It’s all different now. Again. Mom takes a leave of absence from school and all anyone can talk about is the trial and Dad’s coming over once a week for family dinners just to be near Jamie and we’re supposed to think it’s amazing.” Clack. “But I don’t. They’re all home all the time. I miss the peace and quiet. I miss—”
It suddenly occurred to me precisely what I was saying. I missed the quiet. When my brother wasn’t home all day, every day. When he was being held captive in another state, raped nightly. I tossed the fidget toy back into the basket and held my hands over my face again.
“It’s okay,” Kit said, “to have complicated feelings right now.”
“No it’s not. There’s no room for my feelings here.”
By here, I didn’t mean this office, of course. This room existed for nothing but my feelings. But outside, in the world beyond, everything belonged to him. And maybe the real problem wasn’t that it belonged to him now. It was that the whole world always had, stretching back forever, even before I was born.
“Home is hard,” Kit agreed. “But maybe it’s time for you to find somewhere else for your feelings. School or girls or art or friendship. You’ve become close with Miranda again, haven’t you?”
I had, and I felt good about it. But there was just as much guilt there as there was joy. Because I’d been the one to let things fizzle in the first place, too distracted by the prospect of the black-haired princess to notice the friend who had been standing, stalwart and steady, by my side all this time.
“Yeah,” I said. “But I can’t rely on her to be everything for me. Or any girl, really. Sometimes I think that was the problem with Vidya. I expected her to save me, and Jamie, too. And nobody can do that. We’re a mess. All of us.”
“I don’t know about that,” she said. I darted my eyes up. Usually, she accepted what I said with a sort of polite blankness. But here she was, disagreeing with me. Politely, of course. Pushing her glasses up her nose.
“What do you mean?” I demanded, trying not to let my anger flare white-hot inside of me.
“Well,” she began, “from everything you’ve told me, it seems that your brother did save himself. He walked out of that apartment on his own two feet and went right to the police. It took him time, but he did it.”
I studied her face, the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and circling her mouth. I wanted to hate her. Who was she to tell me anything about my brother? But she was right. And I’d buried my head in the sand. I hadn’t wanted to face what had happened to Jamie, which meant that I missed his strength, too.
My brother had been kidnapped, but he’d saved himself. And if he was capable of saving himself from that, wasn’t I capable of clawing myself out of this, too?
How? I wondered. Damn it, how?
My heart pounded in my ears. I pointed to the clock over the door with one finger, arching my eyebrow at my therapist.
“Time’s up,” I told h
er.
We still had two minutes left, but Kit only smiled at me. “Sure,” she said.
36
I’d finally said the words I thought might break the world. Yet somehow, the world kept turning. That night, I ate dinner with Mom and Jamie, and if he knew what I’d been saying about him, he didn’t say a word about it. Didn’t even let it show on his face, which was the same blank mask it always was. I did my best to look impenetrable, too.
“You teenagers,” Mom said, “make such thrilling dinner companions.”
No one laughed. It really wasn’t funny.
After dinner, I did the dishes, then went up into my room to hide away from the world, like I always did. Put on an old playlist Vidya had made me, but somehow, the chords now rang hollow. Telling Jamie about Vidya hadn’t ushered in a new era of peace. And telling my therapist how much I resented him hadn’t helped, either. If anything, I felt even worse than I had before, like my bones were rattling around an empty cage of skin.
That night, I set my homework aside. I was the perfect student—honor roll, even—but it had never done me much good. Poppy had stopped sending me checks for my grades sometime after Jamie had disappeared. And our parents never said a word to me about my report cards; it was just assumed that I’d get a merit scholarship to the SUNY down the road, like it was assumed that a fledgling bird would one day fly. My classes weren’t interesting, anyway. I didn’t care about them. But I’d done well at them because I could and Jamie couldn’t. What was the use in it now?
I’d spent my whole life defining myself against Jamie. When he was amazing, I was mediocre. When he was gone, I was there. The truth was, now that he was back—now that I was no longer Annie [Redacted], the dead kid’s kid sister—I had no idea who I was.