For quite a while now, people have been asking me for more details about David & Lori’s early life, why Lori was so angry for so long with him, how it was for her while he was gone, and what it was that attracted her to him, so here’s the untold first part of the story.
Read, enjoy, I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it as I did writing it.
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Child Lori
My first, and strongest, memories are all to do with the fact that Davey, my big brother, had such beautiful green eyes; one of the first things I can remember with any clarity is trying to grab those startling emeralds because they were so beautiful. Then when I got a little older, I would make him hold me up to Mom’s dressing mirror so I could look at my blue eyes looking at his beautiful green eyes. It wasn’t until I was much older that I began to wonder why he had green eyes, and soft, lush, golden hair, when Mommy and I had black hair and blue eyes, and Daddy had brown (well, mostly gray, actually) hair and pale gray eyes.
One day, when I was maybe seven or eight, it occurred to me to look, really look, at some of the thousands (OK, I’m exaggerating… a little) of framed photos dotted around the house of my Mom, Davey, and another man, a stranger to me, but one who looked just like Davey. I’d seen them all a million times, never giving them a second glance, but now, when I studied them closely enough, and saw the way the man was holding Davey, or smiling at him, or the way he and Mom were holding hands, or holding Davey and smiling at the camera, the realization struck; that was Davey’s Daddy, and hard on the heels of that, my Mommy had been married before! Shock, horror, Davey wasn’t my brother, how could he be, that was his Daddy right there, not Daddy, not my Daddy…
Mom found me crying in my closet, one of those incriminating photographs clutched in my hands, and so she took me out of there, dried my tears and blew my nose while I cried about the fact Davey wasn’t my brother, he couldn’t be, everyone had been pretending to me all along, Daddy wasn’t his Daddy blah blah blah blah.
Mom let me run out of steam and get it all out of my system, then held me on her lap while she told me the story about how Davey’s Daddy had died and gone to Heaven when Davey was just a little boy, in England, and how she and Daddy had fallen in love and gotten married, and that Daddy had adopted David, that Davey was still her little boy, but he now was Daddy’s little boy too, and I was her and Daddy’s little girl, we were both her children, so Davey was, and would always be, my big brother.
That big hole that had opened-up in the middle of me when I worked out that Davey wasn’t my brother closed-up again; Mom made it right with me, only now I knew why Davey looked so different from me, and why it didn’t matter, because he was still my gross big brother who made me pull his finger, and gave me wet-willies, and woke me up with a stinky-finger, and, when I was a pre-schooler, convinced me the neighborhood alley cats came into my room at night when I was asleep and spat in my mouth, and how the crusty stuff in my eyes in the morning was dried-up cat wee; it gave me sleepless nights and nightmares for weeks and Mom nearly grounded him for life over that; even today I still feel creeped-out whenever I see a cat…
Yep, he was my big brother alright.
Now that I knew Davey was from England, and so was Mom, I realized they both spoke differently to Daddy and me. I’d been listening to them all my life and I never noticed anything different, but now that I knew I couldn’t stop hearing that accent. My friends, and his, had always known he was different, but it had never struck me as odd; it was just something else to go along with his vast collection of nasty habits, his smelly feet, and his weird sense of humor; I always put it down to Davey just being Davey and never gave it another thought.
*
Life was fairly even and undisturbed through my early childhood, except for one thing: Davey always seemed slightly uncomfortable at home, like his clothes didn’t fit him properly, and he never really had what I would call close friends; just me, really.
I had Sara and Josie, my closest friends; we went through pre-school, elementary, Middle, Junior High and High School together; they weren’t related, but with their fair, freckled skin, light, golden-brown hair, and green eyes everyone just assumed they were twins; their families came from Cincinnati and Austin, Texas, so there was no possibility they were related, but that didn’t stop pretty much everyone from calling them ‘the twins’.
The three of us did just about everything together, Sunday school, church choir, Wilderness Girls, everything, but when I got to like nine or ten I kind of started to feel like maybe they were hanging with me because they wanted to be near Davey, which grossed me out. Davey? He was disgusting. Daddy needed a gas-mask to go in his room, Mom had to hold her breath when she sorted his laundry and you couldn’t get me near his room with a ten-foot towing chain, but Sara and Josie used to get all tongue-tied and blushy and just gaze at him whenever he walked into the room.
I suppose, if I’m completely honest, and didn’t look at him through the ‘little sister’ spyglass, he was kinda pretty; he had the kind of blond hair you don’t often see on guys, a bright, lustrous golden, and big green eyes. He never seemed to tan, even in the blistering Iowa summer, and always looked pale, and just different to everyone else; most blond kids darken as they get older, but not Davey, he stayed golden-blond right up to the time he left, but I’m getting ahead of myself here.
Just about all my friends’ big sisters were trying to get him to notice them, which puzzled me some; after all, I lived with him, I know what he looked like first thing in the morning, and endured his unique collection of smells, grunts, burps and other noises I’m sure you don’t need to know about; being in a closed room on a hot day with him after two tacos and a couple cans of Dr. Pepper was an experience once tried, never forgotten; burping the alphabet was the least of it…
*
When I was coming up eleven, just about to start middle-school, everything suddenly went wrong. Davey and Mom had a huge fight. No-one would tell me what it was about, then Daddy got involved and after that it was never the same; Mom cried a lot; she’d slam Davey’s food down on the table in front of him with her mouth set in a thin line; she stopped laughing at Daddy’s terrible jokes, and even Daddy seemed to not really be into it even when he was trying to make Mom laugh.
Davey walked around like a zombie, his face set and expressionless, but I could see he was mad; every time I tried to ask him what was going on he’d snap at me or just shove me out of the way and tell me to mind my own business, or go ask Mom.
Then I found out. He was leaving. Davey, my big brother, was going away, to England; he was going back to what he called home, and that hurt me deeply; I thought this was home, his home was here, with Mom, and me, and Daddy, not some mythical place millions of miles away.
Mom had told me stories about England once, when I was still just a little girl, but all I could recall were jumbled stories about queens, and princes, and lots of knights running around (in clanking suits of armor?), and golden-blonde princesses, and castles, and ladies drinking tea with milk in it and their pinkies stuck out, and some weird game called ‘cricket’, and horses everywhere; it was all very confusing and disjointed to an eleven year-old Midwestern girl…
This tension and anger in the air was almost palpable, and went on for what seemed like forever; the house was like a morgue, gloomy and depressing to be in. Every evening Mom would make us dinner and pick at it, then glare at Davey and excuse herself and go sit in her bedroom with the door closed; Daddy would help Davey and I clean up, Davey would wash-up and disappear into his room, and Daddy would just shrug and look sad.
Something was coming, I could feel it, jeez, I could hear Mom crying about it at night and Daddy’s low rumble as he talked to her.
I tried to make Davey stay, but it ended every time with his screaming at me, his voice cracking and warbling, his eyes blazing green and his face beet-red; Mom usually broke it up, and she’d go after Davey for disrespecting me while he just stood there, refusing to say a word to her, his lips clamped so tight they were bloodless, with his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder, which just made her even madder.
*
The day my Davey left me, the day my big brother got on a plane and left me, and disappeared from my life, that was the day my heart broke in little pieces; even as we were standing and waiting for his flight to flick up on the overhead, I still thought it wasn’t going to happen, that Davey was just mad and punishing Mom for something, that he’d drag it out, but at the last second he’d relent and say “OK, let’s go home, I call Denny’s!” and it would all be OK again.
But his flight flicked over to ‘Now Boarding’ and Daddy made this real funny, sighing, snorting kind of noise and turned his back on Davey, who walked away without a backward glance; at that point the conflict inside me was so great I almost exploded; half of me wanted to run after him, to lock my arms around his waist and trip him up and pound him with his flight bag until he came to his senses, but the other half of me hated him so much it was like a rush of vomit in my throat; all I wanted to do was stab him and kick him and hurt him like he was hurting me, and make him pay for making my Daddy cry.
He was walking away from us, and now I knew what he really thought of us, of me; he thought we were nothing, our home was nothing, his real home was a long way away on the other side of the world, and he never, ever thought of our home, our house, our family as anything to do with him; he was leaving us behind and dusting us off his hands, and going back to his real life, and we’d never meant anything to him at all.
All his life, when I thought he was happy at home, with Mom, Daddy, and me, he was pining for someplace else, and now he was going back there, and I hated him for it.
Mom finally broke, and ran after him when he was half way to the gate, and I watched her hug and kiss him goodbye with murder in my heart; already I was writing him out of my life the way he’d written me out of his; from then on, I resolved to have nothing more to do with him, ever; no mention of him in my presence, no sign he’d ever been my brother; he’d made me an only child, so that’s what I’d be, and I swore to myself that, come hell or high water, I’d never speak to that ungrateful worm-pig ingrate ever again; he didn’t deserve my time and attention.