Life without Davey was a constant misery and ache in my heart; I hated him for what he’d done to me, I hated the thought of him even being part of me, I wanted nothing to do with him. When he called home (MY home, not his, not ever again…) religiously every Sunday evening, Mom and Daddy would talk with him, then they’d hold the handset out to me and give me that imploring look, and I’d just clench my teeth and look away; what I wanted to say to him I wasn’t supposed to know, and I certainly wasn’t going to scream it out in front of Mom and Daddy, so I bottled it all up and held my tongue.
After a while, Mom stopped asking me if I’d at least say hello to him; why should I? He left us behind, he had a life that was nothing to do with us, so I wanted nothing to do with him.
It still hurt so much, though…
*
Lori Alone
This is how life was for the next few years; every week or so a letter would arrive from England; sometimes it would be a school report card, but mostly it was a real letter from that… that turncoat traitor, and sometimes a handful of photographs (which I never once even looked at; I didn’t want to see that heartless jackal frolicking around with all his new friends, people he’d rather have been with than be here at home with us, with me…)
Mom insisted on telling me all about how well he was doing at school, how popular he was, how he was on-track to study medicine, like I cared; he’d deserted us, he’d abandoned us, he’d abandoned ME like I meant nothing to him; he was my big brother, and I adored him, bad habits and weird smells and all, and he’d left me without a backward glance; hate was too mild a word for what I felt for him…
My friends went through something very similar with me; it gradually percolated through my wall of anger that they had lost him too; they’d known him all their lives, and they were missing him as bad as I was, if in a slightly different way; they didn’t have any brothers, Davey was the closest thing they’d had to a big brother, and they felt like he’d abandoned them too.
It didn’t help that every wall in the house was plastered with photographs of that shitty, treacherous little turncoat; when they thought I wasn’t looking, I’d sometimes see either Sara or Josie gently touching one of the myriad pictures of him, their eyes glittering, and their lip quivering, and my heart would ache for them.
That, of course, was yet another reason to hate him; it wasn’t enough he had to hurt me so, but to do it to my closest friends too? That was unforgivable.
So that was how it was as I moved up into middle-school, trying to make believe I didn’t care that my big brother had deserted me, that he no longer mattered to me, because I was a teenager now, thirteen years old, not yet an adult, but no longer a child, and childish things like that no longer mattered to me. And then that damned photograph showed-up, and everything changed.
*
One evening, Daddy asked me to get him something from his study, so I went in there, and while I was rummaging around inside the bureau, a pile of photographs spilled out. I picked them up without thinking and glanced at the top picture, and my heart slammed inside my chest at what I saw.
It was Davey, still in school, but how he’d changed; obviously it was a rowing team picture; he was surrounded by a whole bunch of strapping young men in number singlets smiling at the camera and leaning on oars, but all I could see was him; he was beautiful, I had no other word to describe him. The date was just a few weeks earlier, so he was almost eighteen, and gosh, how he’d changed; the boy I remembered was gone, but the young man he’d become was just so gorgeous it stopped me in my tracks, holding my breath as I took him in.
I don’t know how long I stared at that picture; I couldn’t stop looking at him, every single feature was the same, yet at the same time so totally different, and I remember wondering at the time why my heart was beating so hard and fast; this was my brother, this was David, who left me without a backward glance to go and have another life far away from me, and here I was, transfixed, breathing so shallow I could hear my heart drumming in my ears.
The next thing I knew, I was bolting out of there, running to my room to cry because my heart was breaking, and now I hated him all over again for making me feel this way, but even as I cried, I was seeing him in that photograph, his golden hair, his eyes like sparkling emeralds, and most of all that smile, his happy smile; I hadn’t seen it in such a long time, he’d taken it away from me, and now, seeing it again, it cut through my heart.
Mom came and knocked on my door but I yelled at her to go away, so she did, because I didn’t know why I was so angry, so sad, and a whole lot of other things as well, things I couldn’t describe, even to myself. What it all boiled-down to, though, was just as I thought I’d finally gotten over Davey and his callous abandonment of me, he’d waltzed back into my heart and broken it all over again.
As the days passed, I couldn’t get that image of him out of my head; I told myself I was being weird, mooning over some stupid photograph, of my brother, of all people, but that didn’t stop me sneaking into Daddy’s study most every night after that to take that photo out of the bureau so I could stare at it.
I thought I was being all sneaky and discreet about it, but Mom knew something was up; sometimes I’d catch her giving me a peculiar look, which tipped me off that she was using her special Mom-powers to look into my head, because she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and feeling, and what I was doing night after night, but she never once said anything.
I eventually stole that picture from Daddy’s study so I could look at it whenever I needed to; if Mom noticed it was gone she didn’t say anything, but if she’d asked me why I took it I had no answer; I didn’t know myself, it was like a compulsion. In the course of my day, suddenly, completely out of the blue, for no reason I could think of other than I just needed to, I’d stop what I was doing and go look at it again, study his face, memorize his smile, the way his eyes seemed to be looking directly at me, every last wave and curl of his hair and it was a complete mystery to me why I had to go look.
If I couldn’t go there for any reason, then next time I took it out I’d actually find myself apologizing to him in my head, which was pretty bizarre, and freaked me just a little when I realized what I was doing, but I still kept that photograph; nothing could have made me give it up, and I really, truly didn’t know why…
It wasn’t until I was almost sixteen that I let myself admit what I was doing, and why, and it was Josie, of all people, who pointed it out to me when she commented that, for someone who hated David so much, I was sure giving him an awful lot of air-time…
She was kind of sly about it, or at least her tone was, but there was a definite smirk there when she said it, and when I demanded to know just what the hell she was talking about, she rattled off some nonsense about how love and hate were as close as two sides of a mirror, which she probably thought was profound, but I just thought was profoundly stupid, because it sounded like she was saying I was in love with David, and that just wasn’t possible; it was gross, he was my brother for Chrissake, eeww, yuck!
That night, I lay awake half the night going over and over what Josie had said; it was impossible, it was wrong, it was weird that someone could even make a statement like that, because things like that just don’t happen; sisters love their brothers, of course they do, but they don’t fall in love with them, that was… icky, and wrong, and just… wrong… so wrong…
I fell asleep with my head still full of all this weirdness, and when I woke up, obviously my brain had been shuffling all sorts of things around and into place while I slept, because the first thing I knew when I opened my eyes was that Josie was right: I was in love with David, and it appalled and disgusted me; how could I be, he was my brother, he wasn’t even here, I hadn’t seen him in almost five years, I’d certainly never spoken to him in all that time, and I still didn’t want to, because all that anger and loss was still simmering nicely inside me, so how could I be in love with someone who was a: my brother, and b: a vermin-weasel who’d abandoned me, and his life with us, for a new life on the other side of the world?