When he came back he was silent, drawn; he looked weary, beat-down, and older than his years, but even after travelling all the way from England, he still he carried Mom up to her room, gently tucked her in and made her comfortable, checked her meds, and sat next to her holding her hand, just like Daddy used to. When I looked in on them a little later, they were both fast asleep, still holding hands, so I tip-toed away.
I’d had this long speech ready about why it had to take him eight years to come home, didn’t he know it was too late now, blah-blah-blah, but Mom kind of defused that; while he was saying his goodbye, she gave me the rundown on what it was like for him as a medical student in Britain.
The last eight years hadn’t been any stroll through the park for him, and if I’d ever once relented and actually spoken to him, I’d have learned for myself just how tough it was on him; he was a junior doctor, which meant they worked him like a dray-horse, day in and day out; it was a test of commitment and character, and he endured five years of that, not counting his first year as a lowly medical student; that was why Mom had refused to tell him what was happening at home; he’d worked too hard, and given too much, to lose it all. He was in the middle of his second year training to be a cardiologist when we got the news about Mom, and then lost Daddy a year later.
When I understood that, I got where those lines at the corners of his eyes had come from; he lived perpetually on the cusp of exhaustion, no real vacation time, no time-off to get into trouble and do the things students did, nothing but work, study, and more work again. Davey was studying at a prestigious teaching hospital in London, not a college, so he was learning medicine and surgical technique right up there at the sharp end, and constantly burning the candle at both ends to try and keep up with such a punishing regimen.
When Mom explained all this to me, how committed and single-minded he’d had to be to get through it, most of my anger evaporated; he’d set out to prove he could make a difference, he’d stuck it out, and followed in his Daddy’s footsteps, and Mom was proud of him for being the man he was. And so was I; now all I had to do was somehow get through what was coming next.
*
The funeral was as bad as I thought it would be; Davey had organized as much as he could, and the funeral home had helped him when he drew a blank, because it was pointless asking Mom or me, we just couldn’t get our heads around what we were doing, here and now, in this place; it was unreal and scary, so we leaned on Davey and hoped he’d make it come out right.
We put Daddy to rest the way he’d always said he wanted to go, his ashes scattered over the hills and forests by a buddy of his with an old biplane, and that was how it was done, end of chapter.
Mom was my strength through the whole thing; frail as she was, she still gave me what I needed to get through it, me and Davey; he wandered through the whole thing with a vague look of disbelief on his face, like he never thought he’d be doing this. Intuition told me what it was; he’d lost two dads now, and soon he was losing Mom; I’d been missing from his life for so long, and had given him such a sharp and cold welcome home he obviously didn’t feel like I was part of him anymore. I could feel him withdrawing, preparing himself to be alone again, and I didn’t know how to get past that…
Mom and Daddy had always talked about retiring to Maine; we’d vacationed there when we were kids. Mom said it reminded her of England in the Summer, some place she called ‘The West Country’, so Davey went ahead and bought a house for us in Bar Harbor, Mom’s favorite, picture-postcard place.
I don’t know how he did it; he just made a call and a couple days later we had a new house, but it was already too late; Mom passed away in her sleep two nights after Daddy’s funeral. Davey found her, and came and told me, and held me while I fell apart all over again; first Daddy, now Mom. What had I done to be dealt one paralyzing blow after another like this?
Davey was my lifeline, he kept me from going out of my mind, and maybe I helped him too; he’s never said, but it was a hammer-blow to him, too; I saw how he was almost crushed under the weight of Mom’s loss, but he kept it together somehow, and he kept me together, don’t ask me how, while he went through the whole thing again, another funeral hard on the heels of Daddy’s, and yet another truck-load of grief, guilt, and loss to burden him.
Once Mom’s funeral was over and it was just the two of us, the question of leaving Des Moines came up again. There was no way I was going to live alone in that house, not with Mom and Daddy there in every single piece of furniture, every ornament, book, and knick-knack; their personalities were stamped so deeply and indelibly into that house I’d be bumping up against them forever, and I wouldn’t let myself he haunted like that.
Davey agreed that a clean break was what I needed, and while he asked me to come back to England with him, I didn’t think I’d fit in, not half-way around the world, so we moved half-way across the country instead, to Maine, and began trying to get to know each other again.
*
Living with Davey, actually sharing a house with the man he’d become, one so different from the boy who’d gone away, had its own unique set of problems. For one, while all the upheaval and loss we’d endured had matured both of us, all the things I’d been feeling for Davey hadn’t gone away; I’d just pushed them down and sat on the lid while we tried to deal with our loss, and now they were emerging again, only this time he was right here. Half of me wanted to throw myself on him and desperately declare my love for him, in the hope that tweeting birds and little cherubs would orbit around us as he swept me off my feet.
The other half thought that would be a very bad idea indeed; he’d shown no signs of anything other than a completely proper brotherly concern and affection, and a little voice inside told me that taking any kind of aggressive lead with him would probably freak him out and drive him back to London forever.
So I left him alone, and spent most of my time in my room, either crying over Mom and Daddy, or crying over him. When I did slip downstairs for a drink, he’d be sitting in the sitting room with the TV muted, Mom’s photo albums on his lap, his eyes bright with unshed tears. I knew he was hurting. I could see it when he couldn’t see me. But I didn’t know how to make that initial overture, how to let him know it was alright to be as sad as he was, because he was obviously being the strong one for both of us and holding it all in.
I spent so much time moping around uselessly, unable to say what I wanted, unable to detect any signs of interest from him, and incapable of wanting anyone else, not that I had much choice. The locals were all retirees or weekend New Englanders from Manhattan and the nightlife consisted of oyster bars, crab-shacks, and lobster-stands, and a few bars or taverns I couldn’t go into anyway; so my default entertainment was Davey, and he was too busy being my big brother to notice me.
This went on for weeks; sometimes I’d slip into my skin-tight jeans and a plaid shirt a couple sizes too small and sashay around in front of him, but to no avail; his ‘Big Brother’ radar was running at full gain, and his ‘Willya look at that ass!’ instincts were just not functional when it came to me. It’s not even like he’d take the occasional sneaky peek at my ass if he thought I wasn’t looking; he just never even noticed. I was desperate to find some way to pique his libido, because I know my brother, and I was pretty damned sure he was neither a monk nor keeping himself pure for Jesus; God made him gorgeous for a reason, and I was it; now all I had to do was work out what was going to reel him in…
He never went out socializing or bar-hopping of a weekend, so I couldn’t take him dancing and maybe rub against him provocatively; his hospital would email him all kinds of paperwork and junk, so he’d spend the week doing chores, grocery shopping, other stuff around the place, living mostly by himself while I moped and cried in my room, and his weekends writing reports and reviewing surgical notes.
I did try and take an interest, reading over his shoulder, sometimes even jumping ahead and asking him a question once in a while, which seemed to please him, but some of the digital photo’s his department mailed him were stomach churning, to say the least, so I stopped doing that.
At last, though, I reached the tipping point; I knew that he was considering returning to Britain very soon, and if he took me there then bang would go any chance of getting him to myself; he had a life, friends, maybe even girls there; it was a small place, and once he told people I was his kid sister any possibility of having him the way I wanted would be dead in the water.
Desperate times call for desperate measures. I’d been scanning the porn landscape on a regular basis, trying to figure out just what it was men of his type found most appealing, and I reasoned that he was a man of the world in every sense, what he’d most likely want was a woman who fit into that adventurous, uninhibited mold, one who’d take her fun and not be an albatross around his neck. So that’s who I became: Lori Adventure-Slut, Playgirl of The Western World. If that didn’t stop him in his tracks nothing would…