‘Devin,’ I said. ‘Catch a fucking train. Or better still, make him pay for a taxi.’
When I went back into the bedroom there was no change. Samuel still stared out at the afternoon and my mother’s eyes looked inward, taking her wherever she wanted to go. ‘Devin’s coming,’ I said. ‘Devin will be here soon, Mom.’
My mother’s eyes opened. In one movement my father and I pulled towards her as though her eyes were magnets. ‘Devin,’ my mother said. ‘My baby.’
Later, when the sun had lowered in the afternoon sky, the doorbell sounded. I rose to answer it and Samuel got up from the window and followed me. My sister leaned forward and kissed me on the cheek as she came through the door. She smelled of roses and she was wearing a new sweater that was rounded in places where she’d put on a little weight. I wondered if he ever took her out for dinner, if he appeared with her in public.
‘You made it,’ I said.
‘I made it.’ She gripped me tightly, and I felt I couldn’t breathe.
She stopped in the archway of the bedroom door and she took in the extent of our mother’s illness, the slow wasting, the final decay. I took a step back.
Devin lurched forward and kneeled at the bedside and rested a shaking hand on my mother’s forehead. She bent forward and her lips touched the skin of the pallid cheek. ‘I’m sorry, Mom. I love you, I do,’ I heard her whisper. ‘You can go now. It’s okay. I wish—’ Her voice cracked.
She stood upright suddenly and turned, her eyes wide as though she could see directly through to the other side of me. There was another world within her too and none of us had ever tried to follow her into it. If there was a reason for that, I couldn’t yet find it within myself. In that moment I saw not only what Devin had lost in her life, but also what we’d lost. Beyond our integrity, we’d lost her. There was no excuse, not for Samuel, not for Dawn, not even for me.
She turned from the bed and left the room, eyes wet, and I followed. ‘Dev—’ I began.
But my father was at the window in the living room, lifting the heavy curtain that was closed in the afternoons to keep the sun off the furniture. My sister moved towards him as he turned from the window to face her. ‘Whose car was that?’ he said.
She gazed back at him, her eyes steady and cool. ‘Don’t act surprised, Dad.’
‘Where are you living, Devin? Are you living with him? Are you sponging off Marshall again?’
‘I came here because Catherine asked me to,’ she said. ‘Because of Mom.’
He raised his hand and I saw the flat of it and he must have heard my breath drawn inward and he lowered it again.
‘How dare you,’ he said. ‘How dare you use my brother like that?’
‘You’ve got to ask yourself, Dad, who exactly is using whom. If anybody else gave a damn, then maybe I wouldn’t have to,’ Devin said. ‘Maybe I wouldn’t have to use anybody, if everybody stopped using me.’ Her lips were pulled tight and thin, her eyes narrowed.
My father spoke softly now. ‘Don’t you think Marshall has done enough for us? You have to get into the world and make your own way. People will think it’s very strange that you’re living there by yourself.’
Devin laughed, the sound I’d heard from her before, every time she stood alone and vulnerable against the people who were supposed to protect her, who had failed her every time. It was a laugh that made my father even madder and he covered his shame with his anger.
‘People will think it strange? Is that what you’re worried about?’ Devin said. ‘Who helped you when we were small and you were down and out from gambling all of our life away? Whose house did we live in then? Which brother saved you? Think about that, Dad.’
Samuel’s fist clenched, his forefinger protruded and stuck very close to Devin’s face. ‘Let me tell you,’ he whispered. ‘If you let other people carry you too long, there’s always a price to pay.’
Devin’s face drained to pale. I saw her nose move, like a small and frightened animal contemplating whether to flee or to fight. The shock of what he had said hollowed her out, made her an empty shell through which her clear voice reverberated, steady and oddly calm.
‘Don’t worry,’ she said. ‘I know all about price, and what such an exchange entails.’ There was no blame in her eyes. They rested on him sadly and I wanted to intervene, to stop her talking and take control again.
‘I have paid, Dad, many times over,’ she continued. ‘I’ve paid with my life, all my life.’ I didn’t move. All of my life, I had never moved. Instead I let her say it, whispering, as she looked straight at my father’s face. ‘And I’ve paid for yours too, Dad. With my own body.’
He slapped her then and the sound of it was innocent, like a twig breaking, or a hand clapping, but the pain of it stretched across the room and around my world and everywhere but inside her. She stood still and looked at him and she didn’t say anything and he said nothing in return. He had never raised his hand to either of us before, but Devin had long ago learnt to separate from the rest of the world; she had learnt how to become a shadow in a beautiful skin, a small ghost who danced between the cracks of life, escaping inside herself to avoid what was happening to her in Marshall’s house. It became a habit, one that protected her, but also carried her far from the world I knew. Real life only hurt if you allowed it to, in my sister’s world, but she knew how to keep the substance at bay.
Each of us had our own truth that we’d tacked onto our lives over the years. Her truth was never mine. I didn’t want to jeopardise what I had worked so hard to build, or the love I was beginning to trust. I moved at last. I turned my back, and I left them there.
In the bedroom the light had faded to almost black. I flicked the switch on and the room illuminated, just like that. I made magic and brought light to the world. But there should by nature have been no light at all. Nothing was different but everything had changed. My mother still lay in the same mound with her eyes closed and her mouth silent and the trees outside waited for the verdict upon her life. The sky grew dark and the world bowed low at the passing of another of its children and there was nothing different in the room or outside of it, except that her breathing had ceased and the heart in her had grown quiet. Nothing else had changed. Not in that room, or in the heavens, or anywhere else on earth.
Thirty-Two
I suggested a walk. Every day. Even if it was just to the end of the block and back. This was no longer about university or work or finding a career. She was beyond the point of wanting to make an effort. Now, as we approached our thirties, it was about keeping her alive. I offered to walk with her, if she would just do it once a day.
‘But why, Cat? Why would I want to walk?’ she asked me.
Even then I couldn’t allow myself to understand it, whatever Devin had gone through, how someone could willingly choose a life of immobility, that place of resignation in her mind. I was too preoccupied with maintaining my own order to acknowledge how deep her damage went. She’d given up university, and the maths that she was so good at. She’d moved back into Marshall’s house, and then out again. I hadn’t read a poem she’d written for many years.
Why should she want to walk? Her question was clouded in irony like the whole of her. It wouldn’t be to satisfy my desperate need to get her back on her feet, to enact a semblance of a normal life. I needed to convince myself that she did really want to walk; to take that first step, to make an effort. Even now, when all evidence points to the contrary, I try to convince myself that, given the chance, Devin would have walked, she would have driven, studied and fallen in love; she would have flown, just as I had. All this she would have done in time – if she’d had the time to do it.
Once a month Devin came to visit us on a Friday evening, and as the hours slipped away, she often gave up on the journey home and stayed over. One night we sat talking in the shadows of the garden, and the whole world turned. Inside, Auster, now my husband, was safely protected by the mundane tunes of the television. The child we’d ma
de together was fast asleep in the safety of our small world. But there outside a valve was loosened and I finally had to see my sister’s life as it was.
‘He called the cat a thing today.’
‘What?’
‘That next-door cat. He couldn’t remember the word for it. He kept saying that thing, and I knew it was because the word wasn’t there.’
‘I get word blocks sometimes. You know, when it’s on the tip of your tongue—’
‘Catherine. Really, it must be hard work, this conscious effort to remain obtuse. It was a cat.’
I pulled at a blade of grass. I’d noticed too. I spent more time with my father than Devin did, and in the past week I’d heard him call a cup of tea a jug, seen him spend an hour trying to remember the word for a towel, and put a small pot plant in the fridge. But still I couldn’t verbalise it. I’d lost the words needed to name his condition. ‘He’s taken it really badly, that Mom’s gone. He’s so preoccupied now, it’s as though his mind is always on something else.’ I turned my head and looked at her carefully. She was seeing more of Samuel these days; my mother was dead and Samuel lived alone, refusing often to go out, to leave his house. Since my mother’s passing, they seemed to get on a little better; Devin was making an effort to spend more time with him.
‘It’s great that you’re concerned about him,’ I said.
She snapped a look right back at me. ‘Don’t think it’s going to happen,’ she said. ‘Don’t think Dad and I are about to become bosom buddies.’
‘It’s time for change, Dev. We all can change. Maybe now’s your time to become someone different in our family.’ As I said the words, I knew they were wrong. She looked at me and shook her head, narrowed her eyes in her disbelief. The time for hide-and-seek was over.
‘The person I could have been was killed, Catherine,’ she said. Catherine. She never called me that. Now the naming that felt cold and adult to me came too easily to her tongue. She was done with words that glossed over what was real. I reached towards her, I tried to encircle her in my arms, but she resisted me, she pulled away. ‘I don’t want your pity,’ she said. ‘I have no pity left for myself.’ Her hair fell and it covered her face. Her voice was flat, matter-of-fact. She wasn’t asking for pity, I knew that now, but still she summoned me to hear her, forcing her will on me to see.
‘Then what do you want?’
‘I’ve just told you. Don’t you listen? I’m not asking for your attention, for you to flutter round me like a mother hen. I told you what I want, and it has nothing to do with you.’
‘Nothing to do with me? You sit here and tell me you don’t even see the point of going for a walk, and you expect me to act like you just told me you want to go shopping? What am I supposed to do with that? You’re my sister, for god’s sake. I’m tired of this, Devin, but I still give a shit about you. You need to get help.’ I looked to the moon and it had no answer for me. It hung in the sky, cold, gleaming, aloof.
‘I’m tired now. I’ve seen it all. That’s all.’
‘Lots of people are depressed. Lots of people are survivors … of … of all sorts of things. Don’t you want that? Don’t you want to be a survivor?’ The words came, but they marched like soldiers trained for duty. I knew she sensed them tinged with frustration, my irritation suppressed, even. In truth my heart was elsewhere, inside the house, warm and safe with my husband.
‘I have nothing left to survive on.’
‘You’re the most beautiful person that I know. You’re brighter than me, smarter than me. You were more beautiful from the day you were born. You have everything; you always did. And you’re not a child any more. We’re getting older. Take some responsibility.’ It was the same old dance and we hadn’t yet learnt a new routine. But Devin didn’t quite play it out right this time around. She was distracted by another thought-train in her head and she let me have it.
‘You had him.’
‘Who?’ But I knew.
‘You had Samuel.’
‘Oh please, Devin. So that’s what this is about.’ It wasn’t, of course. It was about so much more. I was clinging to my defensive anger, ready to call it into play and shut her down with accusations of her shortcomings, but Devin was ready for me.
‘You had his love and you had his protection. It was like an invincible force field around you and I could never break through. You had a secret pact that no one else could enter and it destroyed my life.’
‘I was a child! I was younger than you! What the hell was I supposed to know? What did you want me to do?’ My words were lifted into the still night air like a small child carried high in the strong hands of a man she trusted.
She looked away and her hair fell backwards and revealed her face, a pale reflection of the moon above us. My sister moon. I wanted to turn the words we had between us into conflict to protect myself, but her pretext of self-pity negated any argument. She wanted me to shift my perspective, to see her, just for once, in another way. I had to give her that.
‘I’m sorry, Devin,’ I said. ‘I thought that time might take it away. I never knew how to deal with it.’
She leaned forward, placed a hand on my knee. I thought it was a gesture of comfort, and wondered how she’d managed to swing it like this, as though I was suddenly the one who needed solace. But I was wrong. There was no comfort when she spoke. Instead a ruthlessness edged her voice like dark lace. She wasn’t looking at me. She was trying to send me a message, only the sea between us was too vast and the bottle floated on the surface, lost. ‘I don’t want anything from you, Catherine,’ she said. ‘I don’t want you to save me, or help me, or say shit to try and make me feel better. I have died many times already. It is not a new concept for me. We’re all going there anyway. You will die too. So will Samuel.’ She paused, swallowed, her throat cracked. ‘And so will Marshall.’
‘Bad things happen to everyone. You could see a counsellor. There must be medication that you can take.’
‘Yes. Yes, there must be.’ The tone in her voice made me want to cry.
‘Stop drinking so much coffee. And if you would just eat, Devin. You look like a stick. It has to affect your moods, how you cope with things. How you cope with life. Sometimes it just looks like attention seeking.’
‘I got all the attention I could cope with years ago. The wrong kind. From the wrong person. How the hell does a twelve-year-old deal with that?’ She pushed her lips together and they fit perfectly. Beauty is a deceptive mask for those who bear the weight of it.
‘Why didn’t you say anything? Why didn’t you tell anyone?’
She turned her face to me. ‘Why didn’t you?’
I looked at her, incredulous. I thought of my father, how small I was in his hands and how he spun me around in the night to orbit the yellow moon. I said it fiercely, I said it strongly; I said it to keep her at bay: ‘Because I didn’t know.’
But I knew. Always. I had fought against the vision of my fading sister since we lived in Marshall’s house and he’d destroyed her and now, with her words, I had to face what I’d tried to hide from all along.
I knew that Samuel loved me, and that he was afraid of her. She was always a mystery that he didn’t understand. I knew that Marshall did things in his room under the stairs about which none of us had ever spoken. And I knew that she’d been there. I knew that in the circle of our family she stood on the outside, and when she howled to the moon we closed ranks in order not to hear. We held each other tighter, closing in the spaces through which she might have squeezed, fitted into even. Love is our own construction after all. Everything else that we choose to ignore still exists outside of it. ‘There’s a way to do it,’ I said. ‘There’s a way to get past this, Devin. A way to start again.’
‘Samuel knew too,’ she said. ‘My own father did nothing.’
The trees were already black against a leather sky and the darkness took everything that was earthbound. Devin sat with her fists against the ground and her head bent and I could hardly s
ee her face. ‘You can’t get past anything,’ she said. ‘You can’t start life again.’
She looked at me and the truth was between us. Words alone could break the code that bound our family more tightly than the chains of an eternal prison. My voice could carry the truth into the trees and against the past, against them all, and carry Devin to another place. But two men were always in the thoughts and words that passed between us, two brothers opposed in love and in the way they found their own family. Marshall and Samuel. Samuel and Marshall. To speak now – for either one of us to speak – would save my sister and destroy them both. The ghosts of the men moved above us, each begging Devin and me for protection, to keep this family in the chains of silence. For either choice there was a sacrifice. It was my call to speak, and I couldn’t make it.
I rose from the grass. My heart pounded. I couldn’t destroy him, the man who loved me, whom I loved more than anyone else. The larger ghost had the power to swallow all of us whole. I stretched like the surrounding trees, my arms reaching skywards in an echo of the silhouetted branches. ‘You’re right, Devin,’ I said, releasing the tension of my arms to my sides. ‘You just have to go forward, to take it from here. Focus on the positive, get some exercise. This thing will go away eventually. I’m sure it will all get better with time.’
I walked away from her towards the lights of the house. The night could never consume these; they glowed for the new family I had created, for everything I remained sure of, every corner of my life where Devin wasn’t. I left her on the lawn in the dark, and I didn’t need to look back to see her frozen and unable to move in the wake of my denial.
Back in the house I bathed my child and made her a boiled egg and toast soldiers for her supper. I fed her in her high chair, laughing as most of the food missed her mouth and made a small mess of her baby face. I made myself a cup of tea and waited for Devin, but she didn’t come inside. I left her there, cloaked in betrayal, and she stayed that way, until darkness covered her completely.