I have been laid face down on my bed, sobbing, for an hour now. Nothing is more likely to do this to me than the closeness of a sister with her brother.
Lexie, I know from a social media post, has her brother to stay in her flat. They speak in quiet, companionable voices that mean I cannot catch a word, but their laughter comes through with the sounds of a little boy, giggling too and shrieking.
I think of David and how he never came to visit me in the UK until he picked me up from a police station. I think of him moving in with somebody called Sadie and if they will have a baby. If it happens, will I know that child? Will I love it? Will I tickle its little belly after I change its diaper? I think about reaching out to my brother and how much I miss him, but it feels too late now, like it is impossible to come back from.
The sobs are overwhelming me and they are not, as people often say they do, making things feel better. I am not purging, I am cultivating. I click on David’s Facebook page, where he is living his life with friends I don’t know, sporting facial hair I don’t recognise and espousing political beliefs that I didn’t know he had. There are now people in his life who are so periphery and yet, are closer than me. Meanwhile, Lexie sits back and wins, yet again, laughing with a brother who is tangible and real and sitting on her sofa.
The worst thing is that it is my own fault. Despite their horror at what I did, my family tried to keep me in their life. When I finally allowed David to tell them what had happened, my parents – never before having left the US – sorted out passports and travelled all the way over to see me in hospital.
They walked in as I lay prone on my bed, staring at the ceiling. I had no phone to browse, no comb to brush my hair. I couldn’t be trusted with even such innocent items.
The door pushed open.
While Mom rushed to me, Dad held back. When I refused to put my arms around Mom and carried on staring in silence, she returned to him looking confused, shaken.
‘It’s your fault,’ I said when I finally spoke. Not how are you, not how was the flight.
I hissed a chasm between us.
‘All of this. Look what you did.’
The family who had come thousands of miles to see me and love me didn’t mean anything; all I wanted was Luke.
They were silent, utterly shocked.
‘You never liked him. Luke never felt like he could be part of our family. That’s why he left me. Now look what’s happened.’
‘Harriet, you can’t blame …’ began my dad, wide-eyed and pale at my response and at this environment that none of us had ever thought we would find ourselves in.
‘We just want to help,’ interrupted my mom, softly, with a hand on his arm.
I knew she was trying to bring the whole conversation down a level, to calm a hysterical toddler.
‘Why?’ I snarled, looking up and meeting her eye for the first time. ‘You sabotaged my life. You pushed Luke out. No wonder we had to move abroad in the first place.’
They stood, framed in the doorway. A moment passed. My dad, I saw, still taking in the room in its starkness and its lack. My mom failing to blink away tears.
‘You abandoned me,’ I continued, eyes back on the ceiling. ‘Now I’m abandoning you.’
They left then but tried to visit again every day they were in the country. I refused, repeatedly, to see them. Their return ticket delivered them back to the States two weeks later.
Towards David, I was a little gentler. My brother had decided to stay in England for longer, with some mates who were here on a gap year.
David was always my Achilles heel and made me comprehend what people felt when they talked about having your own child. I’d jump in front of a bus for David. So I let him visit.
He sat alongside my bed every day, before he went to a gig or a pub or a party. Sometimes I was silent; sometimes we would chat. Music, TV, mutual friends.
Then one day, a few weeks after I was admitted, he moved from his usual chair, sat on my hospital bed and took my hand in his. He thought I had had enough drugs and therapy to be spoken to more honestly. I steeled myself.
‘I know you were heartbroken about Luke,’ he said gently. ‘But can you try to explain to me what happened? I just can’t believe you’re capable of doing that to somebody.’
I couldn’t face a lifetime of knowing that David was disgusted by me. So I attacked, pushed away.
‘I don’t know why you care,’ I sniped as a nurse handed me some meds. ‘You hated Luke anyway.’
He looked shocked.
‘For starters, I didn’t hate Luke,’ he said. ‘I don’t know where you got that from.’
I raised a sulky, weak eyebrow. Luke had told me. It had to be true.
‘But anyway, that’s kind of beside the point.’
‘I’d like you to leave now,’ I said and turned away from his kiss goodbye.
After that I refused his visits and David, needing to return to work, flew back to the US. When I came out of the hospital, I kept our contact minimal.
We exchanged the basics – work’s fine, life’s fine, fine, fine, fine. But compared to where we were before, I let a ravine form between us and he, I think, found the whole thing so bewildering that eventually, it was a relief to let it happen.
With my parents, I was even more extreme. There were phone calls to the hospital and later, when I got out, emails, but I was stoic in my coldness.
Then a letter arrived.
We won’t give up, Harriet. You’re our daughter. We will give you time to calm down but in a month or so we are coming over, or we’re flying you home.
I considered calling them so many times, to say sorry and to explain and to say yes, yes, yes, please bring me home. Look after me. Feed me chicken soup. I looked at flight prices myself, thinking it may be better to try to explain in person. If I went all that way, they would know then that I was remorseful, good. But in the end, I was too ashamed. How could I explain to people who had invested years in raising me, teaching me morals and how to live, why I had done that to another human? And how could I take back everything I had hurled at them? How would we recover?
I thought of David’s speech to me, adult suddenly and superior.
And I knew I couldn’t be told off again, eye to eye, by someone who I adored. It was better just to let them go.
I wrote back.
Do not contact me. Do not visit me. I’ve moved flats now anyway, so you would have a wasted journey.
Lies, harshness, whatever was required to make sure I didn’t have to answer to those faces who loved me so very much.