LIBBY STOPPED BELIEVING IN love when she was fourteen, and her little brother, Richie, died. They lived in Waltham, a suburb of Boston, and Richie was clearly the golden boy, reading when he was three, skipping grades so that even though he was three years younger than Libby, he was only a year behind her in school.
Back then, Libby had no idea what she wanted to be when she grew up—a dancer, though she couldn’t really dance? a movie star who would stand out because of her red hair?—but Richie had always known that he was going to be a doctor.
Libby adored him, but she couldn’t ignore the helpless, gnawing jealousy she felt. Her parents were always bragging about Richie to everyone, how smart he was, how he was going to be this great doctor, and when they mentioned Libby, it was like an afterthought, like they were saying, “Oh, wait a minute, yes, Libby’s good, too.” They didn’t look at Libby the same way that they did Richie, their whole bodies seeming to turn to him as if he were the sun.
Richie’s death on a blistering hot summer day was Libby’s fault. She had talked him into going with her to the Millers on Greer Street because they had a pool, and even though there was a lock on the gate, she could always hoist Richie up and over and manage, with a little more effort, to scramble over the gate herself. They got to the pool, and to Libby’s delight, she saw the lock on the gate was broken, hanging on its hinges. It was a sign! As they shucked off their shorts, Richie showed her a quartz stone he had in his pocket, a talisman that he said he was going to carry with him every day when he became a doctor.
It was Libby’s idea to urge Richie to dive off the board. “Go ahead, show-off,” Libby said. She’d never get up there herself, but Richie climbed and bounced on the board, and the last thing she saw of him was his perfect smile focused on her even as he made a perfect slice into the water.
And then, she saw it. A scribble of red in the water, Richie floating up, crumpled like a comma on the surface of the pool, blood unspooling from him. She grabbed his arm and yanked him up to the edge of the pool, her whole body shaking. Libby laid him flat on the cement and hysterically did the CPR that Richie had insisted on teaching her last year, and when Richie didn’t move, she screamed and screamed for help.
THE COPS AND Libby’s parents never actually blamed Libby, not out loud, but they didn’t have to. Libby knew it was her fault, that she should have been responsible. Her parents hugged her so hard that it hurt her ribs, but they couldn’t bear to look at her, and their faces were creased with grief and Libby felt the world go strange and cold around her. All Libby kept hearing was You should have known. You should have seen. You should have been someone different. Forgive me, Libby thought. Forgive me. But all she heard was booming silence.
Her parents wouldn’t talk about it. She had to go to a lawyer’s office with her parents, and another lawyer was there, one she didn’t know. She was asked questions about what she had done, why they had gone to the pool, what she had noticed. Her mind shut. She sweated so much her dress was pasted along her back, and she felt like throwing up. She stared down at her hands.
LIBBY DECIDED THE only thing she could do was to live Richie’s life for him. If he couldn’t be a doctor, then she would be. It would be a way of keeping him alive in her, and a way, too, of having her parents love her, if only for the Richie inside of her.
She buckled down, and to her surprise, she began to love science, the simple beauty of a chemical equation, the wonder in the workings of a cell. You could make people better.
Her teachers noticed her, praised her, gave her prizes. But when she came home with A’s in chemistry, in biology, when she announced that she was going to be a doctor, her mother looked pained. Her father didn’t look at all. “Good girl,” they said, the way they might praise a dog that had learned a new trick.
Libby knew her parents didn’t have money, but she told them if she studied hard, she could get a scholarship to college. If she did well enough there, there’d be money for med school. “You don’t have to do that. We’ve saved for you,” her parents told her.
“How?” Libby asked.
Her mother shrugged. “We’ve been saving for you since you were born.”
Libby didn’t see how that was possible, but they assured her it was. She ended up going to NYU, first undergrad and then med school. She had decided to be a general practitioner, to help more people, but she knew the real reason was that Richie had never said what he had wanted to focus on and she felt this would cover all the bases.
At college, Libby was so busy that she didn’t have time to come home very often. When she did, she felt more like a visitor than a daughter. She kept trying to get either her mother or her father alone, to really talk to them about what had happened, but her mother said, “Can’t we just have a nice visit, please?” and her father told her there was nothing to talk about. When they waved goodbye, her parents held hands tightly. Libby dug her nails into her thigh to keep herself from begging them to hold her hand, too, to ask her to stay. She tried to remind herself how proud they would be of her when she became an excellent doctor.
The month before she was to start her internship, her father fell asleep while driving, her mother beside him, and the car shot over the guardrails. Both were killed instantly, and then there was nothing to talk about ever.