It was four years ago, on the twenty-first of April 2017, when everything went down. I remember waking up that morning and lying in bed before school, randomly scrolling through social media. A song started playing that I’d never heard before, “When Doves Cry.” There was something so haunting and strange about it. A tortured melody of discordant, aching sounds, a voice that sounded deep at times and then impossibly high. Tense. Jarring and yet beautiful too. I clicked on a link and watched, fascinated by the strange, sexual video. This glam-looking, androgynous man crawling across a purple-lit floor. His eyes looked like they held a secret, and when he looked straight into the camera, you got the feeling he would never tell anyone what that secret was . . . but he knew what yours were too.
I watched to the end of the video, and then read the words that floated onto the screen. He had died one year ago, Prince. A rock legend. I googled his name and news articles came up reporting on his tragic, untimely demise, and the one-year anniversary of his death. And then on the way home from school I walked past a record store and saw one of his albums in the window. And that’s when I got the hysterical call from my mother.
“Your brother has had an accident at school. . . . Needs emergency surgery . . . can’t get a hold of your dad. . . . Is he home? . . . Know where he is?”
No. I didn’t know where he was. He’d been working a lot recently, and was hardly home. A big development that his real estate company was working on, he’d said. I put the phone down in a state of shock. I’d called my grandmother and asked her to take me to the hospital. I’ll never forget walking into the hospital room; the atmosphere was like that song.
My brother was lying in the bed, his arm wrapped in a cast, fast asleep. A woman and a man in white coats were talking to my mother in hushed tones—my mother looked wide-eyed and afraid. There was a sense of urgency in the air like something was coming. A policeman and the school principal were standing outside the room.
“Why is there a policeman here?” I heard myself ask. My mom and the two doctors turned around. I read the titles on their white coats: surgeon, psychiatrist.
“Is he going to die?” I was suddenly hysterical. I didn’t know what to make of the strange tension in the room, the way the principal kept glancing at us through the glass as she talked to the police officer outside, and the way my mother was wringing her hands together tightly.
The surgeon stepped forward. “Your brother is going to be fine. It was a severe fracture but we’ve put it back together.”
“Why is the principal here? Why is she talking to a policeman? Why is a psychiatrist here?”
Finally, the whole story was relayed to me.
My brother had had a total meltdown at school. They hadn’t been able to stop him. He’d run outside, climbed up the tallest tree in the middle of the playground, and no one had been able to get him down—they were afraid he would jump if they tried. They’d called the fire department but when they’d put the ladder up, he’d jumped. Police had to be called in when accidents “like this” happened at school. The way they’d said like this left me feeling cold. The principal seemed upset with my mother too; she kept saying that she’d warned my parents something like this could happen. She’d told them that Zac needed to be evaluated, but they weren’t listening.
It was the first time I’d ever heard the word that I know so well now: autism. It was the principal who’d suggested it to my parents months ago, and now it was the psychiatrist who was giving my mother the name of a neurodevelopmental pediatrician, and speaking of evaluations and possible occupational therapy and all those things that have become so normal to me over the years, but that seemed so strange to me then.
I remember standing there and knowing that this all made sense. I’d watched Zac since he was a baby, and something about him had always seemed different. The way he played on his own in the corner and didn’t really engage with others. How he refused to eat to the point of becoming thin, and then how he would only eat certain foods, and they all had to be on separate plates and at certain temperatures. The words he used, so brilliant and advanced for his age I wasn’t even sure where he’d heard them. The way he jumped and freaked out at the smallest sounds, the way he became obsessed with things to the point that you wanted to go crazy . . . and then, like a tidal wave, there was truth in what the principal was telling my mother, even if I didn’t understand it then like I did now.
My mother was devastated, though. So confused, and she kept trying to call my dad. Finally, his receptionist suggested that he might be at his new development, and that was when my mother went looking for him. I’d stayed with Zac, who was sleeping peacefully, like a cherub. A perfect angel.
Over the years, I’d been so impatient with him and grown so irritated that I’d locked him out of my room. I’d shouted at him when he’d repeated my words back to me or gone on about something nonstop for hours, and I remember feeling so guilty and promising him that from that day forward, I would be the best sister I could be to him. I laid my hand on his cheek; it was soft and his eyelashes were so long. He made this little noise when he breathed out, and his lips kind of squished together like they had when he was a baby, and when he opened his eyes slowly and smiled at me, it felt like someone punched me in the stomach. He hardly ever smiled.
“I jumped out of the tree,” he whispered.
“I know.”
“I didn’t fly though,” he said and then he did something so strange and bizarre that I can only think it was because of the cocktail of drugs he was on. He reached up and put his little chubby hand on my cheek. I laid my hand over his and held on tightly, never wanting this moment of contact to end.
“Please don’t try to fly again,” I urged him.
He closed his eyes and shook his head a little. “I won’t. Night, night, Lori.”
I think I finally knew what it was to really love a sibling that night. I’d dozed off for a moment, with my head on the bed, holding on to his hand, when my parents came back. The air suddenly became thick with tension, so much tension you could almost taste it, bitter on your tongue. I’d kept my eyes closed and listened to the conversation that played out while they thought I was sleeping.
My father was having an affair with a realtor in her twenties named Maddy. My mother had found them celebrating in the hot tub with champagne after selling the last of their development in record time. He was apparently “in love” and moving out of our home to be with her. My mom begged him to stay. They could go to therapy, they could work it out, lots of couples managed to get through this, but he wasn’t interested. And the more he said no, the more my mother groveled and the more I wanted to scream and cry. I had to bite down so hard on my lip that night to stop myself from making a sound that it was bruised for a week afterward. And that was the day that everything changed. The day the doves cried.
The next morning, I woke up to find my mom sitting at the hospital window, looking out over Joburg, drinking coffee. She had this strange, distant look in her eyes, and she’s had it ever since. As if something inside her died that day. Zac began all the millions of evaluations that week and was finally diagnosed. Life around me began to revolve around everyone else, and suddenly I was lost in it all. My mom worried about my brother, and how to screw my father over in the divorce and get his money. My father worried about Zac, and his new girlfriend, and how to keep his money in the divorce. And somewhere along the way, it felt like no one was worrying about me anymore.
But at least one good thing came out of it: my bond with Zac. I probably wouldn’t exchange anything for that. Even if everything had to fall apart in order for me to get it.
Things I Like about Myself by Lori Palmer
I’m a good sister.