40

The business with Anna dredged up some old memories about my brother I thought I had put to rest. I found that hard to forgive, too, for once I’d moved to England I was nearly able to forget him. It was all so far away in distance and in time. Surely it’s healthy to have forgotten. How long are you supposed to punish yourself—how many years are you to waste in pointless regret?

Sometimes, though, I thought I could feel him standing at my shoulder. I’d imagine I could feel his breath on my skin, hear that gasping sound he made as he lay dying. Or feel him leap at my back and shriek in my ear as he used to do, horsing around, scaring the bejesus out of me. And while what happened to Anna was fated to happen and was in no way the same thing, her death started up the memories again. It was like taking the dust sheets off old furniture in a haunted house, flinging all the dust motes into the sunlight.

My brother’s allergies kicked in on that final camping trip with the parents, one of their erratic stabs at normal family life. He was allergic to peanuts and bee venom. You would be surprised to know the many products that have peanuts lurking in them. But the bees were what finished him. Unlike with peanut allergies, bee sting reactions can begin in a matter of minutes. I’m a bit of an expert on this.

He knew right away what had hit him—in fact, it was in swatting the bee and making it angry he got stung by it. Self-defense works in the insect world, too.

He began showing all the symptoms I’d seen often enough—his hands, face, eyes, and lips instantly swelling; he was wheezing like a bagpipe and would soon turn a grayish blue. The parents, hovering over him, yelled at me to go get the injector out of his backpack. But it wasn’t there. I shouted this news back at them. My father ran over and grabbed the backpack from me, turned it upside down, dumped out all the contents.

My brother had been fourteen, at the classic age of rebellion, flags unfurled. He thought our mother worried too much and he hated having to carry the injector around like some invalid. He would forget it on purpose. And that was apparently what he’d done, again.

Meanwhile, the sounds of his gasping grew harsher. And then fainter. He would lapse into a coma before long, as his blood pressure dropped to nothing. He would die without help.

“There’s a spare epi in the car,” my father said. That look on his face I’ll never forget. He was senseless with fear, his eyes frozen wide, the whites showing all the way around. His own breath came in harsh gasps. I had never seen him afraid. Drunk, yes, with all the arrogant confidence of the drunk. He was only a little drunk now. “Go get it. Now!” he shrieked at me, right in my face. I turned to do what he said and I heard, from under his breath, “Stupid girl.” I think that is what did it. That’s what finally broke me open.

There was no question of his going to fetch it, drunk or no; he started to run but he was pulled back to his son’s side, his precious only son, and I was more than old enough for the task, I was sixteen, and I could run like the wind, I was fit, my lungs strong. My mother couldn’t tear herself away either. I looked back and saw she’d scooped my brother in her arms like a child. I saw his face and it was blue. I swear it was already too late.

I ran through the woods to the car, where we always kept a spare injector in the glove box, but the thing wasn’t there, the epinephrine injector that might save him; I rifled through the glove box where it should have been, strewing maps and packets of tissue and gum and registration papers everywhere. I tore through the contents, scattering them over the seats and the floor of the car. The pen just wasn’t to be found, as I told my parents later, as I told the authorities. Not at first. He had had an episode recently, so his two-pack of injectors was just a one-pack. I knew it was there, but in my panic it took forever to find, I told them.

And at last there it was, under the driver’s seat, and I sat looking at it for the longest time, breathing hard. Not too long. Long enough. Screwing my courage to the sticking point.

Running back, I knew it was too late. Of course it was already too late.

There was an autopsy, completely unnecessarily given his long history of allergies. But the state got involved somehow. The ME found antibodies to the bee venom in his blood, making it conclusive he’d died of anaphylactic reaction. We all knew that, and personally I never forgave them for putting us through that ordeal. It needed to be over, and quickly. My parent’s marriage went into a death spiral from which it never recovered.

They didn’t blame me, not even my father, who was quick to blame, always. Somehow that made it worse.

The thing about having a sibling who died young is that you get a free pass for years to come. That’s the upside. Teachers don’t ask why you haven’t done your homework. They think they know; they imagine you spend half your time seized up with grief, crying over your math equations, unable to think or focus. Nobody, in other words, expects anything of you, and for a high-flyer, a straight-A student like me, it came as a relief. They never stop to think you might be glad he’s gone.

Then losing your mother practically on top of that? Bonus points in the sympathy department. Plus, my mother was barely in the ground when my father brought Tralee “Trailer Trash” Ashton out of the wings where she’d been waiting. No one knows what to say to a kid who has survived so many losses, who has won this booby prize of a stepmother in the bargain. So they leave you alone.

I think Tralee was a little bit afraid of me, to tell you the truth, and I liked that. It gave me a power over her I didn’t otherwise have.

Life is about evolving. Getting past the religious mania of the Middle Ages, past the invented morality, past the point of people telling you, for their own benefit, how to live your life. It doesn’t matter, nothing matters, the rules don’t matter except the ones you make for yourself. Choose your own path. Live free or die.

A cold winter was creeping in on Weycombe. The roof soon would creak with the weight of snow and ice, making sounds like a glacier rubbing against the hull of a frozen ship. I had to get out. Sell up and go.

I had once thought Will and I would be snug forever against the cold, wrapped in a fleecy white comforter, safe and warm as we read the papers cover to cover, drinking our morning coffee. Sundays in winter, we’d put on boots and sweaters and jeans and venture to the pub for our midday meal, and that meal would stretch until dinner time. We had all day to do nothing much but eat and make love, and knowing we both had to be at work the next day made us cherish those hours, stretch them out, hoard them, make them last as long as we could. When Monday came, already I couldn’t wait until the next weekend. I know Will felt the same. Used to feel the same.

Once I didn’t have a job to go to, Sunday was no different from any other day, and I frequently forgot altogether what day it was. Simple things like a dental appointment would have slipped right past me if they hadn’t rung with reminders. This, I remember thinking, must be what retirement looks like. It’s not that you’re losing your mind to dementia, it’s that one day looks exactly like the last. There are no buoys, no markers.

Of course the miscarriage didn’t help. After all that trying, the worst had happened, right around my birthday. Even worse was Will’s reaction. He barely pretended to be sympathetic. The biggest emotion he seemed to feel was relief, and he was bloody awful at hiding it. And somehow, the guilt or whatever it was he was feeling about Anna made him behave like even more of a shit. I fell into a depression and he grew tired of that too, poor thing. He kept telling me to snap out of it. So helpful.

One day he told me he was no longer in love with me. I ignored this. Children often say things they don’t mean when they’re frustrated, and to me Will was little more than a child.

While I’m in confessing mode: I got pregnant because I went off the pill and didn’t tell him. That was the worst, certainly from his point of view: foisting a pregnancy on him he didn’t want. Well, he had wanted at one time and wanted no more.

I guess that was wrong of me. I would say something like, “I’m going to get my prescription filled” and dash out the door. But I never said what type of prescription and he never asked; he just assumed. It might have been for depression, might it not? But he never asked, so to hell with him.