My brother died, in the early hours of a Saturday morning, running, naked, arms outstretched, down the road into the path of an oncoming car. The car wasn’t even going particularly fast. He died of concussion, later, on the way to hospital. He was seventeen. That made me the only son.
• • •
They did an autopsy on him and that was when they found the traces of drugs in his body. The pathologist called my mother to ask if she knew that her son was a dope-fiend. I can see my mother now, cradling the telephone between head and shoulder, her glasses perched on the top of her head and her eyes fixed in the middle distance, thinking of something else. “It could have been worse,” she said. The pathologist hung up, disgusted. (Later, he included this anecdote in his best selling memoirs.)
I knew what she was thinking of. She had just read a life of Marie Curie and she had told us about the part where Pierre Curie is in a road accident, trampled to death beneath a horse-drawn vehicle. For months, his wife kept the scraps of clothing smeared with the remnants of his brains, poor matted nerves, muscles and blood impressed onto threads. Recounting it, my mother went pale. My brother was unimpressed. “Ma, you’re so morbid.”
All the relatives came to the funeral, all the ones I knew and hated, and some new ones I had never seen before but knew I would hate. They came to gloat over my mother. First my father (who had committed suicide a few months before my brother’s death), now my brother: surely, now, she would betray some signs of being human? She did not. She sat through the funeral service, straight, composed, wearing what I call her Buddha look, made up of double-lidded, veiled eyes, an intimation of hidden secrets, a preternatural calm. I have seen the same transfixed, unblinking expression on the faces of lizards. When I was little, she could quell me simply by directing that stare at me. She did not cry.
• • •
If my brother hadn’t been my brother, I think I would have hated him.
Things came easily to him. Too easily. Exams, games, friends, my mother’s wide-eyed, chiselled looks. He did everything well, but not too well; because of that, he could seem facile, a lightweight to some. “That daring young man on the flying trapeze,” my mother called him once, satirically, and that was the family image of him—heedless, flyaway. “I don’t know whom he takes after,” my father used to say, meaning, my mother. I, on the other hand, take after my father. Even as a baby, I had a certain recognisable solidity.
• • •
And of course there were the girls. When I was eleven and he was fourteen, we made a pact. If I would screen his calls for him, he would lend me the pornographic magazines circulating like an underground river among the older boys in school. (The prefects ran the racket, their source being a fatherly bookseller in a second-hand bookshop in Bras Basah Road.) My mother could never be relied on to be either possessive or strict; she’d say, “Oh, hold on, dear,” and my brother would be stuck for hours on end on the phone with some girl whom he couldn’t remember but who claimed to have met him at the bus stop. Whole battalions of girls claimed to have met him at the bus stop. They fascinated me, these girls, with their long, silky fringes and belts pushed low over narrow hips, but I would never have dreamed of saying anything to them.
• • •
My brother was an insomniac. In his whole life, I had never known him to sleep more than four hours a night. Often, it was less. Dark shadows circled his eyes: he looked perpetually hung-over, prematurely dissipated, irresistibly seedy.
He’d be up half the night, prowling about the flat, making surreptitious calls to friends, smoking incessantly. Sometimes he took long walks around the estate, sliding in at six in the morning, just in time for school. My mother never knew. She took a sleeping pill every night and went out like a light.
A few weeks before his death, my father, who’d magnanimously left home a year earlier when my mother said she couldn’t stand to live with him any longer, came over and had a fight with my mother about this insomniac behaviour. According to my father, a friend of his had driven past the estate the night before and had seen my brother picking the lock of a car. And then, my father said dramatically, he got in and drove off.
My mother pondered this, and turned to my brother. “Is this true?”
“Of course not.”
“Well,” said my mother. “He’s denied it. So what do you want me to do?”
She was always edgy when my father visited: guilt makes you fidgety, she said once, plants a tightly knotted coil of tension in you.
My father said it was clear that she was incapable of controlling the children and that he was going to sue for custody, my God, he was sick and tired of this. “Go ahead,” my mother said. “Just go ahead.” She was, is, a Catholic, though she never goes to Mass. She refused to divorce my father, who, still madly in love with her, agreed to a judicial separation for the sake of theological propriety. To everybody, this was yet another example of my mother’s high-handed irrationality. My mother liked to say, wryly, that you could take a woman out of the Catholic church but you couldn’t take the Catholic out of the woman.
My father called her implacable. Cold as ice. Hard as granite. My mother wore her faraway Buddha look, and I could understand my father’s frustration. My mother and brother were elusive, evasive: when you thought you had them in the palm of your hand, they had already fled, with a swift, unthinking ruthlessness. My parents’ marriage had always been a struggle, my father struggling to pin my mother down, my mother struggling to flee. Often, I had felt my mother’s manic desperation, like that of an animal caught in a trap, willing to snap or chew a leg off in its single-minded desire to escape.
“Leave her alone,” my brother said. My father hit him full across the face and he went down theatrically, like a ninepin. My mother snapped out of her gilded trance; I stood poised, ready to prevent a murder. Family life’s better than Disneyland, my brother liked to say, there’s never a dull moment. Magically, a red welt appeared across my brother’s cheek.
“Look at him,” said my father. “I mean, just look at him. He looks a mess. He’s losing weight, he doesn’t sleep, apparently. What sort of family is this, anyway?” To my brother, who was lying on the floor, staring at the ceiling and smiling beatifically: “Get up. You think this is some kind of game?”
“I’ve had enough of this,” my mother said. She marched into the bedroom and locked the door.
My brother got up slowly, touching his cheek. “I think I’ll wear this permanently. It’s kind of cool. What do you think?”
My father sat down heavily, in the nearest chair. He looked old, defeated; for the first time I noticed that a whole new crop of white hairs had sprouted overnight on his head. “Promise me one thing,” my father said. “Promise me you’re not on drugs or anything stupid.” He was a police superintendent in the narcotics unit. He was highly respected; he really was. It was only around his family that he wore the air of hurt bafflement that I’d come to associate with him.
“Dad,’ my brother said. “I got all A’s in the exams, remember? Come on. This is stupid. But I promise.” You could see why old ladies would unhesitatingly entrust him with the money they had so cunningly stuffed into their mattresses.
My father gave us both a hard stare. “It’s not easy being a father.”
“No,” we said in unison.
He looked towards my mother’s bedroom, wistfully.
“Sometimes she stays in there for a whole day,” I said.
“Why are all of you conspiring against me?” my father said. “Why do I get pushed out of my own home and continue paying the bills? What did I ever do?” He was shouting by now.
“Nothing,” my brother said. It was meant to be soothing, but it came out different—accusatory. And we all knew, more or less, that that was the trouble. In anybody else’s eyes, my father would have been the model parent and husband. But ordinariness, to my mother, in any shape, size or smell, was a death-knell. She would settle for nothing less than greatness. And it was no use expostulating, but who does she think she is? She didn’t love him.
As he was about to go, he clapped my brother on the back. “So, tell me, did you really drive off in that car?”
“Dad, what do you take me for? One of those assholes you fuck about with during an interrogation?”
“Watch your language.” He ruffled my hair (I hate that) and left.
• • •
Soon after this, my father killed himself.
They get confused in my mind sometimes, the two funerals. I have dreams where I’m not sure whom all the people in black are mourning, and my brother drifts past, asking, “Am I dead?”
Of course there are some details that belong exclusively to either occasion. Like the rows of policeman in uniform at the service for my father. They sat, perspiring stiffly in the heat, and afterwards they shook my mother’s hand, one by one, carefully avoiding her eyes. They knew about my father’s personal life and they knew whom to blame.
The thing I remember about my brother’s funeral were the girls. Tall girls, short girls, mini-skirted girls, girls in long shredded skirts and feathery scarves, selfconsciously ethereal, hockey-playing girls with achingly sleek muscles. Skinny girls without figures, who huddled at the back of the church, hiding beneath their fringes, their long, slim legs tucked decorously under the seat, looking furtively around. “I didn’t know he was a Catholic,” they murmured. He wasn’t. He was hedging his bets, or so he said.
All these girls were at the funeral. They all cried, silently, into handkerchiefs. As the cortege was leaving the church, one of them ran up to my mother, who was walking alone, a little ahead, and pressed something into her hand. It turned out to be a dried flower. She gazed at my mother directly, red-eyed. “He gave it to me,” she said.
My mother turned on her the full, frightening serenity of her Buddha look. “Thank you, dear.”
Outside the church, the girls held a heated discussion. Should they or should they not go with the family to the Columbarium?
Most of them elected to go. They were incandescent, alight with self-inflicted grief; they were proud of that grief, jealous of anyone who tried to wrest it away from them. Many had hardly known my brother and I thought it very peculiar that anyone would want to enter this charged, infected atmosphere of mourning for no good reason. I said, “Hi,” to one of the girls, and she gave me a look of horror, as if I had indecently propositioned her or something. I wanted to tell her that it was possible to be anaesthetised by grief, that I’d had an excess of it in the past year. Years later, I imagined, they’d still be talking about this day, with nostalgia for the time when they could still love, purely and fiercely, from afar. My brother, the icon. My little groupies, he’d call them, lovingly.
• • •
Now and then I go to the Columbarium to put flowers in the little metal holder beside the stone tablets of my father and brother. It’s a depressing place, I admit, miniature HDB grey blocks housing the ashes of the dead. My father and brother are placed side by side: my father’s photograph shows him to be eternally forty-five, my brother is forever fourteen, gazing, wide-eyed and startled, at the camera. (After that, he refused to pose for photographs.) My mother never comes. I don’t know why I do, unless it’s a primitive suspicion that the dead are not really gone, that they need succour like everybody else.
• • •
The only girl who didn’t go to the funeral was Rachel. She was sent to stay with relatives in Israel, or so I’d heard; she was supposed to purge her mind of all that had happened. I could see her at the beach, in some zebra-striped bikini and a pair of the blackest Africa shades, her little mouth set in a straight line. She would be outwardly demure and inwardly seething, plotting her escape.
When Rachel appeared on the scene, I knew she was different, somehow. She was quite mad, for one thing, and that appealed to my brother. Any streak of insanity appealed to him. He told me the story of Rachel on a combined schools camping trip. The instructor had fried a couple of slugs, to show how one could survive in the wild without provisions, and passed them around for consumption. No one, not even the boys, would touch them, except Rachel, who swallowed one unblinkingly.
I was quite keen to meet his slug-eating girl, but when I did, I was disappointed. She was small and slender, with a halo of hair surrounding an angelic, heart-shaped face; she looked terribly fragile, like somebody capable of breathing her last at any moment. When she smiled, her eyes narrowed and almost closed altogether, and her face wore an expression which I recognised from reproductions of the Mona Lisa. She was half-Jewish, half-Chinese, and had already been expelled from one school for disruptive behaviour. Without her parents’ knowledge, she smoked a joint every morning for breakfast.
She was only two years older than I was, but the gap seemed vast, unbridgeable. “Hello, kiddywinks,” she’d say when she saw me, and I’d go red all over. I didn’t like her. She was dangerous.
The first time they made me try the stuff, nothing happened. Or rather, nothing seemed to happen. The three of us were sitting on the sofa, the two of them watching me benevolently, my brother’s fingers entwined in Rachel’s hair. “This is boring,” I said. “You have to go with the flow,” my brother said. They were both free falling, floating, moving in lunar time. I tried to get up to go to my room, and found I couldn’t move. My legs wouldn’t move. I broke out in a cold sweat; sweat was pouring off the bridge of my nose. “Hey, you guys,” I said. And then I was sick all over. I was sick for the rest of the night.
“The stuff was too strong, I guess,” my brother said, sorrowfully, after helping me to the bathroom for the fifth time and holding my head over the toilet bowl. But I knew that wasn’t the real reason. I was meant for the straight and narrow. I had no wish to expand my horizons or climb onto higher planes of consciousness. I relished normality. It was just that, in my family, normality had been scuppered in its infancy.
• • •
So anyway, there was Rachel and there was my brother and there didn’t seem to be any room for me in between. I watched them together, and I knew they thought they were the favoured ones, the ones who could glide through barriers and emerge on the other side, intact, more alive. “They’ll learn,” said my mother, who viewed all my brother’s amorous escapades with detachment.
Rachel’s family was exotic by our standards, “sickeningly liberal,” she called them once. Her Jewish grandparents had fled the anti-Jewish upheavals in Baghdad after the Second World War. An uncle on her Chinese mother’s side was a CPM guerilla. All this had bred in her parents a dour insistence on the importance of liberty and freedom of the individual. Dinner table discussions centred, relentlessly, on politics and the human condition in general; her father dabbled in human rights activism and more than once nondescript men had come to take him away for questioning. Rachel was the youngest of four children, the unexpected product of her parents’ middle age—for her, they had always been elderly, embroiled in dead, antiquarian struggles.
“I believe in the three A’s,” Rachel said. “I’m amoral, apathetic, apolitical. I’m in the vanguard of the new youth.”
All this meant nothing to me. When I looked at Rachel, I saw someone capable of walking on burning coals, who probably ate shards of broken glass for breakfast, with her inimitable jaunty air. She was destroying my brother.
“Destroying, piffle,” she said. She was waiting for my brother at the corner of our block of flats, when I returned from school that day. I had never heard anyone say “piffle” before.
“He doesn’t sleep any more,” I said. “Not since he met you.” Not since he started smoking pot and taking pills to help him relax through the night. He blanked out, drifted off, which was what he wanted. But in the morning he was more wrecked than ever. He was no longer pretend-seedy. He was genuinely seedy.
“You really admire him, don’t you?” Rachel said. “It’s quite touching, in a way.”
“Why don’t you leave him alone?”
“Please,” Rachel said. “Please don’t make him out to be some pathetic victim or whatever. He knows what he’s doing.” I stared at her and began to walk off. “It’s just that he doesn’t want to be ordinary,” she explained to my back. “He wants to be extraordinary.” She was that far gone.
• • •
Like some nocturnal creature, my brother only really came into his own at night. At night, his eyes lit up like 100-watt light bulbs and he was running about the flat in a passable imitation of those mice you see in pet shops, going round eternally on the toy wheels in their cages, expending energy uselessly, frantically. He was so febrile he looked as if his hair might catch fire of its own volition.
I couldn’t sleep either. I had never seen him like this before and I was worried. I hovered around, scared he’d take a nose-dive from an open window (my mother had never got around to fixing metal grilles) and end up splattered all over the pavement; everybody loves a tragedy, as long as it happens to somebody else. The drugs did things to my brother: I saw him depressed, hysterical, ecstatic. But what really put me into a blue funk was his thinking he could fly. “I can fly,” he’d say, looking straight into my eyes, and I’d look away, for fear of being mesmerised into believing him, he was so convincing. And he was forever dangling out of the damned windows.
I’m counting the lights in the block of flats opposite, my brother would call to me at night, dreamily. During the day, it looks drab, grey, and utilitarian, but at night this gigantic checkerboard takes on a symbolic, magical quality. It’s a swarming warren of secrets, and I can decipher them, if I want to. Daylight is the spell destroyer. It picks out the cracks in the walls, it lays an accusing finger over the whole blighted landscape. I like the night, little brother.
• • •
I couldn’t watch him all the time. Sometimes I nodded off, and then it was my brother who made breakfast, turned on the bathroom heater and got us both ready for classes. He’d be exhausted, but cheerful. All perfectly normal. Except that he would swallow a couple of brightly coloured pills with his coffee and, when he reached the bus stop, he was as high as the stratosphere, beatified, tanked up with gallons of euphoria to get him through the day.
When I was little, and prone to getting beaten up by the school bullies, I used to tell my brother I wished I was him, liked by everybody. “Don’t ever wish to be me,” he said. “Where’s your self-esteem?” He got quite fierce. “Don’t ever wish to be me.”
• • •
The names were like an incantation. Downers, uppers, speed, Quaaludes, amphetamines, Benzedrine, acid, valium. (My mother took the valium.) Poetry. I liked the names.
• • •
We had a fight one night. “You’re a junkie,” I screamed at him, though, technically, I knew you had to be doing heroin to qualify as one. Lately, I’d started looking out for hypodermic needles—I hadn’t found any in the flat yet, but I was far from complacent. Pills were already beginning to infest my dreams: they whirled, in gaudy-coloured arabesques, through my sleep.
My brother cocked an eyebrow, and wandered about, whistling.
• • •
His grades were slipping, of course, and he was dropped from the school tennis team, because his game was falling apart. But it wasn’t the sort of thing that rang alarm bells: people put it down to our father’s death, girlfriend trouble, the flu, whatever. Nobody would have believed me if I’d told the truth. Not my brother.
Rachel’s father was a pharmacist; he was her unwitting supplier. She’d go down, after school, and have the run of the place, under the pretence of helping Daddy in his work. Rachel had the cool methodical efficiency of a genius, never creaming too many pills at any one time and never too many of the same. Her strength lay in her capacity for self-restraint, which sounds an odd thing to say, but it was true—she never once slipped up in her accounting methods, she never once went overboard. What she hated most in the world were crazed druggie types—no, what she was after was a managed detachment from reality. It wasn’t her fault that it was my brother who betrayed her in the end, with his self-destructive messiness; he was her one conspicuous failure. Anyway, she looked so sweet, and serious, she had eyes like Bambi’s, and hair like a sun-spattered cloud, who would’ve suspected her? Certainly not her father.
She caught my brother once with another girl, holding hands and strolling around a shopping centre. She watched from afar, wearing that ineffable Mona Lisa smile. The next day, she tracked the girl down, grabbed her by the wrist and twisted it hard; the girl gave a muffled scream. Rachel never stopped smiling. “You leave him alone,” she said gently. For someone so tiny, she was very strong, and no one ever doubted she meant what she said. She was convinced that she and my brother had a destiny together; she was oracular about this, and mean as hell.
I thought a lot about what to do. My mother, I knew, was hopeless, locked tight in her own remote Lapland of the mind. My father was dead. The day before my brother’s death, I called the pharmacy where Rachel’s father worked. “Mr Abraham,” I said. “You don’t know me, but I had to make this call.” “What?” “Why don’t you check the stores after Rachel’s been through them?” “Who is this?” Seized by fright, I hung up. But by then, it was too late.
• • •
Picture this.
Picture a party at the flat, my brother and his friends, to celebrate the start of the holidays. I haven’t asked any of my friends: they are only thirteen-year-olds and I don’t want them to be laughed at. By now, in any case, I have become a twenty-four hour self-appointed guardian angel for my brother, and this unceasing vigilance doesn’t leave me time for anything else.
Midnight. Most of the food is plundered and gone, or scrunched underfoot. The point of these parties is not to eat, anyway. It is to look and be seen and to make out. The sitting room is cleared of furniture, and someone is performing a complicated dance routine. Everybody claps. The music is loud, hypnotic, high-frequency; I imagine bats in remote parts of the island pricking up their ears, receiving the message. Someone has brought vodka and it is passed around, sacramentally. So as not to look out of it, I drink a glassful. It is colourless and tasteless, and I feel fine. My mother would not approve, but my mother is in Malaysia, visiting relatives. Out of the corner of my eye, at the knife-edge of my vision, I see Rachel threading her way in and out of the crowd, an evil, little elf in a tight, body-hugging, gold-patterned number. She is bite-sized and delectable, and moves with a confident, loose-jointed swing. Leaning against my brother, she barely comes up to his shoulder. He puts his arms around her and squeezes her tight; she laughs and pummels him, and he bites her ear, smiling.
I don’t know who makes the suggestion to play strip-poker. The girls dissent, groaning. Rachel pops a pill into her mouth and slips one to my brother. It could be candy, for all I know. It’s late and the excitement is growing, an excitement born of the hour and the heady vodka fumes, a boisterousness tinged, unspoken, with sex. Most of the girls leave, squeamishly, en masse—they are nice girls, and this sort of thing, on top of the vodka, is beyond them. A couple of boys gallantly offer to escort them home. I can imagine the rumours the next day.
Rachel stays, offering to play. “No,” says my brother. “Yes,” she says, glaring at him, and he has nothing more to say.
The rules are, footwear and accessories first, accessories being watches, bracelets, earrings, necklaces, scarves, caps, followed by the rest of one’s clothes. The idea is to prolong the titillation as far as possible. My brother changes the music; no more House, instead The Doors come on, with The End, sepulchral, camp, ludicrous. “Yeucch,” someone says, but by then they’re far too engrossed in their game to notice. Things have got to the stage where a joint is being passed round and people are dragging on it, without really knowing what they are doing. They are all decent, middle-class kids, whose idea of depravity is to smoke a cigarette. They have no idea how far my brother has transgressed their unwritten boundaries.
My brother is losing, badly. He is down to his jeans and he is lying on his stomach on the floor, his bare feet thrust ceilingwards. He is too toked up to concentrate and he makes bad guesses, wild guesses. I think he wants to lose. I sit on the bed, watching the game; I haven’t been asked to play. Rachel, on the other hand, sits demurely, her legs curled beneath her, her cards held high, primly, so no one can see them. Now and then my brother makes mock grabs at her cards and she swats him hard, with her fists, like a street-brawler. I can feel the exhilaration coming off my brother in waves of psychic energy: he is in love with the world, with humanity, but especially with Rachel.
Now The Doors are playing Light My Fire, and everybody has lost at least a shoe, except Rachel. The weed is beginning to take effect and everybody is shiny with perspiration: they think they’re acting normally, but to me it’s obvious that everyone is operating in a time-frame of his own and is puzzled why the others all seem to be too slow, or too fast, in their motions. It’s funny, like a film where the sound and the action have ceased to synchronise. But it’s a good feeling building up, a feeling that one can live forever.
My brother disappears into the kitchen to get more ice, and Rachel follows him. They are gone for a long time, and I’m sent to see what’s happening. What’s happening is that they’re necking by the sink: Rachel’s small hands have burrowed inside my brother’s jeans and he is busy unzipping her dress. They move apart, unhurriedly, when they see me. “Hello, kiddywinks,” Rachel says.
“Shut up,” I say.
“Don’t be rude,” my brother says, smacking me. I hit him back and for a moment we glare at each other, heaving. I know, despite the fact I’m younger, that I can defeat him now in any fight; he has lost so much weight in the past few weeks that he’s almost emaciated, the ribs in his chest are sticking out.
“Stop it,” Rachel says, and places herself between us. My brother’s arms encircle her waist. She is always between us.
The others are hollering for the game to continue. “Let’s get rid of them,” my brother says to Rachel. She nods, and slips him another pill, from her purse. He gulps it down with a glass of water.
I go and lie down on my bed. The vodka has gone to my head and I feel as if I’m being attacked by a sledgehammer. I’m tired of this party, though I like the jangling, demented guitars on Light My Fire, which my brother is playing again, defiantly. It sounds out of tune and yet in tune, pointless and yet full of cosmic meaning. This is the closest that my brother and I have come to a punch-up in a long time. I turn on my side and in a moment I’m asleep. In the one wasted minute I take my eye off my brother, he gets himself killed.
• • •
By this time, the brakes are off: in my brother’s mind, he has circled the globe and back again, and is heading, feverishly, towards intergalactica. Everybody else is just so slow, winning, losing, playing, talking. All his life, he has been waiting for others to catch up with him. He wants, needs, to speed things up. By then his jeans have been dragged off, with much screaming ribaldry and sly glances at Rachel. My brother lopes about the room in bright red underpants, ignoring the protests of the others that he’s trying to look at their cards. He leans out of the window, giving them his usual post-midnight rendition of how he can decipher the secrets of the night; they have to haul him back, bodily, from the window.
“I’ll raise you,” my brother says to Rachel. His cards are a mismatched motley. She shows her hand; she has four aces. My brother lets out a whoop; Rachel rolls her eyes. And before the others know what is happening, he has streaked out of the door, and down the stairs to the ground floor. They pelt after him in a rush, getting entangled in the doorway; laughing, out of breath, they glimpse him running, naked, ahead of them, straight across the grassy verge that marks the boundary of the estate, and hurtling into the road.
• • •
They stand at the top of the grass slope, staring at the body sprawled on the road. It looks white, unevenly marbled, under the light of the fluorescent street lamps. The driver of the car stands on the pavement, shaking his head and flailing his arms in stupefaction. He starts to shout: Why couldn’t the stupid kid watch where he was going?
One by one, they step out of the dark and surround my brother, jostling for view. They are awed. This is the first person their age they know personally who has died. They wish, fleetingly, that it had been a more sublime death: this smacks of the faintly ridiculous. Still in this, as in everything else, my brother is the forerunner: they have yet to achieve non-existence. Someone whimpers. There is no blood. He lies very still, face-down.
They will remember this, and mythologise it.
• • •
Hours after they had taken the body away, Rachel was still sitting at the top of the grassy slope, clasping her knees. She was so rigid she seemed frozen. Nobody could get her to move and, in the end, they left her there, after calling her parents. I found her crouched, kneading her fingers into her palm. There didn’t seem to be anything to say. We sat for hours, it seemed, without talking. Then her parents drew up in their car, and she was off and running towards the road, with some mad idea of flinging herself in front of another vehicle—I don’t know—except that her father cornered her and dragged her back, she twisting and turning all the while, and that was the last I ever saw of her.
• • •
I don’t hate her any more. I wish I did. At least you know you’re alive when you hate someone.