CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Blame(less)
Christmas morning is great. I keep us moving so that there is not much time to overthink how f*cked up the day is and how inexcusably awful it is that we are alone on such a major holiday. I blast music and giggle to myself when the radio station plays Michael Bublé, and we open presents and eat an enormous breakfast. James gives me presents that do not include any college sweatshirts, and I suspect that his girlfriend helped him pick out the perfume, fancy makeup, and shimmery scarf. I like her even more. He seems to really love the clothes, gift cards, overly expensive headphones, and new phone that I got for him, and it is great to see him happy.
Estelle got me an utterly gorgeous deep purple off-the-shoulder top and a designer handbag, and the gift bag from Sabin holds a beautiful silver cuff bracelet. Eric outdid himself by giving me my pretend genie wishes: a basket of small alpaca-stuffed animals, a can of whipped cream, and huge gel inserts that I could stick into my bra to achieve triple-D breasts. I have to explain the odd collection to James, who seems momentarily concerned about this new group I am hanging out with. The presents from my friends overwhelm me.
James and I watch action movies and stuff ourselves silly. It is a great goddamn day.
While my brother spends a lot of his vacation out with his high school friends, I spend a lot of time dealing with online banking and bill-paying arrangements. I want to take over all of the stuff that Lisa has been doing, something that I should have done the day that I turned twenty-one and could legally manage all of our finances. It’s a monstrous amount of paperwork and a big game of phone tag with our lawyer and accountant, but I straighten out some incredibly boring property issues and make irritatingly grown-up financial decisions. I make arrangements for the house to be maintained while James and I are back at school, and I get in touch with the property manager who has been overseeing the house in Maine and making sure it doesn’t topple into the ocean. I confirm with him that, no, I do not want to rent it out.
Every phone call sucks to all hell, but I get shit accomplished, and I feel in control.
The most important thing that I do is send an e-mail. I write Annie, my mom’s best friend who soldiered through her own grief to take care of James and me during the weeks after the fire. I track her down on the internet and write her an eight-paragraph letter. It takes me three hours to find the words to tell her that I royally f*cked up, that I miss her and need her. I do what I can to explain my pain and my healing (or lack thereof) over the years. Aside from Chris, there’s nobody I’ve opened up to like this, and the risk feels immense. But one that’s worth taking.
There are frequent texts and pictures from Sabin , a video of the four of them waving and yelling hellos at me from a Hawaiian beach, and the occasional text from Chris to see how I am, but I am careful not to let myself obsess over my communication with them. This is my time to myself and time to be with James, and I’m thrilled that we’ve made it two and a half weeks without a scene.
And then we have a shitty conversation, James and I.
To be fair, it is what I thought I wanted—an honest exchange.
And it f*cking hurts, and it f*cking sucks.
Yet it’s necessary.
James is sitting in the corner of the sectional in the living room watching television, and he interrupts my reading. “Blythe?”
“One sec.” I hold up a finger. I’m totally involved in this book, and he probably wants a ride somewhere.
“Blythe,” he says more insistently.
I look up and see that James’s eyes are red and watery.
Oh my God. My heart sinks. He’s miserable. I thought that we were doing well and that I’d set up this break to be as easy as possible, but I can see suddenly that I’ve failed.
He begins talking, dumping onto me the truths that, so far, he has never shared. “It’s so hard to be here. In this house, especially like this with the damn holidays and all, and not have them here. It’s just that … everything feels so fresh since this is our first time back, and it’s too much. It’s too much. I feel like they just died yesterday.” My brother bursts into tears, and I’m completely taken aback. I don’t know if I should go sit next to him and comfort him or not. “I want them back,” he says.
“I know. Me, too.”
“I want them back so much that, Blythe, I’d make the worst deal possible.”
He’s made a huge confession. I know exactly what he is thinking, and I don’t want him to have to say it. I’ve had the same unbearable thought myself, and I know how it feeds self-hatred. I don’t want that for my brother, so I say out loud what must burden him to the core. “You’d trade me to have one of them back.”
He completely breaks down. This is new because I’ve always been the one in pieces, and James has been the calm, collected, smart one. Now I have to step up.
“James, it’s all right. I will not let you feel bad for wanting them back. If I could give you that, I would. No matter what the cost.”
“I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry,” he says, fully crying now.
“I know that you blame me for that night. For why we were there, for how I …” I have to compose myself to continue. “For how I hurt you.”
“No, you don’t understand.”
My brother has tears flowing down his cheeks. I hate this. “I can take it, James. I blame myself, too. The sound of your screaming will haunt me forever. Do you know how often I’ve gone over that night in my head and envisioned how I would do it differently? How I would have woken up at the first hint of smoke? Or that I would have checked to make sure that I’d knocked out every shard of glass from that window? I go back even further, to when I picked that rental house. I should have let you pick the house. Everything. I would change everything. But no matter what you want to throw at me, I’m not leaving you, James. Ever. So you be as mad at me as you need to, and I will still never leave you, and I’ll never stop loving you. You are my brother forever.”
James is too upset to speak, so I continue.
“I understand. This is … part of what we have to go through. What’s happening right now. I believe that this is going to get better. I know that I’ve been out of it and useless for so long, but I’m back. And I’m not Mom. I know that. You should have a mom and dad, and you were unfairly robbed of that. It’s not easy for anyone to lose a parent, but you lost both when you were still a kid. I can’t make that shit go away, but I am going to be here to help if you’ll let me.”
He’s rubbing his eyes and sniffling, and I get up from my seat and sit next to him. I start to put my arm around him, but he collapses into my lap.
“I did something bad, Blythe,” he says through his crying. “You’re not going to want to be around me if I tell you.” James is like a little kid right now, bawling and clinging to me.
I can’t imagine what he’s talking about, but he clearly needs to get something off his chest. As I rub his back, I think how foreign it is for us to touch each other, but I’m glad that he’s letting me comfort him. “There’s nothing you can say that would do that.”
He can’t even look at me as his garbled words come out. “I could have played soccer. I wasn’t hurt the way you thought.”
I freeze. “What … what do you mean?”
He keeps hiding his face. “I told everyone that my leg was too damaged for me to play anymore because I didn’t want to. I couldn’t. Soccer didn’t mean shit to me after, but everyone wanted me to be this big soccer star. I just didn’t care. Except for the scar, my leg is fine.”
My brother’s leg is fine. The ramifications of what he is telling me hit me. I have spent four years blaming myself, hating myself, for taking away a huge piece of James’s future. Soccer was something that I believed could have been a salvation for him in a horrible time, and now I find out he didn’t even want it. Yet he let me take responsibility for destroying what little he had left.
I keep my voice level because I don’t want him to know how furious I am. “Why didn’t you tell anyone that you could play? That you were pretending?”
“Because … because everyone expected me to want to … I don’t know … prove how tough I was in the face of such shit. What a great story, right? Local boy goes on to triumph in the face of tragedy? And I didn’t have the heart to do it.”
“Who else knew you were fine?” I ask.
He shrugs and wipes his nose. “Just the doctors. I mean, the coach never made me prove that I couldn’t play. I just said there was too much muscle damage and pain for me to get back to anywhere close to what I was.”
I nod, trying to process what he’s told me. I am seething, absolutely filled with rage for what he’s done to me, and yet … I know how easy it is to go crazy when your parents burn to death one floor above you. Underneath my anger is a piece of me that can sympathize with his choice. Chris was right when said that it was easier for James to blame me for everything. If I’d had someone other than myself to blame, I might have taken advantage of it. And my brother was only fifteen; he was just a kid. F*ck, he’s still just a kid in a lot of ways.
I say the one thing that I know to be true. “It must have been hard for you to tell me the truth.” And then I have to ask him, “Why now? Why are you telling me now?”
“Because … because you’ve been so nice to me. I think that before, when you were so messed up, it was easier to trick myself into thinking it was true. That my lie was actually true and that you deserved all the blame because you were so awful to be around. The way you were acting made everything so hard.”
I love James, but I f*cking despise him right now. He used my grief and my depression as an excuse to perpetuate a lie that hugely contributed to my miserable state.
“You’re going to hate me forever,” he says.
“No, James. I don’t hate you.” I move my hand on his back again. As much as I am confused and out-of-my-mind angry, he has still done something brave by telling me this, and I know that both of us have already suffered enough. Screaming at him now will not do any good. And I could never hate him.
“I’m really, really sorry. It was really f*cking dumb of me, and I wasn’t thinking. I was just so mad about everything, and it snowballed, and I didn’t know how to get out of the lie, and …”
I shut my eyes and continue to rub his back. In my head, I am screaming, You son of a bitch! You f*cking little shit! Instead, I think about how Chris managed that Thanksgiving fiasco with Sabin, how he was able to handle his brother so coolly when he probably wanted to throttle him. No good would come from screaming, so I speak calmly. “I understand. I know what it’s like to get stuck.”
I am holding back tears, for him and for me. James is in horrible pain, again, and now so am I, and I’m stuck parenting my brother when I could really use a little f*cking comforting myself. Life is not fair, but it is what we have to deal with. And we are going to deal with it so that we can live. No, so that we can thrive.
“Why does it still hurt so much?” he asks. “Why can’t we just move on and deal?”
“I know. We’ve been grieving for more than four years, but not grieving well. And now, it seems, it’s time.”
There is no set pattern to grief, despite what every stupid psych text has told me. There is no time frame that dictates when and how you’ll feel what you feel. You just get to deal with hell however, and whenever, it hits you.
“We’re going to get through this,” I tell him.
“It’s so hard to be home,” he says. “It’s too hard.”
I picture Chris helping me to breathe.
I stroke my brother’s hair and think for a few minutes. Finally I ask, “Do you want to go back to school a little early? Do you have someone you could stay with?”
He nods and wipes his eyes again.
“I’ll change your plane ticket. It’s not a problem.”
“Are you mad that I want to leave?”
“Of course not. School is where you’re probably the most comfortable, and you should be wherever will help. I know this house doesn’t feel like home. But it will, and it will be here when you’re ready.”
“I’m so sorry,” he tells me again. “I’m going to make this up to you. I don’t deserve how nice you’ve been or now nice you are being now. I ruined everything.”
“It’s all right.” In disbelief over what has just transpired between us, I drop my head back on the couch. “We’re going to be okay, you and me. One day, we’re going to be okay.”
But we are not okay now.