I texted back immediately: I love you.
And later that night she answered: I know you think you do.
The next day she sent me a text: Lucy you’ve always thought you were better than me. And I think you have been very selfish in your life. I’m sorry but I do. I should pray for you but I am too tired.
* * *
—
I felt like she had shot me in the chest. This is what it felt like to me.
* * *
—
On the phone my brother sounded tired, and noncommittal. When I said, “She called me selfish,” he said nothing. So I asked him, “Do you think I’m selfish?” And he said, “Well, no, Lucy.”
* * *
—
Vicky did not die of the virus, but my brother did. He called me from his house and said he had chills—his teeth were chattering—and he had shortness of breath, and I begged him to go to the hospital, but he said, “I’ll be okay.”
“Oh, please go!” I said, and after a moment he said, “Okay, maybe tomorrow.”
Before we hung up he said, “Hey, Lucy.”
And I said, “What, Petie?”
He said, “I don’t want you to think you were selfish. That’s just Vicky talking.”
“Oh Petie, thank you,” I said.
And then he said quietly, “I love you, Lucy. Bye now.”
My brother had never said he loved me. No one in our family ever said that.
* * *
—
When he didn’t answer his phone the next day, I almost called Vicky’s husband to ask him to go over there, but then I thought, No, I will call the police. And so I did, and a serious-sounding fellow said he would drive there and check on him, and I kept saying, Thank you, oh, thank you.
And half an hour later the police called and told me that my brother, Pete Barton, had been found dead. He had died on his bed, the same bed that my father had died on many years earlier.
* * *
The grief I had was terrible. At first it was terrible because I kept thinking how Vicky had called me selfish. This is what killed me. I kept murmuring out loud: I was just trying to save my life. I thought about my brother, how pale he had always been, I thought of the boys beating him up on the playground, of the pins my mother had stuck into his arm. He never had a chance, I kept murmuring that too.
When I spoke to Vicky, who was by now home from the hospital, she sounded calm, and I understood that this was because she thought my brother was in heaven. And I thought what a bad life my sister had also had. She had her children, and even her husband, but all I could do was to picture her as a child, how she had never smiled, how she was always alone at school. There was one image I had of her walking past the art room one day, she had been alone and she looked frightened, and it was an image that seared itself into me that day; she had seen me and looked away—we never spoke in school when we saw each other. I had almost not liked her that day, I mean I had felt put off by her, by her loneliness and her look of fear. Both of which I had felt myself for all those childhood years.
* * *
—
I remembered the last time I had seen my brother and Vicky—a few years ago now, but I had gone to visit my brother while I was on a book tour in Chicago. I had rented a car and driven two hours to that tiny awful childhood home that he still lived in, and while I was there Vicky had come over, and we got to talking—the three of us—about our childhood, our mother in particular. And then I had a terrible panic attack, and I asked Vicky if she would drive me back to Chicago, and I asked Pete to follow us in my rental car. And they had done that! My sister had put me in her car, and she had driven toward the city of Chicago, she had done that for me!
Before we got to Chicago my panic had gone down, so I was able to switch cars with Pete and take my own rental car back. I said goodbye to them on the side of a four-lane highway. That was the last time I saw my sister. And my brother.
But they had been willing to do that for me!
I understood exactly why Vicky had called me selfish.
* * *
—
William had to sit in front of me, holding both my hands that night, looking me in the eye and telling me I had come from a very, very sad family, and if I had stayed there my life would have been sad as well. “And look what you’ve done, Lucy,” William said. “Look at all the people you have helped with your books.”
* * *
—
I have always wanted my books to help people.
But in truth, I have no sense that they do. Even if someone writes to me and says, Your books have helped me—while I am always glad to get the note—I have never really been able to believe it. I mean, praise seems unable to enter me.
ii
One night there was a huge storm with high winds and we lost our power. I woke in the night because I was cold, and William was already up. “The power went out,” he said, not unhappily.
I said, “What do we do?” And he said, “We wait.”
“But I’m so cold,” I said, and he went and got the other quilts from the other beds, but they were not enough to stop me from shivering.
As a child I had often not been able to sleep at night because I was so cold. I thought of that now—how there had been a few nights when I had called out to my mother because I was so cold, and she had brought me a hot water bottle! I could still remember the rubbery smell of it, it was red, and not very big, but it was so warm, and I wouldn’t know where to put it on my body, because wherever I put it, the comfort I felt from it was just enormous, but it made the rest of my small body feel bereft, and so I would shift it around from place to place; all this I remembered that night we lost our power.
* * *
—
The next morning Bob Burgess brought us over three flashlights. “Keep one upstairs all the time, and keep the other two downstairs so you know where they are.”
* * *
—
That same morning William drove me to my studio and then he went to L.L.Bean. When he picked me up later that afternoon he was quiet, but he reached over a few times and touched my hand as he drove. And when I went into our bedroom there were two down quilts, white as fluffy snow, looking so beautiful there on the bed.
* * *
—
At night William and I slept holding each other.
* * *
In December, I noticed a drop in my mood. It had to do with my brother’s death; it was no longer Vicky calling me selfish, it was the single, horrifying fact of Pete’s death. It felt to me as though my entire childhood had died. You might think—I would have thought—that I wanted every part of my childhood gone. But I did not want every part of my childhood gone. I wanted my brother alive, and he had died alone in that small house. I thought how he had not wanted to go to the hospital with the virus and I remembered how frightened he had been of getting that shot as a kid in the doctor’s office, and I could not stop the sense of sadness; it was a sadness that went so deep it was like it was a physical illness.
And it got dark so early and it was so wintry and cold that I could not walk as much as I had when we first arrived in Maine. And there were no more social gatherings, it was too cold, and also Covid had come to Maine and was all over the state, and so we had to be very careful. I went most days to my studio over the little bookstore, and really, I might have gone mad without it. I still almost went mad. Everything seemed very difficult. To even clean the two bathrooms in the house seemed beyond me, though when I finally did clean them I noticed I felt better. For a few minutes. As is true with many people who feel poorly, there was a sense of shame that accompanied this. I did not want to tell William, and what was there to tell him anyway? There was nothing I could do but hold on.
But he knew, I think, and he tried to be good to me.
I was very grateful to have William, but grief is a solitary matter.
* * *