Elijah was born when I was six. I loved him and he loved me. I became his second mother, pushing him around in his pram and spoon-feeding him in his high chair. Later I would dress him up and we “married” under the willow tree in the back garden.
At age three he became sick and spent two months in hospital. My mother and stepfather took turns sleeping by his bed and barely saw each other as they passed in the night and the day. Elijah got better. Life carried on. But my parents watched him more closely after that, letting their anxiety show in dozens of small ways.
I grew older. Elijah kept pace. He was like a shadow, following me around, asking me endless questions that I couldn’t possibly answer. “What if whales could walk?” “Are there dinosaurs in heaven?” “Where does the light go when you turn it off?”
Usually I made stuff up and his little face would beam with pleasure when he learned something new, even complete bollocks. Occasionally, he made me angry and I yelled. Elijah’s mouth would turn down in a perfect frown and tears would pool in his eyes. I hated myself for that.
He turned five and started school. I had to walk with him every day, holding his hand at intersections as he bounced up and down in his new shoes, wanting to run ahead. My friends thought he was cute. I thought he was embarrassing.
On show-and-tell day, Elijah brought a castle that he’d made from shoeboxes and toilet paper rolls. He needed both hands to carry it and could barely see over the tops of the turrets.
“Hurry up. Hurry up,” he said, excited to get to school.
He waited at each intersection, knowing I was supposed to hold his hand. Once we’d crossed, he ran ahead, the turrets swaying above his head. Nobody saw exactly what happened next. I heard the high-pitched squeal of tires against tarmac and turned my head as Elijah bent against the hood of the car and sprang back again. He turned in midair and for a moment seemed to be looking directly at me. The cardboard castle disintegrated against the windscreen. Elijah landed on the road and his head snapped in a different direction. He came to rest on his back with one leg twisted beneath him at a strange angle. I could see a bone poking out through a ripped hole in his trousers.
Like an explosion in reverse, people were sucked inwards, appearing from nearby buildings and cars. I cradled Elijah’s head in the crook of my arm. He lay, looking up at me, a scattering of freckles across his nose and cheeks and a cold fog clouding his eyes.
“What happened to his shoe?” I asked someone. “He can’t lose a shoe. They’re brand new. My mum will be angry.”
The driver, Mrs. McNeil, had a daughter in my class. We found out later it was Mrs. McNeil’s birthday. She hit Elijah at thirty-five miles per hour—fifteen over the speed limit in a school zone—but was never charged.
The paramedics came but they didn’t take Elijah away. They put curtains around him and left him lying in the street for hours, taking photographs and interviewing witnesses. People assured me it wasn’t my fault and that Elijah had run out onto the road.
My parents arrived. My stepfather took off his glasses so he could sob into his cupped hands. Meanwhile, my mother kept asking, “Where were you, Aggy? Why weren’t you holding his hand?”
“He was carrying his castle,” I said, but that was no excuse.
Later, whenever a therapist asked me what I most wanted from our sessions, I told them, “To be normal.”
“What makes you think you’re not normal?”
“I killed my brother.”
“That was an accident.”
“I should have held his hand.”
From the day Elijah died it was clear to me that God or fate had made the wrong choice. If my mother and stepfather were going to lose a child, why couldn’t it have been me? That might sound melodramatic or self-loathing, but the truth cuts deeper than the lie. Elijah’s death stole all the oxygen in our family and nothing I did would ever allow my parents to breathe easily again. I could have aced my exams, helped old ladies across the street, rescued cats from trees, and cured cancer, but none of it would have mattered. Dead or alive, my half brother could do no wrong, while I could do no right.
I could understand my stepfather loving me less than Elijah, but not my mother. Why did she mourn Elijah and ignore me? I wanted to scream at her. I wanted to bite and scratch and pinch to generate some emotion or recognition that I counted too.
Although I didn’t realize it yet, Jehovah had turned his back on me long before I turned my back on Him.
MEGHAN
* * *
I wake with a start, my heart pounding and panic filling my throat with cotton wool. I dreamed my baby came out looking exactly like Simon, with smoky gray eyes, sharp cheekbones, and dark hair parted on the left. He was wearing a rumpled linen jacket and brogues—baby-sized—and had a designer stubble shading his jawline.
What sort of wife sleeps with her husband’s best friend? I’m not some sixteen-year-old groupie at a rock concert, throwing myself at the drummer because the lead singer is already taken. I’m not a sex-starved housewife who flirts with tradesmen or answers the door naked under her housecoat. I don’t even own a housecoat.
Jack rolls over and puts his hand across my chest. His fingers cup my right breast. My heart slows. I breathe. Close my eyes. Drift off. His hand drifts lower, over the rising slope of my belly and down the other side between my thighs. He snuggles closer. I feel his erection. That’s more like it.
I raise my hips and he pulls off my knickers. His boxer shorts go twirling through the air.
“What is Daddy doing?” asks Lucy, who is standing with one hand on the doorknob and the other holding a bunny.
“Nothing,” says Jack, covering up.
“Go back to bed,” I tell her.
“I’m not sleepy.”
“Go downstairs and watch cartoons.”
“Lachlan wet the bed.”
“How do you know?”
“The smell.” She wrinkles her nose and waits for me to do something. I pull down my nightdress and swing my legs out of bed. Jack groans. I lean over and kiss his cheek, whispering, “Wait here.”
“I can’t,” he says. “I’m being picked up at seven.”
“When will you be home?”
“Not until late.”
By the time I get back to the bedroom he’s showered and shaved and is answering emails on his phone. The car arrives. He kisses each of the children. I get the same peck, but no words of encouragement or secret squeeze. I envy him going off to work, talking to adults about grown-up things. OK, I don’t regard sports as being a grown-up subject, but it beats the hell out of discussing tantrums, toddler recipes, and teething trouble with a group of mothers who subtly try to one-up each other, complaining about their precocious offspring, calling them “too clever for their own good,” by which they mean cleverer than other children.