Page 2 of Remain (one-of-a-kind)

I lost my sister, Sylvia, almost a year ago.

After she died, I found myself sliding into a paralyzing depression, one that eventually robbed me of my ability to get out of bed for weeks on end, to answer phone calls or emails, or even to bathe.

My sole anchor during that dark period was Paulie; despite neglecting everything else in my life, I managed somehow to keep her alive.

When Oscar finally banged on the door of my apartment and convinced me to enter a psychiatric hospital’s treatment program, he promised to watch her during my stay.

For that—and so much else—I’ll be forever grateful to him.

I arrived at the hospital during a late January blizzard, snow falling for three straight days, blanketing the landscape in white.

As I stared out the window of my room overlooking the grounds, I remember wondering where all the birds went during storms like this, thinking that Sylvia would have known.

Five years older than I and preternaturally attuned to the natural world, Sylvia cherished beauty and life in all forms, perhaps because so much of the latter had been denied her in her youth.

Her heart had been damaged by a virus in early childhood, and though she was seen by renowned specialists from around the country, she spent much of her early life confined to our home on Fifth Avenue, educated by tutors.

In her spare time, she either escaped into romance or fantasy novels, or stared out her bedroom window, wistfully observing the people below in Central Park.

The longing I saw on her face as she tracked the families, lovers, and tourists relaxing on the grass made me ache for her, but she’d nonetheless been able to see the world in a way that felt utterly foreign to me.

To her, it was a place of infinite mystery and wonder.

I recall, when I was a child, her pointing out the everyday miracles that caught her attention—the dusty pathways left on the window after the rain had dried, for instance, or the symmetrical intricacy of a spider’s web.

She explained that if I was willing to really see the world around us, not simply look, then I, too, might experience the transcendent, whatever that meant.

My psychiatrist, Dr. Rollins, often observed that Sylvia would have been proud of me for getting the help I needed, and I have no doubt he was right.

It was an expensive place with a top-tier reputation, located in the lush countryside of Connecticut.

During the course of my four-month stay, I saw him three times a week, in addition to participating in group therapy and sessions on emotional skills building.

While most of the patients were struggling with addiction, a smaller subset, like me, were there for other reasons, and I’d checked in voluntarily with the knowledge that I could leave at any time.

These days, I’m relieved to say that I no longer feel as though I’m living in a darkened tunnel, although I sometimes wonder whether I’m really cured.

I’m still me, after all: Tate Donovan, a thirty-eight-year-old architect who lost his only true family with the death of his sister.

In the wake of all that happened and many months of physical and mental absence, I finally allowed my partners at one of New York’s premier architectural firms to buy me out.

Thus, I found myself for the first time in my adult life entirely at loose ends, alone and uncertain of what kind of future was still possible for me.

If you’d asked my parents, they probably would have expressed little surprise that I ended up this way.

Then again, nothing I did ever seemed to please them, and while I may not be alone in feeling that I was neglected or unloved as a child, Dr. Rollins helped me understand that I didn’t need to allow those feelings to define me forever.

Still, even he admitted my childhood had been unusual in its circumstances.

My father had been the CEO of a conglomerate that made money in a variety of industries.

Mining. Farming. Pharmaceuticals. Oil and gas.

Aerospace. Despite the fact that I was still one of the major shareholders, I’d never paid much attention to the business, other than to glance at the monthly statements when they arrived in my inbox.

The company had been started by my great-grandfather, expanded by my grandfather, and eventually built into an empire by my father.

Real go-getters on that side of the family, at least when it came to creating generational wealth.

My mother, on the other hand, was a Romanian beauty who spoke several languages fluently and had appeared on the covers of magazines.

She’d been working as a model when my parents met, and I suspected they had children for no other reason than that people of their station were expected to make heirs.

But I’m just guessing. I don’t really know.

What I do know is this: We lived in a penthouse on the Upper East Side of New York, but my father was seldom around.

He traveled extensively, usually for business but other times—as I eventually learned—to enjoy the company of his various mistresses.

My mother started drinking every day after her morning workouts, picked at her salads instead of eating them, and spent many evenings at charitable events.

My sister and I were raised by nannies, and the staff included housekeepers, assistants, a chef, even a lady who came in twice a week to wrap gifts.

I was driven by chauffeurs, flew on private jets, and like Sylvia, was educated by tutors during my early life, which kept me isolated from other children my age.

We spent our summers in an oceanfront mansion in the Hamptons, where every other night my parents hosted cocktail parties, which my sister and I were forbidden to attend.

Instead, we would watch movies upstairs or sit on the beach while drunken guests reveled by the pool.

On the rare night that the four of us were home together, I had the sense that whenever my parents glanced at Sylvia and me, they were baffled by who we were and where we had come from.

If my parents had one redeeming feature, it was their appreciation for the value of a good education, which explained the endless string of highly paid tutors.

After surgery led to an improvement in her health, Sylvia was finally allowed to attend Brearley, an elite all-girls school just blocks from our home.

A few years after that, when I was twelve, I was shipped off to Exeter.

My years at boarding school had a profound effect on me.

While I missed my sister, dorm life and distance from my parents finally gave me a chance to make friends.

Over time, I learned the art of small talk and casual conversation, even if I continued to keep my inner world private.

As my confidence grew, I joined the soccer and lacrosse teams, and was a natural enough athlete to pick up the sports I hadn’t played as a younger kid.

I excelled in math and developed a knack for drawing.

I even had a bit of luck with girls, eventually dating Carly, a pretty girl from Newport, Rhode Island, for much of my senior year.

Most significant, I became best friends with a scholarship student named Oscar and spent occasional weekends with his large and lively South Asian immigrant family in Dorchester.

They joked and talked over one another, laughing loudly.

When I gathered with the nine of them at the table for dinner, watching as they grabbed at the platters of aromatic food while telling colorful stories, I couldn’t help feeling that I’d suddenly landed on another planet.

It was Oscar who taught me what it meant to be a friend, and with him, as with my sister, I was able to relax my defenses and simply be myself.

Because I seldom saw my parents—I went home only in summers and on holiday breaks until I graduated from Yale—they remained mostly strangers to me.

I do remember that in the tumult of my high school graduation, my father pulled me aside to tell me that he wanted me to follow in his footsteps and major in business at college.

Nonplussed, I stared in silence, then pretended to see a friend in the crowd and rushed off.

Following my own inclinations and openly defying my parents’ expectations for the first time in my life, I majored in architecture instead.

The summer after I received my diploma, I moved into my own apartment in the city and started work as a lowly draftsman at an Upper East Side architectural firm.

Eventually, after returning to school a few years later for a master’s degree, I became a partner at that same firm, attracting newly wealthy clients who were intent on building their dream homes.

Sylvia, meanwhile, attended college in the city, graduating from the New School with a degree in environmental science.

She was working for a nonprofit and living in the East Village when she met a man named Mike through friends and fell in love.

My father insisted on a prenup—Mike taught music at a tony prep school near our home and was as poor as we were rich—but it was clear that Sylvia and Mike truly adored each other.

After our parents’ jet nosedived into the Atlantic when I was twenty-nine, Mike held my sister while she wept at the funeral and supported her with patience and understanding through her grief.

He was, and remains, a genuinely good guy.

Sylvia took their deaths harder than I did, but then again, she’d never felt alienated from or unloved by them.

My sessions with Dr. Rollins helped me accept the idea that they might have been different with her because of her health issues; that the neglect I felt may have been at least partially the result of their anxious focus on Sylvia.

Still, in my heart I believe that Sylvia’s innate goodness simply skewed her perceptions.

She was kinder than I, more forgiving and inclined to assume the best about people.

Unlike me, she believed in God and the mysteries of the unknown, including the existence of ghosts and the afterlife.

I wouldn’t understand just how deep those beliefs ran until much later.