Page 83 of The Night We Lost Him

I look at him and I can see it—what’s going on with him, what he is desperate to shut down. He doesn’t want to know what he is starting to know about himself. Because he doesn’t want to do the uncomfortable work that comes when you accept something needs to change. The uncomfortable work that comes with knowing that change means showing up for yourself in a new way.

But I refuse to simply judge him for that. Because I look at him and I see something else too. I see that he expects my judgment. Why wouldn’t he? All these years that we’ve been kept at a distance from each other and I’ve done nothing to reach out to him—to reach out for him—he’s been playing the role too. He’s been playing the role that’s more comfortable to him. The role of someone who doesn’t care. So, I try something else.

“Look, let’s do this differently, okay? Let’s just decide that starting now we are going to do this differently. For each other. And for Dad.”

He looks at me, and his eyes soften. And I think I’ve reached him. I think I’ve reached my brother. But he shakes his head, turning away.

“This is all I can do,” he says.

Then he shuts the door, leaving me in the hallway, all by myself.

Twenty-Four Years Ago

“This is not going well,” Liam said.

“Well, who on earth asked you?”

Liam laughed, Cory flicking a paintbrush in his direction. They were at Windbreak, at the end of a rainstorm. They had both been in Los Angeles for work and they found an excuse to meet here for a couple of days. (Didn’t it always end with them finding an excuse to meet here for a couple of days?) Cory was hanging wallpaper in Windbreak’s living room. Bird-patterned wallpaper.

She didn’t want his help, so Liam was standing beneath the ladder, watching her work, watching that wallpaper go up. He didn’t particularly like it. The birds seemed wild, dangerous. And hadn’t his mother always said that birds inside a house were bad luck? Nevertheless. Cory loved it, so up it was going.

Cory stepped up higher on the ladder, readjusted the level. “I think that looks pretty good.”

“That makes one of us.”

She smiled at him, reached for her razor knife.

“You know,” he said, “the books, the views, the ugly birds… This seems like a perfect room for you to write in.”

He felt her body tense. “It would be, I imagine. But it’s not my room.”

“The wallpaper says otherwise.”

She let out a laugh.

“Do you ever think about writing?”

“Liam—”

“What?”

“Don’t think that I don’t see where this is going,” she said. “Just because Sylvia is spending a suspicious amount of time with her personal trainer…”

“He’s not her personal trainer. He’s her friend’s personal trainer.”

“Forgive me. Just because Sylvia is being Sylvia, that still doesn’t mean you get to question my life choices.”

“I love your life choices. I love every choice that has brought you to still be standing here in this room, on this ladder, in those very adorable overalls and old lady glasses… somehow and miraculously not done with me quite yet.”

“Oh, believe me, I’m getting closer.”

He smiled at her. He knew he needed to tread carefully. Her work was a source of contention for them. He wanted to remind her that when she interviewed with Sally, it was supposed to be temporary. The corporate world, the long hours, the stress her job put on her—that was never supposed to be the long-term plan. She’d made plenty of money now to do what she wanted to do. Why wasn’t she doing what she wanted to do?

“I think someone might say that I’m hitting a nerve,” he said.

“Don’t give yourself so much credit,” she said. “Besides, who says I’m not still writing anyway?”

That stopped him. “Really?”