And so Willow sits there, just sits there, waiting for David to notice her. Will he ever look up? Will he ever let her into hisworld of pain, even if only to lacerate her himself? And then David does look up. He does see her.
Willow slips the razor back into her pocket, and walks slowly toward him. Today has been a day of firsts, and she is desperate to connect, in some way, with her brother. She needs to let him know that she still loves him, even if she has forfeited his love, that she is made miserable by his anguish.
She watches his face as he watches her. She doesn’t shy away from his tears. She doesn’t turn away from his pain.
Willow stands in front of her brother. She sees him open his mouth, barely hears him whisper her name.
She leans closer, so she can hear what he has to tell her. Suddenly he grips her hand with surprising force, grips her so tightly that she can barely move.
“Oh Willow,” he says. “Oh, Willow, what if you had died that night too?”
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Okay, I guess that’s it. You need to do the footnotes, though, because I’m just not up for that right now.”
“Are you sure?” Willow looks anxiously at the computer screen. “I still think we should put that stuff in about how ironic it is that the pomegranate, the thing that keeps her stuck in the underworld, is a symbol of—”
“Look, you don’t want this to be too good, do you?” David gives her a look. “I mean, you don’t want everyone to know that your brother did most of the work, right?”
“But you didn’t come up with that, I did!” Willow protests.
“How about this, then.” He pushes the chair back from the desk and stretches his arms over his head, then looks down at where she’s sitting on the floor. “I’m done. I haven’t stayed up all night working on a paper since I was in college, and I could really live without the experience. I’m not kidding, Willow. You told me this thing was assigned three weeks ago, if you wanted help with it, couldn’t you have come to me before two a.m. on the morning that it’s due?”
“Okay, I guess. I mean, yes,” Willow says between yawns. She still can’t believe that she even asked him thistime.
After she had come upon him crying, after his extraordinary statement, which moved her more than she would have thought possible, they had sat at the kitchen table and talked. Not, however, as she would have hoped, about anything of significance.
Certainly, after such a naked display of emotion, it had proven impossible for David to continue to act with his cold reserve, and his manner toward her had softened considerably. And yet the content of their conversation, to her intense disappointment, had remained on the most superficial level. And so, Willow found herself notspeaking about how much she missed their parents, about how strange their new circumstances were, but talking to him instead, finally, about the French quiz, and also about the trouble she was having with her paper. David had suggested writing it with her, for her, really, as it turned out. Surely this is something that would not have occurred a few weeks ago, at least not as easily or as comfortably, and yet, as she leans back against the desk and watches him make the last few corrections, she feels empty inside. There is still something, everything,unresolved between them, and although talking to him like this is better than not talking to him at all, she still wishes for more.
“Anyway,” she continues as she shifts her legs, which have fallen asleep from sitting still for so long. It is almost six thirty in the morning, they have been up in her room for the past four hours. “Thank you, I would never have gotten this done on my own.”
“Yeah, sure, of course,” David responds, but Willow can see that he’s not really paying her any attention, he’s looking at their father’s copy of Bulfinch,which is lying on the desk, and which unbelievably enough, she has forgotten about. “Did you . . .” He trails off, picks the book up with a frown and flips through it. “This is . . . this is . . . from the . . . from the . . . house,isn’t it?”
“Uh-huh.” Willow nods. She can see how hard it is for him to even say the words. “I um, I uh . . . I took it that time I . . . that we went back for me to get some clothes. I knew I would need it. . . .”
“You did?” He glances down at her backpack lying on the floor.
“Uh-huh.” Willow nods. “Sure.”
“Really?” He looks at her in confusion. “But I keep seeing you dragging around some cheap paperback. Besides, I remember that day. Cathy gave you a huge lecture about the fact that your bag wasn’t nearly big enough to fit anything. . . .” He frowns for a moment, then reaches down to the floor to pick up her backpack.
“Don’t!” Willow says. But it’s too late. She thanks God that her stash is inside a zippered pocket, she’s sure that he won’t open that, but for once she’s carrying other contraband that is almost as worrisome.
David looks inside the bag. Maybe he’s just trying to see how much room there really is, but that doesn’t stop him from pulling out the copy of Tristes Tropiques.
“I . . . I hope you don’t mind,” Willow stammers. “But I want to . . . I’m going to give that to Guy.”
Stupid! That was a stupid thing to say!
Okay, so maybe she hasn’t been able to stop thinking about Guy all night, maybe she was trying to get David’s mind off of whether she really did bring the Bulfinchback with her that time . . .
But it was still a stupid thing to say!
“There’s no way that you’ve had both of these books with you the whole time you’ve been living here,” he says slowly. “You’ve been back to the house.”
“No, I . . .”
“Willow.” David looks at her in alarm. “Please tell me, and please be honest, you didn’t driveout there by yourself, did you?”
Willow knows that any attempts she makes at concealment are useless, that the truth is written all over her face for anyone to see. Not only that, but it is obvious to her that his main concern is not that she went out there, but how she got there. Clearly the thought of her driving by herself terrifies him, and she wants to spare him that anxiety.
“No, I didn’t go out there by myself, and I wasn’t the one doing the driving anyway.”
“Pretty nice of someone to drive you all that way just so you could pick up a book. Sorry.” He looks at the copy of Tristes Tropiques. “So you could pick up two books. Pretty nice of you to want to give him this too. I have an idea of what it must mean to you.” He pauses and looks at her for a moment, deep in thought. “Willow, you can’t tell me that’s why you really went out there.”
Willow stares at her brother in amazement. How could he possibly know what she herself didn’t. That her odyssey had a deeper purpose, that her desire to go out there for the Bulfinch had been nothing more than . . . And then she realizes that David’s mind is elsewhere, he thinks she went out to the house with Guy—he knowsthat she went with Guy—just so they could have some privacy so that they could . . .
“Willow,” David says suddenly. “You’re bright red. Bright red. Go look in the mirror.”
But Willow doesn’t need a mirror to know that her face is flaming.
“Oh my God. Oh my God.” He starts to laugh. “I am not equipped to deal with this, I’m just not equipped to deal with this kind of thing at all.”
Maybe it’s the lateness of the hour, or maybe it’s just that he’d been crying the way he was, but for whatever reason, David seems to be thawing. He is looking at her, really looking at her the way he hasn’t in months. He is finally connecting with her, teasing her the way he once would have. . . .
Okay, she wanted her brother to unbend toward her, to talk to her the way he used to . . .
But did it have to be about this?
“You would notbe turning that color over a simple road trip.”
“Fine. Just shut up already, okay?!”
“Sure. Look, I guess it had to happen sometime, and I think you picked the right person, because—”
“Gimme my stuff back!!”Will
ow snatches both the books and her bag from him.
“No problem. Just . . . look . . . Is there anything that you need to tell me?”
“No.”
“Okay, is there anything that I need to tell you, or rather, explain to you about how—”
“NO!” Willow cuts him off.
“Well then, is there anything that maybe Cathy has to talk to you about? I want to make sure that you—”
“NO!” Willow cannot believe that she is having a conversation, or rather, trying very hard notto have a conversation like this with her brother.
“What’s so funny anyway?” she asks belligerently after a few moments. She’s sure that his laughter is not directed at the situation, but at her.
“Oh, I’m just thinking that when Isabelle is seventeen I’m locking her up.”
“Will you stop it!” She hits his arm.
“All right.” He is serious once again. “But Willow, I’m not joking about this. If you need me to explain anything, if you need me to talk to you . . .”
“I doneed you to talk to me! I do need you to talk to me! I do need you to talk to me!” Willow startles both of them with her outburst. Unlike the day before with Guy, she is immediately aware that she is crying. “I do need you to talk to me,” she repeats once more, burying her head in her hands.
“Willow!” David gets up off the chair, sits down next to her, cups her chin in his hand, and lifts her face to his. “What is it? What’s happened? Did you . . . Did he . . .”
“I do need you to talk to me, and not about that kind of stuff. . . . I’ve known about things like thatsince I was in fifth grade. . . . You need . . . You need . . . You . . .” She can barely get the words out, she is hyperventilating so badly.
“All right, take a deep breath.” David moves so that he is sitting next to her on the floor with his arm around her. He’s trying to sound calm, but Willow can tell that he is, in fact, very worried by this sudden fit of tears and has no idea what it might signify. She is hardly less astonished than he is, and she can’t help wondering if this is the way things will be from now on. That perhaps her grieving apparatus, frozen for so long, will now erupt at any moment, and, if that is indeed the case, if that is something she can tolerate.
“Give yourself a second,” David continues. “Just take a second and then try and tell me what’s going on.”
“You . . . You . . . We need to talk about the way things were,” Willow finally says. “We need to talk about them.Maybe they’re dead, but they shouldn’t be dead to us. They shouldn’t be dead betweenus. You need . . . You need to talk to me too. You need to tell me how . . . how angry, how furious, you are with me about, about what happened. You need to talk to me too!”
“I . . . I do. I know that. . . .”
Willow wipes her face and turns to look at David in surprise. “You do?”
“Yes. And maybe I’ve done something very wrong these past months. I’ve wanted to talk to you, it just doesn’t seem fair, I mean to make you relive . . . I never know how to talk about what happened. Or when. And I worry that if I do talk about things, then you won’t be able to keep going the way you have, or that I won’t. And I think that maybe it ’s just best to keep things contained. But obviously I don’t know what I’m talking about.” He pauses for a second, reaches up to the desk where she keeps a box of tissues, and hands her some.
“Thank you.” Willow blows her nose very loudly.
“I . . . I’m even less equipped to deal with this kind of thing than I am the other. . . .” David sighs deeply and for a second he looks like someone twice, three times his age. “It’s so hard for me to think about what happened and even harder to see what it’s done to you. So I just try and focus on getting on with things, on taking care of you, which I don’t know the first thing about. But I try and do one thing, I try and make sure that I don’t constantly remind you, so that you can get on with things. And you do seem to get on with things. I’m so amazed at how well you’ve been dealing with all this, that I thought that bringing up the past would be cruel.”
Willow doesn’t know how to respond to this. He’s said so many things that it’s hard to focus and let them all in. She’s dimly aware that he has alluded to what he considers her ability to deal with things well, and she is sure that she should disabuse him of this notion. But other thoughts are fighting for prominence, and she needs to reassure him that he has not been wrong. That even if she has wanted to talk to him, at times wanted that more than anything, that does not mean that he has failed her like she has failed him.
“But you do, you do handle things well,” she stutters after a moment. “I know how hard it is, how hard it must be for you and Cathy to have me here and how hard it is financially, and how I barely contribute. It’s all my fault. And I—”
“Oh Willow,” David cuts her off harshly. “None of this is your fault. Did you ever think that maybe it was irresponsible for them to drink enough so that a sixteen-year-old with a learner’s permit was forced to drive in what was one of the worst storms of the year? Did you ever stop to consider that if I was on top of things I would sell the house, that it wouldn’t matter how long the insurance was taking, and that if I did, we wouldn’t have any money worries at all, for years? That the only reason you have to contribute anything is because I can’t face doing that? That it’s my fault that you have to give me all your money instead of spending it on yourself?” He looks angry, angrier than she can ever remember seeing him, and she can only be thankful that it seems to be directed at himself, because she doesn’t think that she could handle him looking at her like that.
“I’m mad at myself for that, because with everything else that’s going on, that should be one area where things are easy. And I know I’d better deal with it soon too. I need to sell our house before you have to start thinking about college.”
“Okay, I guess I never did think about that exactly—I mean, make that connection about me having to work at the library and you selling the house.” Willow puts her hand on his arm. “But still I think that—”
“And I get mad at other things too,” David interrupts her once again. But Willow doesn’t care because she can see he is about to say something very important. “I get mad at other things too,” he continues. “I get mad that I’m forced to think about things like you going to college and putting the house on the market to pay for that college. I get mad that I can’t have sex with my wife whenever I want because this apartment is so small and I don’t want my little sister to hear us. I get mad that I can’t walk around the house in my underwear and that I have to behave as if I am the parent of a seventeen-year-old and not just an infant.” He pauses for an instant and takes a deep breath. “I don’t ever get mad or hold you responsible for our parents dying. That would be worse than crazy. I meant what I said at dinner. It was a hideous accident, it was just an inexplicable event, and my first thought about it is always, always, alwayshow hard it is for you. How hard the next ten years will be for you, ten years that I had parents to help me with, but that you won’t. But you’re right. I do get mad at you. I’m mad at you for the fact that almost every aspect of my daily life, every stupidaspect, has been irrevocably changed. And I’m mad that our relationship has changed too, that even though I still adore you and always will, it is not the same easy feeling that I had before.” He holds on to her hand where it rests on his arm. “I have always been responsible for you. Just by virtue of loving you, I’ve had a responsibility to you and for you. You have that responsibility to me too, to anyone that you will ever love. But it’s different now. Now on a daily basis, my responsibility for you has been put onto a practical plane, now I have to deal with French quizzes and teacher conferences, and there are times when it drives me crazy, when I know I’m not oldenough to have these additional worries. And then, then I hatemyself for thinking that, because I know how petty, how irrational, how unfair I’m being. And I look at you and I see how strong you are, and I’m amazed that you can
be that way, and then I get even angrier at myself that I can’t handle these little everyday problems, when you’re able to handle so much more.”
“But I’m not strong! I’m not strong,” Willow cries. She takes her hand away and once more covers her face. She is so moved by what her brother has told her, she is so relieved by his emotional honesty, by his admission that he still loves her—an amazing thing!—even though he has been angry and frustrated and confused and conflicted, that she can’t bear to sit there with him under false pretenses.
She should show him her scars, show him the razor marks, let him know that his image of her is fraudulent. Only his praise is like balm in Gilead, and she is terrified of forfeiting that. Neither does she want to add to the burden of his responsibility. She knows now, really knows that what she told Guy was true. It would killhim to learn this about her.
And she has not yet decided to give up her razors either. She realizes now that she is not quite ready to let them go. Yet she sits there next to him, takes her hands away from her face, holds her arms out in supplication, almost wishing that he somehow would take it upon himself to roll up her sleeves and discover the truth. And she thinks as she did before with Markie that it would be so easy. All it would take is for her sleeves to be pushed back, and the thing would be over, done, finished! She would be separated from her instruments, taken to a doctor, watched over, protected.
But she will not be the one who makes this happen. She will not put herself in a position of having this happen to her. She thinks that she still needs her blades, and she is sure that she can never tell her brother. That although he may love her, and although they now will be able to talk, they are still separated. His image of her is on one side, and the reality of what she has done, of what she chooses to do, is on the other.
“I’m not strong.”She continues to weep. “I’m not strong.”