Page 24 of You Can't Hurt Me

“I’m sure I won’t get it,” I lie again, rolling the stem of the wineglass between my thumb and forefinger. I always find myself doing this, play down my ambitions to make him feel better about his unfruitful ones. The effort of tiptoeing around my career, downgrading it to a series of lucky accidents, is exhausting. He needs to maintain the illusion that we’re equals, orphans together struggling in the storm.

Tonight, however, I’m struggling to suppress my jubilant mood. A few days after my interview, Nate texted. They, although he didn’t mention Priya, wanted me to start the job straightaway. I couldn’t think of a better outcome. Life away from the office, away from the confines of my work pressures, my cramped apartment.

“You’re smiling,” Tony accuses.

“Am I?”

He leans back to study me. “You’ll get it, you know you will, you’re brilliant. Although I’d think we should maybe talk about it before you got into something like that.”

“I don’t need your permission.” I force a laugh, emboldened by the wine.

“Sure. Only after seeing the newspapers, I’d worry about you working for someone like him. I remember reading about it all—the whole situation sounded screwed up. I don’t like the idea of you going anywhere near Dr. Nate Reid.” He shivers.

“Well, don’t worry. Another drink?” I say briskly, eager to change the subject.

“Maybe a bottle?” Tony replies, pushing his chair back. “Snackage?”

“Go on.” The pub begins filling up with the clamor of a Friday-night crowd. They push their way to the bar, knocking our chairs. My nerves jangle, my own mood darkening by the minute.

Next time I won’t drink, I vow to myself. I know where this can lead. Tony returns and sits down, pouring dry roasted peanuts into a bag of salt-and-vinegar chips and shaking it, a little trick he devised in the pub gardens of Essex when we were kids.

“Dinner is served.” He rips the packet open and places it on the table between us, pours us each another glass and raises his to mine. “I’d like to make a toast. To Mom.”

“To Mom,” I echo and he chinks his glass with mine. We always meet up around the anniversary of her death, and each year I dread it, the grief it brings out of us both. His hand reaches across the table, long slender fingers like our mother’s cover mine, his voice softens.

“It’ll be twenty-three years on Tuesday.”

“Twenty-three years,” I echo, conscious of the weight of his hand on mine.

“I thought we could do something special. Maybe go to her favorite spot, that pub on the river back home in Essex.”

“I’d love to, but we’d have to find a time when I’m less swamped at work.”

“I understand,” he says, his eyes raking my face. “Just thought it had been a while since you last visited her grave?”

I open my mouth to say something, then close it. He gives a theatrical sigh, watches me take a long swallow of wine and glance out the window. “Mom loved this time of year, didn’t she?” I offer, inadequately.

“What are you on about? She hated winter, always moaned about the cold.”

He gets up to go to the bar. I pretend to read the news on my phone but the headlines blur. The room swirls a bit, my eyes lag, the clatter of voices and background music rises up around me.

I wonder, sometimes, how can two siblings grow up in the same family and turn out so differently, feel our grief so differently. As soon as I moved to London, I did my best to forget about the past and move on, more or less successfully. But Tony has become stuck in that time, unable to move forward emotionally, incapable of sticking to a grief counselor or therapist for more than a few weeks. Traveling around the world looking for new adventures is his coping mechanism, not a particularly effective one. When we meet, he drags me back to my younger years with the gravitational pull of a black hole. Armed with anecdotes that he repeats over and over, they are the only version of our childhood I seem to remember. Sometimes I think siblings are like a mirror reflecting back a twisted picture of who we believe we are.

At times it can feel that one’s family history is like a Wiki entry, allowing you to go back in there and edit your details whenever you wish. The trouble is so can other people.

This is what I remember still about Tony, my half brother. He was five when his father died from a heart attack and a year later, my mother remarried. She met my dad at the local school where they both worked as teachers and, within months, I was born. I’ve always wondered if it was a marriage of convenience, or some sort of reaction to grief. Tony maintains she was only ever in love with one man, his own father. The perfect union that created Tony. My father was highly insecure about my mother’s first marriage. There was a tacit understanding that her husband was never to be mentioned, no photographs, all memories of him extinguished.

Perhaps that’s why my father went along with my mother’s suggestion to adopt Tony. For him, I suspect, it was one more way to erase evidence of that first marriage. If the surname was gone, so was her husband. In defiance, of course, Tony resolutely hung on to his original surname, Thorpe, once he left home.

I can still recall the precise shade of her chili-red sundress that she wore each summer, the cinched drawstring waist and spaghetti straps. The smell of her favorite nail varnish as it dried. Toasted almond. How on warmer days the veins stood out on the back of her hand, eau de Nil green, as she held mine. I remember her fingertips in my hair, the soporific feel of them grazing my scalp, how even now the memory of that particular touch makes me drowsy.

I treasure these fragments, no matter how small or fleeting, because I alone own them. No one can steal or reframe those recollections. I have never told anyone, not even Tony, that I visit my mother’s grave at least once a month, when I have her all to myself.

From the outside we functioned well enough. There were family camping holidays and theater trips to London, birthday meals out together. But hovering below the surface was a simmering tension between Tony and my father. After the adoption, there was no acknowledgment that we were a blended family, patched together with a stepparent and stepsiblings.

In the end, that turned out to be the least of our problems when my mother went for a routine checkup that revealed a small shadow on her left lung. A stage four tumor, secondary breast cancer. A year later, on an unseasonably bright sunny January morning, she died peacefully in the hospice with us around her. I was eleven and Tony seventeen.

Maybe it was grief or loneliness, the responsibility of caring for us as a widower, but my father began to change. He always had a temper, but looking back, I realize that without my mother there to mediate, his behavior grew more extreme. Tony started out as the target of his anger, but I could never take for granted that he wouldn’t turn on me. An innocuous remark, an unfinished meal or muddy shoe marks on the stairs: all these could trigger the molten heat of his rage.

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