He grew up in a house where a child was made not to exist, and at thirty-two he had his brother asleep on his sofa and no language at all for what that was, because the only model he had ever been given was his mother’s.
He is in therapy and has been since the March. I go to some of it.
There is a photograph of two four-year-olds on a step on our hall wall.
I took it out of my bag the day after the funeral, still in the envelope it had been in since Sabine’s seventieth, because I had never put it back in that shoebox.
My brother died when he was four, and we don’t do that at my mother’s table.
He said that in front of thirty-five people with his palm flat on the back of a photograph, and he knew it was not true when he said it, and he had known for five years.
And thirty-five people heard a man say his brother had died, in a room containing that man’s mother, and every single one of them let it stand.
His mother was eleven feet away holding a serving spoon.
