You Let Me In - Camilla Bruce Page 0,56

if someone asked you, at school or at a friends’, about us, your aunt and uncle, you could always say: “We saw Aunt Cassie just recently, her petunias looks lovely this year,” or “Aunt Cassie and Uncle Tommy just bought a new parasol, we had ice cream in the garden, with strawberries.” That way no one would know that our relationship was frigid as a barren nun, and the two of you would grow up with the illusion that you were part of a healthy family.

Suited her, suited me. Suited Mother, I presume.

I think you’ve been fooled like that often.

The visits stopped, though, after the trial. Despite what she said, Olivia always thought me guilty. I think she worried about letting her chickens near the viper’s nest, and I can’t really blame her for that. I honestly can’t say I’ve missed you much either. Janus, you were always such a sullen child, always discontent. And you, Penelope, afraid to get your hands dirty, so picky about your sweets: too sour, too sweet, too sticky, too much. I have no patience with things like that.

I don’t know how your mother justified it then; how, if ever, she discussed those things with you. If you ever asked: “Are we going to Aunt Cassie’s?” or if you, like me, let out a breath of relief when summer became autumn and autumn became winter without so much as a glimpse of Olivia’s car in my drive. I’ve never really liked children much, except for my own girl, of course. You two are grown now, Penelope childless, I think you can relate.

Just because I lived so apart from you, I don’t know how your uncle was with you. If he was a funny uncle who played with you in the garden after Sunday dinners, a serious uncle you rarely spoke to, an uncle you were afraid of because he snapped and barked, or the kind who made you feel uncomfortable because his jokes weren’t really that funny.

I know that to me, Ferdinand was always more like a shadow; a tall, pale specter that drifted through our childhood home. He didn’t say much, never laughed. I always believed that he had a good heart, but I never really examined it. Between his sisters, he disappeared too easily. He was crumbling under Mother’s thumb and shivered in my father’s fist. I think he spent much of his childhood afraid, worrying about the next day, yet he never moved further away from our shared prison than the house next door, which Mother bought for him when it became clear he did not have the drive to do it himself.

He must have been such a disappointment to her, another one to add to the list. She would never say that, of course, least of all to you, but I can imagine he heard it, more than once. She would have tormented him daily with accusations; how his lack of ambition was the end of them, how he never could seem to succeed at anything, how he could have had it all yet there he was, drifting from one useless job to the next, never finishing any of the countless educations he pursued before he gave up and resigned.

You two can never truly relate to that, what it’s like being broken. How it is to grow up a white-bellied dove among pitch-black crows, a piece that won’t fit the puzzle. You, with your suburban castle childhood home, Miss S— beauty queen mother, and executive father, how could you relate to failure, to being scarred on the inside, bleeding from within?

You can’t.

I don’t think Ferdinand was always like that, though. I think he could have been a crow like all the rest, a magnificent one too, soaring high. But our brother had that one flaw, the heart that I mentioned. To a boy as soft as he, my family was poison. I’m counting myself in this time, I too was a dose of arsenic lacing that poor boy’s veins: too loud, too angry, too wild for him.

We were no fit company for doves.

After I moved to the brown house, I’m sad to say he almost ceased to exist in my mind, became a distant part of Mother, maybe, her silent shadow or willing servant. I remember feeling pity—I do, but never once did I call him or invite to my home. He was a stranger, this brother of mine, even when we shared a roof.

So imagine my surprise, then, when I