In Love with Lori Ch. 06

For quite a while now, people have been asking me for more details about David & Lori's early life, why Lori was so angry for so long with him, how it was for her while he was gone, and what it was that attracted her to him, so here's the untold first part of the story.

This is a fantasy, set in a world of my own imagining, and only vaguely resembles the real world, so please don't take it too seriously; it's only a story. If you like it, please vote or comment, and if you don't please let me know why. If you want to email me I do reply if at all possible, so don't forget to include your email address if you would like a reply.

My thanks go, as always, to my friend, editor, font of wisdom, and seeker after reality GrandTeton, without whom most of my work would remain the gibberish it is before he sorts it out, and to my own Lori, who was the original reason this story came about.

Read, enjoy, I hope you get as much pleasure from reading it as I did writing it.

beachbum1958

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Child Lori

My first, and strongest, memories are all to do with the fact that Davey, my big brother, had such beautiful green eyes; one of the first things I can remember with any clarity is trying to grab those startling emeralds because they were so beautiful. Then when I got a little older, I would make him hold me up to Mom's dressing mirror so I could look at my blue eyes looking at his beautiful green eyes. It wasn't until I was much older that I began to wonder why he had green eyes, and soft, lush, golden hair, when Mommy and I had black hair and blue eyes, and Daddy had brown (well, mostly gray, actually) hair and pale gray eyes.

One day, when I was maybe seven or eight, it occurred to me to look, really look, at some of the thousands (OK, I'm exaggerating...a little) of framed photos dotted around the house of my Mom, Davey, and another man, a stranger to me, but one who looked just like Davey. I'd seen them all a million times, never giving them a second glance, but now, when I studied them closely enough, and saw the way the man was holding Davey, or smiling at him, or the way he and Mom were holding hands, or holding Davey and smiling at the camera, the realization struck; that was Davey's Daddy, and hard on the heels of that, my Mommy had been married before! Shock, horror, Davey wasn't my brother, how could he be, that was his Daddy right there, not Daddy, not my Daddy...

Mom found me crying in my closet, one of those incriminating photographs clutched in my hands, and so she took me out of there, dried my tears and blew my nose while I cried about the fact Davey wasn't my brother, he couldn't be, everyone had been pretending to me all along, Daddy wasn't his Daddy blah blah blah blah.

Mom let me run out of steam and get it all out of my system, then held me on her lap while she told me the story about how Davey's Daddy had died and gone to Heaven when Davey was just a little boy, in England, and how she and Daddy had fallen in love and gotten married, and that Daddy had adopted David, that Davey was still her little boy, but he now was Daddy's little boy too, and I was her and Daddy's little girl, we were both her children, so Davey was, and would always be, my big brother.

That big hole that had opened-up in the middle of me when I worked out that Davey wasn't my brother closed-up again; Mom made it right with me, only now I knew why Davey looked so different from me, and why it didn't matter, because he was still my gross big brother who made me pull his finger, and gave me wet-willies, and woke me up with a stinky-finger, and, when I was a pre-schooler, convinced me the neighborhood alley cats came into my room at night when I was asleep and spat in my mouth, and how the crusty stuff in my eyes in the morning was dried-up cat wee; it gave me sleepless nights and nightmares for weeks and Mom nearly grounded him for life over that; even today I still feel creeped-out whenever I see a cat...

Yep, he was my big brother alright.

Now that I knew Davey was from England, and so was Mom, I realized they both spoke differently to Daddy and me. I'd been listening to them all my life and I never noticed anything different, but now that I knew I couldn't stop hearing that accent. My friends, and his, had always known he was different, but it had never struck me as odd; it was just something else to go along with his vast collection of nasty habits, his smelly feet, and his weird sense of humor; I always put it down to Davey just being Davey and never gave it another thought.

*

Life was fairly even and undisturbed through my early childhood, except for one thing: Davey always seemed slightly uncomfortable at home, like his clothes didn't fit him properly, and he never really had what I would call close friends; just me, really.

I had Sara and Josie, my closest friends; we went through pre-school, elementary, Middle, Junior High and High School together; they weren't related, but with their fair, freckled skin, light, golden-brown hair, and green eyes everyone just assumed they were twins; their families came from Cincinnati and Austin, Texas, so there was no possibility they were related, but that didn't stop pretty much everyone from calling them 'the twins'.

The three of us did just about everything together, Sunday school, church choir, Wilderness Girls, everything, but when I got to like nine or ten I kind of started to feel like maybe they were hanging with me because they wanted to be near Davey, which grossed me out. Davey? He was disgusting. Daddy needed a gas-mask to go in his room, Mom had to hold her breath when she sorted his laundry and you couldn't get me near his room with a ten-foot towing chain, but Sara and Josie used to get all tongue-tied and blushy and just gaze at him whenever he walked into the room.

I suppose, if I'm completely honest, and didn't look at him through the 'little sister' spyglass, he was kinda pretty; he had the kind of blond hair you don't often see on guys, a bright, lustrous golden, and big green eyes. He never seemed to tan, even in the blistering Iowa summer, and always looked pale, and just different to everyone else; most blond kids darken as they get older, but not Davey, he stayed golden-blond right up to the time he left, but I'm getting ahead of myself here.

Just about all my friends' big sisters were trying to get him to notice them, which puzzled me some; after all, I lived with him, I know what he looked like first thing in the morning, and endured his unique collection of smells, grunts, burps and other noises I'm sure you don't need to know about; being in a closed room on a hot day with him after two tacos and a couple cans of Dr. Pepper was an experience once tried, never forgotten; burping the alphabet was the least of it...

*

When I was coming up eleven, just about to start middle-school, everything suddenly went wrong. Davey and Mom had a huge fight. No-one would tell me what it was about, then Daddy got involved and after that it was never the same; Mom cried a lot; she'd slam Davey's food down on the table in front of him with her mouth set in a thin line; she stopped laughing at Daddy's terrible jokes, and even Daddy seemed to not really be into it even when he was trying to make Mom laugh.

Davey walked around like a zombie, his face set and expressionless, but I could see he was mad; every time I tried to ask him what was going on he'd snap at me or just shove me out of the way and tell me to mind my own business, or go ask Mom.

Then I found out. He was leaving. Davey, my big brother, was going away, to England; he was going back to what he called home, and that hurt me deeply; I thought this was home, his home was here, with Mom, and me, and Daddy, not some mythical place millions of miles away.

Mom had told me stories about England once, when I was still just a little girl, but all I could recall were jumbled stories about queens, and princes, and lots of knights running around (in clanking suits of armor?), and golden-blonde princesses, and castles, and ladies drinking tea with milk in it and their pinkies stuck out, and some weird game called 'cricket', and horses everywhere; it was all very confusing and disjointed to an eleven year-old Midwestern girl...

This tension and anger in the air was almost palpable, and went on for what seemed like forever; the house was like a morgue, gloomy and depressing to be in. Every evening Mom would make us dinner and pick at it, then glare at Davey and excuse herself and go sit in her bedroom with the door closed; Daddy would help Davey and I clean up, Davey would wash-up and disappear into his room, and Daddy would just shrug and look sad.

Something was coming, I could feel it, jeez, I could hear Mom crying about it at night and Daddy's low rumble as he talked to her.

I tried to make Davey stay, but it ended every time with his screaming at me, his voice cracking and warbling, his eyes blazing green and his face beet-red; Mom usually broke it up, and she'd go after Davey for disrespecting me while he just stood there, refusing to say a word to her, his lips clamped so tight they were bloodless, with his eyes fixed on something over her shoulder, which just made her even madder.

*

The day my Davey left me, the day my big brother got on a plane and left me, and disappeared from my life, that was the day my heart broke in little pieces; even as we were standing and waiting for his flight to flick up on the overhead, I still thought it wasn't going to happen, that Davey was just mad and punishing Mom for something, that he'd drag it out, but at the last second he'd relent and say "OK, let's go home, I call Denny's!" and it would all be OK again.

But his flight flicked over to 'Now Boarding' and Daddy made this real funny, sighing, snorting kind of noise and turned his back on Davey, who walked away without a backward glance; at that point the conflict inside me was so great I almost exploded; half of me wanted to run after him, to lock my arms around his waist and trip him up and pound him with his flight bag until he came to his senses, but the other half of me hated him so much it was like a rush of vomit in my throat; all I wanted to do was stab him and kick him and hurt him like he was hurting me, and make him pay for making my Daddy cry.

He was walking away from us, and now I knew what he really thought of us, of me; he thought we were nothing, our home was nothing, his real home was a long way away on the other side of the world, and he never, ever thought of our home, our house, our family as anything to do with him; he was leaving us behind and dusting us off his hands, and going back to his real life, and we'd never meant anything to him at all.

All his life, when I thought he was happy at home, with Mom, Daddy, and me, he was pining for someplace else, and now he was going back there, and I hated him for it.

Mom finally broke, and ran after him when he was half way to the gate, and I watched her hug and kiss him goodbye with murder in my heart; already I was writing him out of my life the way he'd written me out of his; from then on, I resolved to have nothing more to do with him, ever; no mention of him in my presence, no sign he'd ever been my brother; he'd made me an only child, so that's what I'd be, and I swore to myself that, come hell or high water, I'd never speak to that ungrateful worm-pig ingrate ever again; he didn't deserve my time and attention.

*

Life without Davey was a constant misery and ache in my heart; I hated him for what he'd done to me, I hated the thought of him even being part of me, I wanted nothing to do with him. When he called home (MY home, not his, not ever again...) religiously every Sunday evening, Mom and Daddy would talk with him, then they'd hold the handset out to me and give me that imploring look, and I'd just clench my teeth and look away; what I wanted to say to him I wasn't supposed to know, and I certainly wasn't going to scream it out in front of Mom and Daddy, so I bottled it all up and held my tongue.

After a while, Mom stopped asking me if I'd at least say hello to him; why should I? He left us behind, he had a life that was nothing to do with us, so I wanted nothing to do with him.

It still hurt so much, though...

*

Lori Alone

This is how life was for the next few years; every week or so a letter would arrive from England; sometimes it would be a school report card, but mostly it was a real letter from that...that turncoat traitor, and sometimes a handful of photographs (which I never once even looked at; I didn't want to see that heartless jackal frolicking around with all his new friends, people he'd rather have been with than be here at home with us, with me...)

Mom insisted on telling me all about how well he was doing at school, how popular he was, how he was on-track to study medicine, like I cared; he'd deserted us, he'd abandoned us, he'd abandoned ME like I meant nothing to him; he was my big brother, and I adored him, bad habits and weird smells and all, and he'd left me without a backward glance; hate was too mild a word for what I felt for him...

My friends went through something very similar with me; it gradually percolated through my wall of anger that they had lost him too; they'd known him all their lives, and they were missing him as bad as I was, if in a slightly different way; they didn't have any brothers, Davey was the closest thing they'd had to a big brother, and they felt like he'd abandoned them too.

It didn't help that every wall in the house was plastered with photographs of that shitty, treacherous little turncoat; when they thought I wasn't looking, I'd sometimes see either Sara or Josie gently touching one of the myriad pictures of him, their eyes glittering, and their lip quivering, and my heart would ache for them.

That, of course, was yet another reason to hate him; it wasn't enough he had to hurt me so, but to do it to my closest friends too? That was unforgivable.

So that was how it was as I moved up into middle-school, trying to make believe I didn't care that my big brother had deserted me, that he no longer mattered to me, because I was a teenager now, thirteen years old, not yet an adult, but no longer a child, and childish things like that no longer mattered to me. And then that damned photograph showed-up, and everything changed.

*

One evening, Daddy asked me to get him something from his study, so I went in there, and while I was rummaging around inside the bureau, a pile of photographs spilled out. I picked them up without thinking and glanced at the top picture, and my heart slammed inside my chest at what I saw.

It was Davey, still in school, but how he'd changed; obviously it was a rowing team picture; he was surrounded by a whole bunch of strapping young men in number singlets smiling at the camera and leaning on oars, but all I could see was him; he was beautiful, I had no other word to describe him. The date was just a few weeks earlier, so he was almost eighteen, and gosh, how he'd changed; the boy I remembered was gone, but the young man he'd become was just so gorgeous it stopped me in my tracks, holding my breath as I took him in.

I don't know how long I stared at that picture; I couldn't stop looking at him, every single feature was the same, yet at the same time so totally different, and I remember wondering at the time why my heart was beating so hard and fast; this was my brother, this was David, who left me without a backward glance to go and have another life far away from me, and here I was, transfixed, breathing so shallow I could hear my heart drumming in my ears.

The next thing I knew, I was bolting out of there, running to my room to cry because my heart was breaking, and now I hated him all over again for making me feel this way, but even as I cried, I was seeing him in that photograph, his golden hair, his eyes like sparkling emeralds, and most of all that smile, his happy smile; I hadn't seen it in such a long time, he'd taken it away from me, and now, seeing it again, it cut through my heart.

Mom came and knocked on my door but I yelled at her to go away, so she did, because I didn't know why I was so angry, so sad, and a whole lot of other things as well, things I couldn't describe, even to myself. What it all boiled-down to, though, was just as I thought I'd finally gotten over Davey and his callous abandonment of me, he'd waltzed back into my heart and broken it all over again.

As the days passed, I couldn't get that image of him out of my head; I told myself I was being weird, mooning over some stupid photograph, of my brother, of all people, but that didn't stop me sneaking into Daddy's study most every night after that to take that photo out of the bureau so I could stare at it.

I thought I was being all sneaky and discreet about it, but Mom knew something was up; sometimes I'd catch her giving me a peculiar look, which tipped me off that she was using her special Mom-powers to look into my head, because she seemed to know exactly what I was thinking and feeling, and what I was doing night after night, but she never once said anything.

I eventually stole that picture from Daddy's study so I could look at it whenever I needed to; if Mom noticed it was gone she didn't say anything, but if she'd asked me why I took it I had no answer; I didn't know myself, it was like a compulsion. In the course of my day, suddenly, completely out of the blue, for no reason I could think of other than I just needed to, I'd stop what I was doing and go look at it again, study his face, memorize his smile, the way his eyes seemed to be looking directly at me, every last wave and curl of his hair and it was a complete mystery to me why I had to go look.

If I couldn't go there for any reason, then next time I took it out I'd actually find myself apologizing to him in my head, which was pretty bizarre, and freaked me just a little when I realized what I was doing, but I still kept that photograph; nothing could have made me give it up, and I really, truly didn't know why...

It wasn't until I was almost sixteen that I let myself admit what I was doing, and why, and it was Josie, of all people, who pointed it out to me when she commented that, for someone who hated David so much, I was sure giving him an awful lot of air-time...

She was kind of sly about it, or at least her tone was, but there was a definite smirk there when she said it, and when I demanded to know just what the hell she was talking about, she rattled off some nonsense about how love and hate were as close as two sides of a mirror, which she probably thought was profound, but I just thought was profoundly stupid, because it sounded like she was saying I was in love with David, and that just wasn't possible; it was gross, he was my brother for Chrissake, eeww, yuck!

That night, I lay awake half the night going over and over what Josie had said; it was impossible, it was wrong, it was weird that someone could even make a statement like that, because things like that just don't happen; sisters love their brothers, of course they do, but they don't fall in love with them, that was...icky, and wrong, and just...wrong...so wrong...

I fell asleep with my head still full of all this weirdness, and when I woke up, obviously my brain had been shuffling all sorts of things around and into place while I slept, because the first thing I knew when I opened my eyes was that Josie was right: I was in love with David, and it appalled and disgusted me; how could I be, he was my brother, he wasn't even here, I hadn't seen him in almost five years, I'd certainly never spoken to him in all that time, and I still didn't want to, because all that anger and loss was still simmering nicely inside me, so how could I be in love with someone who was a: my brother, and b: a vermin-weasel who'd abandoned me, and his life with us, for a new life on the other side of the world?