In Love with Lori Ch. 06

Daddy came and sat next to me so he could hug Mom and me together; I could feel his chest shaking with silent sobs, and his hand on my arm was like a vise, like he could hold us all together forever, frozen like that.

As I cried, Mom stroked my hair and kissed my forehead, reassuring me, but I could already feel her slipping away. The thought of a life without Mom there to share it scared me more than I knew how to express, but even with that, suddenly Davey's face, his eyes, his smile flashed up before me. Mom must have felt me stiffen, like an electric shock had jolted through me, because she pulled back slightly, her eyebrow raised in that querying look I knew so well.

"What, what is it, baby?" she murmured.

"Davey...I have to tell him...he should be here, we need him...he should come home now..." I gabbled. Mom pulled me close again, dabbing my eyes dry.

"Sweetheart, listen to me; Daddy and I, we already talked about this. Your brother is at the most important part of his life now; right now he's preparing to take his finals; depending on how well he does determines whether or not he becomes a doctor, and you know how important that is to him, to me, and to your father. Please, promise me you won't tell him, he needs to be focused and stay on track; I don't want him to fail, and I know you don't either. By the end of summer he'll have graduated, then we can call him back home; we have time, baby, but right now, he should stay where he is; I don't want the last eight years of his life to have been for nothing; as long as he doesn't know, he'll do what he always wanted, and be just like his father; that means too much to him, to Daddy and me, for me to take it away from him. I can wait, sweetheart..."

And so the decision to leave Davey once again in the dark was made; much as I loved him, and wanted him, another, darker part of me altogether hated him for not being here, for not sharing and easing my grief, for leaving us alone to wait for my Mom to die while he sauntered through medical school without a care in the world.

That probably sounds as lop-sided and unfair as it really was, but that's how I felt; reason had nothing to do with it, only emotion and impending loss, and a burden I wasn't strong enough to bear myself.

Daddy decided to take indefinite Leave of Absence from his job so he could be home with us; we all knew why, so there was no need to discuss it, but it terrified me all the same; he was home because we were sitting the death-watch, and I couldn't get that out of my head; Mom was going to die, so we were circling the wagons around her...

Mom, of course, didn't see it that way; whatever was happening with her, her first thought was about what I was going to do with my life after...after.She hinted several times that I should perhaps start thinking about school again, but I wasn't interested; the thought of spending the next four years studying wasn't appealing right then; I had more important things to do and think about than racking-up credits at community college or applying to some out-of-state college with my indifferent 3.0 GPA.

Daddy busied himself doing all the things he'd always promised us he was going to get around to; he began dry-walling the cellar to turn it into a rec room, he dug up the buried tree-stump in the middle of the driveway that always made the car rock and the suspension go 'clonk-thunk', he ferried Mom around from clinic to doctor to home almost every day, he ran errands, did the grocery shopping, tried to help Mom in the kitchen, never a pretty sight to see, and generally busied himself.

At day's end, he'd take Mom out to the porch and sit on the old lounger with her on his lap, rocking her gently with his arm around her and her head on his chest, just he and Mom in their own private world, loving each other while they still had some left time together.

He loved her so much, and he was going to lose her; he never let Mom see his anguish, but I could see it plainly. It hurt me to see him hurting so badly, but he never let on to Mom; he was the upbeat, jolly one, keeping Mom's spirits up with his silly jokes and terrible puns, but after he'd helped Mom into bed, and tucked her in, checked all her meds, and sat with her until she fell asleep, he'd come back downstairs, smile that smile of his as he tweaked my ear, and go sit alone in his study, usually with a pile of photo albums, smiling and chuckling to himself as he looked back through our lives.

That was how I found him one night, relaxed and composed, deep in his big armchair; his face was so calm, so serene, with a small smile fixed on his lips. It was late, and I thought he'd dozed off, but when I tried to wake him, that's when I realized he'd gone. I was devastated; Mom was so sick, and now I'd lost my Daddy too, how was I supposed to deal with this?

I tiptoed into Mom's room and sat in the easy chair next to her bed, where Daddy sat holding her hand every night until she fell asleep, and wondered, through a haze of grief and loss, how the hell I was supposed to tell her, in the midst of all she was going through, that the man she loved more than anything in the world was gone, that he'd slipped away alone and unregarded while I watched some mindless TV show...

She woke, and looked at me, and she knew; somehow, she knew what had happened, and she held me as my world fell away in shreds and tatters. When the worst of my tears had passed, I helped Mom out of bed, and held her as she slowly made her way downstairs, and into Daddy's study. Her face was a mask of grief as she smoothed his hair back, then slowly lowered herself onto his lap, to hug him one last time and whisper something in his ear, then rest her head on his chest, just like they had out on the porch only a few hours earlier.

Mom reached out to me and took my hand, sharing her strength with me, giving me what she had such a boundless supply of.

"Call Davey..." she murmured, "I think it's time he came home."

*

Homecoming

When I went to pick up Davey from Des Moines International I wasn't prepared to actually see him again. I was jittering because I was going to see him again after eight years, and I was trying to stay angry with him, but mostly I just wanted him to be near me. I was standing there, my mind free-wheeling, thinking disjointedly about how Daddy used to take us to Racoon River Park, just a few minutes away from where I was standing, and we'd spend the day kayaking and swimming, and end the day with a twilight barbecue cooked by Mom, because Daddy was hopeless, and Davey was clueless, when Davey came walking through the gate.

My heart leaped and slammed against my ribcage. He was gorgeous, there's no other word to describe how he looked; all the other women, girls, teens, even, were gazing at the tall, handsome young man with the eye-catching emerald eyes and hair like spun gold.

He looked at me, and stopped-dead, his eyes wide and surprised, slowly turning apprehensive, because suddenly I was mad at him again, beautiful or not, and it must have showed; as far as I was concerned, he had a lot of explaining to do, and a lot of ground to make up. He just stood, staring at me, with his mouth hanging open, and all I could do was toss a patented Lori Keene smartass comment at him.

His eyes clouded over even as he hugged me, and I was in two minds over whether to hug him back or pull away and slap him the way he deserved. He must have got it, because his arms dropped away before I had a chance to properly feel his arms around me (the one thing I'd wanted, if truth be told). Also, I'd called him 'David', a name we only ever used in the family when we were mad at him.

In the car we talked about Daddy, about how he'd been taken in his sleep by a massive coronary; the ME said he probably didn't feel a thing, so there was that, at least, a blessing of sorts. We talked about Davey's boyhood, sharing memories of my dad, but it was hard; my loss was still raw and painful, an open wound I didn't want to go anywhere near and I think he sensed that, because he tried to steer the conversation away and prompt me into talking about what else had been happening.

I couldn't keep it up; too much was happening, and too much had happened already for me to make small-talk; my conscience was clamoring to tell him about Mom, he needed to know, because I couldn't just let him walk unawares into the house and see what had happened to Mom while he'd been gone.

So I told him; about the initial diagnosis, the chemo and the surgery, remission, and then the relapse, and where we were today; his face was a mask of shock and guilt that he'd been so disconnected from us while all this was going on; I told him Mom had forbidden me from telling him, and I think that's what hurt him most.

"I was only eight hours away..." he murmured, "if you'd called me I would have been here that night...", and, angry as I was, my heart broke for him; he'd left us behind, but we'd left him out. I don't know who was right and who was wrong, but it was done, as impossible to recall or make right as words spoken in anger, and now he'd come home to grief and recrimination.

It was then, at that point, that I decided that it was time to let all that stuff go; no matter how I beat him up over this, it was nowhere near what he was going to do to himself; he needed me now, and I needed him to be my rock, because there was no-one else left.

*

Davey's reunion with Mom was as heartbreaking as it was tragic; the guilt and regret were almost palpable, his horror at how Mom had deteriorated was plain to see, no matter how well he tried to hide it; when he left, she was a fit and pretty 40 year-old housewife, and now in just a few short years she'd turned into a brittle, fragile, aged husk of her former self; when she called him 'Darling Boy', her one pet name for him, I could see the muscles of his neck and arms corded and straining, and his knuckles showing white as he tried desperately not to break down.

When he hugged her closely, carefully, the face he turned to me over her shoulder was that of a frightened boy, not the man he'd become, knowledge of her impending departure writ plainly there; of course, he was a doctor now, he must have seen this dozens of times, but that had obviously not hardened him; he was still our Davey, and now, at ninth and last, he was back with us again.

A family friend drove him to the funeral home so he could say his last words to Daddy; of course, Daddy was Davey's Daddy before he was mine, and Davey had as deep a connection with him as I had, something I'd forgotten in all my anger and confusion, but I still couldn't go with him, not to see Daddy like that, cold and waxen, all trace of warmth and vitality gone and just the shell left for us to mourn over.

When he came back he was silent, drawn; he looked weary, beat-down, and older than his years, but even after travelling all the way from England, he still he carried Mom up to her room, gently tucked her in and made her comfortable, checked her meds, and sat next to her holding her hand, just like Daddy used to. When I looked in on them a little later, they were both fast asleep, still holding hands, so I tip-toed away.

I'd had this long speech ready about why it had to take him eight years to come home, didn't he know it was too late now, blah-blah-blah, but Mom kind of defused that; while he was saying his goodbye, she gave me the rundown on what it was like for him as a medical student in Britain.

The last eight years hadn't been any stroll through the park for him, and if I'd ever once relented and actually spoken to him, I'd have learned for myself just how tough it was on him; he was a junior doctor, which meant they worked him like a dray-horse, day in and day out; it was a test of commitment and character, and he endured five years of that, not counting his first year as a lowly medical student; that was why Mom had refused to tell him what was happening at home; he'd worked too hard, and given too much, to lose it all. He was in the middle of his second year training to be a cardiologist when we got the news about Mom, and then lost Daddy a year later.

When I understood that, I got where those lines at the corners of his eyes had come from; he lived perpetually on the cusp of exhaustion, no real vacation time, no time-off to get into trouble and do the things students did, nothing but work, study, and more work again. Davey was studying at a prestigious teaching hospital in London, not a college, so he was learning medicine and surgical technique right up there at the sharp end, and constantly burning the candle at both ends to try and keep up with such a punishing regimen.

When Mom explained all this to me, how committed and single-minded he'd had to be to get through it, most of my anger evaporated; he'd set out to prove he could make a difference, he'd stuck it out, and followed in his Daddy's footsteps, and Mom was proud of him for being the man he was. And so was I; now all I had to do was somehow get through what was coming next.

*

The funeral was as bad as I thought it would be; Davey had organized as much as he could, and the funeral home had helped him when he drew a blank, because it was pointless asking Mom or me, we just couldn't get our heads around what we were doing, here and now, in this place; it was unreal and scary, so we leaned on Davey and hoped he'd make it come out right.

We put Daddy to rest the way he'd always said he wanted to go, his ashes scattered over the hills and forests by a buddy of his with an old biplane, and that was how it was done, end of chapter.

Mom was my strength through the whole thing; frail as she was, she still gave me what I needed to get through it, me and Davey; he wandered through the whole thing with a vague look of disbelief on his face, like he never thought he'd be doing this. Intuition told me what it was; he'd lost two dads now, and soon he was losing Mom; I'd been missing from his life for so long, and had given him such a sharp and cold welcome home he obviously didn't feel like I was part of him anymore. I could feel him withdrawing, preparing himself to be alone again, and I didn't know how to get past that...

Mom and Daddy had always talked about retiring to Maine; we'd vacationed there when we were kids. Mom said it reminded her of England in the Summer, some place she called 'The West Country', so Davey went ahead and bought a house for us in Bar Harbor, Mom's favorite, picture-postcard place.

I don't know how he did it; he just made a call and a couple days later we had a new house, but it was already too late; Mom passed away in her sleep two nights after Daddy's funeral. Davey found her, and came and told me, and held me while I fell apart all over again; first Daddy, now Mom. What had I done to be dealt one paralyzing blow after another like this?

Davey was my lifeline, he kept me from going out of my mind, and maybe I helped him too; he's never said, but it was a hammer-blow to him, too; I saw how he was almost crushed under the weight of Mom's loss, but he kept it together somehow, and he kept me together, don't ask me how, while he went through the whole thing again, another funeral hard on the heels of Daddy's, and yet another truck-load of grief, guilt, and loss to burden him.

Once Mom's funeral was over and it was just the two of us, the question of leaving Des Moines came up again. There was no way I was going to live alone in that house, not with Mom and Daddy there in every single piece of furniture, every ornament, book, and knick-knack; their personalities were stamped so deeply and indelibly into that house I'd be bumping up against them forever, and I wouldn't let myself he haunted like that.

Davey agreed that a clean break was what I needed, and while he asked me to come back to England with him, I didn't think I'd fit in, not half-way around the world, so we moved half-way across the country instead, to Maine, and began trying to get to know each other again.

*

Living with Davey, actually sharing a house with the man he'd become, one so different from the boy who'd gone away, had its own unique set of problems. For one, while all the upheaval and loss we'd endured had matured both of us, all the things I'd been feeling for Davey hadn't gone away; I'd just pushed them down and sat on the lid while we tried to deal with our loss, and now they were emerging again, only this time he was right here. Half of me wanted to throw myself on him and desperately declare my love for him, in the hope that tweeting birds and little cherubs would orbit around us as he swept me off my feet.

The other half thought that would be a very bad idea indeed; he'd shown no signs of anything other than a completely proper brotherly concern and affection, and a little voice inside told me that taking any kind of aggressive lead with him would probably freak him out and drive him back to London forever.

So I left him alone, and spent most of my time in my room, either crying over Mom and Daddy, or crying over him. When I did slip downstairs for a drink, he'd be sitting in the sitting room with the TV muted, Mom's photo albums on his lap, his eyes bright with unshed tears. I knew he was hurting. I could see it when he couldn't see me. But I didn't know how to make that initial overture, how to let him know it was alright to be as sad as he was, because he was obviously being the strong one for both of us and holding it all in.

I spent so much time moping around uselessly, unable to say what I wanted, unable to detect any signs of interest from him, and incapable of wanting anyone else, not that I had much choice. The locals were all retirees or weekend New Englanders from Manhattan and the nightlife consisted of oyster bars, crab-shacks, and lobster-stands, and a few bars or taverns I couldn't go into anyway; so my default entertainment was Davey, and he was too busy being my big brother to notice me.

This went on for weeks; sometimes I'd slip into my skin-tight jeans and a plaid shirt a couple sizes too small and sashay around in front of him, but to no avail; his 'Big Brother' radar was running at full gain, and his 'Willya look at that ass!' instincts were just not functional when it came to me. It's not even like he'd take the occasional sneaky peek at my ass if he thought I wasn't looking; he just never even noticed. I was desperate to find some way to pique his libido, because I know my brother, and I was pretty damned sure he was neither a monk nor keeping himself pure for Jesus; God made him gorgeous for a reason, and I was it; now all I had to do was work out what was going to reel him in...

He never went out socializing or bar-hopping of a weekend, so I couldn't take him dancing and maybe rub against him provocatively; his hospital would email him all kinds of paperwork and junk, so he'd spend the week doing chores, grocery shopping, other stuff around the place, living mostly by himself while I moped and cried in my room, and his weekends writing reports and reviewing surgical notes.

I did try and take an interest, reading over his shoulder, sometimes even jumping ahead and asking him a question once in a while, which seemed to please him, but some of the digital photo's his department mailed him were stomach churning, to say the least, so I stopped doing that.

At last, though, I reached the tipping point; I knew that he was considering returning to Britain very soon, and if he took me there then bang would go any chance of getting him to myself; he had a life, friends, maybe even girls there; it was a small place, and once he told people I was his kid sister any possibility of having him the way I wanted would be dead in the water.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I'd been scanning the porn landscape on a regular basis, trying to figure out just what it was men of his type found most appealing, and I reasoned that he was a man of the world in every sense, what he'd most likely want was a woman who fit into that adventurous, uninhibited mold, one who'd take her fun and not be an albatross around his neck. So that's who I became: Lori Adventure-Slut, Playgirl of The Western World. If that didn't stop him in his tracks nothing would...