Isis - Douglas Clegg [14]
“He’s still with us,” I said, softly.
“I know. I know. In that way that no one ever leaves,” and then he turned to me, sobbing as all of us sobbed at times, but mostly in private.
I held my older brother. For a moment, it was like being with Harvey again. I could pretend that his hair was parted on the right. I could pretend the birthmark was behind his ear; I could pretend I smelled lavender rather than that hint of dirt that Spence always had upon his skin.
But I knew there was no birthmark anywhere on Spence’s body.
I knew in my heart that Harvey would never hold me like this again.
I knew that Spence’s affection was about his vanity. He was not hurt because he missed Harvey. He was hurt because he no longer had a mirror to look at to remind himself of who he might be.
When his heaving sobs had ended, he drew back from me and lay back in the soft grass. “I go back to that day, in my mind,” Spence said.
“Please don’t,” I said.
“I was in the library when I heard the shouts. I went into the hall and saw Harvey running down from the other end, by the doors to mother’s room. He stared at me. Perhaps I imagined it. He moved so fast, how could he have stared? But he judged me then. He judged me. Perhaps he knew about Edyth. Perhaps he didn’t. He was my twin. We knew about each other, even when we didn’t speak of it. Perhaps he forgives me.”
“Yes,” I said. “He does. I know it.”
But I did not mean those words, for I did not forgive Spence, nor did I forgive Edyth. Nor would I allow Harvey to forgive them, for he was the best of our family. I would never forgive myself for my part in this, for if I had only fallen free from Edyth’s grasp, Harvey would never have cradled me to his death.
I missed my brother too much to allow his tragedy to be washed away in forgiveness like soapy water down a drain.
When Spence wandered off for a bit, overcome with a need for privacy, I drew up a twig from the ground and wrote in the dirt, in our secret ancient Chaldean magic language, OSIRIS, ISIS SEARCHES FOR YOU.
Beneath this, I drew one of the symbols of Isis herself—an ankh, the key of eternal life.
5
That night, feeling as if I had been too hard on my older brother for nearly a year, I climbed the stairs to his room. I would knock, and tell him that all was forgiven. That Harvey had blessed us all. That even the sorrow of our lives could be turned into a shining victory over death itself.
But outside his door, I heard her voice in his room.
She was with him.
Edyth.
I listened to their love-talk from the hall. When the lights had gone out in his room, I went to the window where Harvey had held on to me to protect me from death’s own embrace.
I peeled back the boards until my fingernails bled.
A shock of cool air burst through from the other side, and I looked out over the sunken garden and across the cliffs to the blackness that was both sea and sky.
I sang softly to the night, “Jack, swing up, and Jack swing down, up to the window, over the ground. Swing over the field and the garden wall—Watch out for Jack Hackaway if you should fall.”
6
My rages began then, and I could not contain them.
I found myself in the garden that night, beating my fists against the stone wall until it seemed the rock itself bled. In the cellars the next night, where no one could find me. I stood at the door of the Thunderbox Room and thought of Harvey there, washing up after working in the gardens all day, and out along the cliffs, looking at the locked doors of the Tombs and imagining the bones there, the death, the waste and end of all life.
The world is backwards, I thought.
The living should be dead.
The dead should be living.
The good should be victorious.
The evil should die and stay dead.
I