You Are Not a Stranger Here - Adam Haslett [28]
“He’ll be over again,” Owen said. Hillary nodded. They finished their dinner in silence. Afterward, neither had the appetite for the strawberries set out on the polished tray.
“I’ll do these,” he said when they’d stacked the dishes on the counter. He squeezed the green liquid detergent into the baking dish and watched it fill with water. “I could pour you a brandy if you like,” he said over his shoulder. But when he turned he saw his sister had left the room.
He rinsed the bowls and plates and arranged them neatly in the rows of the dishwasher. Under the warm running water, he sponged the wineglasses clean and set them to dry on the rack. When he’d finished, he turned the taps off, and then the kitchen was quiet.
He poured himself a scotch and took a seat at the table. The door to the garden had been left open and in the shadows he could make out the azalea bush and the cluster of rhododendron. Up the lane from where they’d lived as children, there was a manor with elaborate gardens and a moat around the house. An old woman they called Mrs. Montague lived there and she let them play on the rolling lawns and in the labyrinth of the topiary hedge. They would play for hours in the summer, chasing each other along the embankments, pretending to fish in the moat with a stick and string. He won their games of hide-and-go-seek because he never closed his eyes completely, and could see which way she ran. He could still remember the peculiar anger and frustration he used to feel after he followed her to her hiding place and tapped her on the head. He imagined that garden now, the blossoms of its flowers drinking in the cooler night air, the branches of its trees rejuvenating in the darkness.
From the front room, he heard a small sound—a moan let out in little breaths—and realized it was the sound of his sister crying.
He had ruined her life. He knew that now in a way he’d always tried not to know it—with certainty. For years he’d allowed himself to imagine she had forgotten Ben, or at least stopped remembering. He stood up from the table and crossed the room but stopped at the entrance to the hall. What consolation could he give her now?
Standing there, listening to her tears, he remembered the last time he’d heard them, so long ago it seemed like the memory of a former life: a summer morning when she’d returned from university, and they’d walked together over the fields in a brilliant sunshine and come to the oak trees, their green leaves shining, their branches heavy with acorns. She’d wept then for the first time in all the years since their mother had taken herself away. And Owen had been there to comfort her—his turn at last, after all she had done to protect him.
At the sound of his footsteps entering the hall, Hillary went quiet. He stopped again by the door to the front room. Sitting at the breakfast table, reading those letters from America, it wasn’t only Ben’s affection he’d envied. Being replaced. That was the fear. The one he’d been too weak to master.
Holding on to the banister, he slowly climbed the stairs, his feet pressing against the worn patches of the carpet. They might live in this silence the rest of their lives, he thought.
In his room, he walked to the window and looked again over the common.
When they were little they’d gone to the village on Sundays to hear the minister talk. Of charity and sacrifice. A Norman church with hollows worked into the stones of the floor by centuries of parishioners. He could still hear the congregation singing, Bring me my bow of burning gold! Bring me my arrows of desire! Their mother had sung with them. Plaintive voices rising. And did those feet in ancient time walk upon England’s mountains green? Owen could remember wanting to believe something about it all, if not the words of the Book perhaps the sorrow he heard in the music, the longing of people’s song. He hadn’t been in a church since his mother’s funeral. Over the years, views from the train or the sight