Read Isis for Free Online Page A

about that trunk they will be put in when they die.”
     
    My mother, whose health had not returned, remained ill through even the summer season and rarely left her room.
     
    We had become a house of invalids, a house of silences, and a house of sorrow.
     

4
     
    I asked Spence to walk with me to Harvey’s grave on a particularly golden day. I still used a cane, and would need his support as we walked the uneven paths through the gardens along the stone walls.
     
    At the doors of the Tombs, I said a few prayers si lently. Spence sat down in the grass and offered me his arm to curl up beneath, for his mood had changed. We sat as if we were little children, rather than a girl of sixteen and a man of nearly twenty. We sat the way Harvey and I had often sat down together, out on the grassy summer cliffs.
     
    “Are you all right these days?” he asked.
     
    “Not too much all right,” I said.
     
    “I worry for you.”
     
    “I worry for all of us,” I said.
     
    “I’ve seen you at night. When you walk up and down the stairs.”
     
    “Do I do that?” I asked, not sure I believed him.
     
    He nodded. “At first I thought you might be sleep-walking.”
     
    “Perhaps I am.”
     
    “Perhaps,” he said. “What about this?” He lifted my arm so that my sleeve fell down a bit. There, on my forearm, were small marks, as if a cat had clawed me.
     
    “I suppose it will take a while to heal.”
     
    He looked me in the eyes as if not believing me.
     
    “My shoulder still hurts, sometimes,” I said.
     
    “But these,” he tapped my forearm. “These aren’t from your fall.”
     
    “Yes they are,” I said.
     
    We were both silent for several minutes. I had begun wishing intensely that Harvey was with us.
     
    “I miss him so much,” Spence said. “You know that, don’t you? I miss him so much. He’s the first person I ever knew in my life. That sounds absurd, but he was my twin. He’s half of me. And he’s gone forever. I knew him like I knew myself. We were different. Night and day. If he was good, I would be bad. If he was hard-working, I would be lazy. We had balance. And now, it’s gone. There is no balance. I don’t know how to be.”
     
    “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