I wish I could say the same about everyone else in the house.
My siblings left as soon as they were able. Matthew first, then Jake, then Kirk, then Jessica, each one relocating to a different city and building a life that pointed away from Ridgemont and away from each other and away from the house on Clement Street where our grandfather had given up a portion of his retirement and the whole of his private life to ensure we had somewhere to grow up. They left and they did not look back in any meaningful way, which I understood. Young people need to leave. But what they also left behind, what none of them seemed to think required examination, was a particular piece of understanding about me, about the accident, about what my existence had cost.
I was sixteen when I heard Matthew say it. I was passing through the hallway and his voice was loud with the confidence of someone who believes he is not being overheard. If she hadn’t been born, he said, they wouldn’t have been driving that night. He meant my parents. He meant the accident. He meant me. I stood in the hallway for a moment after the words landed and then I walked to my room and sat on the edge of my bed and let it settle into me the way things settle when you have always half-known them but needed to hear them in plain language to understand that the half-knowing was accurate. My siblings had never liked me. They had been polite when required and absent when possible and the resentment ran under everything like a current nobody named because naming it would have required them to examine whether it was fair, and fairness was not something any of them seemed to be in a hurry to consider.
Grandpa tried. Family dinners, organized with the focused optimism of a man who believed that a shared table was a form of argument he could make on my behalf. They would come, my siblings, when their schedules allowed, and they would say the right things and eat the food and then leave again, and the current ran uninterrupted under all of it. He knew. He watched the room the way he watched everything, quietly and with great attention, and he adjusted his behavior accordingly, making sure that when he was alone with me the temperature was different, that there was room for me to be something other than what my siblings had decided I was.
