For My Sister

In my mind, I have written you a thousand times to finally begin our relationship, though I can’t bring myself to write even the first line. There is so much to say that a physical letter, let alone a measly email or Facebook message, could not begin to encapsulate it. How would I even start? “Dear Heidi.” Too formal. “Heidi.” Too confrontational. “Hey, Heidi.” Too conversational. When was the last time we spoke? Have we ever?

I was twelve and you were thirty-two at our last family vacation. We stayed at the barracks in Santee, along with our brother Ryan and our cousins. The walls were white cinderblock, the floor a white tile. The bedroom I slept in had two twin beds, one for me and one for our cousin Alyssa. It felt more like an asylum than a vacation home, with the crooked drawers and the bedbugs that attacked only half our family, but it was in some gorgeous South Carolina woods and on the same lake where our grandfather lived. The family was all together: Grandpa Harry and Grandma Ruth, Aunt Susie and Aunt Debbie and Mom, our cousins and second cousins and cousins once- and twice-removed.

Outside, the family played games of corn hole and hillbilly golf. Maple and sycamore trees enclosed the patch of orange dirt that made up the front yard. Uncle Mike grilled hamburgers and hotdogs. Ryan’s girls and your son played with toy trucks in the dirt, all of them too young to join in our games but not too young to steal a bean bag or golf ball when we weren’t looking. The sun was shining through the gaps in the foliage overhead and in my memory, everyone is happy.

“Go inside and grab my camera,” our mother instructed me, wanting to photograph her grandchildren playing together.

Inside the barracks, you saw me searching around the living room. Three tan couches faced in toward a TV, each couch with a side table covered in junk.

“What are you looking for?” you asked, passing through the living room on your way to the kitchen.

“I’m looking for my mom’s—I mean, Mom’s camera.” Referring to her as our collective mother still felt strange. I had nobody with whom to share a mother, as you and Ryan were already grown by the time I was born.

If you had heard the catch in my words, you didn’t let on. You didn’t know where the camera was, so I went back outside empty-handed.

Dear Heidi,

I have a good relationship with Ryan. I babysit his children, even though they are old enough to watch themselves. He went to my concerts, my graduation, and even on some college visits with me. We still talk late into the night when I stay over. He’s grateful because he doesn’t relate to his coworkers or the other suburban parents, and I’m grateful to have a nuclear family to spend time with. Only three years younger than you, he’s eighteen years older than me. I looked up to Ryan when I was a child. I wanted to be a computer programmer when I grew up, just like him. He has a job, a house, a wife, and a happy life, which was more than I ever saw from my own father. When I learned what godparents were, I asked Ryan and his wife if they would be mine.

The summer after I graduated from high school, Ryan and I were drinking beers in his backyard. We stayed out there long after his wife corralled the children inside for bedtime, long enough to watch the sunset and the fireflies come out. That night he told me that he was proud of me. He was proud of the heart I poured into my high school’s band program, proud of me graduating with top honors and enrolling in a university. I had put myself in a good position to leave my hometown and learn to grow on my own. It felt good to have his approval.

He also apologized to me that night for not being around more when I was growing up. It was the first night of many where we stayed up late and he would give me snippets of his childhood to piece together. My parents—my mother and Keith—were a mystery to me, especially the twenty years before I was born. You know as well as I do, Heidi, that our mother is mysterious. Maybe you remember her as an open book who wore her trauma on her sleeve, but for me, her youth was pieced together through offhand comments and stories passed along from other family members. You undoubtedly must also remember a different version of Keith, an angrier, more violent man. A man who took what he wanted but sabotaged himself before he could accomplish his goals. Would you believe me if I told you how withered he is now?

“I imagine that our childhoods were very similar but at the same time vastly different,” Ryan said. I watched the fireflies rise from the grass in his backyard, like raindrops in reverse. I nodded.

“I was ready to leave all that behind and cut Mom and Keith out, just like Heidi did. But when you were born, I knew I couldn’t leave you alone. I knew I needed to be in your life—my baby sister’s life—and maybe protect her from anything I could’ve.” He paused and looked down at his beer, playing with the label on the glass bottle. “You have to understand, I couldn’t go back. It was too hard, and I wish I had made a better effort because I know I was missing for a lot of those years, but I just couldn’t.”

“I understand,” I said, focusing my eyes from the fireflies to his dimly illuminated face. “It’s okay. You have already done more than enough.”

Heidi,

How are you? I’m fine. I live in Kalamazoo now, more than a hundred miles from my parents. I understand why you kept your distance from me. It wasn’t me you were avoiding but the environment I was in. I’m the product of your mother and your stepfather, two people you want nothing to do with. There was no way you could contact me, especially as a child, without contacting one of them. You moved to Florida when I was six, unlike Ryan, who was only a couple of towns over. The geographical distance was necessary for you to heal. I understand.

I hope you know that I’m not like them, Mom and Keith. Old age made them diluted versions of how you remember them, but I can imagine what they would’ve been like twenty years younger. I don’t have the anger or the self-sabotaging tendencies of Keith. I finish what I start, and I’d like to think that I do them well. I don’t tolerate toxic people as Mom does. Maybe I don’t get as emotionally invested as she does, but it makes it easier to cut ties when needed. Maybe you and I share that quality, Heidi.

I don’t understand why you couldn’t have contacted me when I was older, when Facebook existed and I became more autonomous. I’ve been on my own for years now and I still haven’t heard from you. The only things I know about you have been whispered late at night. Ryan told me what happened in Phoenix, when he was in seventh grade and you were in tenth. He told me how obsessed Keith was with you, how he almost physically hurt a fourteen-year-old because he thought the boy liked you.

I know of how Keith came into your bedroom one night with a flashlight in his hand, his other hand sliding up your leg. I know you told your little brother that you both needed to return to Michigan immediately. When you told Mom years later, she didn’t take you seriously.

Ryan cried when he told me. I wanted to reach out and comfort him, let him know I was there for him, that his emotions were valid. Instead, I sat on the barstool, feeling so small in the moment. What do you say to comfort your hero that won’t feel disingenuous?

I was and still am horrified for you. I am shattered to think of the weight you carry with you, of how your loved ones have failed you. But a small, selfish part of myself is angry. Were you ever worried that the same thing would happen to me? I felt betrayed, left behind, as I had my entire life. Like there’s a mystery I didn’t have enough clues to solve, like I started a movie halfway through and couldn’t catch up with the plot. You ran away and left me behind, and how am I supposed to reach out to somebody who never gave me a chance? Please, just let me prove myself to you.

Hey, Heidi,

I genuinely hope that you found what you needed to be happy, that you healed and allowed yourself to move on. You have a beautiful family. I’m glad that Ryan’s family visits yours every other year, that your children and his can know each other, that they’re given the chance to have simple and happy childhoods together.

I’ve resented Keith less for how he treated me than for how he made the home dangerous for you and Ryan. He stole the healthy relationship Mom could have had with you both. Is it stupid to resent a version of somebody I’ve never met, to hate a man who was once a monster but now a painfully human whisper of his former self? I don’t know if he feels sorry for what he’s done. Knowing him, he has probably convinced himself that most of that stuff has never happened or that it wasn’t his fault because somebody was once just as mean to him.

One of the hardest parts of growing up was learning to humanize my father. It was easy when I could make him out to be a one-dimensional monster. I know now that he has a traumatic past of being constantly beaten and belittled by his mother and older brothers, of not being able to save his little sister from the horrors of their household. He sabotages his successes and relationships because he was taught he wasn’t worthy of those things. He’s a textbook example of how abuse is cyclical.

Now, at almost sixty, he has three different types of lung disease. He’s dying. There’s a softness to him now—not to right old wrongs necessarily, but in the way he crumpled when I told him that the bread he feeds the birds makes them sick. I don’t know if I can call what I feel towards him pity, but there’s a softness now to the hatred and fear I once felt. I sent him a bird feeder with birdseed that Father’s Day.

None of this is to say that you should forgive him, Heidi. Maybe he doesn’t deserve forgiveness from you, nor are you obligated to give it to him. I just don’t know where I am supposed to stand. I have wonderful memories from childhood of riding on his shoulders while trick-or-treating, of him carrying me to my bed almost every night until I was eight. He built me a swing in our living room and a treehouse in our front yard with a dumbwaiter so he could send snacks up to me. The worst he ever did to me was become resentful while I was in middle school. He’d corner me when Mom wasn’t home and demand I tell him why I didn’t love him. The whiplash from his unwavering love to his disdain destroyed me, but in a different way than you were destroyed. My hurt came from a love taken away, where yours was from a love never given.

I may have developed an anxiety disorder directly related to those events, but I can look back now and recognize he was in one of his many self-sabotaging relapses. He cheated on our mother and she kicked him out. He started having seizures and went on medication that made him act like he had dementia. It would be within my capacity to forgive him, especially with the critical distance I’ve gained from growing up and moving away. I came out mostly intact from childhood, more so than probably you and Ryan combined, though I am angry with the injustices he’s done to others. I don’t know how to forgive a man who psychologically damaged people I love so much. I want to be angry on their behalf, to fight their battle alongside them out of solidarity, I guess.

But I also may be the only person who has the capacity to forgive Keith and whose forgiveness may finally give him the calm he’s been searching for his whole life. He’s irredeemably human, just as I am. After he’s gone, would I feel better for cutting out a toxic man or being one of the only people to show a broken man kindness, whether he deserves it or not? I don’t have an answer to that, Heidi, and I doubt you do either.

I wish we had a relationship where you could have told me your stories. I’ve heard of your life from so many perspectives, none of which your own. I want to give you your voice back, let you tell me firsthand about how you felt and why you ran. I don’t know where we’d even begin though, and I suppose you’re in the same position. Do you ever think about me? Did you worry about me when I was a child? I hope you never harbored any guilt for not being there. I also hope you know that I believe you, even if nobody else did. I believe you, and I don’t want to fail you, too.

I hope to hear from you soon.

Love,