I was 10 when I found my older brother’s hamster dead in its food bowl. 

He was at baseball practice for another hour, and I knew our mother would walk through the living room within that time, still wearing her work shoes. Black kitten heels, closed-toed, the brand label worn from the mesh sole. The sound of them against the hardwood floor brought on a sense of impending doom–she wasn’t one for empathy. Nor did she like pets. I knew I had to keep this secret.

She was upstairs talking to Dad, yelling at him while he took it. I opened the latch on the cage, stuck my hand in, and was careful not to come too close to the feeling of death. I grabbed a handful of paper bedding to cover the creature with her fur ruffled and resting eyes until she was hidden. 

Later in the evening after our mother went to bed, Dad took his usual place on the front porch to drink beer and watch the smog roll over the Kentucky sky. I followed Gabe outside to the old, hanging willow nestled in the deep corner of the backyard beside the firepit. I stalked him from a few feet back as he lowered the corpse of his hamster into a small hole. 

The weight I felt on my chest when I discovered its death was nothing compared to how I felt watching Gabe having to grapple with it. He was a year older, but his only friends were Peanut and misery. He loved animals and hated me because I had what our parents wanted him to have: a need to be liked.

He took his hands out of the grave he had dug and rubbed his eyes, and I said, “You shouldn’t touch your eyes after holding a dead animal.”

He said, “Shut up, Taylor!” and punched the rigid autumn dirt with a fist. I felt the force of it in my gut. His grief constricted me to stillness. “I know you covered her up.”

I quieted. As if that would assuage him. “I didn’t want Mom to see and throw her away.”

“Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me find her when you knew?” 

“I don’t know.” 

Gabe sniffled and slumped sideways against the tree, legs crossed as he peered into the open grave. He took a moment before scooping up a handful of dirt and letting it slip through his fingers and back into the ground. I remember thinking about Genesis, our mother read it to us. About how we will return to the same land God made us from. And how it never mentioned what death was supposed to make you feel, only that it has to happen.

Gabe repeated the motion and asked, “Why did Mom tell me to ask if you were okay? Peanut’s my hamster and she told me to ask if you were okay.”

“I’m sorry. I’m fine.”

He was crying, using his sleeves to wipe his eyes. “I don’t care how you feel! She’s my hamster! Why did Mom tell me to ask if you were okay?”

“I don’t know.”

Gabe punched the dirt again. “I hate you.”

I started crying too, whether it was empathy or fear or grief I don’t know.

Gabe turned to glare. “You’re a crybaby. And a bad sister.”

I remember worrying that he could read my mind, wondering if that was why he decided to hate me. I said, “I’m not.” 

“You’re not what?”

I knew what he was doing, though he didn’t know anything but his overwhelming sadness. 

I said, “I’m not a crybaby.” 

I came outside in the first place to sit down beside him. But I never did. I was afraid of his grief. I was afraid of myself.

—  

I was 17, heartbroken, godless, breathless. I leaned over the cinderblock pit and tried to light a fire. I had never tried before, but suddenly it felt more important than ever to do it. To burn something, to do something with all the monstrous feelings I didn’t ask for. 

I didn’t know how to use a lighter. Boys always did it for me, at the parties I lied to my mother about attending and begged Dad not to say anything about when he caught me sneaking in later. I knew an end would come to anything like that. The boys, the parties, the lying, and the begging.

I let the wet grass seep into my vintage Levis as I kneeled, trying to keep the lighter aflame long enough to light crumpled newspaper. The air was static. There was no reason for it to be hard, but my hands shook and my rings kept restricting my fingers. 

I heard footsteps sliding through the grass behind me. I hoped they would just turn away. But they didn’t stop. 

“I heard what happened,” was all Gabe said, though him being the one to say it was enough for me to whip around. He looked the same for the most part, like me but more masculine. And, by the frown he sported and his dark eyebags, much more miserable. 

“Aren’t you supposed to be at school? Don’t you have baseball to play and animals to dissect? Didn’t you say you weren’t going to come back home unless someone died?”

“What’s with all the questions? You look like shit.” Gabe scoffed. I could have said the same for him, but I didn’t. “Mom called me. She told me what happened. I was already planning to come home. Figured you might need the support.”

It had been almost a year since Gabe left for college a few hours away. I hadn’t missed him much.

 I clenched the lighter and watched my fist turn ghostly white. “I didn’t even tell her.”

“She said Finn told her that you were a manipulative liar. He apologized to Mom for ‘being unable to fix her’. That asshole.” 

“Did he tell her my secret?”

Gabe paused and sat down across from me. His eyes were dull, all of that gold color lost.  

“Hand me that lighter.”

I asked again, “Does Mom know what I told him?” 

It was such a nice lighter. It was Finn’s, the metal one he always kept in the front pocket of his Carhartts if I didn’t have it. The flame it drew was pretty. Dark. Something about it was mesmerizing. Captivating enough that I didn’t return it after he broke up with me.

I thought about our second date, sitting in his truck in the school parking lot. He rubbed his calloused palm up and down my thigh and showed me the lighter after he lit our joint. He told me how much it meant to him and said to hold onto it. He said that he trusted me with it. 

Gabe sighed slowly. “Yeah. Mom knows. He told her a lot of things.”

“Is she upset?” 

The question stalked me like a predator waiting to attack. No sudden movements, no sudden noises. I had a gutwrenching feeling that I had fallen into a trap. 

“She’s scared that it’s true. She was backtracking before she even told me what Finn had all said, trying to convince herself that it wasn’t her fault that you turned out like, um, this.”

I flipped the cap of the lighter on and off and never lit it. I looked at my rings against the lighter’s shining body. The amethyst Dad gave me for my sixteenth birthday, the bubblegum opal I bought with my first paycheck from the clothing alterations place I worked at. The thin gold bands that I borrowed from my mother’s jewelry collection, and my favorite–a dark gold ring with a darker, almost brown-colored ruby that Finn had bought for me after a year together. Finn had said it made him think of my eyes.

I took that ring off and pocketed it. Then I asked Gabe, “What’s ‘like this’ supposed to mean?”

Gabe said, “Well, ‘a deviant’ were Mom’s exact words. But I think you might just be… misguided. That’s what Dad said.”

I let myself fall back into the grass. From my view, I couldn’t see the colors of the sunset any longer, it was just dark sky stretching over everything. “Do you think Mom’s going to kill me? Is that why you came home?”

“No. I dropped out, Taylor.”

“Oh,” I said, too preoccupied with the thought of our mother killing me to care very much about his response. “Why?”

“I just couldn’t do it anymore.” 

I didn’t ask him to explain. I slid the lighter across the concrete before I could think of a reason not to.

He picked it up and I listened to the chuff of the sparkwheel as it struck the stone. Then he asked, “It’s Finn’s, isn’t it? You must be pissed at him.”

I was. I wanted to kill him. I told Gabe, “I would’ve done the same in his shoes.”

It was true. Finn wouldn’t look at me after I told him I wasn’t a girl. I didn’t want to look at me either. I wanted to kill him and I wanted to kill me, too.

Gabe shut the lighter. “What? Taylor, he knows what he’s doing. He knows how Mom is. He’s trying to hurt you.”

“I didn’t expect him to stay with me after I told him. I just couldn’t pretend any longer.”

Gabe finally tended to the fire pit. The lighter shuddered once more and the newspaper caught fire. He asked, “How long have you known?”

“Long enough.”

Gabe kicked my bare feet to get me to move further away when the logs finally started burning. “Are you sure this is what you want?”

“Yes.” I couldn’t believe he was asking me that. “Are you sure dropping out of college is what you want?” 

I felt myself gag, an inconveniently empathetic reflex, when he whispered, “I don’t know what I want.”

I didn’t say it, but what I really wanted was to die. To return to the Earth and come back right in the next life.

I wondered if that’s what he really wanted, too.

— 

I was 25 and four beers in, opening a fifth Natural Light when Gabe sat beside me at the firepit. Our mother was holding a retirement party for herself inside the house, its warm light radiating from the windows. It was a June night. It was cold. 

Gabe asked, “What are you doing out here?”

“What does it look like?”
“Uh, avoiding everyone?”

I scoffed. “Mom told me to go somewhere else so I wouldn’t embarrass her anymore.”

She had introduced me to her coworker, Wendy, as her daughter and I corrected her. When the moment passed, our mother told me to leave the party.

Gabe didn’t respond. I said, “You know what was actually embarrassing?” 

He obviously didn’t care. He looked tired. Hollow. “What.” 

I was drunk and I cared a lot. “Wendy from oh my God, so prestigious ‘Capstone Property Advisors’ thinking she could pull off that green peplum dress. And her husband, Jesus Christ, Gabe! He was wearing this fucking awful gray suit that didn’t match her at all and had to be from like, Banana Republic. And I thought these Capstone fucks would at least have the money to get a blazer tailored, the way Mom idolizes them like they’re realtor Gods. I hadn’t even started drinking yet! And I was the embarrassing one. Bullshit.”

Gabe pulled out a box of Newports and lit one before putting them back in his jeans.

I continued, “You know, she bragged to Finn’s mom about my job at Thom Browne. Then as soon as we’re alone she tells me, ‘nobody needs to know that you’re mentally ill.’ And oh my God, she asked why I went and changed the ‘perfect body’ God made for me like she didn’t get a nose job all those years ago.”

Gabe looked forward into the fire that I was tending, it burned high. He cocked an eyebrow and took a drag. 

He wasn’t listening. He murmured, “I didn’t know you knew how to start a fire.”

I wanted to punch him. “You don’t care about anything I have to say, do you?”

He shook his head, not in agreement but in disbelief that I was even asking, and blew out a long stream of smoke.

“None of you do. You all call me selfish for wanting to be myself, well, someone has to care about me. Someone has to like me.”

Gabe kicked the ground with a sneer. “I’ve never called you selfish.”

Dad hadn’t either. He didn’t do much of anything, though. When I came storming through the garage after the sour encounter with our mother and stole a six-pack of his beer, he looked up from his Consumer Reports magazine for no more than a brief moment before returning to his reading. He didn’t say anything. I had always been too much for him to handle, so he always watched from afar. 

I looked over at Gabe who was tapping the ashes from his cigarette over the fire. I said, “I knew I shouldn’t have come.”

He said, “Why did you, then? New York’s a long way from here.”

“And seven years is a long time to hate someone. I thought things would be different.”

Gabe looked down at where his shoes made imprints in the dirt. “Well, you look different. You sound different. You’re probably freaking everyone out.”

“And you’re all making me feel like a freak.”

Gabe picked up a log from the stack I pulled together and threw it on the fire, warranting an explosion of smoke. 

Finally, he said, “Why do you care so much?”  

I started crying. Gabe closed his eyes, put his head in his free hand, and ignored me.

I couldn’t take it. I remember screaming and then punting my foot forward. We watched my beer can as it sailed through the air and landed on its side, a puddle pooling beside it in the yellowed grass. 

I dressed well for the occasion. I wore Alexander McQueen! A shirt with an embroidered collar that showed off how broad my shoulders had gotten. I had retired the sentimental crystal rings for silver bands. My hands looked like they belonged to a man, not a scared teenage girl. I looked amazing, I made sure of it. It didn’t matter, though. Not a bit.

“Taylor–” Gabe started when I tucked my knees to my chest and cried into the fabric of my pants. Thom Browne, I had helped design them, and it was meaningless. He asked, “What do you want from me?”

“I want you to look at me.” 

Gabe turned towards me slowly. Cautiously. We locked eyes for the first time that night and in seven years. 

His facial expression was indecipherable. 

I was just relieved to be seen.  

— 

“Hey,” Gabe calls out, stretching his neck to look back at me walking towards him. “I didn’t expect you to come.”

He’s still wearing his secondhand suit from the funeral a few hours ago, though he’s forgone the ill-fitting blazer. His eyes are red and his cheeks are flushed. I ignore it, but I know he would point it out if our roles were reversed. 

“Well. Here I am.” 

I walk across the concrete pad overgrown with weeds and take a look around the firepit. Gabe is lighting dark, wet logs and breathing through his mouth as if the smoke billowing up isn’t suffocating. He’s sitting on the only uncollapsed cinderblock, so I sit at the base of the willow a few feet away. 

A decade has done a lot of damage.

I close my eyes and think about the last time I was here, wishing I wasn’t sober. Gabe’s voice pierces me. “You’re sitting on Peanut.”

I shift to the other side of the tree, thinking about the whiskey on my kitchen counter, over 500 miles away. “There probably isn’t any more Peanut. Rodents probably ate her.”

“Why would you say that?”

“Sorry. I don’t know how to deal with death.”

“Oh, believe me, I know,” Gabe says and pokes at the fire with a long stick. “Did you cry at the funeral?”

“No.”

Gabe pokes at the fire again, dust and ash flying up. “You cried when Peanut died.”

He looks like a child, fascinated with the way the logs collapse, eyes glittering. I say, “No, I cried then because you yelled at me.”

“Yeah, you can cry at just about anything but death. That’s strange,” Gabe says. He drops his stick to count on his fingers, “Me yelling at you, Finn yelling at you, Mom yelling at you, Dad letting Mom yell at you, being ignored, being disliked. You know, everything.”

Gabe picks another log up to add to the low-burning fire as I ignore the hit. I already knew all of that. 

I ask him, “Why are you lighting wet logs? You’re going to be here forever waiting for them to go out. I could smell the smoke from the driveway. It’s terrible.”

“It’s nostalgic. You don’t have to be here, you know. I’ll be fine.”

“I know. But do you really want to be here by yourself?”

We watch another log break into two. Gabe picks his stick back up to poke the fire and says, “I’m not. Dad’s inside.” 

“He doesn’t count. He can’t help you grieve when he’s going to keep all of his grief pent up inside and it’ll be there until he dies. Come on.”

Gabe indulges me with a snicker before asking, “Taylor, what are you doing here?”

I want to say, ‘You looked pathetic and I felt bad for you.’

I say, “I’m trying to be here for you,” which is also true.

“Could have used that when Peanut died. Or when I dropped out of college. Or when I decided to be a fucking mechanic,” Gabe mumbles, but turns around to flash a brief smile. “You suck at this.”

He pokes the fire. A 36-year-old man shouldn’t be so infatuated with hitting flaming logs. I say, “I know. I’m a selfish asshole.”

“I never called you selfish.”

“Oh my God, I know. Shut up.” I look away from the fire-prodding and down at Peanut’s grave, the grass completely grown in and the little gravestone gone, as if nothing was ever there. I wonder how long it will take for the grass to grow back over our mother’s grave, and how long it will take for the memory of her to decay.

Gabe grabs yet another log and sets it in the metal firepit. 

“How many more of those are you going to put on?”

“I don’t know. Enough to last until the sun goes down.”

Gabe looks restless, constantly moving. I watch him. 

After a few minutes, I stand up and move to sit beside him in the grass. He acknowledges me with a nod and returns to poking the fire, staring into it like an answer to how he feels will be there, waiting. There’s a lot I want to say.

I look into the fire, too. There’s nothing there. We sit, basking in silence, waiting for answers to come anyway. We watch the conflict of flame and dust and ash and I stay with him until it dies.