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The third time Natalie sees her dead brother, she’s high off her ass.
He’s leaned up against the streetlight. LEDs cast him in a prism of uneasy blue. Some days she misses the sunburnt yellow of sodium vapor; Henry probably has a whole spiel prepared about how they were worse for the environment, but all she knows is that the streets used to be warmer. He’s grinning, amused, as she keels over and vomits in the gutter.
“Go ahead,” she spits, the cocktail of stolen pills turning her stomach, the stupid club bass still ringing in her ears, “Say it.”
“Say what?”
Her knees sting from the concrete. The back of her throat burns. She says, “You got me. You win. Just one more way you’re better than your fucked up, junkie sister.”
The world is kind of hazy, but he lingers, like always, on the edges of it. His hands are in his pockets. He looks older than before, suddenly the full span of the eighteen years he would’ve been. The last time she’d seen him she’d been twelve and feverish and unsure of what to make of the strange figure coiled on her windowsill, but now she knows exactly who he is.
“I was gonna offer to hold your hair back,” he says languidly, “but I take it back. I hope you get puke in it.”
“Fuck off,” she tells him. She wipes the corner of her mouth on Henry’s sweater. “Haven’t you done enough?”
His laugh is the kind of thing that echoes. She hears it all the time. “Oh, sweetheart,” he smiles, and puts one gentle hand on her shoulder, “I’m just getting started.”
She’s not stupid. She’s not her mother, either; she knows he’s not real. It’s psychosomatic. A half-destructive, half-indulgent fantasy. It’s genetic, really, the natural product of a catastrophic household and probably a whole laundry list of inherited mental illnesses.
When she was a kid she’d wanted a sibling more than anything. She’d actually prayed for it, gotten all the way down on her knees, desperate for someone to swoop in and settle the brewing storm in her family, thinking that if only there was someone else who’d look at her, she’d be okay. Back then she’d been young and stupid enough to still believe there was someone out there who was listening. As if just to remind her of her place in it, the universe had sent her brother.
He was snarky and solid but not alive. He’d made idle conversation; she’d closed her eyes and asked him to leave. He hadn’t put up a fight then, he’d just slipped away without a word, as if he, like everyone else, had more important things to worry about than her.
He’s sitting on the kitchen counter when she gets home from school. Whatever’s on the stove is burning. Her dad is hunched over the sink, blood running down his wrist, standing very, very still.
“Dad?” Natalie’s bag is on the floor, she’s beside him before she even knows she’s moving. “Dad!” Her gaze snaps to her brother, “What did you do?”
He holds his hands up in surrender. Shrugs. The corners of his mouth are twisted, but not in a smile.
Her dad shudders as if coming back to life. “It’s alright, Nat,” he says suddenly. He looks at her. Clarity inches into his face. “It’s okay. I just cut myself chopping some veggies, see?” He lifts his hand to show her the shallow slice across his palm. Natalie remembers to breathe.
“Jesus, Dad.” She turns the faucet on, shoves his hand under it, watches the water chase the blood away. She doesn’t look back at her brother. “I thought—you were just standing there—”
Her dad’s eyes go somewhere else, just for a second. Her brother waves.
“No,” Natalie croaks. “Not again.”
Something crashes down in Dan’s expression. He blinks. “Hey, honey,” he reaches out and pulls her in, “It’s alright. I’m right here.” His good hand goes to her hair. She half wants to shove him away, sick to death of the too-little, too-lates, but she doesn’t, she just stands there. The pan on the stove puffs with smoke.
“It’s not going to work.” Her brother’s voice is raw. She feels her dad flinch, just a little. “You can’t just push me away again. It’s not that easy.”
No part of this has ever, ever been easy. Natalie wants to tell him to shut up, wants to scream at him until he slinks away again, but instead she ignores him, because she knows that it’s worse.
Her dad leans over to turn off the stove. “How about we get takeout, yeah?” He goes back to petting her hair. It makes her feel suddenly very young, like the little kid he used to sing to sleep. “Chinese, or something?” Natalie nods into his shoulder.
“Fuck you,” her brother fumes. “I’m not going anywhere.”
She’s not crying, but she feels off-kilter. She fumbles on the counter for a clean towel and passes it to her dad. “You should—bandage that. I’ll call the restaurant.”
“Dad,” he begs. “Could you just look at me?”
Dan closes his eyes. “Good call,” he tells Natalie, cradling his bloody hand. “Um, get some sesame chicken. Crab rangoons.”
“Jesus.” Her brother leaps off the counter, passing a hand over his face. His eyes are wet. “You two deserve each other,” he says, and kicks a chair on the way out.
“Do you know where she is?” Natalie asks him. “Are you there with her, too?”
It’s bad form to make conversation with the ghost-slash-hallucination, probably. But it’s hard to ignore him when he’s sprawled out on her bedroom floor, and Natalie’s always been instigative, especially around witching hour.
Her brother see-saws his hand. It makes angular shadows on the wall in the moonlight. “A part of me, I think. Or her version of me, or whatever. I won’t bore you with the metaphysical details. But I can’t see her, no.”
“But you were hers before. When she was still here. I mean, before Dad and I could see you.”
“Yes. Maybe? It doesn’t make much sense to me, either.”
She squints. “So now, what, you stick around here and haunt us until we go crazy, too?”
He pushes himself up onto his elbows to look at her. Searches her face. Sometimes when his gaze gets desperate like that, he looks just like their mom. “I’m not trying to hurt you,” he says.
She scoffs. “You ruined my life.”
He rolls his eyes at her. “At least you have a life.”
At her most self-pitying she’s always thought he got the better end of the deal. It’s fucked, maybe, but eight months of suffering followed by nothingness sounds pretty damn blissful in comparison to the full endless shitshow of her adolescence.
“What exactly do you want from me?” she says. She means it to be more demanding, but it comes out sort of tired. “You’re jealous that I’m alive, is that it? Getting Mom and my whole fucking childhood wasn’t enough for you, you need everything else too?”
He picks at the carpet. “That’s not why I’m here.”
She hates him so much. If he were alive she would kill him; she’d be Cain. “Then what?”
He looks at her for a long time. Mostly he’s flippant about everything but his eyes are always serious, what she imagines someone who’s faced death to look like. Sometimes he looks like a little kid, and sometimes like he’s lived forever.
He shrugs one shoulder, finally, and says, “You’re lonely.”
As if that’s all. Natalie would punch him if she thought she’d actually make contact.
“And what, you want to help?” she sneers. “Whose fucking fault is it?”
He barks a laugh. “You’re kind of beyond my help,” he says wryly. He tucks his hands behind his head to look back up at the ceiling, at the faded little splotches where her dad had helped her tape paper stars when she was ten. She’d torn them down a year later in a fit of preteen angst amplified by her mother’s weekly mental breakdown. “And you can’t really blame me, Nat. All I ever did was die.”
“Yeah, but you just couldn’t stay gone.”
“And whose fault is that?”
She screws her eyes shut. Maybe when she opens them he’ll have disappeared again.
“Do you really think that’s gonna work?”
“I’m considering calling an exorcist,” she tells him.
“I’m not a fucking demon, dude.” He chucks a pillow at her and misses, but the movement startles her so bad it feels like being hit in the face; all the air leaves her lungs. “I’m like, a metaphor.”
She stares at him. “A metaphor,” she says flatly.
“Or a manifestation, maybe. Grief, anxiety, whatever you want to call it,” he waves an idle hand. “I’m only here because you won’t let me leave.”
“Did you do this much pathologizing with Mom?”
He grimaces, looking guilty for the first time. “She was—looking for something else.”
“She wanted a good excuse to kill herself,” Natalie guesses.
His eyes pull away from her.
“Whatever,” she says, after a moment. She points to the bedroom door. “It’s open,” she tells him. “You could just walk away.”
He smiles, just a little. “We both know I’m not leaving for good.”
“I have a biology quiz tomorrow.” She flops backwards and drags the covers over her head. “Come back another time.”
“So, Dr. Madden gave me a list of specialists, you know.” Her dad leans over to turn the radio down as they hover at the red light. “I was wondering if maybe—if you want, that is. You could see one?”
She should’ve known when he’d offered to pick her up from school that it was a trap. It’s so fucking typical of this family that he’d rather pay someone to drug her than talk to her himself.
Her brother leans forward from the backseat, grinning at her. “Dad thinks you’re crazy.”
She rolls her eyes. Waits, for the telltale sign on her dad’s face that he heard it too, the subtle twitch of an acknowledgment that he’d never actually voice, but nothing happens. It’s the first time in weeks. Her brother waves a hand in front of his face, and Dan doesn’t even blink.
“Huh,” he says.
“It’s just talk therapy,” her dad continues, completely oblivious. Her brother frowns and slumps back in his seat; she catches his gaze in the rearview, the unsettled crinkle in his brow. “No meds unless you’re okay with it, I swear.”
“Isn’t that how it started for Mom?” Natalie says, but it lacks her usual bite; she’s distracted by the look on her brother’s face.
Dan’s knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. “Nat, baby,” he says, “You’re not your mother.”
He’s been better, lately. Less dismissive. Notices things he didn’t before, which is probably why he’s suggesting she go to therapy. It should make her feel better, probably, to know he’s trying to change, but mostly it just pisses her off—she’s been here the whole time.
But when he looks over it’s at her, and not her brother.
“It really is helping you, huh?” Natalie says quietly.
The eyes in the mirror go panicked. “It won’t be the same for you,” he says. “Nat, seriously. They’re gonna treat you like a freak. Do you think the same people who fried Mom’s brain can fix you?” He kicks the back of her seat, the fucking child.
Her dad says, “It’s your choice. It’s not going to make it better right away.”
“It’s not gonna make it better at all,” her brother snarls. “It’s gonna fuck with your head. Dad doesn’t know anything.”
Natalie picks at her black nail polish. It’s funny to think that everyone’s got a sudden vested interest in what she does. “Maybe I’ll give it a try,” she says finally, half just to piss her brother off. It works; he kicks her seat with more insistence. “Just one session, though. And I want to vet whoever I’m talking to.”
“Okay, deal.”
“Nat.”
She turns the radio up to drown him out, and doesn’t look back again.
He comes and goes.
He likes sitting in on her sessions with Miranda, her temporary therapist, making snide little comments from the corner. She goes a few days without seeing him and then finds him flipping lazily through her copy of I’ll Give You the Sun. At dinner he hovers near the table like a fucking dog, big puppy eyes practically begging them to throw him a bone, while both of them ignore him and make stilted conversation with each other. He disappears for nearly a week and then shows up in the middle of her history midterm just to sit there and stare at her. She flunks it. He laughs in her face.
In May she loses her virginity to Henry. It’s good; he’s sweet as always, they talk each other through it. She doesn’t know why she cries the whole way home. It’s stupid, it’s so stupid teenage girl that she could die from it.
He’s stretched out on her bed when she gets back, turning her Rubik’s cube over in his hands. “I hate this thing,” he says. There’s a furrow in his brow. “I can’t figure it out.”
Natalie closes her door. She can feel the makeup crusting at the corners of her eyes, the places where her mascara has run. “Can you leave me alone, please?” she says. It was a good night. She wants it to be over.
He glances at her and lifts an eyebrow. “Don’t you think I’d like to?”
She kicks off her converse. “I have no clue what you’d like, honestly.”
He’s different all the time. Like one of those lenticular-printed bookmarks you’d get at the dollar store, where the picture along the ridged edges would change whenever you tilted it towards the light. She wonders which parts of him are really her brother, if any. She wonders which parts are herself.
“Was it that bad?” he asks her, tossing the cube into the air and catching it. She tries not to question the mechanics of that.
“None of your business.”
“You could ask for Dad’s advice.” He’s grinning. “He has tons of experience with mediocre sex.”
Natalie goes over about seven different ways she could kill him, were he alive. It’s her new favorite coping mechanism. “If you’re just going to be a little shit, could you at least be quiet about it?” She ducks behind her closet door to shuck off her clothes. She’s wearing Henry’s Queens of the Stone Age shirt; it smells like weed but mostly like him. “I’m not in the mood.”
He crinkles his brow at her. “Shouldn’t you be on Cloud 9 right now?”
“Yeah, well.”
He flips onto his stomach and props his chin in his hand. “Aren’t you in love with him?”
The pajama shirt she’d grabbed is way too big for her; she gets caught in it, thrashing lamely as she tries to find the neckhole. Her brother is no help at all, obviously, because he’s an asshole. “What kind of question is that,” she says, when she breaks through to air. “We’re seventeen.”
“Only a few years younger than Mom and Dad were.”
“Ew, we’re not getting married.” Natalie peels her socks off and lobs one at him; he makes a disgruntled yelp as he tries and fails to dodge. “It’s high school.”
“So?” He rolls his eyes, fake gagging as he discards her sock on the floor. “You could still love him.” He pauses. “Or maybe not, since your heart is so shriveled and decayed.”
She kicks her chair. It rolls dejectedly away from her. “I’m not talking about this with you.”
“Lemme guess, you’re saving it for your therapist?”
There’s vitriol behind that, the good-natured humor flickering briefly out. He sounds fucking jealous. Natalie does not have the energy to unpack that right now.
“I like my advice from professionals, not metaphors,” she says, grabbing a makeup wipe to scrub at her face.
“I’m your brother,” he protests.
“You’re in my head,” she counters.
“Not necessarily mutually exclusive.”
The mascara comes away in soggy clumps. “What are you still doing here?” she hears herself say, through a tired sigh. She feels tetchy, sore. She wants a shower or to sleep for a hundred years. “It was a good night. Can’t you just let me have this?”
His expression goes a little sad. “Nat,” he says quietly, after a moment, “There’s nowhere else for me to go.”
She doesn’t cry again. She takes a breath, and finishes taking off her makeup, then washes her face and brushes her teeth in the bathroom. He’s still sitting there when she gets back, looking at her with those huge eyes. Somehow he looks more solid tonight than usual, less of a spectre, more of a person. He could’ve really been her brother.
“Move over,” she says, and he obliges, curling up at the foot of the bed as she clambers under the covers. “Don’t fucking watch me sleep, dude, jeez.”
He cracks a smile. “I’ll close my eyes,” he says. “Goodnight, Nat.”
She sighs, and turns off the light.
There are good days and bad ones.
The Prozac doesn’t work great for her but the Zoloft, miraculously, does. Therapy, against all odds, doesn’t totally suck. At least once a week she winds up in a screaming match with her dad, but they have movie nights every Friday. Her grades soar; Henry’s solid: the sex is still middling, but everything else is actually really good. Yale rejects her—apparently going on a bender halfway through your sophomore year and tanking your GPA isn’t the best for admissions—but she does still have—
“Northwestern?” Her brother squints at the letter. “What is that, the dollar store Ivy?”
“That,” she flicks the page, “Is a top-tier school, and a full ride. That’s my ticket out of here.”
He studies her expression. He’s around less these days, and when he is he’s quieter, just sort of hanging around in the corner of her eye. It’s a good change of pace; he’s no longer all she thinks about. For the first time in as long as she can remember, her life doesn’t revolve around her dead brother.
“What about Dad?” he says finally. Sunlight slants through the blinds; it lights him in pillars of gold.
She huffs a laugh. “What about Dad?”
He tilts his head at her. “I mean, you’re just gonna leave him?”
It cuts right through her. Natalie tears the letter out of his grip and turns away. “I’m not leaving him,” she says, over her shoulder. “I’m turning eighteen. I’m going to college. That’s what people do.”
“He needs you, though.”
She stuffs the envelope in her backpack. She hasn’t shown it to her dad yet; she doesn’t know why. He’d be excited for her. He’d tell her to go. “He doesn’t need me.” She shakes her head. “He’s getting better, isn’t he? He doesn’t see you anymore.”
She doesn’t turn around, but she feels her brother flinch. “He won’t look at me,” he says flatly. “There’s a difference.”
“Whatever,” Natalie says. Her room is a mess—when did it get this bad? She sets about on picking through the pile of dirty laundry on her floor, depositing clothes into the hamper with a little too much force.
“I’m serious,” her brother presses. “It’s gonna catch up to him again. He thinks he can avoid me by taking care of you.”
“Right, because he does so much of that.”
“At least he tries.”
The bitterness in him makes her seethe. He’s fucking dead and still wants everything to himself. “Daddy issues, much?” she snarks, but it’s not as sharp as she wants it to be.
“Oh, fuck off,” he says, “You’re the one running away from him.”
“I am not running away.”
“He can’t do this on his own. He doesn’t know how to deal with me.” He doesn’t hesitate, just sinks in his teeth, “If you leave him like she did—“
“Don’t,” she snaps, balling a t-shirt in her fist. “Don’t compare me to her.”
He hovers at her shoulder. “Nat,” he says. “I’m trying to keep our family together.”
She feels cold all over.
“My family,” she says.
“What?”
Natalie swallows. “It’s my family.” She turns to look at him. The expression drops off his face. “Not ours. Not yours. You’re not a part of this.”
“I’m your brother.”
“You’re dead. You’re not here.”
She moves towards him, and he lurches back, stumbling around her bed, his eyes huge, his hands raised in front of him. “Nat.”
Rage is crawling up in her throat. “You tried to kill mom. You made her leave.”
“That’s not—“
“It’s been eighteen fucking years. Don’t you think it’s time to let it go?”
He makes a noise of disbelief. “You think I want this?”
“I think you’re a parasite,” she bites out. She knows she’s being awful; she doesn’t give a shit. It’s worth it to see him like this: recoiling, cowed, afraid of her for a change. “You don’t care about us. You want us all to be lonely and miserable, like you are, so you won’t feel so alone.”
A shiver goes through him. She’s backed him into the corner. “Nat—”
“You’re afraid, right? If we don’t need you, you disappear. But as long as we hate our lives and hate ourselves, you have all the power.”
He swallows. “I don’t—”
“You’re pathetic,” she snaps. The anger sends vibrations through her whole body. “You’re a selfish coward who never grew up.”
“Natalie,” he says, a little desperately. It sounds like he’s begging.
“I’m not going to do it,” she tells him. “I’m not going to throw my life away for you. You’re nothing. You’re no one. You don’t exist.”
He shakes his head. His face screws up. She feels guilty only for a half-second; mostly she relishes in it. She feels like she’s been angry her whole goddamn life, and this just the culmination of it, the forgone conclusion. She feels like she’s finally beaten him.
“I’m not—” he wets his lips. “I just wanted—”
“I don’t care,” she says, with finality. “Get out of my fucking room.”
She doesn’t see him for months.
She tells her dad about Northwestern. She swallows her guilt about leaving. She makes salutatorian, and talks long distance with Henry, and gets a head start on her summer reading. Then, forty minutes before her senior piano recital, she forgets how to breathe.
He’s waiting for her when she gets to the girls’ bathroom. His legs swing over the edge of the counter; he watches while she braces herself over the sink.
“I should’ve—known it was you,” Natalie mutters, trying to pull enough air into her body to get the words out. She fumbles with her phone. She could call Henry; but he’s on a jazz band retreat—he’d been infinitely apologetic about missing her show, but she’d insisted that after everything he’d done for her he deserved a life of his own. She told him she’d be fine.
“It's always my fault, right?” Her brother rolls his eyes.
There’s a bottle of Xanax in her bathroom cabinet. For emergencies like this. She’d stopped carrying it around with her two weeks ago, convinced she didn’t need it, that leaving it behind was a sign of progress. She’s such an idiot.
He leaps down from the countertop, eyeing her with sudden concern. “Deep breaths, Nat,” he says. She can’t tell if he’s making fun of her. “Call Dad.”
“No,” she moans. “He’ll flip.” Things have been good. The meds have been working, and therapy is helping, and her dad is in the audience tonight. She can’t screw this up. She can’t slip now.
The edges of the countertop dig into her palms. She dry heaves but nothing comes up. Why the fuck can’t she breathe?
There are hands on her. She feels them but not really; it’s like having someone’s eyes on you, like when something hovers millimeters away but never really makes contact. A phantom sensation, crawling at her skin. What the fuck, she thinks, but distantly. “Nat—Natalie,” he says, right in front of her face, “You need to breathe.”
“I’m fucking—trying—”
“Jesus, okay, um, just focus on my voice,” he says, which really doesn’t make any goddamn sense, because it’s his voice in her head. She tries anyway. “What’s the thing Miranda taught you? Uh, five seven nine?”
She gasps out a laugh. “Four seven eight, asshole,” she manages.
“Yeah, that.” He peels one hand off her shoulder to hold it in front of her face. “In for four, right?” His fingers tick down. “Hold for seven.”
She feels completely crazy. Her breath stutters in her chest. She keeps exhaling too early, but her brother holds her there, imploring, until it starts to even out. The fluorescent lights come into unsteady focus. “There you go,” he says gently. “That’s it.”
“This is insane,” she breathes.
He gives her a crooked grin. “Welcome to our family.”
Natalie does the inhale again. Holds. “What are you doing here?” she says.
His smile falters, just a little. “You thought you got rid of me?”
She shrugs, shivering a bit. “Hoped, maybe.”
He takes two hesitant steps back. Rakes his hair out of his eyes. The gesture is so hangdog-teenage-boy that she wants to laugh, but she’s still trying to catch her breath. Her ribs ache. She’s pretty sure that if she tried to play the piano right now she would somehow manage to break every key.
“I’m not doing it on purpose,” he tells her. Natalie doesn’t know if she believes him, but his eyes are so earnest. “I really did try to leave.”
She turns the water on high and splashes some on her face. “Try harder,” she says, and he huffs a laugh.
“What happened?” he asks.
The real answer is nothing. She’s never had stage fright. She knows the sonata like the back of her hand; she could play it with her eyes closed, in her sleep. It’s her last show before graduation. Her dad is here. Her mom is not.
“Everything’s different,” she says. She closes her eyes and shuts the water off. “It’s a good thing. It all sucked before, and now it sucks a little less. It’s just—sometimes, it’s—”
“Overwhelming?” he offers. She nods. His eyes widen a little. He grins and then nudges her with his elbow, the touch shooting goosebumps through her body. “Hang on,” he says, “Did you miss me?”
“Not even a little bit.” It’s mostly the truth. He’s not her brother. He’s not alive. He’s a reminder of everything that’s ever been wrong with her family, with her life, with herself.
But he’d been something to hold on to. Something, at least, that she could believe would stick around, no matter how hard she tried to push it away.
“You’re such a jerk,” he tells her. “If I was alive—” He cuts himself off before he gets any further and shakes his head. “Whatever. I’m here now. Do you want me to sit in the audience? I could hang out front row center, make faces at you while you try to play.”
“Don’t you dare.”
“Maybe I want to see it,” he says, “Your last show. Your swan song.”
“I’m not dying, jeez. I’m going to college.”
“But you’re not taking me with you.”
She looks at him. He’s still smiling, but his eyes always give him away.
“Gabriel,” she says softly.
“It’s okay. It’s a good thing.” He shrugs one shoulder. Chews his lip. “You’re moving forward. It’s what we both need.”
“And you’ll, what—”
“I don’t know,” Gabe admits. “Maybe I’ll hang around with Dad. Maybe he’ll—” his voice hitches; he shrugs again. “I don’t know.”
She feels strange, untethered. Like the first time she’d gotten high, but without all the distance from herself; just the settling of something in her body, closer to a come-down. She breathes. His hand hovers near hers on the counter.
“For what it’s worth, Nat. I’m sorry.”
“It doesn’t really cover it,” she says, but without much ire. Then, she tells him, “I’m not going away for good, you know. Like, I’ll come back. Holidays, and stuff. If you’re still—”
“Maybe,” he nods.
“Don’t follow me.” Natalie closes her eyes. “Please?”
Gabe pulls her gently into his arms, and she lets him. He’s warm. She didn’t expect that.
“I’m proud of you, Nat,” he says. He tucks his chin against her hair. “You’re the best of us.”
“Low bar,” she mumbles. The laugh bursts out of him. She feels it against her own chest, like music. “I wish I’d known you for real,” she hears herself say, all at once surprised that she means it. She hates him, still. But she misses him. “I wish we could’ve been—”
“Yeah,” he breathes. “Me too.”
She lets herself imagine it. Considers asking him to stick around, if only for a fleeting, ridiculous moment. But it’s not the kind of thing she can stay in. He gets that. He pulls away.
“Alright,” he says, nudging her towards the door, “You’ve got a show to play.”
The air feels colder, but she's solid, steady on her own two feet. “You’re not coming?” she asks. Just to be sure.
He tilts his head. “I’ll hear it,” he says, looking only a little lost as he lets go of her hand. He smiles. “Go and get ‘em, Supergirl.”