“It was a Friday night. December. Christmas was coming. Claire and I had been playing Mario Kart after school.” The corners of my mouth lift as I remember the way we’d cracked up laughing when she finally beat me by pounding me with three perfectly spaced red turtles as I approached the finish line. “Mum called us downstairs for dinner. We were still joking around and trash talking each other. Claire said I might be faster in the game, but she could still beat me to the dinner table. She ran for the stairs. I ran after her.” My throat closes up and I shake my head. “So stupid.”
Taking a deep breath, I clear my throat before starting again. “I slipped. Three steps from the top, my foot missed the edge of the step. When I fell, I grabbed for the railing, but I missed. I got Claire’s arm instead. I took her down with me. When we hit the bottom of the staircase, I landed on top of her. She hit her head, fractured her neck. She bled into her brain. A few hours later she was dead.”
Sam’s grip on my hand tightens. “I’m so sorry.”
A small breath huffs out of me. “Yeah, me too.” Sorry doesn’t mean what it used to. There comes a point when repetition strips all meaning from even the most sincere apology.
“Were you hurt, as well?” he asks. “Physically, I mean.”
“Nope.” The word has a casual air to it. How ridiculous. “I barely managed a bruise.” I’d wanted to hurt in the days after. I’d wanted to be in physical pain. It might have distracted me from the horror of what I’d done. “Kids fall down stairs all the time. It’s one of the most common household accidents. If I’d been alone, I probably would have come out of it with a few bruises, maybe a broken arm if I was unlucky. But what chance did Claire have with me crushing her like that. I was sixteen years old. So much bigger than her.”
“It was an accident, Tristan,” Sam says quietly, his free hand curling around the back of my neck. “You never meant to hurt her.”
“Yep, you’re right.” My head bobs in agreement. “It was an accident. What the hell difference does that make?” I pull my hand from Sam’s grasp, sitting forwards on the couch with my elbows on my knees. “Claire died and it’s my fault. Beyond those two facts, nothing else matters. I killed my sister. My parents lost their only daughter. It’s not the kind of mistake that can be forgiven simply because I didn’t mean to.”
He hesitates. “Your parents. Did they blame you?”
“Of course they blamed me,” I snap, rising to take the mugs back to the kitchen. “There was no one else.”
Sam follows, coming to stand on the other side of the counter. “I mean, were they angry at you?”
My shoulders lift in some variation of a shrug. “No?” The question mark tacks itself onto the end, reluctant but inevitable. “And yes. I don’t know.” My legs carry me to the dining table where I fold into the chair I used at dinner. “After the funeral, Mum collapsed in on herself. She barely got out of bed, barely ate. She would beg me to sit with her, but my presence only seemed to upset her more. I didn’t know what to do and I hated feeling like I was hurting her, so in the end I stayed away.
“She didn’t start to get better until after I moved out of home, when she stopped having to see my face every day,” I add, bitterly. I was glad when she started to find her way back to life, but hated knowing my absence was her cure. “She still has bad days, but not like before.”
“That’s good,” Sam says with a half-hearted nod. “What about your dad?”
“My father became this drone. He worked and he took care of Mum. The bills got paid, there was food on the table.” I don’t know how he did it, kept going after the world ended. “He held everything together, but it took all of him to do it. Sometimes, I think it still does.”
Sam’s fingertips brush against mine across the surface of the table as he sits opposite me. “What about you? How did you cope?”
“I followed his lead. I helped around the house, worked at his office, got good grades. I didn’t want to do anything to cause them more pain.” No matter how badly I hurt, it was nothing compared to what they were going through. “So, I kept my head down and did what I was told. When he told me to eat, I ate. When he told me to study, I studied. When he told me to sleep… I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling.”
Sam releases a slow breath. “You’ve barely slept since.”
There it is, the guilty secret behind my insomnia. The burden that keeps me awake at night and fills my dreams when I do sleep. Claire.
“Every night I would lie there in the dark, reliving the same few seconds over and over.” I lift my left hand, palm up, my fingers curling. “I could still feel her arm in my hand. I could smell her blood, hear her scream as we went down.” Unable to sit still, I rise from the table. Crossing my arms, I lean back against the kitchen counter. Sam turns his body towards me, but he doesn’t get up.
“The sleeplessness drove me crazy, so I started going for walks in the middle of the night. Just wandering around. One night, I ran into a couple of guys who took a dislike to me.” Maybe it was the way I’d shoved my way between them that set them off. Maybe it was the less than savoury things I’d said about the taller one’s mother when he demanded an apology.
Sam mutters a curse and my lips quirk upwards. I’m not sure I’ve ever heard him swear before. “They hurt you,” he says in a gravelly voice.
“Some.” Not as badly as I’d wanted to hurt. “It took the guy three tries to put me on the ground.”
I shouldn’t have laughed when I finally hit the cement. I shouldn’t have dared him to hit me harder. Maybe he would have kept going and I’d have managed to get my outsides to match my insides. Instead, he’d glared down at me like I was unhinged.Go home, kid,before you get yourself killed.He’d walked away. His mate trailed after him, but not before landing a boot to my ribs.
I’d lain there for a while after they were gone. Curled into a ball on the footpath, my head cushioned by the softer grass beside it. My face had throbbed and it hurt to breathe, but I hadn’t broken anything as far as I could tell. Finally, I’d pushed myself up from the ground, groaning quietly as a fresh wave of pain washed over me, and I’d walked the few blocks home.
“My father was waiting for me when I got back,” I tell Sam. “He was pissed when he saw me. He asked me what happened and I told him. What else could I say? That I tripped and fell?” Laughter bubbles up my throat at the thought, spilling out of me in fractured bursts. I bend over, clutching at my stomach, unable to hold it back.
Sam’s knees hit the floor before mine. Grabbing hold of my arms, he pulls me forwards until my forehead drops onto his shoulder. He smells so damned good. So Sam. I want to curl up against him and sleep forever. So this will be over and I won’t have to live with it anymore.
“What did your dad say?” Sam asks after a few minutes of silence.
Lifting my head, I sit down and lean my back against the counter. Sam turns to sit beside me, one arm draped along my bent leg.
“He lost it.” It was the first sign of true anger I’d seen from him in almost a year. The first sign of any emotion really, other than despair. “He accused me of all sorts of shit. Stealing booze from the kitchen, which granted was true. Getting into fights at school.” Sam glances at me in question. “Also true.” I could only listen to Claire’s friends call me a murderer so many times before I snapped. “Then he said…” I pause, swallowing past the aching lump in my throat.
