Educated

again and again, each time repeating the same lines, that I should watch my
back, that his assassin was coming for me. I called my parents.
“He didn’t mean it,” Mother said. “Anyway, he doesn’t have that kind of
money.”
“Not the point,” I said.
Dad wanted evidence. “You didn’t record the call?” he said. “How am I
supposed to know if he was serious?”
“He sounded like he did when he threatened me with the bloody knife,” I
said.
“Well, he wasn’t serious about that.”
“Not the point,” I said again.
The phone calls stopped, eventually, but not because of anything my
parents did. They stopped when Shawn cut me out of his life. He wrote,
telling me to stay away from his wife and child, and to stay the hell away
from him. The email was long, a thousand words of accusation and bile, but
by the end his tone was mournful. He said he loved his brothers, that they
were the best men he knew. I loved you the best of all of them, he wrote, but
you had a knife in my back the whole time.
It had been years since I’d had a relationship with my brother, but the loss
of it, even with months of foreknowledge, stunned me.
My parents said he was justified in cutting me off. Dad said I was
hysterical, that I’d thrown thoughtless accusations when it was obvious my
memory couldn’t be trusted. Mother said my rage was a real threat and that
Shawn had a right to protect his family. “Your anger that night,” she told me
on the phone, meaning the night Shawn had killed Diego, “was twice as
dangerous as Shawn has ever been.”
Reality became fluid. The ground gave way beneath my feet, dragging me
downward, spinning fast, like sand rushing through a hole in the bottom of
the universe. The next time we spoke, Mother told me that the knife had
never been meant as a threat. “Shawn was trying to make you more
comfortable,” she said. “He knew you’d be scared if he were holding a knife,
so he gave it to you.” A week later she said there had never been any knife at
all.
“Talking to you,” she said, “your reality is so warped. It’s like talking to
someone who wasn’t even there.”
I agreed. It was exactly like that.