I pretended I hadn’t understood, but this only made him aggressive.
Now he was hurling insults, snarling. I tried to calm him but it was
pointless. We were seeing each other at long last. I hung up on him but
he called again, and 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