aggressive. He’d shouted at Tyler that if he brought this up again, he
would be disowned, then he’d hung up the phone.
I dislike imagining this conversation. Tyler’s stutter was always
worse when he talked to our father. I picture my brother hunched over
the receiver, trying to concentrate, to push out the words that have
jammed in his throat, while his father hurls an arsenal of ugly words.
Tyler was still reeling from Dad’s threat when his phone rang. He
thought it was Dad calling to apologize, but it was Shawn. Dad had told
him everything. “I can have you out of this family in two minutes,”
Shawn said. “You know I can do it. Just ask Tara.”
I listened to Tyler relate this story while staring at the frozen image
of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Tyler talked for a long time, moving through
the events quickly but lingering in a wasteland of rationalization and
self-recrimination. Dad must have misunderstood, Tyler said. There
had been a mistake, a miscommunication. Maybe it was his fault,
maybe he hadn’t said the right thing in the right way. That was it. He
had done this, and he could repair it.
As I listened, I felt a strange sensation of distance that bordered on
disinterestedness, as if my future with Tyler, this brother I had known
and loved all my life, was a film I had already seen and knew the
ending of. I knew the shape of this drama because I had lived it
already, with my sister. This was the moment I had lost Audrey: this
was the moment the costs had become real, when the tax was levied,
the rent due. This was the moment she had realized how much easier it
was to walk away: what a poor trade it was to swap an entire family for
a single sister.
So I knew even before it happened that Tyler would go the same way.
I could hear his hand-wringing through the long echo of the telephone.
He was deciding what to do, but I knew something he did not: that the
decision had already been made, and what he was doing now was just
the long work of justifying it.
It was October when I got the letter.
It came in the form of a PDF attached to an email from Tyler and
Stefanie. The message explained that the letter had been drafted
carefully, thoughtfully, and that a copy would be sent to my parents.
When I saw that, I knew what it meant. It meant Tyler was ready to
denounce me, to say my father’s words, that I was possessed,