Life looks depressing when you define it as a series of losses. The loss of a mother, the loss of a sister. Losses of girlfriends. They come in different shapes and sizes, too - the moment you lose your grip on your mother's hand in some crowded city street or a department store, the tears when you think you may never see her again. That is loss, however temporary, and don't exactly shape your life.
My mother died in 1989. It was a suicide. You imagine that someone wouldn't do this to themselves if perhaps they understood how much pain everyone else went through upon their death. You think, perhaps, if your kind words were more frequent, she would not have felt so alone. Looking back, I guess that's unfair. I wasn't a bad son, my sister wasn't a bad daughter. We were well-behaved children, brought up in a Roman Catholic home in Montreal, Quebec. We did well in school, we did our chores, we played peacefully. Of course, we weren't ever saints, but we were good children. Good enough, I think, for it be confusing that ma mere no longer wanted to walk this Earth with us. Worse for our father too.
It changes things, but I think we remained good children even in adolescence and adulthood. I attended McGill university, I took journalism as my major, and it would become my career. You do what you're good at, and I liked writing, and I liked writing about the world. I made friends easily and discarded them easily too, sort of an emotional gypsy I guess. I never made relationships last for awfully long, I wanted to keep moving. I think perhaps I did well in university from the simply fact that if I didn't, I'd have to stay there for even longer. One thing did remain constant for a long time, however. My friendship with ma soeur, my sister, Charity. Now that we were separate, we did what we could to fight this - letters, phonecalls, visits. She was to be a dancer, something she was good at.
Unfortunately, she is also cursed. Not something I believe, not something that is accurate, but it is a kinder way of saying that just like our mother, like our aunts, our grandmother, the women in our family, she had the same tendencies towards mental illness. Perhaps that is why I stayed in contact with her when it's so easy for me to move on, because I couldn't let myself say not enough kind things, to let her get trapped the way ma mere got trapped. My efforts, conscious or not, are only efforts. She got married to an older man, Nicholas Thornton, a good man. No man is good enough for one's sister but he could at least provide for her. He called me, one time, telling me that Charity had moved out of their home, believing it was haunted. I'd already decided what was wrong even before I had flown down to New York to help, and stupidly, I shared my burden with Nicholas. I told him about our mother's illness, our family's history, my fear Charity would be the same, that she probably was.
Charity never forgave me. She pointed me back to Canada, and I went, and we have not spoken since. I kept scarce contact with Nicholas, enough to know how far low their marriage spiralled after that. It would be self-absorbed to say that it was my fault, and ignorant to say I had no hand in it. Somewhere along the way, Charity was sent to an institution, and at one point I grew so weary of hearing about how difficult my sister was being, the implication that I had the solutions as to this problem, but just like before, I had none. I even told Nicholas it might be better for everyone if he divorced her, and that's around the time I knew I had to stop meddling.
I took years to do what I had wanted to do - I traveled. I stayed in England for a time and cut my professional journalist teeth on the tabloids there. I did well for myself, I made my fleeting friends, I made money. I made connections, too, which is perhaps the most important thing in the world of media. I wrote about world events for reliable papers - war, poverty, famine, and I even visited some of these places.
So I was very far away from New York when the 2006 Bomb hit, a fair feeding frenzy for journalists everywhere. Which is an awful way to look at it, but I was so far away that I only recall the impact it had on my career and those around me. Both Charity and Nicholas had survived it, and that was enough. I lurked around the corners of Europe for a little while longer until news, perhaps more important than the Bomb itself, swept the world. The discover of the Evolved. I, myself, was not one, but it dredged up such feelings. Never mind civil unions, racism, abortion, politics. It was fascinating, actually, the way popular opinion would shift in waves.
They are dangerous, lock them away!
They are people too, they have rights!
This changing tide around the world, back and forth, it was hard to keep up with what was the fashionable opinion. And then more Bombs happened. America has no idea. It is arrogant to think that what happened in New York was the one main disaster to hit the world, and yes, no tragedy quite like it has been repeated. But tidal waves in east Asia, earth quakes in Africa, fires in South America, Evolveds persecuted left and right for disasters they committed and sometimes disasters they did not. Men and women and children were dragged over coals as witches and demons in third world countries, beaten by rural people, beaten by officials. My job never knew purpose until this time, trying to gather evidence of all that was wrong with the world, trying to tell the unspoken stories.
Somewhere along the way, my sister died.
That is, at least, the story. She has disappeared, and Nicholas's accounts are confusing, full of hints and uncertainty. I have not set my job aside forever, not even close, but I found myself flying to New York, the beginning of when hell broke loose, I guess. Or got worse. I've been getting so good at finding truth about the lives of others, I feel perhaps it is time to do the same for my sister. I owe her that much.
I owe myself that much.
