The Fortunate Brother Read Free

six weeks later Chris was dead. Poor sister. And now she was gone. Off backpacking in Africa somewhere, bewildered by how it all turned out, that her feet continue to walk above the sod whilst Chris’s reside in the shadowed depths of the underworld.
    At times Kyle cursed Sylvie and Chris both. For leaving him torn between two grieving parents whose desired end could never be found in him. For his feeling lame because there wasn’t enough of him to fill their hearts. Times he wished for a sword to cleave himself in half: one traipsing behind his father, keeping him fromthe loneliness of his pain, the other shadowing his mother, helping her cleanse her house of grief.
    He stirred in his seat, a sliver of pain darting through the quick of his thumbnail. He’d been chewing his nails again. He reamed his hand into his pocket. Foul! There was something foul about Trapp showing up all the time and never talking to anyone. There was something foul about the whole thing. Sylvie coming home alone with the body. Then Ben coming with Trapp in tow. All three had been tight when they worked the rig. All three had taken a hand in looking out for Chris when he joined them. And yet only Sylvie came home on that flight bearing Chris’s coffin. Sylvie and their mother. Addie. Flying the skies for the first time to help Sylvie bring Chris home. Else Sylvie would still be out there, cowering in the closet where Addie found her. Too distraught to stand. And Ben off searching for Trapp who’d run from the accident and couldn’t be found. They returned three months later, Trapp and Ben. Shame-cast eyes. All three of them—Sylvie, Ben, and Trapp—with shame-cast eyes and a broodiness accompanying their grief. He’d never understood that. Never understood what stalked their sleep at night and eventually sent Ben and Sylvie prowling through savannahs and jungles, leaving Trapp behind to roam in darkness.
    His father’s dark shape sifted through the thinning fog. Kyle sat up and started the motor, stomping down on the gas pedal to quiet its revving. Sylvanus kicked the muck of his boots against the truck tire and near fell over.
    “Cripes, Mother’s going to shoot you,” said Kyle as his father climbed aboard. “You all right?”
    Sylvanus darted a crooked finger towards the windshield. “Drive.”
    “Smell the booze a mile away.”
    “That’s it now.”
    “
That’s it now.
Right.” Kyle eased the truck over a rough track of tire-flattened beach rocks and turned right from where the river fanned out over the beach before flowing into its shallow mud flat at the mouth of the bay. He drove them across a gravel flat that served as a soccer field during the dustier days of summer. A nice clapboard cabin stood on the inner side of the flat, its back pushing against the encroaching alder bed. Kate’s place. Her door was closed, white smoke clouding from her chimney. Wood must be green. Perhaps he should check whether she had enough wood splits to keep her fire hot.
    At the end of the gravel flat he turned left onto Wharf Road, a rutted thoroughfare leading between the rocky edge of the sea and the steep hillside to its right. A few hundred yards down and the road T-boned onto a long sagging wharf. To the right was their one-storey house with its front step resting on the wharf and heavily treed hills rising straight up behind it. He parked in front of the weathered woodshed and jarred his father awake with a punch to the shoulder.
    “Mother’s going to kill you. Get in the shed till you sobers up.” He got out of the truck and Sylvanus kept sitting there. “Go on, get out. Get in the shed. I’ll tell her you’re fixing your rod.”
    “Come with me.”
    “Fucking go by yourself.”
Jaysus!
    He went into the porch and hung up his coat and kicked off his boots, his damp wool socks smelling like overcooked mutton. The inside door was ajar and he stepped in through to the front room. She wasn’t moving around the kitchen fixing