Ghosts by Daylight (20 page)

‘What the fuck? You could have killed him. And us.’ We were so close to them I could see the fear in the eyes of the kid’s girlfriend, who rode behind him in a miniskirt and high-heeled boots. It was like bumper cars, but real. ‘God, Bruno, don’t do this.’

But he was at war, like when he played ‘Age of Empires’ all night on his computer with various strange addicted people all over the world, and when I came in to interrupt him, he would shout, ‘This is war, baby!’

Then a cop was on top of us. A big cop, also North African, moustached, pissed off, aggressive. ‘Get down off your bike.’ Bruno got down. I got down. He let loose a torrent of complaints to the cop who appeared not to hear him. ‘Papers?’ Bruno handed him his papers. ‘Ah,’ the cop said, ‘I see you live in the 1st arrondissement.’

‘No, the 6th. We just moved.’

‘The 6th, I see.’ Even I could read the expression on his face: rich bastard, thinks he can kick some poor kid from the suburbs. And he lives in the 6th! The cop, after some kind of negotiation, let the North African teenager go.

Bruno exploded. He shouted back it was unfair, that the kid had cut him up, that he had been driving a moto in Paris for twenty years and knew what he was doing, that the kid was wrong, he was right.

‘You’re drunk, just shut up and take a ticket,’ I said. ‘If he breathalyzes you, you’re finished.’

‘I know what I’m doing.’ Suddenly I saw my husband, who had been such a heroic figure to me, as someone ferocious, angry, slightly deranged.

The cop decided he would take him to the station, back brace and all, and he could spend the night. I imagined him getting beaten by French cops, sleeping on the floor of some cell, waking up with the taste of all that tequila in his mouth.

‘Good, take me to jail!’ Bruno said as the cop called on his colleague for help.

I pleaded and begged. It took time. Bruno walked to the river and smoked cigarettes. ‘We have a baby at home; I promise this won’t happen again.’

The cop let us go with a huge, fat ticket. He said to me, ‘You look like a good person. But your husband,’ he looked at him, staring off into the summer river, ‘is in trouble.’

Why do we deny ourselves reality? When is the right time to suddenly see the truth? I knew, instinctively, why I did not. It was the way that I was raised. Once, in London, my good friend Sweetie was standing by the window of my second-floor flat witnessing a crime on the street below. ‘Come here, come here! You’ve got to see this, a man just took a woman’s handbag and . . .’ I don’t remember this, but she claims that I said, ‘I really don’t need to see that. I would rather stay in my little world.’

In my childhood world, the bad things that happened were hidden and never discussed. The sister who died was only a photograph besides my parents’ bed, referred to as the most beautiful angelic baby, a child who was now in heaven. As long as my hair was brushed and my clothes were expensive, life was seemingly perfect.

But there was so much mystery. We never talked about cousins who disappeared and died, about the problems in our own home: the bags of dope stashed in the cellar; the boys’ grades slipping or the fact they stopped playing sports and spent more time with bongs; the birth control pills hidden in an aspirin bottle in the bottom of my school bag; the unhappiness of my older sister and her increasing mood swings. We never talked about growing up, about what would happened when I left the painted black front gate of our home and went into the real world.

My mother made it seem that everything outside that door was dangerous and to be feared, and she kept buying me Fair Isle sweaters and plaid kilts and talking about hope chests filled with fine linens for the time I would marry.

She did not see because she could not. Her own father, Bucky, was an alcoholic who died when he was forty-eight, on his way home from work. He stopped in a bar, ordered a brandy, put his head down on the counter and died of a heart attack. But we never talked about it, his drinking, or how he died.

‘Mommy . . . was he an alcoholic?’

‘No, darling! An alcoholic? He had a few glasses of wine and liked to feel good.’

The night of the motorcycle and the police near the Seine was the night I thought of my grandfather for the first time in many years. I knew so little about him. There were no photographs, except from my mother’s wedding, and he looked young, sad and handsome.

But I wondered if he was cursed, and if he had cursed his offspring, and their offspring. I took out her wedding pictures often, and tried to find a map, a guide, by studying my grandfather, who had died more than twenty-five years before I was born. In the tinted photographs, he guides my radiant mother down the aisle in her satin 1940s dress that was so beautiful it was given to a historical society as an example of the lines from the fashion of the period.

Theirs was a wartime wedding, and my father wore his air force uniform. There is a row of bridesmaids in tiered satin gowns and pretty little girls in long skirts and braids. The photographer got drunk at the reception after and passed out, so there aren’t any more photographs other than those two. Later, when my father came home on leave, they had to repeat the pictures, but my mother was already pregnant with my sister and could not zip up the dress. ‘I could have cried,’ she always said. ‘My wedding day.’

‘What did Bucky drink?’

‘Wine, very good wine, and brandy. Sometimes Scotch.’

My brother Richard drank Scotch too, but he had been in rehab five times by the time he died at forty-seven, and he was proud of the fact that he was sober for ten years. Alcoholics Anonymous got him sober, and he carried, like most AA devotees, the little blue book which has inspirations to help keep them sober. But even after ten years of not drinking, he still called himself an addict. ‘If it’s not one thing, it’s another,’ he said, and told me that people became addicted to AA meetings as a way of replacing the drink, the longing for oblivion.

Before he died, Richard’s addiction became painkillers, but I understood so well his vortex, the darkness of the pain that he was suffering. I understood it well because I had the same: not physical, but my addiction was to disappear into the world, and often a dangerous world where there were no rules.

‘It’s in the genes,’ Richard told me. ‘Bad blood. Crazy, Gerard blood.’ Gerard was my mother’s family – a family of surgeons, lawyers, chemists and senators. They were, my mother had always told me, ‘a good family’. We used to joke about the crazy blood, inbred from years of the Gerards marrying second and third cousins.

But despite their sometimes misplaced snobbery, some of them ended their lives alone and miserable. One, a distinguished doctor, disappeared on the streets of Manhattan. Another, a musician, was murdered in his apartment in Miami. Another died, aged thirty-two, of cirrhosis of the liver, alone in Arizona. And Richard died alone one autumn night, not far from the Shrewsbury, a river in Red Bank, New Jersey, that leads to the sea, in the same hospital in which my father had died ten years before.

The doctor who tended him at the end would not give my brother a painkiller to fight the extraordinary pain that must have been racking his body. In fact, he said had too many opiates in his body and gave him an injection of a drug that reversed the painkilling effect. So Richard’s last hours were spent in terrible distress, struggling to breathe.

The doctor would not let my sister Judy, who had tended my brother with devotion all of his life, into the room. He made her wait in the hall with my other brother, Joseph. They waited for hours, and my sister kept watching Richard through the window of his locked door. He was half-hanging off the bed, struggling, nearly unconscious. She went to sit in the hallway, distraught, helpless, waiting, and constantly checking him through the window. But she could not touch his hand, or comfort him.

After several hours’ a nurse came running to get her. ‘Hurry! You have very little time.’

She and Joe arrived just in time to each hold his hand. He turned to her. ‘I waited for you,’ he said. Then he died.

When they came to tell my mother that Richard was dead, I was in France. They say she curled up in a ball on the floor, in the position of an infant in the womb. When I heard that, all I could think of was my mother losing two children she had given birth to, two children leaving the world before her.

I cannot bear to think of my brother’s death. I try to console myself that he is in a better place, that he was so lost in the world, that he found something much better. For my sister, it is worse. She is haunted by the fact that his final hours were alone and in pain, even though she had promised him he would not die alone. We tried, in the beginning, to bring the thick medical files to doctors, to find what had gone wrong so that his life had been so horribly lost and ended in such a violent and brutal way. Judy wrote endless letters that never got answered, and confronted doctors who gave her cold, contrived answers. Eventually, she gave up.

Two days before he died, I had called him in the hospital. His voice was so faint. My brother, the coolest, most handsome boy in town, the best athlete, the smartest, the fastest, and the older brother all my friends had a crush on. The one who listened to Jimi Hendrix and Crosby Stills Nash & Young and the Allman Brothers Band. The one who had parties when my parents were in Jamaica or the mountains, with wonderful and strange people with Afros and caftans and tie-dyed clothes coming through the door, while I lay upstairs in my bed with my Raggedy Ann dolls.

‘Take care of your little boy,’ he said. Those were the last words he spoke to me.
Take care of your little boy
. Because, I suppose, no one had taken care of him, not the way he needed, not the way he should have been.

I was in Grisail, Bruno’s mountain home, when I last spoke to my brother. Over the miles, I wished him with all my heart some peace going into the next world.
Take care of your little boy
. I remember how I ran off into the forest after that call, and cried my heart out for the little boy who was so beautiful, so haunted and so misunderstood, and whose life was such an unbelievable waste.
Take care of your little boy
. Bruno followed me into the woods. He did not say a word, just took my hand and led me to special places in the forest on his land. A small space where the trees parted. The bridge where Germans shot his ancestors a few days before the war ended, and where two wooden crosses marked their graves. The small altar to Our Lady, across the cow pastures, where we had walked the day of our marriage to lay a bouquet of pale pink roses at her feet.
Protect our marriage and our little family
, I had prayed.

Even now, I cover the pain of my brother’s death with something harder, a shell, a belief that it’s easier for me to live in a world where I get slightly more of my mother’s attention because my brother is not around to suck up all the care. ‘Your brother is going into rehab again,’ I remember my mother saying. I was seventeen and needed her attention. But she was exhausted. ‘I don’t have time for this now, darling,’ she said. She sat on the stairs in our old house, the big house we had all grown up in, now long sold, long gone, and cried. I can’t remember what I needed her for. But it was forgotten. I sat next to her on the stairs and stroked her arm.

So my brother was lost, and my husband was lost, and I was determined of one thing, more than anything else in the world: my son would never be lost.

The relationship one has with drugs or alcohol or whatever it is that takes you into another realm – addiction – is something I struggled to understand. I had tried everything in my life, but nothing ever caught me in its grip. I could smoke a pack of cigarettes under stress, then not smoke again for a year. I could drink, but if I did not drink ever again, I would not miss it. I did not think I was addicted to the adrenalin that seemed to affect other people when it came to reporting war. But two of my brothers struggled with addiction, and I was beginning to see that Bruno’s addictions were similar. He was unable to do anything in a small way. Everything he did, from falling in love, to building a house, to having a baby, was done with tremendous attention and all his energy until he was depleted, emotionally and physically. He could not have one glass of wine, he had to have the bottle. He could not just fall in love and marry, it had to be the greatest love story in the world. He could not have a child without being the one to do night shifts for a year, feeding the baby, being the protector of the household, until exhausting himself to the point of no return with his unending love and sense of responsibility to his family. So he cracked.

I was too young, or perhaps never wanted to see it, to understand my brother Richard’s rehabs. One day he was home, the next, my mother would be sitting at the kitchen table in tears, and he was gone. I had no idea how long he stayed, what he was doing, who his sponsors where. I knew he had a sponsor at AA, and that in many ways he saw the programme as his saviour, something that rescued him from drowning. But he also met his nemesis at one of the meetings, a woman who got him hooked on the prescription pills that later played a part, I believe, in killing him.

Once, a few years after Richard died and when I was at the darkest point of the struggle with Bruno’s addictions, I found a diary of my brother’s from rehab. I was home visiting my mother and someone had accidentally put it in the old oak bookshelves that had been in my childhood room. It was a journal of my brother’s recovery and the twelve steps, and at the end, his friends from rehab had written their comments. Most of them were alike. Words of simple encouragement:
Stay sober; stay clear.