Robbie #2
It’s funny how memory works. Lally had lived this story, had repeated it over and over again to herself.
She’d been told the story, not by her parents, who refused to speak of it, but by well-meaning therapists hoping to help her confront it, even when it was torture to endure.
Eventually telling became not a retelling of the event, but a retelling of the last time it was told, pulling Lally further and further away from what actually happened, further away from Robbie.
Slight edits and polishes and changes, made perhaps with well-meaning intention to alleviate those closest to the event of the worst of their guilt.
Whatever actually happened was long gone, edges dulled with time.
Lally hated that. She longed for the sharp clarity of the truth, the pain of it, perhaps thinking that was what she deserved.
It was Robbie’s idea to build the fort. Or it was Lally’s.
Those were the only two options. The plow had recently come.
That was how much it had snowed. Had it been a lesser storm, Norman and Robbie would have been the ones to shovel the drive.
The plow left enormous snowbanks, especially at the keystone of their arched drive, leaving them the raw materials needed to create a fort.
To achieve their vision, they didn’t need to build up, but rather tunnel down and possibly through.
The snowbank was away from the house; occasionally their mother would open the door and yell for them and they would yell back, proof of life that seemed satisfactory.
Otherwise they were totally left to their own imaginations.
Robbie dug first, and then Lally when his arms would tire.
She was no match for the towering bank, so she was quickly relegated to snow removal.
It was an important job, Robbie assured her, the tunnels had to be cleared.
Robbie hollowed out the snowbank as best he could, and the structure more than held.
But Lally wanted another entrance, something smaller, just for her, and Robbie dutifully obliged.
He dug another tunnel, and they raced each other to the hollowed middle.
Lally would laugh and laugh and they would back out of their respective entrances (there wasn’t really enough room to turn around) and do it all over again.
For hours they worked on improvements to their fortress, a window here, a retaining wall there—they pretended the whole thing was surrounded by a moat of ice that would break if any enemy, say Norman, attacked.
Lally had never experienced such a perfect day, the numbness in her toes and her fingertips notwithstanding.
Minor inconveniences, worthy sacrifices in service to the triumph of their castle.
Her cheeks were red with cold, with delight, with inspiration.
In an act of defiance, Lally removed her snow mittens and then the knitted ones underneath.
On her fingers she counted the entrances and window, and came up with three.
But there was still a finger left on her hand.
“What?” Robbie had asked. But he already knew what she was thinking.
The fort needed something else to be complete.
A grand doorway that even adults would look at with wonder, an architectural marvel that would be undeniable.
“I’ll be right back,” Robbie said, and crawled through his tunnel deep inside.
Those were his final words.
Confused and frightened, Lally rang her own doorbell.
Her mother answered to find her mittenless, misreading her shock for cold.
She ushered Lally inside and took her tiny blue hands in her warm pink ones, rubbing them until sensation returned.
It was a few minutes before she inquired about Robbie, even sticking her face out the door.
“Robbie?” she called, but there was no reply.
There was also no obvious reason to panic.
The glory of the fort was a snowbank again, an afternoon of work erased with collapse.
It was only when no reply came that Lally burst into primal tears, which sent their mother sprinting out of the house in her slippers.
She saw Robbie’s boot near the snowbank and was enraged that the boy had taken it off.
She tugged at the boot, which appeared frozen to the ground.
Except it wasn’t.
She tugged again and again until it came off in her hands, revealing the foot, which had still been inside it.
A foot she once held to play peekaboo. A foot she would kiss gently after a bath to distract him while she put drops in his ears.
A foot she had pressed in clay when he was still only a few weeks old, to preserve its imprint forever.
By the time fire and rescue arrived, called by a quick-thinking neighbor, Robbie had long suffocated.
There was nothing that anyone could do. An autopsy later revealed asphyxia as the cause of death; he’d suffered three broken ribs from the weight of the wet snow.
Robbie’s death was ruled an accident. His boot was only pried from his mother’s arms by their father when the crowd of neighbors and first responders that had gathered had gone.
For hours Lally took refuge in the coat closet just inside the front entry, refusing to come out. How could she not be at fault?
As soon as Lally was old enough, she followed Norman to California; she’d seen enough snow for a lifetime.
Because she was the only one to witness the snowbank’s collapse, adults worried there was a growing weight inside her that might also one day cave in, and they waited on edge for years for her to fall to pieces.
Norman welcomed her to Venice with open arms. He didn’t know if she needed saving, but he wasn’t going to wait until it was too late.
She stayed with him until he got serious with Jesse, and then he set her up in an apartment.
He still included her in his life with his new boyfriend, who, as an only child, delighted in having a kid sister, and Norman introduced her to all of their friends.
Lally gasped it all in like oxygen. Family at last. She had endured everything: survivor’s guilt, deep remorse, a relationship with Robbie that she kept fervently alive within.
She’d done it on her own, as her parents closed Robbie’s bedroom door and it was years until they spoke about him again.
Norman did the opposite when she arrived in California.
He wanted to talk about Robbie nonstop, as if Robbie’s absence had been haunting him, too.
He wanted to know what Lally remembered, and what she didn’t he wanted to help her fill in.
He was an ally in not blaming their parents per se, but in acknowledging that their emotional absence did Lally real harm.
But eventually Norman’s need to keep Robbie so present was its own form of torture and Lally took to the skies, hoping the life of a flight attendant—the constant departures and changing schedules—would help her outrun her grief.
But now, all these years later, she was left to wonder if she hadn’t abandoned Norman.
Didn’t he endure the same loss—more, even, as Robbie was his brother for eleven years, while Lally only had him for just shy of six?
“You’re finished!” Connie said when she returned, feigning disappointment that everything had been put away neat and orderly.
Lally forced a smile, but that was the most she could do. She scooted past Connie, pausing at an open window into the night. She looked for the lights she had seen weeks earlier. She hadn’t seen them again or since and tonight she almost missed them, as if they might have much-needed answers.
Something was not right with Norman’s absence, and she would get to the bottom of it. Lally was done with her family shrinking. She wanted it to grow.