Thank you, for telling me.
Zachariah had said the exact same words to Samuel after his confession about Ira Vaisman. He knew the value of them, knew the weight. He tried not to brush it away, but accept the thanks the way hew knew it was meant.
Zachariah sighed a long tired sigh. What now? “I’m not entirely sure.” He wished there was a switch he could flick, to get rid of everything he’d adopted and absorbed and leave behind only what was genuinely him, but there wasn’t. He’d been at this for so long and had wanted so badly for these traits and thoughts and skills he’d picked up to be truly his, that he had managed to convince himself that they were. He wasn’t sure what was his and what wasn’t, or if it even mattered. “I think it will be a long process of unpicking. I’m all in knots but- well I don’t think I’ll feel them until I come across them, and then I’ll have to inspect them very hard I suppose and wonder why it’s there, if I need it. If it makes me happy simply because it served its purpose of allowing me my sameness or if I genuinely enjoy it.” And still, still, it was terrifying, this idea that if he undid all these knots that he’d be exposed, as an outsider, as someone who didn’t belong, as someone his family could not recognise or love the way they had before because he was not one of them. “And then after all of that I still have to figure out how to undo the knot. If it’s possible.” If it was worth it. “You think it’ll be worth it?” He asked, looking to Benny for guidance, something he had done far more often than perhaps his younger brother knew.
A small laugh pushed its way through at Benny’s joke. It wasn’t even that funny, but he’d needed the excuse to release some of the tension. He rubbed his eyes and pinched the bridge of his nose with a smile despite it all. “I loved it too. I wish- I just wish it had come from a different place.” Some of his best memories were of playing with his siblings, helping them build towers of blocks, running through fields and hiding in the trees. He remembered pulling out books for Leah, from shelves just out of reach. Then they’d sit flicking through the pages and he’d help her with words she didn’t know yet. And now he didn’t know, had he done that because he’d enjoyed it, or because he was terrified of losing them? The thought was nearly enough to bring tears to his eyes once more, but he held them at bay. No more tears. “I don’t think maintaining my place in this family would have been nearly so essential to me if I didn’t love you all as intensely as I do.” They were more than worth the skewed sense of self, the part that ruined him now was realised it probably hadn’t been necessary.
He supposed it was some comfort, that his act had been so convincing. “Luckier?” He asked, a little confused. He had never considered himself very lucky, but as Benny explained, he sagged with sympathy, with understanding. He knew acutely what it was to look at another and want what they had. “If it’s any consolation, I’ve never thought you lacking in anything, handsomeness or otherwise. Valentin clearly doesn’t think so either.” He cut himself off, like he was surprised by himself. “It is Valentin, isn’t it?” He asked, hoping he hadn’t horribly misread the situation. He also couldn’t bring himself to articulate it much better than that. Either it was Valentin, or it wasn’t.
When Benny asked about when their mother had told him, he felt the weight inside him ease immediately, just from the anticipation of being able to share it with someone else. “Let me try to remember it properly…” He told Benny the story, less fragmented and emotional than he’d received it, about their mother meeting a man, falling in love and becoming pregnant. About that man abandoning her, and how she’d had to flee her home and to give birth to him in Farrington hospital where she’d met their father. About her attempting to return home only for her family to try and ship her baby off behind her back. About her chasing after him, and their father saving the day on horseback. About how he’d proposed later that night as they recovered in his apartment and the rest, as they say, was history.
After it was told, he left a long silence. It was a lot to digest, even hearing it the second time. “I’ve never seen her like that Benny, so emotional, so angry.” When she’d told them off for misbehaving the anger had never been so deep and seething. “She said she didn’t regret it, but that if she could go back she’d choose not to love that man, my biological father, again. She said men were not capable of love, and I think she believed it, truly. I think she believes they are only capable of devastation and heartbreak.” He was not telling Benny this to turn him against her. He himself, even after hearing it all from her own mouth, could not be truly against her. “But I think she’d do almost anything to protect us, to save us, or some other poor girls from the same fate. Perhaps that’s why she’s never encouraged us to marry. In a sick way I suppose she was quite happy with the way fate intervened with Sissy and Maurice.” He sighed again, and then his thoughts caught up with the words he’d just said. His eyes widened a little. He looked up at Benny.
Understanding,and yet not, for Benny had never experienced something so world-changing as Zachariah had, Benny nodded along to his brother’s spoken plans. They sounded like good plans, like rational plans. The sort of plans that were grounded in the reality of what any one man could do, or could achieve. To find the knots. To untangle them, methodically, bit by bit by bit. To slowly unravel the chain, and see, in the end, whether it was worth keeping. Benny thought it sounded more than worth it, he thought it sounded necessary. He let a smile onto his face, one which was encouraging, one which was true. “Of course,” he said, with a certainly he wasn’t sure he felt. “And I’ll be here, you know. If you need some soap or butter, to help things along, or just someone to… someone.” He gave a little shrug. Someone to bounce ideas off of, someone to look to for advice when it came to not fitting in, someone who wanted to know him, the real him, just as much as he himself.
“Does it matter, where it came from?” Benny prompted, tilting his head to try and catch his brother’s eye. “Not that- not that I mean your feelings aren’t important. I just mean, we still have the memories. You still spent the time with us. You still love us.” Intensely, something that Zachariah admitted with a rawness within his voice, and an honesty that caught on Benny’s heartstrings like a broken nail on a woollen jumper. “Isn’t that what counts?”
Really, it should have been what counted. Not the initial reason behind the action, but the result of it. Did it matter if someone donated to a charity only to look good in front of their peers, if it meant that a hungry child was fed as a result of their vanity? Did it matter if Zachariah had tried so hard to bond with his siblings to undermine his feelings of isolation and difference, if the result was their love for one another, which went well beyond blood? Went beyond appearance? Went beyond any perceived lack of this or that or-
Shocked, surprised, Benny swallowed dry and choked on his own tonsils.
“Um-” he spluttered, wordless, though he very much doubted he needed to voice that Zachariah had been right in his assumption. Benny reckoned that it was clear in the panic upon his face, in the sudden red flush over his cheeks and ears, in the pound of his heart, so loud and wild it was less human and more animal. Yes, Benny loved Valentin. His stomach clenched. His mouth gaped. “It- He- I-” A breath, deep and shuddering. Benny gathered himself, found strength in the reminder that moments ago Zachariah had promised not to change him. “It’s new. Don’t- Don’t say anything, tell anyone. Please?” What had started out as a firm attempt at a command withered into a meek beg at its end. “I’m not to tell anyone. We have to be- safe.” Safe. Secret. Quiet. And yet Zachariah had guessed, without even seeing the two of them together? Was it the luggage in Benny’s room? Was it Valentin’s soap-clean scent on the pillow case and the bedsheets? Was it just the glow of love in Benny’s cheeks, the sort of domestic honeymoon happiness that painted newlyweds, newly founds, in peaches and pinks for the world to see? Benny placed a hand on his burning cheek, as if to hide it.
Thankfully, issues of their mother rearrose, and though Benny felt guilty to admit it, he felt relief in burrowing into Zachariah’s identity and not his own. With steadily cooling nerves and waning embarrassment, he listened. Listened to the story their mother had told Zachariah, about a man who didn’t take responsibility, about the doctor who did, and all the things inbetween. It sounded almost impossible. It sounded almost ridiculous. Their mother, Mrs Forester, the pious woman, the firm woman, the faultless woman, and a child born out of wedlock, and a turning away from filial responsibility, and the adoption of a new life? Surely not. And yet Zachariah said it all with the same certainty with which he had broken the revelation only minutes earlier, leaving no space for any doubt to nestle and make a home. In the silence that followed, each fragment of hesitancy was crushed, one by one, until Benny could only sit, dumbly, and accept that his mother was not the woman he had always thought her to be. She was something, someone deeper, and darker, and far more complex.
Benny couldn’t imagine the way it must have hurt Zachariah to hear those things. It hurt him, it hurt Benny, and he wasn’t even the result of that love. It hurt him, and he wasn’t even the target of her blanket anger. How could she believe that, when their father – his father? – had been so very lovely? Had been so kind? When none of her sons had harmed a woman, only ever been harmed by them in the case of Zachariah? Benny’s brow was twisted with confusion, wretched and tense.
“But that’s ridiculous, I mean look at us, we haven’t…” he began to protest, shaking his head mostly to himself. He sighed, hung his head, and made a soft sound of agreement and acknowledgement as his brother mentioned their mother’s hands-off approach to her children’s marital affairs. Then he let out a sound less of agreement and more of sympathy and pain for their youngest sister. Out of the corner of his eye, Zachariah shifted, moved, and looked towards him. Benny raised his head, and looked back, meeting eyes which clearly churned with query and theory.
“What?” he asked softly, unaware of what had caused his older brother to fall silent, nor to look so perturbed. He ran through what had just been said for a clue. “What?” he repeated, a little more urgently, before his mind waved a tiny, miniscule red flag. His brow changed from crumpled to raised. “Well, happy maybe, relieved, but not- You can’t be thinking that mummy had anything to do with what happened, can you?” he asked, almost laughing a little with some sort of desperate disbelief. Their mother, intervene? Their mother, shoot a rifle? Their mother, a killer? Surely not. Please. Surely not.