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“Not only had my brother disappeared, but--and bear with me here--a part of my very being had gone with him. Stories about us could, from them on, be told from only one perspective. Memories could be told but not shared.”
Where Things Come Back.
John Corey Whaley.
He’s four when he’s told he’s going to be a big brother.
Gilbert doesn’t understand very well what it means to be a brother, except that now there will be someone to play with, someone who will look up at him, someone who’s always going to be with him.
In reality, he is a little overwhelmed and scared because there are a lot of changes already, and Gilbert had never done well with changes and sometimes has the feeling that he’s left out since he is still little. However, Mama always seems to know her son's feelings well and starts to reassure him of the fears of not being loved anymore; after all, he’s always going to be her baby too, no matter how many siblings there are going to be.
And it takes some time getting used to the idea, but soon enough he’s excited about all the cool stuff they will do together when his brother gets a little older to play because babies are small and fragile, and they take lots of naps all the time, and they’re only awake for little periods of time to eat, poop, and look around; well, at least that’s what Mom says, so it must be true.
Gilbert has a job now, a very important job; he’s going to be a brother. So, he swears to himself in childish innocence he’s going to be the most awesome of all the big brothers in the world.
*
He is almost five when his little brother is born.
Mother teaches him how to gently hold a baby, and he reaches with insecure fingers, afraid that if he puts too much pressure, he will hurt him and afraid that if he puts too little pressure he might drop the baby, but he manages it.
His brother is small and delicate, with a little face, alabaster cheeks, and big blue eyes like a cherub.
Wilhelm Beilschmidt is warm in his arms.
Gilbert feels like he might burst at how joy-filled he is, and his face is a little sore from smiling so much, but he can’t really stop. He grins more widely and starts to introduce himself to the newborn. He tells him he’s his awesome big brother, and from now on they will take care of each other and be friends, and that he is awesome too but not as much as himself.
In that room the world is beautiful, exciting, and filled with wonderfulness.
*
Gilbert is eight, and life is good and full of laughter.
Wilhelm is a good little brother. He’s an obedient, sweet, and brilliant child and never fusses too much. He listens to Gilbert and makes him feel important and all grown up. Not only that, but he always comes up to Gil before Mom or Dad when something bothers him or he doesn’t want to be scolded for accidentally breaking something. If Gilbert is honest with himself, it makes him feel like a superhero.
And sometimes they petty fight too because Gilbert is still learning how to share, but it is okay because he’s getting super good at it and does not really mind; nonetheless, he does it anyway because it’s fun to make his baby brother all red in the face and have him say “please Giles…” over and over.
They’re happy as they curl against each other and fall asleep, the youngest breathing gently on the eldest’s chest.
*
He’s ten when Wilhelm drifts to sleep more often than not, his stomach always hurts, and his skin becomes full of purplish blotches without motive.
A week later he learns about cancer and what it means to die.
When someone dies, he learns, they can't speak anymore the words that they want to say. They don’t sleep, and therefore they can’t dream. They don't feel anything, so they can't feel sad and don’t cry over it or any joy to laugh. They can’t hear songs or their name being said. They can’t smell anymore their mother's perfume or her food or the flowers that bloom around in spring.
And they’re neither cold nor warm. They’re nothing, because they cease to exist.
They're gone.
And his baby brother is dying.
To Gilbert, the very idea is absurd. Wilhelm had never been sick except for a cold, and that had been only once. He always had been healthy and full of spark and sunshine rays. He’s little; he can’t die because he’s just six years old. Children don’t get sick. They don't; everybody knows it. It shouldn’t be possible.
It's wrong, and it’s not fair. It’s disgusting and heart-wrenching.
For Gilbert, the world…. The world becomes an ugly and wretched place.
*
Hour’s pass, and they become days, and those turn into months.
A month passes, then two and three, and Gilbert is sobbing.
Six, seven, a year, and he’s choking.
Gilbert is twelve, and he’s raging.
Because there are no monsters to fight with, no puzzles to resolve, and no tramps to evade, there’s nothing he can do to help his brother. Because Wilhelm is betrayed by his own body, his insides are the ones trying to kill him, and there’s no way Gil can fight with that.
The sickness, it’s eating him, all of him.
And he can only watch.
It’s the only thing he can do when his baby brother’s life becomes full of pills, because he can’t keep food down, so he takes a pill for it, and another one because the first gives him nausea and weakens him more than he already is. Some more to vomit, others so he can go to sleep when it hurts too much, and one to wake up. Then along comes the chemo and radiation therapy.
And he’s there watching too when the soft tufts of golden hair start falling off Will’s head like leaves of a tree on autumn days. Gilbert holds him close, and they sob in silence with locks of hair on both their hands, because big boys don’t cry. Gilbert leaves his brother for a moment and brings their father's electric shaver from the bathroom and makes all the golden go.
Suddenly, he decides to start growing his own hair and wear it in a ponytail. Mom does not bat an eyelash, and Gilbert is grateful.
*
One, two, three. Inhale. One, two, three. Exhale. He has to remind himself to just breathe.
*
Will can pretend, but Gilbert knows. He knows that the little child is ashamed of his shaved head. Always wearing that faded black cap, and that cannot do.
So when it’s Wilhelm's birthday, he brings his brother a gift. And Wilhelm smiles. A bright smile, so big and alive and painfully beautiful that it makes his entire self-vibrate even when he tries to hide it, and for a moment that smile can patch a little of his battered heart.
“Now we have matching hair,” he says to the younger one.
“It’s because it’s yours.” The kid touches the wig made just for him with his older brother's hair.
“No, it’s not, it’s yours, it’s always been yours; it just decided to grow on my head.” Gilbert smiles a little. “Do you like it?” He asks, suddenly shy and awkward.
“I love it,” Wilhelm whispers softly, reassuring with a small smile and glowing eyes.
*
When he’s thirteen and a day, the both of them lay sheets and pillows on the carpet and make a fort in Will’s room. They look like little weasels in their burrows trying to warm up, and it should be comical if not for the quiet atmosphere.
“Do you think …? Will I go to heaven? I mean, is heaven even real? If not, will I disappear into nothingness instead?” Wilhelm suddenly asks.
“I don’t know,” Gilbert truthfully answers. He does not know, and he doesn’t think it matters because if heaven is real, it means that God is real too. And if he is… well, Gilbert doesn’t know what to think about a God that claims love but lets a little boy die and bad men live.
God makes Gilbert bitter.
Bitter at all of this, bitter at himself, and hateful and terribly hopeless that the only thing that certainly exists is this endless pain.
But at the same time, he wants so badly to believe that there’s still a chance for Will and that if his brother does not make it in this life, at least he could go to this place called heaven and be happy and healthy without any kind of hurt, because it’s the only place Will should go.
“Do you think whatever it is, will it be pacific, or will it be calm?” His little brother brings him back from those thoughts, and Will is afraid he can tell, and so is he.
“I don’t know, I guess, I suppose it will since you’re really boring,” Gil tries to joke, because there is a knot in his throat that he has not been able to swallow since years ago.
“Giles... why do you never tell me that everything is going to be okay?” Will whispers after a little while.
“Because I don’t know if everything is going to be at the end; besides, I love you too much to lie to you like that,” he whispers back.
*
Life and cancer seem to have entered a truce of sorts, and both stay still for a while.
But like all things in life, that truce ends one night when Wilhelm shouts from his bedroom, sounding scared, sounding terrified.
The plates that Gilbert had been setting on the table for dinner crash when they fall from his hands as he and Mom rush upstairs. His brother is pale and quivering as he stands in the doorway, his tiny feet in a river of blood that falls and falls from his nose.
As they go to the hospital, Gilbert’s heart is beating too hard, and his lungs don’t seem to work properly. Mom shivers with trembling lips and rising tears in her eyes as the doctors and nurses come and go. She reaches for him, and he lets her hold him because one of her babies is dying, and she wishes it not to be now and to be any other way but this one, because her baby is going away too soon, and missing a son lasts a lifetime, and she needs to keep holding on to the tiny threads of hope. Gilbert lets her because he, too, needs to hold onto something.
Dad finds them sobbing and wailing together, and a room is assigned.
*
Wilhelm doesn’t die that night, and after that Gilbert starts to look at his brother's face almost every second that passes. Because Will can die at any minute, it could be the last chance Gilbert has to commit every feature of him to memory.
Wilhelm is granted some borrowed time from a star whose light has dimmed down and starts to live again.
But time, as well as life, is not kind. It doesn’t want to be borrowed.
*
Gilbert is thirteen and ten months old and doesn’t want to go inside the room because he knows what the doctor is going to say.
And what it means makes fear creep slowly through his veins, then speed up as in a race to finally settle in the hole under his ribs. He does not want to go inside because they lie in the hospital. The doctors, the nurses, everyone. They say not to worry, that there are still a lot of new treatments and experimental drugs that could work. But a couple of weeks later, a deadline is given, and it’s better to be prepared, they say, so his parents decide to take Wilhelm home.
*
He would do whatever it takes to make it last a little longer, just another day, a week, or a month with his baby brother.
But Gilbert doesn’t dare to ask for such a thing, because how could he ask for another day when Will is in so much pain that he cannot stay on his feet for more than half an hour? How could he ask when his skin is so pale, his lips so dry and as white as paper, and his body so thin that almost all of his bones are visible?
How can he when the only way to stop the pain is letting go?
*
He’s fourteen and a week old when they have to go back to the hospital, and Will is given a new room. Gilbert starts to skip classes and sometimes stops going to school altogether to stay with his brother. Mom doesn’t say anything about it, not even when she starts to get calls for it.
*
Mom goes for a moment to grab something for lunch; Dad is working.
And he’s trying to read his brother a book, trying, because Will doesn’t stop yawning despite how much Gilbert pleads for him to rest for a moment, but the child is stubborn and wants to continue even in his own tiredness.
Gilbert focuses on the book for a moment, and when he raises his eyes from his lap, he sees that his little brother has fallen asleep.
Even with the beeping noise from the machines.
*
He’s suddenly very cold.
*
He turned seventeen and hasn’t warmed up a bit. He thinks he is never going to.
At the beginning his father withdraws into himself, and his mother clings to him with everything she has, because one of her babies had died and only one remains, and the fear of losing him too eats her. And Gilbert had been drowning on air.
For a long time, their family is broken and empty, and everything is so hard because every one of them grieves in their own ways, and it makes them drift apart from each other.
But they try to heal. It takes a lot to resemble something functional again, but they try anyway. They try hard because they already lost a member of their family, and it would be terrible to lose each other too.
They try to heal little by little, and sometimes when they feel strong enough, they talk about their beloved Will, always little things like what he used to like, his favorite things to do, the food he used to eat, his favorite jokes, and about how old he would have been now, what he would look like, if his hair would still have been made of sunlight threads or more silver-like as Gilbert himself, and other things too.
At first, Gilbert almost chokes on his own tongue because it hurts so much, he thinks he will crumble under the weight of his own pain. Because life passes and the loss does not become easier to deal with, it does not hurt any less than that first day without his brother; there is not a “moving on” because grieving for someone loved doesn’t have an expiry date.
And time does not heal all wounds; it doesn’t, because how does one answer the questions about the existence of siblings? How does one talk about the empty room at the end of the hallway, the empty chair at the table, and the lost birthdays? Life moves on, but all the empty spaces remain forever, and the lost things remain lost.
The only thing Gilbert knows for sure is that for as long as he breathes, there will be a hole in his chest, and he will love his brother forever with all his heart.
And Gilbert tries to live again, but sometimes it’s hard to focus or concentrate for long periods of time at school, and sometimes he wants to call out his brother's name even though he knows there wouldn’t be an answer. He keeps trying because he owns Wilhelm; he owns it because he remained and his brother didn’t.
It’s still hard, though.
*
He’s seventeen and a month when he is told he’s going to be a big brother.
He’s furious with his parents and so terribly angry because how could they do it again?
How could they?
And Gilbert is scared and feels betrayed and almost doesn’t want for the new baby to get born because he doesn’t believe he could stand to have him ripped away from him too.
But he secretly hopes.
Hopes for life to be kind just once. He hopes and prays with all his might that if the God Wilhelm had asked about thousands of years ago really exists, he will have some mercy in himself.
Months later his little brother is born.
*
Ludwig Beilschmidt is a strong and healthy baby boy.
He doesn’t get cancer.
He never does.
*
Slowly, very slowly, Gilbert starts to live again.