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She remembers the old house, with all its creaks and groans. In the country you can’t hear the ceaseless city, the suburban sprawl. Cars going by at night. Civilization never sleeps. But their dad moved them way out here so he could see the stars, and at night, when the lights were out and everything was asleep, it was so quiet that Amy could hear the sounds that things made when she wasn't listening.
Now, with moonlight streaming so bright through her window - Amy had never feared the dark as a child, the sky was her nightlight - she can hear the sounds of the house. Sometimes she thinks their house is haunted, but she's old enough to know that ghosts aren't real. She hears the house, and she hears, through the old, thin walls, a small whimpering.
David is crying again.
Amy gets out of bed and the sound of her bare feet hitting the creaky floorboards is so loud she worries about waking up their parents. It's just the silence that makes it loud, she reminds herself, and moves gingerly across the room and out into the hall, hearing the long creeeaaak of her bedroom door. She leaves it open just a bit.
David's room is only a few feet from hers. His door had been left open. He'd been insisting lately that mother leave it open, and as Amy peers through the door she notices how dark it seems in David's room. The star lamp had been shut off, and she can just see the lumpy shape of her brother in bed. The shape moves suddenly and David cries out again. She's not sure if he's awake, so she steps into the room quietly, a shadow among shadows, although she's not sure how there can be so many shadows when it's so dark.
"Amy?"
His voice quavers like he's not sure it's her. Who else would it be , she thinks, but doesn't want to know the answer to that question.
"David? It's okay, David, it's me. Did you have a bad dream again?"
She's by his bedside and she can see him trying to focus on her in the dark.
"I was…" his eyes look off to her right, then back at her. "I had a bad dream," he agrees after a moment.
Amy smiles gently, flicks on the star lamp. "Move over," she says, climbing up on the bed to lie next to David. They watch the constellations make shadows on the walls and ceiling until he falls asleep again, then Amy goes back to her room. She remembers to leave the door open in case David needs her again.
.
"Do you want the lamp on?"
Amy notices the familiar flick of her brother's gaze, to a place somewhere in a corner of the room, and she doesn't follow him there. She sometimes did, when she was a girl, before she knew that this was a symptom of her brother's sickness.
"I'm not a child," he says, returning his eyes to her.
"I know," she says, but the truth is that she still sees him as the child he was, the little boy who was so scared in the dark. She hears him screaming at night. She knows that this setup is only temporary, that he's only staying here until he can get back on his feet and make enough money to pay rent on his own apartment again. She wonders, though, how he ever managed to do it, with the way he sleeps. If Ben asks her to marry him, then she won't be able to have him so close anymore. She won't be able to protect him and Philly probably won't come back this time.
"You keep worrying about me," he says, "I don't think you've slept a whole night since I've been here." His tone is dismissive, telling her she's being too fussy. Big sister Amy, always the mother hen. But his eyes are ashamed and he won't look directly at her when he speaks.
What is it , she wants to ask, when his eyes get unfocused or focused at the wrong things, at nothing. What do you see? But she knows that that way lies madness. She's heard what the doctors say, she's heard it for years and years. She won't be able to reach him that way, much as she sometimes wishes she could. The best she can do is keep him safe, even if she doesn't really understand what it is she needs to keep him safe from.
But god, the screams.
It scares her, and sometimes she's not sure if she's scared for him or…
There's plastic over the window in the guest room because last week she'd come into the room and found him, little shards of glass sticking out of his arms and hands, most of it on the floor, shattered into a million pieces. She still doesn't understand how he broke the window, and he couldn't tell her, except a hundred jumbled sorrys and some other things that made no sense. Sometimes her brother says the weirdest things and when he was a kid she used to love listening to him, he used to come up with these stories, things that could never happen but when he talked about them you felt like it was real, like you could reach out and touch it, or see it if only you’d squint a little. He doesn't talk as much anymore and when he does he's careful about what he says, long pauses and constant apologies because he knows, even when he sometimes doesn't know better he knows he's supposed to and so he tries. She picks glass out of his skin and he looks at her the same way he looked when they put a needle in his arm at the hospital and she feels wrong, wrong.
She remembers he'd said something about the stars, that time.
What keeps bothering her, though, is that you can’t see the stars in Amy’s neighborhood.