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Standard disclaimer: All characters are eighteen or over.
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My family is nothing close to what you might call, conventional, but the story of how that happened is, complicated. At its heart, it's about love. We've never been able to tell anyone how we came to be. The world at large can never understand, and while I'm certain that we're not alone in how we have chosen to live, we maintain our secret. We're not ashamed, and if there were no one else involved, we might have chosen to be more open, but we're not. There are people who could be badly hurt if our secret was exposed. Secrets weigh heavy though, and after a decade, we decided that we had to do something, to in someway let the world know about us. So, what follows is a true story, one that is still unfolding. We've changed our names and tried to generalise our language usage as much as possible, but I'm sure some of the more observant of you will manage to guess our general location.
This is our message to the world, we exist, we love and are, in turn, loved.
My parents had had, what my mother used to occasionally called an "oops", when she was forty, before my father died. It came as quite a shock to learn that after being an only child for over twenty years, I was going to have a sibling! It took a bit of getting used to, but as I had no choice in the matter, I got used to the concept of having a sibling. Life continued and in due course my sister, Danielle, arrived in the traditional manner.
I can't say that I paid much attention to her in the first few years. I continued to attend college, I graduated, I got my first full-time job, and after all that, her age could still be expressed with a single digit. Not long after her eighth birthday, my father was diagnosed with a very aggressive form of cancer. In the space of half a year, he went from the energetic, cheerful man I had grown up with, to an empty husk. My mother did not take it well, when he finally passed. They had grown up together, living the cliché of childhood sweethearts. My mother had tried to hold herself together, for Danielle's sake, but she'd lost something intrinsic to her soul. No one could blame her for falling apart.
I'd stayed around home for a few weeks after the funeral, helping around the house and catching up on the routine maintenance that my father had once performed. My mother had been withdrawn, but seemed to be holding together, and once things had settled down to something close to normal, I'd gone back to work. A month later, a neighbour from home phoned. They were concerned. No one had seen my mother much, and when they did, she was very distant. My sister had been missing school and was starting to look somewhat wild. I thanked them, jumped in my car, and made the drive home.
It was dark when I pulled into our drive. I could see that there was a light on in the living room, but that was it. No sign of any movement. Stepping inside, I was shocked to see how untidy the house was. Growing up, Saturday had always been set aside for cleaning. My mother had dusted and polished, while delegating tasks to my father. As I'd grown up, I too had been enlisted, sweeping the floor, washing windows, or whatever needed doing. She'd been a house-proud woman, no doubt about it. Now though, I could see dirty plates and bowls on the small table in the living room. A glance into the kitchen showed more plates, bowls, and cups piled in the sink. I went back down the dark hall and saw that my little sister's bedroom door was ajar. I turned on the light and saw her peaking around the door, her dark eyes wide, as she bit her lip nervously. She hesitated for a moment, then she ran to me, threw her arms around my waist, and hugged me desperately.
I knelt down as she released me and hugged her back.
"Hey kiddo." I whispered. "Where's mom?"
"In her room." Dani whispered back. "She doesn't come out much anymore, since you left."
I winced at that. "Why don't we go say hi to her."
I stood up, and she took my hand.
My mother was little more than a shadow of herself, when I walked into her room. She was sitting in bed, wearing a ragged t-shirt that had been my father's. A mostly empty bottle of vodka sat on the bedside locker, with a grubby glass. The tv mounted on the wall was on, but I don't know if my mother was paying much attention to it. On her lap was a photo album. I recognised it as one of a collection that my parents had kept, of their younger days.
"Mom?" I asked, calmly.
I'm not sure how I managed to sound calm, my entire world was teetering.
She didn't seem to have heard me.
"Mom." I said again, a little louder.
She started, and the photo album slid off her lap and fell to the floor.
"Oh!" She exclaimed.
She moved then, leaning to the side, her hand darting out to retrieve the album from the floor. She picked it up and began examining it for damage, turning it this way and that.
"Mom." I said again, firmly this time.
Her eyes met mine and a ghost of a smile passed across her lips.
"Tom, you're home."
I nodded, and in that moment made a decision.
"I'm moving back in, if that's okay."
My mother's eyes welled up.
"I'm afraid I've been a little overwhelmed lately." She admitted, weakly.
I smiled. "That's okay. I'm here now, and Dani and I will help you."
I crossed the room and hugged her. She hugged me back, weakly.
"I'm very tired." She said, quietly.
"Try to get some sleep." I suggested. "We can talk in the morning."
I called my workplace after breakfast, the next morning, and explained that I'd had to go home. They understood, of course, and would be sorry to see me go. I thanked them and hung up. I checked the online listings for local jobs and went to a few interviews. The best fit was a desk job that I was wildly over-qualified for. The pay was a fraction of what I'd just left, but it was enough, and I was able to leverage my skills at programming to negotiate some extra benefits. While I was doing this, I also had my mother visit a doctor, who diagnosed her with depression and so she started seeing a therapist. I became something like a parent to Dani, and a friend. She'd suffered too, with the loss of our father and regularly had nightmares, where she woke up thinking our mother and I had left her too. She would leave her bed, creep into my room, to make sure I was still there, then crawl into bed with me.
*
Two years passed, and while my mother improved to the point where she could take care of herself properly, she was never again fully herself. She was a whisp of a person, just drifting through life. Dani, on the other hand, was a blazing fire of seemingly limitless energy. During the day, once home from school, she would help me with the chores, get her homework done as fast as possible, then she'd go out and spend time in the garden, climbing the old oak tree at the far end of the lawn, by the little stream. She fought battles too numerous to count, with a stick as a sword, against foes uncountable. Now and then, she'd have her friend Jessica over, or she'd go to her house, giving me something like a day off. They'd run around like lunatics, Jessica a little firebrand to Dani's dark looks. At least once a week, there was a prank. They once caught a squirrel and let it go in the house. I've still no idea how they managed it, or why, neither would say, and the squirrel wasn't talking. This was Dani's childhood, and she revelled in it. At night though, the nightmares ruled her, and each night she was driven from her bed, to end up in mine. Sometimes she cried, sometimes she was silent, but each night I became her knight in shining armour, her beacon of hope. I kept the terrors of her night at bay.
My mother died a few days after Dani's tenth birthday. She simply bid us good night and went to bed. The next morning, I found her. The post-mortem had found nothing unusual. There had been no drugs in her system, no sign of heart failure, no internal bleeding, nothing. At 51, my mother had simply gone to sleep and not woken up. In my mind, I think she just couldn't live without my father. She had clung to life long enough to make sure that Dani and I would be alright, and once she was sure, she'd left to be with him. Dani thinks it's romantic nonsense and as far as she's concerned, she abandoned us. She's definitely the more cynical of us.
Life returned to something close to normal for us, following the funeral. I returned to work and Dani went back to school. I became her legal guardian. It really was only the two of us. Our grandparents, on both sides, had all died by the time Dani was born, and both our parents had been only children. So, it was us against the world, with a little help from some of my friends.
