I raised my brother’s 3 orphaned daughters for 15 years — last week, he gave me a sealed envelope I wasn’t supposed to open in front of them.
Fifteen years is long enough that the absence becomes part of the architecture of your life. You stop expecting the phone to ring with a particular voice on the other end, stop scanning faces in crowds with the background hope that one of them will resolve into someone you recognize, stop leaving the small mental door open that says he might come back. You close it, eventually, not from bitterness but from the practical necessity of living in the present tense rather than the conditional one. You have children to raise. You have lunches to pack and permission slips to sign and the specific bottomless daily work of being the person that three little girls can count on, and that work does not pause for grief or confusion or the long unanswered question of what happened to your brother.
Edwin left the day after they buried his wife. I have tried, in the years since, to find a framing for this that makes it comprehensible, and I have never fully managed it. Laura died in a car accident on a Thursday in late November, the kind of death that comes with no preparation and no adequate language, and we buried her on a Saturday with the ground already hard from the first cold snap of the season and the girls standing in their coats by the grave, the youngest not quite understanding what a grave was for, the oldest understanding it too well and having already gone somewhere interior and unreachable in response. Edwin stood through all of it and held himself together in the particular way of people who are being held together from the outside by the requirements of an occasion, and then the occasion ended, and he disappeared.
No note on the kitchen table. No call from a payphone. No letter postmarked from somewhere that would at least confirm a direction. Just the absence, arriving suddenly and then extending, day by day, into something permanent.
The social worker brought the girls to my door on a Sunday afternoon. She was a woman in her forties named Carol who had clearly delivered children to unfamiliar households before and had developed a manner for it that was warm without being dishonest, that acknowledged the strangeness of the situation without making the children feel that the strangeness was about them. She had a single overstuffed suitcase, one to share between three, which told me everything about how quickly the situation had been assembled. Jenny was eight and holding Lyra’s hand with the focused grip of someone who has appointed themselves responsible for another person and is taking the appointment seriously. Lyra was five and looking at the front of my house with the evaluating expression of someone trying to determine what category of place this was. Dora was three and had fallen asleep against Carol’s shoulder and did not wake up when she was transferred to my arms.
I remember the weight of her, heavier than I expected, her small face slack with the complete trust of unconscious sleep, and how it felt to carry her through my front door into my house and understand that the house had just become something different from what it had been this morning.
That first night was quiet in the way Edwin’s absence was quiet, with weight in it, with presence. I put Dora in the center of my bed and she stayed asleep. I made up the couch with spare blankets for Jenny and Lyra, who were both awake, and I sat on the floor between them and answered questions until the questions ran out, and then I sat with them until they slept, and then I sat with the dark and the quiet for a while longer before I went to the kitchen and stood at the sink and held onto the edge of it because my legs had decided without consulting me that they were finished holding me up.
I told myself Edwin would come back. I told myself this with conviction for approximately three months, with decreasing conviction for the following six, and then with the diminishing frequency of a habit you are trying to break for the year after that. By the time two years had passed, I no longer told myself anything about it. I had simply incorporated his absence into the facts of the situation and moved forward on the basis of those facts, which were: three girls, one household, the salary from my job in hospital administration, a sister-in-law’s life insurance that covered more than I had expected and less than was sufficient, and the bedrock knowledge that these three children were mine now and I was going to do this correctly.
I learned how Jenny liked her eggs, which was scrambled and with cheese, and how Lyra liked hers, which was over easy with no pepper and toast on the side, and how Dora, once she was old enough to have opinions about eggs, liked hers, which was whatever her sisters were having because Dora’s primary interest at breakfast was in not being left out of anything. I learned that Jenny processed difficult emotions by going quiet, that Lyra processed them by asking questions until the questions were exhausted, that Dora processed them by attaching herself to the nearest warm body and staying there until she felt stable again, and that each of these strategies was legitimate and required a different kind of response from me.
