AN: Once again unbeta'd. :(

Feel free to point out mistakes. Or volunteer to beta for me. :)

Chapter 9: Speak

I made my confession to Isabel, a wanton sinner at the end of his life, a wounded animal finally given a voice. The words poured from me like running sand in the hourglass. How long had I kept everything bound up so tightly - hidden away like the maladies in Pandora's Box? How long had I lived this lie, one way within and another without? The more I spoke the more the need to be heard welled up in me and I found myself confiding in her - secrets I could not bear to acknowledge even to myself ripped from my tongue. I told her of my mother, of my unwillingness to put myself out to care of her. I told her of my unrepentant use of Ivo and his money, that I had returned home to Aldeburgh to be supported by him solely to escape having to see him. I confessed to lying to her and to Ivo each about the other one, so desperate was I for someone to call my own. I had gone to her because I felt he had failed me and then returned to him because it seemed to me she had done me one worse. I told her not only of stealing Danny's belongings but plagiarising his work for my own gain, to make a name for myself. I told her what a soulless monster I was, wanting people as well as things and then discarding them with no more thought than grinding out a cigarette. I told her of my feelings of inadequacy, resentment that Ivo Danny was so much more than I could ever hope to be. I had sinned terribly, hating him and taking his money and ruining him and Danny had come for vengeance and was literally driving me insane. He haunted me not only in my dreams - those horrific visions of the past and future - but everywhere. I couldn't leave the house for fear of coming across him – on the bus, in the theatre, by the sea – and I could not stay in the house one second longer. He waited for me in corners, came at me from nowhere. Sometimes he climbed through the window and sometimes he hid under my bed. He wanted me and he would not stop until I gave myself to him.

I told her of the horrible things he had shown me – the evil I had done and the horrible deed I was about to do. Ivo's death. Because I would kill Ivo. I was afraid. I was terribly, terribly afraid. Out of my mind with fear. I was losing my mind.

It took her awhile to get hold of me. I frantically paced while I spoke, restrained by the short tether of the phone cord which exacerbated the tension. I was physically and mentally shaking, as if I were in the center of an earthquake.

"Dear Tim," she said when I had calmed enough that she could get a sentence in. I could hear the love and strength in her voice. "I've been waiting for you to call. I'll come to you, shall I? I can catch a flight out tonight."

"Yes," was all I had left to say.

Ivo came with her which didn't surprise me at all. I imagined the first thing she had done was to call him. He would have raced to the airport to meet her and then on to me. I expected as much of her. I didn't know then that he had spent most of his weekends at the Kestrel, watching me walk up and down the beach - lost, alone. If I had known he was close by, I would have been comforted. I would have run to him. As it was, I was quite relieved to see him. He had a way of taking charge of things which while maddening on a day-to-day basis was hugely reassuring in a crisis. Like the child who looks to its parent, I needed him to assume control of me. During the day when Isabel stayed with me to keep the ghosts at bay, Ivo went about organizing my relocation to Warwick. He was far more thorough than I might have been - arranging for the phone and water to be cut off. The electricity had to stay on for the pump, he told Isabel and me. If it flooded, it would need to work to keep the water out or it could damage the house. I thought how very different my childhood would have been if I had had Ivo. We would have had a ground floor for one thing….

He spoke with the neighbors about keeping an eye on the property, giving the most trustworthy of them a key and then carefully locking away items that were subject to theft - "or damage", he said in the neighbors' defense. He even cleaned the refrigerator - "Worse than a chemisty lab!" he complained to Isabel, hauling the toxic substances out to the rubbish. He neatly organized my things for my return to him exactly as he had packed them for my departure.

We went in two cars, Ivo having packed far more of my possessions that I had ever taken to college. He felt I would want my books and records and even the odd piece of artwork for which I had once expressed a fondness. "Home is where the heart is," he recited and while it was trite, it carried a ring of truism coming from his lips. He drove the van with my things and Isabel drove me in his car but even the handicap of a clunker could not slow him. He dangerously passed others on the narrow road – doubtless cursing them for their lack of consideration behind the wheel – and we soon lost sight of him in the first ten miles of the trip. I remarked that he would probably be unpacked and have returned the rental by the time we arrived and she laughed pleasantly.

We chatted amicably about innocuous subjects, mostly Aldeburgh. She said what a splendid existence it was, to live by the sea, how envious she was. She and Kit had only the quiet straits of Vancouver Island. It wasn't nearly as interesting, nothing like the real sea where you couldn't see anything on the other end. She missed the English countryside. She came often to see Ivo – less often once he had me, though she didn't say that – but they usually did London, Oxford, cultural things. How lovely that I lived someplace where both he and I wanted to be, where we were both happy.

"No, I hate it," I said abruptly and then regretted speaking the words aloud for it reminded me of the things I had told her and I didn't want her to remember. "I mean, I much prefer life in the city. And Ivo doesn't like it here. He says it is much too tame. He couldn't find a single fossil on the entire beach."

She laughed, ignoring my first comment. "Yes, he would say that. The man who plays with dinosaurs."

"Did he always like them? When he was little, I mean." I could well imagine he had dozens of them in his room and recreated the food chain in his childhood games – T-Rex eats Stegosaurus, etc.

"Dinosaurs?" She fumbled in her purse for a cigarette, one hand on the wheel. I helped her to retrieve the pack and lit one for her. "Thanks." She took a drag and then left it between the fore- and middle-fingers of her left hand where it burned, forgotten. "No, Ivo was more of a frog and butterfly kind of boy."

" 'Frog and butterfly'?" I repeated, laughing. It sounded like the title of a bad rock 'n' roll song.

"Yes, he had dozens of jars all over the house. One never knew what one might find. Usually it was just a guppy or a crawdad but once he brought home a bullsnake and it got loose. Dear Mother, her eyesight was terrible. She called to me from her bedroom to ask what the long dark thing on the floor moving in the hallway was. Father was furious and forbad any more creatures in the house. Poor Ivo had to release all of them. He cried very hard but I told him they were happier in the wild and that he could enjoy them every bit as much outside where they were free as inside where they were not. Thereafter he spent all of his time out of doors, on his hands and knees in the dirt. So I guess I am more than a little to blame for the turn his life took." She laughed again but it was a happy sound. "The only thing he was permitted to bring in the house were the shells of dead things – beetles and snails and such. He had a huge collection of those."

"I did that, too!" I cried, surprised to think that Ivo and I had similar tastes as little boys. "Only I collected beach shells. And pebbles and crabs and starfish." I was breathless, excited that there was someone else who shared what I had thought a peculiar obsession.

"I think all little boys do," she said easily, pulling off the frontage road onto the highway. "Little girls play fairy princess and little boys gather a host of unattractive dead things." Her lip twitched, exactly as Ivo's did when he was supressing his laughter. "Of course Ivo played fairy princess with me too."

"He was into drag back then?" I burst out laughing. I couldn't imagine!

She laughed louder still. "No! Of course not! Dear God, Ivo! No, he was the cutthroat pirate threatening to dismember me if I didn't hand over the loot."

"What was the loot?" I asked, thoroughly enjoying the image of a ruthless young Ivo. It fit him to a 't'.

"Sweets, I think. Probably money or records as we got older."

"I did that, too!" I exclaimed again, remembering how I seduced James to give me sweets and money. And then because the memory embarrassed me I fell silent.

"He was a wonderful brother," she said feelingly. "'Is' a wonderful brother. I'm lucky to have him."

I felt I should say that I was lucky to have him too but I didn't. Couldn't. I sat awkwardly for another minute before she began again.

"About Danny - "

I felt as if I had just received an electric jolt. I'd never heard Danny's name spoken aloud before by someone who knew him. It felt strange, eerie, to suddenly speak of him. "I'm sorry," I said, shamefaced to remember that I had stolen his things from her house.

"No, don't be. It's only natural to be curious. Especially with Ivo so clammed up." She shook her head and the ash of her cigarette looked in danger of falling on her clean slacks.

I said nothing.

"I know it's hard to think about," she continued.

I shook my head. "I don't know what's wrong with me. I don't know why I think about him all the time." I was losing my mind, that was why. But I didn't think she needed to know that.

"I think he comes to you," she was treading very carefully. I could hear it in her tone, in her carefully considered words. "He can't be at peace until Ivo accepts it."

I was lost. "Accepts what?"

"Ivo never got over it." And then sensing that she had said something to hurt me she started again. "It was such a senseless thing. Why did it have to happen? To them. You know? You read about that sort of thing in the paper but you can't imagine it could ever happen to you. You never think anything like that could touch you, tear your world apart."

Either she was speaking in tongues or I was too exhausted to follow. I waited for it to come clear.

"In many ways I am no better than Ivo. I still can't accept it. Senseless brutal - " The ash fell and disintegrated before it hit, spreading sooty specks of its former self across her black trousers.

"What happened?" I asked, utterly at sea. It dawned on me that I did not know what became of Ivo and Danny, how two so closely joined had split apart.

"That night you mean?" she said and I felt a cold darkness descend on us, as if someone had just stepped over my grave. "Ivo didn't tell you? No, of course he wouldn't. He was attacked as well. He was lucky to have made it out alive. Danny was more of a fighter so they went for him. They kicked Ivo senseless but Danny they beat relentlessly - with bricks and a pipe. They meant to kill him. They came back a little over an hour later – just to make certain they had finished him off. The coroner said so many of the blows came after he was already dead." Bitterness dripped like venom with her words and I saw that her hands clutched the wheel, the cigarette butt in the ashtray where it belonged.

I was too stunned to speak.

We stopped for lunch. We were seated by a window where we could watch the grey afternoon sky and the aftermath of the storm. Water ran down the glass, blurring the outside view.

Danny. Murdered? "What happened?" I asked again when the waiter had departed.

She shook her head. "Teenage boys looking for some queers to kill." She was still angry. I could feel it radiating off her in waves. Ten years on, her jaw was clenched.

Danny had died. Danny was killed. And Ivo. Ivo almost killed. "I can't- " I couldn't imagine it, couldn't accept the fact that he was dead. "How?" I was morbidly curious.

"No," she shook her head firmly. "I was a cow for telling you. I thought you knew. There can be no point in our rehashing the details of that horror. Let sleeping dogs lie, Tim. Danny's purpose here – with you - it is something different." She paused to reflect on that.

"I want to know," I insisted. I felt I had the right. After all, I was the one being haunted.

She held her ground. "Ivo wouldn't like it. He won't even like our talking about it. About Danny. He'd want to tell you himself."

"He never told me anything," I pointed out. "I found out about Danny by accident." Had it been an accident, my stumbling across him what seemed a lifetime ago?

She sighed, fingering the rim of her tea cup. "He's afraid."

"Of what?" I demanded. I still felt I was being handed pieces from different puzzles, left to struggle with their assembly though she knew they would never fit together.

"Of what this will do to you," she said unhappily. She looked as if she were about to betray her own brother.

"Do to me?" I was exasperated.

"He's worried that it will frighten you, drive you away from him." And she looked terribly guilty.

"Frighten me? Yeah, I am frightened. I am scared out of my fucking mind because everywhere I look, there is Danny." The waiter was approaching with our orders but I didn't care. "I am so afraid I am losing it!" I clutched the table so that it rocked on the uneven floor, causing her to sit back.

She shook her head sternly. "No. It's something else," she said in an undertone.

And we both smiled our polite thanks to our server.

I had difficulty sleeping that night. Ivo had given me my old room and Isabel his, claiming the couch for himself. He was leaving for Antarctica in a few weeks, he said, so he didn't mind at all. He waited until Isabel was in the shower before adding that it would give me time to work with Stan and get my head together. When he got back, we would see what was what. He looked sad but hopeful.

I had mixed feelings. On the one hand I was relieved not to have to sleep with him when I was thinking about Danny. On the other, I was a little indignant that he was leaving me when I needed him most. I fell readily into the feminine weaker role, allowing him to play the masculine stronger part. I felt he should cancel Antarctica, stay with me to see me through this latest crisis. I wanted him to lie down with me and hold me and tell me everything would be alright, that he would make it right. I didn't want this distance that had opened up between us. It was as if a wall had descended, placing him just out of reach. In bed, missing him terribly, I realized that in calling Isabel it had been Ivo I was reaching out for, Ivo I wanted. The door and hallway that separated us was a physical manifestation of the enormous divide in our relationship and it gnawed at me incessantly. I wanted to go to him – to get up out of bed and crawl to him, begging for forgiveness. I hated myself for being weak, for wanting him merely because he was apart from me. But I couldn't help myself. It was in my nature, deeply ingrained from childhood.

I heard them arguing about me and I grew still and listened carefully, so strange was it to hear myself spoken of in the third person by the two most important people in my life.

"He is hallucinating because he has gone off his medication without proper medical supervision. Psychotropic drugs are such that when the patient withdraws, it is not unlike withdrawing from illicit substances. Had he withdrawn gradually, the side effects would have been mitigated."

"They are not hallucinations," she remonstrated with her brother, her twin. "Ivo, he knows things! He has seen things. The garden. The angel on Danny's grave - "

"You fill his head with this nonsense - " he snapped.

"It isn't nonsense! How could he know about those things? He saw Danny when he was a child, with his father - "

"He saw Danny's films and read his letters and believes in his confused state that he sees those things - "

"He saw our house - " I could only imagine her head shaking stubbornly, trying to reason with the man of reason.

"Bollocks!" His voice was cold, as cold as an Alaskan glacial surface. "And of this we shall not speak again. I do not need you feeding his fears - "

"Danny - " she began in desperation.

"Danny is dead and nothing comes after death. Nothing!" he roared. "Now no more please, or I shall ask you to return to your home. If you cannot help me, at least do not hinder me in my efforts to save Tim." And he stormed heavily from the room.

I lay miserably in my lonely little bed, thinking about what each of them had said. Danny had been so real to me but he had not come to me in more than a week, not since Ivo and Isabel had arrived. Had I imagined it all then, the ghost that followed me night and day? I shivered and drew the covers closer to me.

Whatever the case, I did not want to come between Ivo and Isabel. I did not want to be the divide that Danny had shown me I would be.