But the living-room was cold and bare. She found sleep at the time she needed it most, just as her thoughts were about to coalesce around the broken image of her baby. She was crying because she couldn't remember what her face looked like.
When she revived, it was dark again. It was as if daylight had forsaken her. She heard movement towards the back of the house. Outside, in the tiny, scruffy garden, a cardboard box, no bigger than the type used to store shoes, made a stark shape amid the surrounding frost. The women were hunched on the back fence, regarding her with owlish eyes. They didn't speak. Maybe they couldn't.
One of them swooped down and landed by the box. She nudged it forward with her hand, as a deer might coax a newborn to its feet. Sarah felt another burst of unconditional love and security fill the gap between them all. Then they were gone, whipping and twisting far into the sky, the consistency, the trickiness of smoke.
Sarah took the box into the living-room with her and waited. Hours passed; she felt herself become more and more peaceful. She loved her daughter and she hoped Laura knew that. As dawn began to brush away the soot from the sky, Sarah leaned over and touched the lid. She wanted so much to open it and say a few words, but she couldn't bring herself to do it.
In the end, she didn't need to. Whatever remained inside the box managed to do it for her.
My Brother's Keeper
Pat Cadigan
Pat Cadigan is the two-time winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award and the author of twelve books. Her fiction is included in many anthologies, including The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror, Dark Terrors 3, The Ex Files, Disco 2000 and A Whisper of Blood, and her short stories have been collected in Patterns. Born in Schenectady, New York, and formerly a resident of Kansas, she now lives and works in North London .
'Addiction really scares me,' she reveals. 'There are many different drugs, but addiction is addiction is addiction. It's harder to kill than a vampire and a whole lot hungrier, and it doesn't have limitations like sunlight or garlic or religious symbols.
' 'My Brother's Keeper' was a story I had been writing on and off for several years before I finally finished it. It grew out of a rather unsavoury experience I had back in my extreme and misspent youth, in a time before AIDS. Heroin chic, my ass.'
All this happened a long time ago. Exactly when doesn't matter, not in a time when you can smoke your coke and Mommy and Daddy lock their grass in the liquor cabinet so Junior can't toke up at their expense. I used to think of it as a relevant episode, from a time when lots of things were relevant. It wasn't long before everyone got burned out on relevance. Hey, don't feel too guilty, bad, smug, perplexed. There'll be something else, you know there will. It's coming in, right along with your ship.
In those days, I was still in the midst of my triumphant rise out of the ghetto (not all white chicks are found under a suburb). I was still energized and revelling at the sight of upturned faces beaming at me, saying, 'Good luck, China, you're gonna be something some day!' as I floated heavenward attached to a college scholarship. My family's pride wore out some time after my second visit home. Higher education was one thing, high-mindedness was another. I was puffed up with delusions of better and my parents kept sticking pins in me, trying to make the swelling go down so they could see me better. I stopped going home for a while. I stopped writing, too. But my mother's letters came as frequently as ever: Your sister Rose is pregnant again, pray God she doesn't lose this one, it could kill her; your sister Aurelia is skipping school, running around, I wish you'd come home and talk to her; and your brother Joe your brother Joe your brother Joe .
My brother Joe. As though she had to identify him. I had one brother and that was Joe. My brother Joe, the original lost boy. Second oldest in the family, two years older than me, first to put a spike in his arm. Sometimes we could be close, Joe and me, squeezed between the brackets of Rose and Aurelia. He was a boner, the lone male among the daughters. Chip off the old block. Nature's middle finger to my father.
My brother Joe, the disposable man. He had no innate talents, not many learned skills other than finding a vein. He wasn't good-looking and junkies aren't known for their scintillating personalities or their sexual prowess or their kind and generous hearts. The family wasn't crazy about him; Rose wouldn't let him near her kids, Aurelia avoided him. Sometimes I wasn't sure how deep my love for him went. Junkies need love but they need a fix more. Between fixes, he could find the odd moment to wave me goodbye from the old life.
Hey, Joe , I'd say. What the hell, huh ?
If you have to ask, babe, you don't really want to know . Already looking for another vein. Grinning with the end of a belt between his teeth.
My brother Joe was why I finally broke down and went home between semesters instead of going to suburban Connecticut with my room-mate. Marlene had painted me a bright picture of scenic walks through pristine snow, leisurely shopping trips to boutiques that sold Mucha prints and glass beads, and then, hot chocolate by the hearth, each of us wrapped in an Afghan crocheted by a grandmother with prematurely red hair and an awful lot of money. Marlene admitted her family was far less relevant than mine, but what were vacations for? I agreed and was packing my bag when Joe's postcard arrived.
Dear China, They threw me out for the last time . That was all, on the back of a map of Cape Cod. Words were something else not at his command. But he'd gone to the trouble of buying a stamp and sending it to the right address.
The parents had taken to throwing him out the last year I'd lived at home. There hadn't been anything I could do about it then and I didn't know what Joe thought I could do about it now but I called it off with Marlene anyway. She said she'd leave it open in case I could get away before classes started again. Just phone so Mummy could break out the extra linens. Marlene was a good sort. She survived relevance admirably. In the end, it was hedonism that got her.
I took a bus home, parked my bag in a locker in the bus station and went for a look around. I never went straight to my parents' apartment when I came back. I had to decompress before I went home to be their daughter, the stuck-up college snot-nose.
It was already dark and the temperature well south of freezing. Old snow lined the empty streets. You had to know where to look for the action in winter. Junkies wore coats for only as long as it took to sell them. What the hell, junkies were always cold anyway. I toured; no luck. It was late enough that anyone wanting to score already had and was nodding off somewhere. Streep's Lunch was one place to go after getting loaded, so I went there.
Streep's wasn't even half full, segregated in the usual way straights by the windows, hopheads near the juke-
