Cutler 03 - Twilight's Child

and more melancholy. She felt the disease was somehow her fault and always believed she was disappointing my parents, especially my father.
    "Despite her sickness, she was an excellent student, always trying harder and harder to achieve. I loved her dearly and would do anything in my power for her."
    He smiled softly.
    "She was always chastising me for spending too much time with her. 'You should be off doing things with your friends,' she would say, 'chasing after pretty girls and not spending all your time with your crippled sister.' But alas, I couldn't desert her.
    "When no one asked her to the high school prom, I took her myself and forced her to go, even though she couldn't dance. I would be the one to take her to movies or shows, the one who insisted she go for motor rides down the seashore or into the mountains. I took her sailing and even horseback riding, when she was still well enough to do those things. After a while anything she saw or did, she saw or did because of my insistence.
    "Oh, what difference does it make, Bronson?' she would ask when I would stubbornly persist. I didn't want to say it, but I wanted to squeeze everything into her life that I could, knowing she didn't have long to live. But then again, it didn't have to be said; she understood.
    "Anyway, I suppose my devotion to Alexandria put some young women off. There were snide remarks and ugly rumors spread about us—to most it was unnatural that a brother and a sister should be so close—but I wasn't about to turn my back on Alexandria just to please some gossips and chase some conceited, pretty young skirt."
    "My mother was one of those young women, wasn't she?" I asked confidently.
    He stared at me blankly for a moment or so, drumming his fingertips on the arm of his chair before he got up to stand before the wide wall of windows, staring out at the gardens and beyond toward the sea. Finally he turned back to me, his eyes revealing a deep inner agony I could understand, for I recognized it as the agony a man feels when he longs for a woman who seems forever beyond his reach. I had seen this look in Jimmy's eyes occasionally when we were growing up together, believing we were brother and sister, and feeling emotions and longings we thought were indecent.
    "Your mother," he began, "was and still is one of the most beautiful women in Cutler's Cove, and like all beautiful women, she has a certain amount of vanity."
    "Mother," I said dryly, "has far more than her fair share of vanity."
    He started to smile but stopped and shook his head.
    "I won't deny that, but I understand why it is so." He paused for a moment and thought. "You don't know much about your mother's family, her childhood, do you?"
    "No. She never talks about it, and whenever I did ask her questions she always answered quickly, impatiently, as if I were annoying her, so I stopped. All I really know," I said, "is that she was an only child, and that both her parents are dead."
    "Yes, she was an only child, a young girl who adored—no, practically worshipped her father. But Simon Thomas was a rake if there ever was one and didn't give her the attention she needed so desperately. His reputation for womanizing was always a topic of conversation. Her poor mother suffered so and tried to pretend all was well. Laura Sue," he stressed, "comes from a world of illusion and deceit, distrust and betrayal.
    "Consequently," he continued, his eyes serious, "she craved attention, craved love, and was far more demanding than any other woman I knew.
    "But I was desperately in love with her from the first moment I set eyes on her. I remember," he said, a smile returning to those aqua eyes, "parking my car at the corner of her street and sitting in it for hours just to catch a glimpse of her coming and going."
    He paused, as if the image of my mother as a young girl was projected on the wall across from him.
    "Anyway," he said, snapping out of his reverie, "I began to court her, and for a while we were quite a striking couple. But after my mother contracted a rapidly destructive blood cancer and died, I felt even more of a need to spend time with Alexandria. She was so shattered by my mother's unexpected passing."
    "And your precious Laura Sue, my mother," I said, jumping ahead, "was upset about all the attention you were giving your sister?"
    "Laura Sue needed a man who would make her the very center of his existence," he explained. "I wanted to be that man, desperately wanted it, but I