RALEIGH V. VANDERGELDER, CAPITOL [WIP]

They said that it ran in your family, depression.

They remember your father suffering from it in terrible, terrible bouts that would last him weeks. You laughed, you said that it's impossible, depression isn't hereditary and I believed you. I still don't know if I believed you because I truly did or because I wanted you to be right so badly. Maybe I was a little of both. Sometimes I wish I could go back to that, the pure belief I used to have as a child.

It's hard now to think about it, the way things were.

Dad had already been gone for four years by the time they diagnosed you with cancer. They said it started in your bones and when I didn't understand because I was eight and a half years old and baseball was my biggest worry they said it was like a tree that had been molested by the vines that grew in large fans over the side of our manor house. The vines integrated themselves with the tree, sapping its strength, killing it slowly.

That was what was happening to you but the vines had been inside of yourself all along, dormant, waiting for the moment it could flourish inside of you. I didn't understand.

"Can't we just cut the vines away like the gardener does every spring," I asked the doctor, hands on my hips, certain I was the only one who could see what had to be done here. He assured me then that it was the plan, they would open you up and take the cancer out and then put you back together again. The surgery was scheduled for a week later and there would be a nurse to help you recover afterwards while I was at school.

I understood that that would be the end of it and for awhile it was.

You let me have my friend Cassius over a lot. He was small and sweet. I liked him because he'd play with me, any game we wanted. We were married three times on the playground, the place where we'd first met, by the age of eleven. I remember the day I came home, seven years old and covered in bruises and cuts. You frowned at the sight of me, asking me, "Baby, what'd you do this time," and you licked your thumb and wiped some dirt off of my cheek. I tugged Cass through the door behind me and told you about him and you'd smiled.

You'd smiled at him and it was like you could lift the pain from his features and I knew it was because that's what you do and that's what made you so ill Mom, it wasn't the cancer or anything. I know now because that's how I am too. You take people's pain off of them and take it all for yourself.

Not in the greedy way.

Tell me how to stop.

. . .

Hey, remember that time we were in the second grade and it was my first day of school?

I'd been homeschooled until then but my mom had gotten too sick to teach me anymore. I don't think you ever knew her before the cancer. It was just my mom and I. My father had killed himself about four years back after his company went belly-up. Mom and I didn't have much, we survived off of regular checks from my grandparents.

My mom was sick so she couldn't pay as much attention to what I wore as she would have liked and most of our money went to medical bills and the house so I didn't have a lot to wear. Kids tried to make fun of me for it but with my charm and winning smiles I got by. I was never too bad with my fists either.

I didn't understand what you'd done to get so much bad publicity but it turns out you've got a knack for it. We met because some third grader had you by your shirt up against a wall and his fist was flying for your nose. I tugged him off of you by the hair. He didn't like that.

Your eyes were so sad.

I wanted to wipe your tears away for you.

So I did.

. . .