Before the Dawn by Kate Hewitt Read Free Book Online

slowed to a trickle, and finally stopped.  By that time I was doing A-levels, and I hadn't seen my brother for six years.
    He came back to England once, to sort out his passport. He stayed for an afternoon.  My parents were ready to throw a party, welcome home the prodigal son and kill the fatted calf.  But Rob was gone before they could get out the knives.
    I'd just come home from school, as he was leaving.  I hurled myself into his arms, eleven years old again.  “Rob, you're back, you're back, tell me everything!”  I was like a puppy dog, jumping around him, licking his boots.
    “Easy, Nat.”
    “Do you realize I haven't seen you for six years?” I demanded, playfully, because I thought he was staying.  “What are you doing?  Are you going to live at home?  Get a job or something?”
    Looking back, I realize the look of discomfort in Rob's eyes was both guilt and annoyance.  He didn't ask us to love him. He didn't even want us to.
    “Look, Nat… I've got to go.”
    “Where?  Will you be here for dinner?”
    “No.”  Suddenly he grabbed my arms and held me so I was looking straight at him.  “I'm catching a plane tonight, for Greece.  I've got a job lined up for a few months.”
    “Greece?  Tonight?”  Realization dawned and I twisted out of his grasp.  “You're leaving again?  Already?  Don't you care about us at all ?”
    “Of course I do.  But I need to do my own thing.   I'd die here, Nat, in this boring suburb… if I lived like Mum and Dad, I'd shrivel up and die.”
    “So that means you can waltz around the world for as long as you like?  It's not fair!”
    “It's my life.”  Rob's face hardened.  “I can do what I want.”  He saw my tears and reached out a hand.  “You can come visit me if you want, during your hols.”
    For a brief moment visions of a summer in Greece, drinking ouzo and eating souvlaki passed before me.  Time, days, even months with Rob.  Then I shook my head.  “No thanks.”  I don't know why, but I wouldn't go.  I was too angry, perhaps, to make the effort. I felt too betrayed.
    He continued to travel, and I think he got into trouble more than once.  An abrupt departure from a country he'd planned to stay in for awhile, sudden silences.  He never asked for money or help.  He never made promises of coming home, or seeing us again. I wonder sometimes if he wanted to, if he thought about us at all.  It hurts to think that he didn't.  Somewhere, deep inside, he must have.  I have to believe that.
    Yet I felt I hardly knew him.  Sometimes I had trouble picturing him, as if he'd died.  I hadn't had a real conversation with him, besides that doorway argument, in ten years, and then I'd been a child. How could we not grieve for a brother we felt we'd never really known?  It was a loss, a different kind of one.
    We stopped talking about him, by silent agreement.  It was easier that way.  Much easier than explaining all the time, 'I have a brother, but...'  Sometimes, in my darker moments, I wondered if I really did have a brother.  Weren't brothers supposed to tease you and tell your dates rude things about you and make your life a misery? Rob never did that, and I knew he never would.  I would've welcomed it. 
    Later, weren't big brothers meant to become friends, the very best kind?  Rob was a stranger.  A stranger I never even saw. I thought about the summer we could've had in Greece, but I didn't regret it.  It was a fantasy.  Rob had moved on by the summer, anyway.
    Sometimes I would stand in front of his photograph on the mantle and stare at him, try to remember his voice, his teasing laughter.  The mocking glint in his eye that made me giggle. As the years passed, the sounds grew fainter. The glint disappeared. It was almost like the Natalie who had a brother was a different person, a different version of myself. 
    I went to university, graduated, and got a job teaching music to primary students.  Rob didn't know any of