: Kathryn Kuitenbrouwer
: Wait Softly Brother
: Buckrider Books
: 9781989496800
: 1
: CHF 5.10
:
: Erzählende Literatur
: English
: 242
: DRM
: PC/MAC/eReader/Tablet
: ePUB

After twenty years of looping frustrations Kathryn walks out of her marriage and washes up in her childhood home determined to write her way to a new life. There she is put to work by her aging parents sorting generations of memories and mementos as biblical rains fall steadily and the house is slowly cut off from the rest of the world. Lured away from the story she is determined to write - that of her stillborn brother, Wulf - by her mother's gift of crumbling letters, Kathryn instead begins to piece together the strange tale of an earlier ancestor, Russell Boyt. As the water rises, and more truths come to the surface, the two stories begin to mingle in unexpected and beautiful ways.

Day One


I pull off in Trenton and text my therapist because I am sad and I need to hear her voice. Mandy is actually my best friend, but, you know, same difference. There are two Harrier jump jets hovering overhead. The military base is close by and I could have gone straight to Mum and Dad’s, so why do I stop here? The jets are quiet, stealthy, but I can feel anxiety rising, like I’m being watched. I send Mandy that emoji with the skull and crossbones and then the broken heart one. It’s pathetic. I’m pathetic. And when she calls, I answer with the Bluetooth and tell her there’s been a death in the family and I’m heading to my parents for a while.

“Who died?”

“Me,” I say. “I died.”

She laughs nervously. Then goes quiet. Then asks, “Are you okay?”

I say, “You think about leaving your marriage, you fantasize about it, try it on in your mind, but when you actually go ahead and do it, it’s not at all like you thought. You couldn’t really fathom the injury it causes to yourself and then you think maybe no pain, no gain. Then it turns out that it hurts other people, too, and the narcissism that led to you leaving, that self-protective ego thing – or so you told yourself when you did it – is actually serving no one. Or maybe it is serving some unconscious need.”

She really is an analyst. So I know to add that last.

And she bites the bait. “So, you’re on a healing journey.”

Of course, I hate that kind of sentimentality. I picture the font it comes in and it nauseates me. I take a long, slow breath. I stare at the road, at the rain as it starts up again, listening to her voice soften. “Kathryn?” she says. “Are you there?”

“Yes,” I whisper. I’m wondering if it is bad form to yell at her. I don’t because, even though I need to yell, she doesn’t deserve it. It’s me I need to yell at. So I say that “it feels like more of a terrible wound. I keep thinking about the mystic Margery Kempe and all of her weeping and wailing.”

“Tell me what happened. Go slow.” She’s such a good person. I’m so lucky.

I say, “It started yesterday. I went out to the back patio to drink my tea. The first day warm enough to do so this spring. And, Mandy, there was a dead cardinal out there. The wind picked up its feathers and ruffled them prettily.” And I’m sobbing.

“Poor th