Chapter 1

When she was little, Lily used to get scared at night - of the dark, of the wind, of thunder, of a bad dream, of anything really. Of course she would always go to our parents’ bedroom when that happened, but at some point, when she wasn’t so little anymore, she got to the point where she could sleep through the night.

Now, I’d always felt very protective of her, even when she was a baby. I loved being the wise older brother who could wipe her tears away if she got hurt, show her how to do things, and make her laugh if she was in a bad mood. So, even though I thought she was long past getting scared at night, I wasn’t actually so surprised the first time she came into my room, scared of the storm raging outside, and woke me up, I wasn’t annoyed to have been awoken at all. I lifted up the comforter and Lily snuggled in beside me. I wrapped my arms around her and we both fell back asleep right away. That morning I woke up before she did and marveled at this adorable little bundle sleeping peacefully in my arms. I remember feeling somehow very old and very wise, like I had discovered an incredible secret of life, had been given a peek into the ineffable beauty of the universe. I lay there motionless for I don’t know how long, then carefully planted a kiss on her forehead. She woke up smiling and said “Robbie!” in a happy, quiet voice. It filled me with joy to hear it.

After that, she started coming up with any excuse to come to my bed at night. First it was a bad dream, then it was the wind (even though it was a still night) ... eventually she abandoned all pretense and just began coming in routinely every night, usually only an hour or two after we’d gone to bed. It was the most wonderful thing. Our parents were loving but they had never been super demonstrative with their affection. I think it was just the era: much later I read that parents then were advised to let their babies cry rather than picking them up, lest they be spoiled. I know (my mom once confessed to me) that my dad had persuaded my mom to start me on a bottle very early; he thought breast-feeding was not totally psychologically sound. So we were probably both somewhat starved for simple human touch. What a wonder we worked on each other, just simply lying there every night in each others’ arms.

The real miracle is that our parents didn’t stop it. They absolutely caught on quickly, even though Lily would always go to bed in her own room first. Probably already the third or fourth time it happened we overslept a little, and Mom went to wake Lily up and found she wasn’t in her room. She knocked on my door, then, as I was groggily waking up, came in, asking: “Robbie, have you seen...” Then she stopped and I could see she was smiling a little. She didn’t seem at all flustered that Lily was all snuggled up to me, asleep, and so I never felt any sense that there was anything wrong with it. And so it just continued, every night. I imagine Mom and Dad must have had some discussion about the situation, especially with Dad apparently having strange ideas about what was psychologically sound and what not, but whatever conclusion they arrived at, they never once brought the subject up ... so it just became the normal thing, unspoken but taken for granted: “Lily and Robbie sleep together every night.” It became part of the inviolable family routine, as inevitable as eating dinner, putting on PJs, brushing our teeth - we’d lie down in our own beds, then a couple hours later Lily would come in and snuggle up next to me. I think it was precisely the fact that it was an unbreakable routine that kept us from simply starting the night together - as logical as that would have been, it would have felt odd.

I was, quite simply, dependent on that wonderful, deep, calming feeling that came from waking every morning with my sister asleep in my arms. Only the fact that Lily’s eventual arrival was a certainty allowed me to fall asleep alone every night. On the rare occasion that the routine was broken - the times that Lily went on a sleepover, for example, or when I had a friend over and he slept on a mattress on the floor, and Lily naturally didn’t come in - I felt ill-at-ease, had trouble falling asleep, slept poorly, and was cranky the next day. Those occasions were rare. Any normal morning, we’d wake up in the same bed, lying in each other’s arms, and bask in the calm bliss of it all before we got up. It set the tone for the rest of the day; we had little drama or disappointment in our daily lives, just quiet contentment. We were closer than siblings usually were; we almost never bickered, and could happily spend hours just existing together. My sister, quite simply, was the single most important figure in my life. The love and protectiveness I felt towards her was so strong, so unwavering that it sometimes felt like it formed the bedrock of my existence.