James Cory

By Angela Remington, sister

I Have a Voice

My mother has asked me to write about my brother, as if that is easy. She doesn’t understand why it’s taking me so long. You’re a writer, she says; just write about what it was like growing up with James. She acts like I’m avoiding this project, like I’m putting it off just to spite her. She doesn’t know that actually, my mind is obsessed with this. I feel so much pressure to get it just right, perfect, so that everyone will understand. Every word has to be carefully chosen, every sentence carefully structured, to convey the extent of the emotion that I feel when someone asks to me to talk, write, or even think about my brother. My greatest fear is that I’ll pour my heart out onto a piece a paper and everyone will read it and say, “so what?”

Starting now, as an adult, I want you to know that I don’t hate my brother anymore. It’s taken a really long time, and 500 miles between us, to not feel my blood boil when I hear his name. But if you ask me if I love him, then I don’t know if I can say yes. I know, I’m a monster right? Everyone, even the youngest of children, knows that you love your family –that’s what you’re supposed to do. And you’re supposed to love them no matter what because God does, and he says we should too. I understand all of that. I understand why I should love him. I just don’t know if I can. I know this because there have been times when I have wished him dead, and then instantly felt terrible. That’s not really what I want to happen, no one deserves to die. There have also been times when I have wished him dead, and then nothing. No feelings rush in bringing guilt and shame. In those moments, I realize that even if there is love it is buried so deeply beneath anger that it is unreachable.

There are two kinds of memories. There are the vague memories –the ones where you can close your eyes and see a fleeting image. In one vague memory that I have, I’m playing quietly on the floor in the waiting room of a psychiatrist while he talks to my parents and my brother. I’m young, seven or eight maybe, but I’m old enough to know that the only reason I’m sitting there waiting is because of James. I’m old enough to know that he gets in trouble at school; the principal yelled his name so loud one day that I could hear it way down by the second grade classrooms. I’m also old enough to not like him because he’s always breaking things. He kicked a hole in the wall of the bedroom he shares with our brother just because he was mad, and he kicked a hole in my bedroom door just because it was there. I’m old enough to know that ADHD (attention deficit hyperactive disorder) means that my brother will never be normal –our family will never be either.

Then there are the memories so clear, so sharp, that not only can you watch them unfold in your mind, but you can still feel faint traces of whatever emotion you felt that day. This is how I feel when I think about being left alone with James.

I hated being home alone with him. He knew how to pick a nerve and work it. When he knew that I’d spent all morning cleaning the kitchen, he’d come in and wipe filthy hands all over. When he knew that I wanted to be alone, he’d burst through my bedroom door and spit a giant wad of saliva onto the wall.

We would fight, oh how we would fight. He’d get me so mad I was screaming, and he’d just keep on pushing my buttons knowing I was helpless. There was nobody around to save me. My parents were at work, my oldest brother off in his high school world, and James was in control. When I think about it now, I realize that James’ games of torment were ways of overpowering me.

By torment, I do not mean normal sibling teasing and bickering. One of those vivid memories that I still have is of the day that James played off of my fear of him. He had come into a phase of setting fires to things –another manifestation of his destructiveness. He started to gather all of the household chemicals that he could find –bleach, lighter fluid, window cleaner, etc. When I asked him what he was doing he calmly replied, “building a bomb.” He took his supplies outside with a roll of tinfoil and a lighter. No, not quite outside –under the carport. He sat in the driveway right outside my bedroom window and sneered at me while inside I freaked out. I was ten, ten. I didn’t know whether my brother really knew how to build a bomb. I was terrified. I tried to call my mother, but he ran inside and grabbed the phone from me –threw it as hard as he could into the wall. He was always doing that, breaking the phones, leaving me powerless.
This is the only thing that I’m sure of –that James made people tired, emotionally and physically. That he made people want to crawl inside themselves and die. Not just me, my parents too. They had their own coping mechanisms, namely avoidance.

James was a train wreck, he was unavoidable. The calls they received constantly from teachers and principals, and counselors –those were unavoidable. The bills from psychiatrists and lawyers –those were unavoidable. The voice of their ten-year-old daughter was probably the only avoidable thing in their life. I wasn’t ignored, I just felt misunderstood. I was very angry. I was angry because my brother had no sense of boundaries; he destroyed things, everyone’s. He was inescapable, always in my face, always the relentless antagonist. Living with James was fighting a constant battle, a losing battle, because nothing that anyone ever said to him sunk him.

The only way I knew how to express my feelings was through anger, and my parents did not recognize that. So they punished my anger, they shut themselves off from it. They couldn’t hear past the tone in my voice, and I didn’t know how to speak to them about James without becoming angry or hysterical. During those years I felt so isolated because I had no voice. I felt the focus was constantly on James –which it was- and I felt that nobody thought about or cared how I felt. Nobody seemed to worry about how James’ behavior might be affecting me.

I can’t blame my parents. Other than my temper, on the outside I was the perfectly well adjusted child. I was quiet and got good grades. I got along well with others, when I didn’t have my nose buried in a book. The funny thing is that my behavior during those years was just as good as James’ was bad. I strove to be as different from him as possible.

I was determined to never cause trouble. I came home from school, and went quietly to my bedroom –away from James. I remained in my bedroom as long as I possibly could. In my bedroom I read book after book. Nobody, except me, considered that I was spending so much time in my bedroom to avoid what went on outside of it. My bedroom was my shell, it was my own, and I never wanted to leave it. I stayed hidden even when James wasn’t fighting with my parents; I couldn’t stand to look at him. His presence alone was disgusting to me.

It’s hard enough to look back and understand, let alone make someone else see what it was about my brother that terrified and angered me. It’s easier if I fast forward, talk about a teenage James. Imagine seventeen-year-old James lying in a hospital bed, so sick he could die. He has blood poisoning, and my parents have just learned that he has been using heroin for at least six months now. They were shocked, horrified. I remember not being surprised, though I had to have been to an extent. It was only the beginning of a long cycle of drug abuse, excuses, and rehab that would repeat itself at least five more times in as many years and continue into today.

Nineteen-year-old James has been stealing. He comes into my bedroom when I’m not home and steals my money. He takes the money I had hidden in my underwear drawer, thinking he would never go through my underwear. I underestimated the low he would stoop to. If I tell my parents, what can they do? James will just deny what he has done. My father will just open his wallet, and pay me back. Hush money perhaps? I’ll end up feeling even worse if I take my father’s money, then the guilt will be on my head.

He steals money from my parents too. He stole my dad’s checkbook and forged his signature all around town. Even grandparents -He stole my grandpa’s clarinet and pawned it. He steals pain pills from my grandparents, antidepressants from my mom. He’s self-medicating, I’m told, because that’s what people who are manic do.

He’s diagnosed at fifteen with bipolar depression. He’s given a battery of medications –lithium is the only name I remember. My parents try to make him take them, but when he’s happy he won’t swallow them. It’s a part of the disease. He sells them; he sells the Ritalin he’s been taking since he was what –six? Seven? When he’s manic he steals money. It’s when he sinks, no drops, into a dark depression that he steals pills, alcohol, and money for drugs. He’s self-medicating.

From here on out, James is no longer himself. He’s a monster, a zombie dazed by a drug-induced haze. Drugs are more than medication for James; they are an escape. For as long as I can remember the lines between the real James and the drugged James have been blurred. Even as a child he was on Ritalin and his behavior was hard to decipher. Is James hyper because he’s got a lot of energy today? Or is the Ritalin kicking in? Or is it wearing off? Seven-year-old James is no different than James at twenty-four.

I still don’t know who he is. I can no longer look at him without wondering if he’s high. I don’t know which is “high” James, which is “coming down” James, or which is the real James. I don’t know my brother at all. I can’t say that I don’t want to, because that’s not entirely true. I wish I could go back and lift the veil, discover who my brother really is. But I can’t, so to me he really is just a drugged loser. He can’t hold a job –part of his disease? And which disease? The bipolar depression or the drug addiction? They are equally destructive.

He is impossible to talk to, though he always has been, but now he speaks maniacally about government conspiracies. I don’t like to talk to him, about him, or even think about him. When my mother speaks of him I bite my tongue to hold in my anger.

James can’t hurt me anymore, but it’s just as painful to watch him continue to hurt my parents again and again. I want to say, “what’s wrong with you?” I want to say, “Why do you keep letting him hurt you, again and again?” But I’m still voiceless when it comes to my parents and my brother. My mother tells me I can’t understand because I don’t have children. Okay, fine. I can accept that, but why can’t she accept that there are two other children in this family who have broken somewhat free of James’ emotional control, and who can’t stand to sit back and watch him continue to assault them with verbal and emotional attacks? He’s a puppeteer, a master manipulator, though somewhat blunted by years of drug addiction. He can still pull our strings and make us dance.

My mother keeps sending me e-mails to remind me that I need to finish this. As if I don’t know. As if I haven’t been thinking about it everyday, waking in the middle of the night with words and phrases dancing in my head. She shouldn’t have asked me, it’s unfair. She’s asking me to go back and relive every moment of a childhood that left me feeling empty. She’s asking me to write about the brother that made me cry nearly every night as a child; that made me ask God why, why, was he punishing me this way? And she’s asking me to write about him with love, with sympathy, so that people can understand what his disease does to him. But I can’t do that.

I can’t even fake an ounce of sympathy for him when I’m still trying to cope with the anger and the inadequacy that was dumped on me when I was still a child. How many children do you know that would pray to God every night that when they wake up in the morning they will be someone else, somewhere else, and the life they thought was theirs would’ve just been a nightmare? I used to wake up every morning and be so disappointed when I realized that I was still alive, and still me.

The hurt that James caused my family and me is infinite, and inescapable. It’s enough to bring me to tears even now that I’m supposed to be a grownup, but how can I be grown up when my childhood is plagued with memories of James, James, James. He’s everywhere, and even from five hundred miles away he can still control my emotions. And I can’t feel sorry for him until someone feels sorry for me, selfish as it seems.

On the outside I’m a twenty-one year old with a husband and a life of her own, but on the inside, I’m still a child –waiting for someone to scoop me up into their arms and tell me that their sorry I have to live this way, that it’s not my fault, and that they are listening. I’m waiting for someone to tell me that it’s okay to be angry, I have every right, and I don’t have to love him all the time. He hurt me as a child by taking away my voice, my power, and I’m still waiting for someone to give it back.