Fearful Symmetries by Ellen Datlow Page A

promised we would stay in the middle when we walked on them, Tommy could come with me. I held his hand so tight it hurt him sometimes, but I did it because I was scared for him. I didn’t want him running to the edge of the pier and falling to the water far below, which sometimes happened when I dreamed. I wouldn’t be holding his hand tight enough in the dream. He’d pull away and, screaming, run to the edge and not stop running. He’d go over, and the screaming would stop only when he hit the water. It was as if this was what someone wanted (and I knew who). To drown him. To make him go away. To make
us all
go away.
    Even when we walked down the very middle of the pier, he could look down and see the green, oily water far below through the narrow cracks between the planks. I’d tell him not to look, but sometimes he would, and it would stop him. He’d sit down on the planks, oily as they were, and he wouldn’t move no matter how hard I pulled. He’d start crying. “She’s going to get me, Jimmy!” he’d say. “She’s going to put me in the trash cans, or drown me.” He meant our mother, and he was right—spells can pull you through cracks—but what could we do? She was our grandmother’s daughter, and (so our grandmother said)
a witch who didn’t know she was one—or didn’t want to know . . . because it was easier that way
.
    I thought he might start screaming, like the dreams, but he didn’t. He would instead cry in hopelessness, in the most terrible sadness I had ever heard. I’d have to pick him up and carry him a ways to get him to forget the water.
    When I told our grandmother, who lived with us, how Tommy behaved on the pier, she stopped her ironing and said to me: “My little brother did the same thing. His name was Ralph. He had curly hair and died when he was six, taken away by a stranger. He was adorable, and I loved him very much. I don’t think I’ve ever told you about him, have I?”
    “No, Grandma. He must have been special.”
    “He was. He would get scared of falling through the cracks. He would carry on and on, sitting there on the pier and looking down through them.”
    “It’s so silly, isn’t it. Grandma. To be scared like that.”
    She looked at me. “No, it isn’t. Your little brother has reason to be scared. I do what I am able, but she never stops. She does it in her sleep, too. She’s just too strong.”
    “I hold Tommy’s hand so hard it hurts him.”
    “I know, Jimmy. You love him, but sometimes that’s not enough. Sometimes they die anyway, even if you don’t want them to. Sometimes people take them away, if not in a stranger’s car then in a dream that is no dream—one you don’t know is coming. . . .”
    We would go out to the end of the biggest pier, Tommy and me, because there we could look out at the whole bay and to our right and left the steel ships were tied with immense ropes to metal cleats taller than I was. Sometimes a sailor would be there, one we got to know. He would be at the end of the pier looking out at the bay, too, but he would be waiting for something.
    He had a rope tied to a cleat that no one used for anything. He wanted something to take what was on the end of it. The first time we met him he said: “Know what’s at the end of this rope?”
    “No,” I answered.
    “They shouldn’t be this huge this far into the bay, but surfers down on the Strand disappear every once in a while. You never know what’s in the sea—even in a bay.”
    “I guess not,” I said.
    Tommy seemed scared of the sailor, but I held his hand tight and finally he stopped pulling.
    “You live in one of the quarters by the banyan tree?” the sailor asked.
    “Yes.”
    “Must be nice.”
    It was—except for the smells at night, and how our father cried. But I didn’t say this. I wanted him to tell us more about the rope and what was down there in the water.
    He kept looking out at the bay. His hands were slick with something I’d seen on my