The Brother We Had Before

It started with a Tuesday in October. Pia had come home from school and Lukas's door was closed.

That was not, on its own, anything. Lukas was seventeen. His door was often closed. He was studying for the leaving exams at the end of the school year. He had a band rehearsal on Thursdays. He had a girlfriend, Marit, who he saw on Saturday afternoons. He had a life that had, this last year, drifted further from the family kitchen.

What was different, Pia would think later, was that the door was closed at five in the afternoon, before Mum was home, when normally Lukas would be in the kitchen making bad toast and arguing with the radio.

Pia knocked. There was no answer. She pushed the door open a crack. Lukas was lying on his bed with his face to the wall, fully dressed, shoes still on.

"You alive?"

"Mostly."

"Want toast?"

"No thanks."

She closed the door. She did not think much of it. She made her own toast. She did her homework at the kitchen table. When her mother came home at seven, Lukas had got up, washed his face, and joined them for dinner. He had been quiet but normal-quiet. Pia did not mention the closed door.

It happened again two weeks later. Then once a week. Then most weekdays.

By mid-November, Lukas was missing dinners. Not loudly — he would say I ate at Marit's or I'm not hungry and disappear into his room. By the end of November, he had quit the band. Hetold the family in a single sentence at breakfast — I quit the band, I needed to clear my head before exams — and went off to school. Pia's mother glanced at Pia's father over the table. Neither said anything. Pia did not say anything either.

There were small other things. Lukas's hair, which he had always been careful about, looked unwashed sometimes. He had stopped going to football on Sundays. He had stopped seeing Marit on Saturdays. (Pia had heard Marit phone the house twice, asking; her father had said gently that Lukas was busy with school. Pia did not think this was true.) Lukas had stopped, mostly, talking to Pia.

Pia was fourteen. She had — as she would later admit — for the first three weeks been mostly relieved that her brother was no longer around to tease her, hog the bathroom, eat her cereal. By the fourth week she was starting to be uneasy. By the sixth, she was worried.

She did not have the words yet. She was fourteen. She had heard the word depression on a school assembly. She had not connected the school-assembly word to the boy two doors down the hallway who had once carried her, age six, on his shoulders all the way home from the river when she had fallen and skinned her knee.

But she was watching. That was something. Pia had always been a noticer. She started keeping a small private list, in the back of her maths exercise book, of things Lukas was no longer doing.

The list got longer.