Morgan was sixteen, riding in the backseat with four of her friends, going home from a Christmas pageant. She played the Virgin Mary. I don't know what that means, or if it means anything. My life is often like that. I was born 8-8-88. My sister died 12-22-2002.

I'm a rational person. I know it's a coincidence. The Law of Averages, you know. In a random sequence of numbers, these things happen.

Remember I told you I had another sister? Anna was stillborn on 8-8-85. She would have had Turner's Syndrome. My mother cremated the body, keeping the ashes in a box in her bedroom, always with her, like some cosmic foreshadowing.

In my gramma's house, there was a painting of a boy and girl crossing a rickety bridge while a guardian angel watches over them. The sister is a little taller, and she's comforting her brother and leading them forward. When I was small, I thought it was painted for us: Morgan and me, with Anna as our guardian angel.

Of course, that was just a coincidence, too. No guardian angel watched over Morgan that night. The mayor's truck collided with her friend's Toyota Camry. The car broke in two. Her seatbelt ripped, and Morgan was thrown from the car and smashed into a light post. She was the only casualty.

The coroner said Morgan died immediately from blunt force trauma to the heart, but days later, I found on the light post where Morgan died a letter. Someone wrote they held her hand as she died, but that meant she lived for a while after being tossed from the car. I suppose one or the other lied to make us feel better. Sometimes I wonder which was true, like a question that haunts me.

I remember that night so clearly. The way moonlight silhouetted Reba as she collapsed in tears in the doorway. The officer and priest spoke euphemistically about 'an accident' and 'moved on.' I remember being confused and anxious because no one would speak straight to me.

When Tom finally said the words, "Morgan is dead," I didn't feel anything. I don't mean that quasi-romantic emptiness that poets write about; I mean, I felt no different. If anything, I felt hungry and more confused. Morgan and I were Irish twins. We went everywhere together. Everyone around me was distraught, but I just wanted to finish eating my General Tso's chicken, and I couldn't understand it. Why wasn't I sad? Didn't I love her most? Something must be horribly wrong with me, I realized. What kind of monster doesn't mourn his best friend and sister? I hated myself so completely it brought me to tears. Tom tried to comfort me, but he didn't understand, and it made me hate myself more because my grief was a lie.

The weight of reality hadn't settled in yet. I know that now. I was fourteen, and death wasn't something I was capable of understanding all at once in that moment. Morgan was dead. I knew that, but for days, for a second every morning, I'd wonder why she hadn't woken me up early to get ready for school.

I remember, weeks later, watching a TV show. A character asked her brother to walk her down the aisle, and I thought, 'I bet Morgan will ask me to do that when she gets marri-' and then I remembered. I couldn't imagine a future without her in it, not at first. But reality is relentless.

Morgan's death broke my mother. Tom carried her home and into bed, screaming and pulling her hair. She stayed in bed for months, smoking weed and hardly eating. It terrified Jude and me. We weren't very self-sufficient. Morgan was the precocious one. Jude and I were free-spirited troublemakers. With Mom incapacitated, Tom moved in with his pregnant wife and newborn son to "help take care of us."

I should give Tom a proper introduction. He was thirteen years older than me but five inches shorter, a detail that offended him to his core. Now I look back on Tom with pity, but back then, I loved and hated and feared Tom in equal measure. He was my big brother but also my worst bully. He would hit me, or twist my arm, or threaten me, or belittle me, or anyone else who made him feel insecure, including his wife, Reba. She was also taller than Tom. You'd think Tom would marry a short girl, but Reba had more essential qualities: gullibility and low self-esteem.

Tom had a pattern, a modus operandi: he finds a girl, turns on the charm, and gets her pregnant within a few months. His charming mask slips before the baby is born, and she has doubts, but after giving birth, after seeing her family together for the first time, she convinces herself it was her mind playing tricks. For a while, they enjoy a beautiful fiction. But reality is relentless, and the next time it asserts itself, she wonders if she made a huge mistake. She considers leaving him. Tom begs. Let's have another baby, he says, and because she's pliable and romantic and naive, she says yes, and embraces the fiction once more.

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I called it a pattern because it's happened three times that I know of. I heard there were others, but Tom swears those babies aren't his.

Tom and Reba moved in to "take care of us" as their beautiful fiction began to fall apart. Tom stopped pretending to be kind or thoughtful. Reba was pregnant with baby number two, and the combined pressures of pregnancy, early motherhood, grief, a strained marriage, and the distance from her family in Ohio, all brought Reba to a state of hysteria semi-regularly. Tom was either unable or unwilling to help his pregnant wife and child, so baby Connor watched a lot of Shrek, and I became both nanny and family therapist while Tom went to "work." I put work in quotes because Tom couldn't keep a job for more than a few months, and I can guess what he did between jobs.

What I'm about to say will seem arrogant or delusional, but it's the truth. I only mention it because it's relevant to my family dynamic: I was the smartest person in my family. I don't have any evidence to back up that claim, except everyone in my family knew it as an uncontested fact. I don't think that makes me particularly intelligent: it just meant my family was very dumb, except Morgan and Jude, but she died, and he was three years younger than me, so I had a head start. Jude is clever, though, and funny, but the ugly truth is, we forgot about him completely.

Jude was eleven when his big sister died. His mom lost herself in grief, and, I'm ashamed to say, so did I. We were all so absorbed in our own selfish depressions. We couldn't, or wouldn't, see how lost and alone he was. The feelings I described earlier, he experienced, too. We could have bonded. God knows he tried. I just... didn't want to.

That's how I was back then. I didn't want to bond or connect. I didn't want to talk to anyone. I didn't want to go to school and see strangers laughing. I hated them. I hated my teachers, who looked at me with compassion and sadness and gave me passing grades even though I ignored my homework. I hated the kids who were suddenly nice to me after years of tormenting me. I hated them most of all. How dare they be kind to me now. A few bullies kept it up, for whatever reason, but it didn't sting like it used to. Their barbs and shoves seemed so distant from me now. I developed a morbid sort of appreciation for them. At least my bullies were consistent. My hatred for them was something clean and uncomplicated.

Besides, they were quaint compared to the bully at home. Which brings me back to my earlier mention of intelligence, or lack thereof. The point is Mom, Tom, and Reba all came to me with their emotional and intellectual quandaries because they thought I was smart. The truth is I was a stupid child. I was fourteen, pretending to be grown-up because it was easier than processing my grief. More and more, I pretended to be someone else, somewhere else. I pretended I was cynical and superior. I lied to myself, and my family believed the lie.

It's hardly surprising. Self-deception comes naturally in my family. Tom convinced himself he was a hero, rescuing his family from the precipice. Mom convinced herself Tom was trustworthy, that she hadn't raised a violent sociopath. I convinced myself I was intelligent. Reba convinced herself her marriage could be saved. And we all supported each other in our delusions because that's what family does.

Speaking of delusions, Mom and Tom became convinced that pigs were spying on them. You see, the truck driver that T-boned the car my sister was in happened to be the mayor. Mom sued him for Morgan's death. After a year of legal dancing, Mom was awarded nearly $200,000.

But in the intervening months and sometime after, Tom became convinced that the mayor was compelling police to tail the family in search of dirt or whatever. I don't know. But I know Mom smoked pot, and in 2003 that was still illegal in the state of Washington, so she got paranoid easily and not without good cause.

I vividly remember the day Mom got the settlement check. We had all abstractly discussed what might be done with the money. I suggested buying an RV so we'd never be homeless again. Jude wanted to open a restaurant. Reba suggested putting money aside for Jude and me to pay for college. Tom wanted a new Dodge Truck with a V8 engine. Mom wanted to travel the world. I guess she compromised (?) by buying two Dodge trucks with V8 engines. Seeing Mom and Tom drive those giant gas guzzlers home for the first time, I had a vision of our future.

Do you know most people who win the lottery are broke again in about a year? They call it a curse, but it's simple: most people who win the lottery have been poor all their lives. They've never seen that much money. They think it'll last forever, so they spend it all. Money management is for rich people, and most lotto winners haven't been rich long enough to know how to manage their fortune. By the time they figure it out, their fortune is spent. That's a lot like what happened to my family.

Mom didn't buy a house, or a restaurant, or an RV; nor did she set money aside for college. Instead, she rented two jumbo-sized Uhaul trucks, and we packed all our belongings and drove across the country for a month. Mom didn't know where we were going, but she knew she wanted to leave Washington, so we wandered. We drove to Nevada, then Colorado, then Texas, and finally ended up in Montana, for some reason.