THE OBJECT OF QUICKSAND WAS TO MANEUVER YOUR OPPONENT OFF THE bed (and into the quicksand) using nothing but your feet. The game was born one bitter winter's eve as I tried to wedge my icicle toes under my sister's toasty butt. Cathy and I shared a double bed for most of our childhood, and on any given night an unexpected visitor to our room might walk in on the wild blur of knotted legs and the muffled grunts and giggles that only quicksand could induce. Being two years older and slightly bigger, I outmatched my sister for a time. When she caught up with me in size, I took advantage of her compassion. Cathy usually flinched when she had me at the edge.

Quicksand was actually a departure for Cathy. She typically showed no interest in the physical games I played with my brothers and the other boys on the block, preferring the more genteel company of the winsome Harz sisters who lived in the red-shingled house at the corner and who, like Cathy, attended the Miss Vivian School of Dance. While I embraced a scruffy tomboy ethic, militantly refusing to wash my hair for an entire summer and prone to vent a quick temper on household walls, Cathy was well behaved, kind and feminine, and like all Virgos, impeccably groomed. For a while there, when she was four or maybe five, she would put on her best dress and greet our father at the door each evening when he got home from work.

At times it seemed my sister's life and mine intersected only in our room. When we walked out of that tiny cube each morning, and eventually forever, we went our separate ways. Cathy grew up to be a critical-care nurse, a wife and a three-time mother. Although I always envied her certainty about what she wanted her life to be, I didn't envy her life. It was too familiar and predictable for the adventurer I fancied myself to be.

I drifted from science into writing as I relocated every two years or so, shedding relationships as I changed addresses, the itinerant owner of a fickle ambition. Cathy has visited me from time to time, but after having shared the same room for 18 years, we have now lived hundreds of miles apart for more than twenty.
When I was a graduate student, I shared a house for a time with an aspiring painter named Barb, who was an only child. One hectic spring morning in the midst of midterm exams, she cornered me in the kitchen and asked, out of the blue, what it was like to love a sister.

Compelled to satisfy her curiosity, I dug for some nugget of insight. I should have said that loving a sister is an unconditional, narcissistic, and complicated devotion that approximates a mother's love. That sisters are inescapably connected, forever, the raw products of a similar commingling of genes, shaped by the same two parents, the same societal rules and expectations, the same trove of memory and experience.

Instead, I babbled something feeble about a sister's love being like the love you feel for your best girlfriends. Disappointed, Barb dropped the subject. She never asked again. And I didn't think any more about her question until nine months after Brian was born.

BRIAN MATTHEW HASHAGEN is my sister's second son. He was born on Wednesday, February 18, 1987, at 9:21 A.M. He weighed 6 pounds, 12 ½ ounces. By all accounts, Brian's was a normal delivery. But Brian wasn't a normal child.

He didn't look different. His first few days were a little harrowing. He ran a mysterious temperature and couldn't keep feedings down. Doctors ruled out everything from meningitis to an immature digestive system. Then, after three days, the symptoms subsided and Brian came home. But when he still wasn't crawling or sitting up at six months, Brian became the subject of many anxious family conversations.

Cathy hid her fears behind a breezy façade. Only later did I learn that she had badgered the pediatrician about Brian's failure to progress, that she and John, my brother-in-law, had discussed the subject. "We knew," she said. "We just didn't want to. Maybe neither of us wanted to say anything because we were afraid that if we said it, it was going to be true."

The truth about Brian began unraveling late in the afternoon of November 13, 1987. He was napping in his crib. My sister was painting some woodwork in her bedroom. Suddenly, she heard the baby coughing and ran to his room. He wasn't breathing. When my brother-in-law got home, police cars and an ambulance were parked on his front lawn. As he jumped out of the car, a neighbor rushed up to reassure him.

"It's okay," she said. "Brian's breathing again."
"What do you mean, again?" he asked.

Brian had suffered a massive seizure. Exactly what that meant would require a few days and a few tests. That night, lying aside a long-cultivated cynicism, I knelt and prayed for my sister and her son. I felt nostalgic and a little silly kneeling there in my nightshirt, head bowed and hands clasped, whispering in the dark. But it was comforting, too. Dear God, please let Brian be all right. Please don't do this to my sister.

The next morning, a neurologist examined the baby. He scheduled a battery of tests, including an electroencephalogram, and explained to Cathy that if the EEG showed seizure activity, it meant that brain damage had occurred. "When the doctor came back the next day, he told me that there was seizure activity," Cathy recalls. "He said that they didn't know at what level Brian would be able to function, but that he'd never be normal."

Brian was brain-damaged, neurologically impaired, developmentally disabled. Pick a phrase. His symptoms included cerebral palsy, mental retardation, and a seizure disorder. Tests ruled out physiologic, metabolic, and genetic defects. In other words, there was no medical explanation. It was just one of those things, one of those crazy, inexplicable strokes of reproductive bum luck. The experts did venture that whatever had gone wrong happened at conception or very early in the first trimester when the nervous system is developing. As to whether Brian would ever walk, or talk, or think? No one could say. But almost five years later, it seems unlikely.

Brian. Brain. Switch two letters, it's a whole new word. Maybe it was that simple. An amino acid out of sequence. A chromosome torn during cell division. Maybe some fetal contortion crimped the umbilical cord, disrupting the flow of oxygen for just a little too long. His body was perfectly formed. But behind Brian's round, dark eyes, the patterned firing of neurons was helter-skelter. A thicket of random electrical outbursts. Short circuits. Brainstorms.

The day after the diagnosis, struggling to contain my emotions, I asked my boss for some time off to be with my family. He consented without hesitation. Then he sighed broadly, clasped his hands across his chest, and confided that his only sister's only son had been diagnosed with schizophrenia about ten years before. The silence that followed was so prolonged that I rose to leave. As I reached the door to his office, he added, as if to no one, "My sister was never really the same after that."

His words hung in the air. I had been ashamed by some of my thoughts and feelings over the previous few days. I felt guilty for wishing that Brian had been a miscarriage, and--God forgive me--for the fleeting moment when I thought it might have been better if he had died that November afternoon. But here was my forbidden fear. What if this wretched event, which had cost me a nephew, should cost me my sister too? What if Cathy was never really the same again?

I remembered Cathy's description of the night Brian was born. She was lying awake in the hospital, worrying about her sick baby. "It was eleven o'clock. Everything was dark. I just remember wishing that somebody was there with me. I started saying the Our Father, and just repeating, Thy will be done, Thy will be done . . ." My sister's faith was stronger than mine. I made plane reservations, packed my bags, and that night I lofted another prayer heavenward: "Fuck you, God."

The first thing I did when I arrived home the next day was unearth a collection of old Kodachromes from my mother's basement and set up the slide projector. We are a fertile Catholic family. Babies, normal babies, are a birthright. On my mother's side alone, there are twenty-two grandchildren and twenty-one great grandchildren. My maternal grandfather's legendary patience with an old 35-millimeter camera and his rambunctious herd left a legacy on celluloid.

Click. Christmas Day, 1962. Ten little boy cousins in bow ties squirm on my grandmother's couch.

Click. July 4, 1957. Fifteen toddlers in party hats pose around a picnic table at cousin Nancy's third-birthday party.

Click. Easter Sunday, 1962. My three brothers, my sister and I, stiff in our Easter finery, squint at the camera from in front of a blooming forsythia bush.

I hadn't seen these slides in years. I don't know what I was looking for. Maybe some clue to why this was happening. Or maybe I just needed the reassurance of all those healthy, smiling faces. You see, we simply weren't prepared for the possibility of Brian. Life in our family had been so perfect for so long that even when my father died, nearly twenty years ago, I consoled myself with the belief that life would be perfect again, now that the Great Tragedy was behind us. Brian shattered that naïve logic. And this time the sorrow was perverse as well as profound. It's one thing to mourn death. But we were mourning life. The life of the child that might have been.

Click. My sister on the day of her First Holy Communion. She is all in white--white gloves, white veil, white Mary Janes. I remember teasing her about how the stiff white crinoline beneath her starched white dress made her look like half a grapefruit. She must have been overcome by self-consciousness just as my grandfather snapped the picture because an exaggerated grin is scrunching her eyes shut and wrinkling up her nose. She is seven years old.

For a while there as a kid, Cathy suffered seizures, usually when she was overtired or physically stressed. Once during a crowded Sunday mass on a sticky summer morning, she fainted, had a thrashing convulsion, and threw up in her new straw hat on the way to the hospital. We still laugh about the hat.

She said she could always feel them coming on. She would get what they call an "aura," or warning sensation. Some people hear a ringing sound. Some see flashes of light. Cathy felt barrels rolling inside her mouth, spinning against her tongue, faster, faster, faster . . . After the seizure passed, minutes that seemed like weeks, Cathy would sleep for hours in the room we shared, now strangely hushed and dark, the shades drawn, and my mother quietly shooing us away whenever we poked our fearful faces through the door.

Cathy had her last seizure the year she made her first Communion. She outgrew them just as the pediatrician said she would. There's no connection between Cathy's early childhood episodes and Brian's disorder. Still, I wonder if Brian has an aura. I wonder if Cathy didn't dodge some disaster during her own development in my mother's womb. And I wonder what life would have been like without her.

In an eerie way, life with Brian is like life without him. His presence is a reminder of his absence. I miss him.

If you've ever been swamped by an ocean wave, you'll know what it's like being Brian, physically that is. A gritty churning wall of water slaps you head over heels and rolls you around before spitting you back up on shore. The whole time you're trapped in the spin cycle. You know that the water is shallow and that all you have to do to escape is put your feet down and stand up. But you don't know which way up or down is. Disoriented by the tumbling, your brain, like Brian's, has lost track of where your body is in space.

I don't know what Brian's intellectual world is like, or that he even has one. Sometimes, I try to find him, searching his eyes for the person inside. He doesn't really look at you. His gaze isn't vacant, just off somewhere, as if he's watching a movie only he can see. He vocalizes, but doesn't speak. He laughs when you play with him, a sign, says the neurologist, of higher brain function. Sometimes, he just laughs to himself. But if there's a sentient person in there, I haven't found him yet. And so I imagine Brian instead.

I dreamt one night that I was pushing his stroller up a smooth hill past a line of parked cars: blue convertible, white pickup, silver station wagon. It was a sparkling autumn morning with crimson and gold leaves rustling and dancing overhead. Suddenly, Brian looked up at me and said, matter-of-factly, "I think we should turn around now."

A rush of joy dampened my cheeks and seared my throat. As I catapulted out of the dream, I struggled to cling to the sound of his voice, to fix its tone and timbre in my conscious mind. The voice slipped away, but I have visited that dream many times since.

I don't have to imagine Cathy. I can hear her breathy "hello" on the telephone, the sound of her contralto harmonizing with mine as we entertain her kids with our rendition of "Three Little Fishes." I can taste her homemade blueberry pie. I can see the mischief in her dark, laughing eyes. And now, with Brian, I can feel her pain.

TWO YEARS PASSED before Cathy and I sat down and talked about Brian. It was a gray afternoon in mid-January. She looked a little weary, sitting on her living-room couch sipping tea. The sound of my nephews' voices drifted up from the family room below. My tape recorder rested on the coffee table; its faint whir reminding us that our conversation had a formal structure and purpose. I was interviewing Cathy for this story.

She told me that she first suspected something might be wrong when she was six months pregnant with Brian. The baby's movement had become uncomfortably constant and "tumultuous." The obstetrician was reassuring, but Cathy was reminded of a disquieting premonition she'd had in her early twenties. "I know it sounds weird," she says, "but I just got a feeling that I would have a child with a problem one day. I didn't think about it when we decided to have children. Then when I was carrying Brian, it all came back. But I always thought it would be a Down's Syndrome child. That's why when Brian was born and he looked normal, I thought, phew, I was wrong." She wasn't.

Her daily life changed dramatically after Brian's diagnosis. Locating schools, therapists, physicians, shuttling Brian back and forth, and caring for him was a full-time job. Two mornings a week, she drove Brian to an early intervention program for handicapped children. In the afternoons, he had separate sessions of speech, physical, and occupational therapy. And there were regular visits to a neurologist, and to a local hospital for the blood work that monitored and helped regulate the dosages of seizure medication. It's a good thing Cathy likes to drive.

In fact, the car is where she did her crying. Some days were simply painful, like the summer afternoon she spent at a local swimming hole with a few neighborhood mothers and their kids. "One of the mothers was going on and on about how she was getting tired of running after her two-year-old daughter, and 'Look how dirty she's getting playing in the sand.' And here I am with Brian, wishing he could crawl around and get dirty. Sometimes, you want to shake people who have normal children. So your kids are pulling Tupperware out of the drawers, or getting food in their hair. Be thankful they can do it."

Other times, especially in the beginning, were devastating. Cathy remembers the day she saw the results of Brian's first developmental evaluation. The report concluded that in cognitive, speech and motor skills, her ten-month-old baby was functioning at a zero- to three-month level. "When I got home, I remember crying and saying to Mom, 'I just can't accept this. I will never accept that this has happened.'"

Cathy still can't help noticing the curious glances, sometimes gawking stares, directed Brian's way wherever they go. But there are also the parents they meet through Brian's classes--some with children even more afflicted than he is--who understand. Despite the hardships, or maybe because of them, Cathy and John came to terms with Brian's handicaps long before anyone else in the family did. Somehow in the painstaking, time-consuming, selfless business of caring for Brian--changing, bathing, comforting, even teaching him to chew--my sister and brother-in-law seem to have entered what the nuns would have called a "state of grace."

"At first, I couldn't believe this had happened to us," said Cathy. "What did I do wrong? I didn't drink. I didn't do drugs. I always took care of myself. Then I started doing nonsense stuff, like, I would say, if I see ten white cars on the way home, everything will be okay. I prayed for a miracle. We went to healing masses. You grab onto anything that gives you a little comfort, a little hope. I still pray for a miracle.

"There were days when I thought, what is life going to be like now? I wondered if I would ever really be happy again. If anything would ever be funny enough to make me laugh. But your sense of humor does come back. It takes a long time to finally realize that it doesn't matter when or why or how it happened--it happened. Nothing is going to change that and now we have to get on with helping him.

"My own little philosophy is that there are some things in life you don't have a choice about. Brian was one of those. You do have a choice about how you're going to deal with it, how you're going to live your life. And I don't want to live my life being miserable and crying and feeling sorry for myself all the time.

"I think the people it's hardest on are the grandparents, because they not only see their grandchild, they see their child suffer. I remember on Brian's first birthday, Mom was here, and we were feeding him, and her eyes got all filled up. And I said I know you want to cry, because you're sad for him. But we're happy. We're really blessed. There are people who are a lot worse off than we are."

In that moment, I felt as if I was seeing Cathy for the first time. Not as the little sister who needed my protection or as the undeserving victim of a personal tragedy, but as the grown woman and mother whose strength now comforted and protected me.

I realized that we had to let Cathy be happy by allowing for the possibility that she could be. It was time to stop feeling sorry for her, for Brian, for ourselves. Time to stop encouraging the downcast eyes and well intentioned but woeful expressions of those who inquired in hushed tones, "How's Cathy?" There was something self-fulfilling, even pernicious about the pity. It seemed to rob Brian and Cathy of their dignity.

As the conversation continued, it occurred to me that I had been afraid to talk to Cathy. The subject was too painful. It was safer to use my mother as an intermediary, safer even now to assume the role of the dispassionate reporter. I had been so worried that this trauma would snatch Cathy away from me, but the truth is, she'd already gone. Cathy and I had not only lived apart all these years, we'd grown apart. We were holiday sisters: Merry Christmas/See you next year. We might have gone on that way, never recognizing what we'd lost until one of us stood sniffling over the other's grave. But as our interview evolved into a heart-to-heart, I realized that Brian was the way back.

BRIAN WAS TWO YEARS OLD when Cathy announced she was pregnant again. The news sent a tremor through the family. It seemed crazy with all the time and energy Brian demanded. And, of course, the specter of another handicapped child haunted everybody. But getting pregnant also seemed like a courageous and wonderful affirmation of life.

"It was a big decision," said Cathy. "I was afraid. What if something happened again? But I wanted to have the normal experience of motherhood one more time, because I felt I'd been cheated the second time. And I wanted [her oldest son] John to have a normal brother or sister. I don't know how long Brian will live, but if anything happened to John and me, I didn't want the burden of taking care of Brian to be on one child."

Paul Christian Hashagen was born, normal and healthy, on January 16, 1960. The family heaved a sigh of relief and emptied a bottle of champagne. After playing surrogate mother to John and Brian while Cathy was in the hospital, I got nearly two weeks to cuddle and coo over the new arrival before flying home. Paul had thick dark hair, and eyes as black as coal. He sat up at six months. He began walking at eleven months. His first word was "duck."

As for Cathy and me, our conversation was a first step. I spend each spring on the East Coast now and we are more a part of each other's daily lives. Last winter, we threw a baby shower for our sister-in-law. Next spring, we're planning a joint beach vacation in South Carolina. We call each other every other day or so to chat.

Sometime after Paul was born, I asked Cathy if she was disappointed that he hadn't been a girl. She smiled and shook her head. "I'm glad I had another boy," she said. "Because when they get older, John will have somebody to talk to, or go out and have a beer with. You know, a brother. They'll have each other."

Like Cathy and me.

Mary Bruno is a contributing editor of this magazine.