I have photos of Natalie and Johnny and me sitting on a porch, our arms around one another. We look very happy, but I can’t remember anymore if my siblings teased me or tolerated me. Did they ever guess that one night they would die, while I would get to live? Did they ever imagine, on that sunny afternoon, that none of their dreams would come true?

“Survivor’s guilt,” Dr. Frank would remind me gently. “None of this is your fault.”

The story of my life.

Aunt Helen did right by me. She was over forty and childless, a corporate lawyer married to her job, when I came to live with her. She had a one-bedroom condo in downtown Boston, so for the first year, I slept on the couch. That was okay, because for the first year, I didn’t sleep anyway, so she and I would stay up all night, watching reruns of I Love Lucy, and trying not to think of what had happened one week ago, then one month ago, then one year ago.

It’s a kind of countdown, except you never get any closer to a destination. Each day sucks as much as the one before. You simply start to accept the general suckiness.

Aunt Helen found Dr. Frank for me. She enrolled me in a private school where the small class size meant I got constant supervision and lots of one-on-one care. I couldn’t read the first two years. I couldn’t process letters, couldn’t remember how to count. I got out of bed each day, and that took so much energy, I couldn’t do much else. I didn’t make friends. I didn’t look teachers in the eye.

I sat, day after day, trying so hard to remember each detail, my mother’s eyes, my sister’s scream, my brother’s goofy grin, I had no room in my head for anything else.

Then one day when I was walking down the street, I saw a man lean over and kiss his little girl on top of the head. A random moment of fatherly tenderness. His daughter looked up at him, and her round little face lit into a million-watt smile.

And my heart broke, just like that.

I started to cry, sobbing incoherently through the streets of Boston as I stumbled my way back to my aunt’s condo. When she came home four hours later, I was still weeping on the leather sofa. So she joined me. We spent an entire week crying together on the couch, with Gilligan’s Island playing in the backdrop.

“The rat bastard,” she said when we’d finally finished weeping. “That fucking, fucking rat bastard.”

And I wondered if she hated my father for slaughtering her sister, or for saddling her with an unwanted child.

The story of my life.

I survived. And even if I don’t always remember, I do live, the survivor’s ultimate responsibility.