“You like your class?”
“I guess.”
The rain stopped, started. The clouds watered the sun white, and my mother turned to me. “I got a call, you know. From Miss Scott. She says you’re not paying attention. Not doing your work.” I lowered my head. “Is this true?”
I turned my back toward her, thinking of the haze of each school day. The musty classroom. The windows pulled open. The low drone of my teacher’s voice.
“It’s not my fault,” I said. “I don’t get why I’m the only one who has to go.”
My mother smiled. “Hm. I always loved school. Especially the beginning. The new books. The new supplies.”
“Yeah,” I said, as mean as I could. “Well, I’m not you.”
I moved to the corner of the porch. Opposite my mother. I heard her drum her fingers on the porch railing for a moment.
“Come here,” she said, and when I didn’t move, she came to me. “Listen. You need to hear this.” She turned me around and put my head in her hands, her palms cupping my cheeks. She looked me in the eye. She said, “You can’t carry this with you.”
“But—”
“No,” she said. “I know how much you love him. But you have to leave it behind.”
Rain ran down her forehead, dripped from the tip of her nose. In another minute or two, we would be soaked, but my mother wouldn’t let me go. Not until I met her stare and told her I understood. That everything that had happened, happened. That it was in the past and that the future, if we let it be, was open.
“Tomorrow is always different,” she said. “Understand?”
I nodded, and through the rain did my best to meet her eyes, hardened over the summer, but still my favorite shade of blue. “Yeah, Mom,” I said. “I get it.”
“Good,” she said.
* * *
When we ate dinner that week, we looked like a family. The TV was off, and my dad sat across from my mother, and I my brother. We chewed our food and my parents discussed their days. My dad talked of the Chief, who at the last minute pushed back retirement another six months. My mom spoke of my brother, telling my dad how smart he was, how studious. It was obvious she was hoping to spur him to speak, and when he didn’t, she would look at me, eyes raised, my cue to try.
After dinner my brother would go straight to the basement and lie in the dark, sleeping or not, I couldn’t tell, while my parents did the dishes in the kitchen. I didn’t feel like I belonged in either place, so sometimes I went out back and sat on the porch, stared at the stars. If the night was clear, I found the constellations I knew, the ones I’d learned from Chris. The Little Dipper. Ursa Major. Orion the Hunter. And even though I knew the brother stars wouldn’t come out for some time, I looked for them anyway. I found the hole in the night where I thought they belonged and wished for them to appear, holding my fingers in the sky. Two dots. Though I didn’t know what the stars looked like, or how far apart they really were.
* * *
My brother’s birthday was the week of Thanksgiving. This year, it fell on the same Thursday. There was little fanfare for my birthday, but my mother made two pumpkin pies for my brother’s, one for my dad and me and the other for the birthday boy. We gathered around the circle table and did our best to look happy. We sang, and when we were done my brother blew out the candles, the one and the one. There were no presents given. We couldn’t think of a single thing my brother would want.
After dessert, we sat on the couch and watched a repeat of the parade. My mother convinced my brother to stay upstairs with us, at least for a little while. Have a second slice, she said. It’s your special day. You deserve it. But five minutes later, when my brother’s plate was clean, and he dropped it noisily in the sink and went to the basement without saying thank you or good night, it was clear that the second slice, him spending an extra moment upstairs, was his gift to us, not the other way around.
My mother poured herself a cup of coffee and sat on the love seat. She’d been sleeping there since my brother was found, but now that he was back in the basement, she had no real reason to. Or not the same reason. More than once I heard my dad invite her to sleep upstairs. To take his bed. He would gladly sleep on the couch. It’ll be like old times, he said with a smile, you upstairs and me in the doghouse. But as comforting as a full bed sounded, my mother kept telling him no. She didn’t want to be too far away from my brother.
The parade ended. The streets of that big scary city cleared and the floats were taken down. When it was all over, it was way past my bedtime. I closed my eyes, wanting to stay upstairs as long as I could. Not wanting to spend another night with my brother, listening to his troubled breathing, feeling his tossing and turning. I pretended I was asleep and listened to my parents talk close to each other. At first, they talked about anything they could so they wouldn’t have to talk about my brother. They talked about things they read in the paper, things they heard. They talked about how the state was losing some of its funding and would have to let a few officers and guards go at the end of the year. They talked about my mom’s job, what she wanted. They talked about my mother going back to school to get her teacher’s degree, though she said she didn’t know. She kind of missed her work, missed Sandy. They talked about other people I didn’t know, places I had never seen or heard of. They talked about things I tried to understand.
But they couldn’t ignore what was everywhere. The thoughts of my brother, their son, which drowned out our days, despite our best efforts to smile, to wade, to stay afloat.
My mother was the first to speak. “What are we going to do?”
A few weeks ago, my dad would’ve said, Give it time. Give him some space. But we had tried that and it had taken us only so far.
“Maybe he should talk to someone,” my dad said.
“Like a therapist?”
“He won’t say any more to me or you. We’ve tried.”
“I know,” my mother said. She lowered her voice to a whisper. “Part of me doesn’t want to make him relive it. But what else could he be doing down there?”
A week ago I woke up in the middle of the night, and I was happy because I couldn’t place where I was, what life I was living. The feeling didn’t last, however, and when I remembered all we’d been through, the burning returned to my chest and I sat up. My brother’s half of the bed was empty. I thought about sneaking upstairs, spying on the world and finding my brother, who for some reason I assumed was sleeping on the couch again. Maybe he couldn’t take it, I guessed. Maybe being down here with me was too much after all.
But when I put my foot to the floor, I heard a noise from the wall by the stairs. A hiccup. A choked sob. My eyes adjusted to the dark and I saw the shadow of a boy, balled up in the fetal position. I went to him, part of me thinking this was still a dream. And when I touched him, he didn’t slap my hand away and his heavy breathing told me I was right; this was a dream. But it was my brother who was dreaming, not me. He was the one who couldn’t wake. Who moaned and moaned, terrified by some unseen force. I tried to put my arm around him, but that only made him wail louder. A siren, calling closer and closer. I didn’t know what else to do, so I ran back to bed and hid under the covers. I listened to him cry for several hundreds, as I counted sheep after sheep, praying for someone to take me to sleep.
In the morning I woke and found my brother dressing, preparing for his lessons with my mother. He didn’t say a word to me. And I didn’t know what to say to him.
But now, maybe, an idea. Something I could do.
“You’re right,” my mother said. “He needs to talk. He needs to tell someone his story.” Then she repeated what she said to me. “He can’t carry it alone.”
My dad agreed, and it was decided they would call someone in the morning. Set up something for after the holiday. But that wasn’t soon enough, was it? My brother needed to talk now, and not to some stranger.