“How,” he said, his voice quivering, “how did I not feel it?”
I didn’t have an answer for him.
“Why me? What does it want with me?”
Again, I had nothing with which to soothe him. I thought of the bear, my last piece of my mother, gone for good, and tears began to fill my own eyes.
“My bear,” I whimpered.
“What? Your bear? The hell does that matter?”
I thought of what he had said earlier that very day, about me, about her.
“You should know exactly what it matters. It matters because it came from her.”
“What do you know?” he asked, the fury clouding his face. “You didn’t love her. You didn’t even know her.”
“Don’t you think I know that? You at least had something. You have memories and pictures and… and kisses and hugs. You know what she smelled like. You know what her laugh sounded like. All I had is that damn bear. And now it’s gone.”
Tears were pouring down my cheeks by then, but I refused to wipe them away. It would have made me look weak. He shook his head, the storm clouds lifting.
“I’m sorry.”
It was just about the last thing I ever expected him to say, but it was a welcome surprise. I didn’t push it, didn’t pry, didn’t demand that he say more. I just took the simple apology for what it was.
“What’s going on?” he asked.
We talked through the night, talked until the two of us couldn’t stand it anymore. And then, when I crawled into my own alien bed, Andy sat down on the edge, his face sincere. “I didn’t know. About that… thing. About everything.”
“I know you didn’t,” I said, pulling the covers over my shoulder. “How could you?”
“No,” he said suddenly. “There’s no excuse. Not for me. Not for the way I am… sometimes.”
I sat up, staring at him, preparing to tell him that everything was fine, that everything would be fine, but he was already up by then, halfway out the door. I expected to hear the familiar drone of his music rocking him to sleep, but I never did, and it wasn’t until he was shaking me awake a few hours later that I knew anything at all.
“Why are we out here?” I asked, motioning to the garage.
“The toys. Last night, you talked about finding your bear in a box. Where was it?”
I waved a hand at the wall of junk, the old boxes, the mismatched furniture, the bags of clothes too small for us to wear.
“I dunno. Here somewhere.”
“Think,” he demanded as he began poking around himself. “How long ago was it?”
“A year or two. I don’t really know. Why does it matter?”
“The box. You said the box was almost empty. That it had your name on it.”
He waited for me to get it, and when I clearly didn’t, he sighed.
“Why put just a couple of toys into a box and put it out in the garage?”
“Who knows?” I shrugged. “You know how Dad is—”
“No,” he said, cutting me off. “Dad’s not like that, even if you think he is. That’s something an idiot would do. Dad’s not like you. I’m not like you. But neither of us is stupid.”
I readjusted my tone and said, “I didn’t say he was stupid, or that you were stupid. He’s just a little flighty.”
“The reason,” he said, ignoring my logic, “that the box was almost empty is because, at one point in time, it was almost full.”
I tried to do the mental gymnastics to catch up with him, but it was still too early. “I guess,” was all I could eke out.
“This thing… it’s been coming here for who knows how long. Taking what it wants. Leaving little pieces for later. Saving them for… who knows?”
“There wasn’t just one thing in there,” I replied, finally getting it. “There were a few.”
“But it was mostly empty, right?”
I nodded, and we dove in. It only took a couple of minutes to dig the box out, and as soon as he lifted my box from the pile, I already knew. It was too light, as if the box were filled with nothing more than air. Then he tore the top off, and we saw it, filled with nothing more than dust and dead spiders.
“You never came out here?” I asked.
“No. You?”
I just shook my head.
“What about mine?” he asked.
It was a good question, one that we spent the next two hours trying to answer. It wasn’t until we dropped down the ladder to the attic that we finally found what we were looking for. Cardboard box after cardboard box, dozens of them in a neat stack near the back of the stifling attic. They looked, from a distance, as if they had never been touched. The words scrawled on them, in fat, black marker, told a story that made a part of my heart wither.
ANDY/BABY
ANDY/TODDLER
ANDY/2 YR
On and on it went. I had a box. I had a bear.
He had a toy store.
I’d always had a sense of the difference between his early life and mine. The pictures had shown me that. They told one story. This stack of boxes told another one entirely. I felt a few pangs of anger as I gazed at them, fury directed at my father for more or less abandoning me. But that fire burned out in seconds, only to be replaced by a deeper feeling that I had never known before.
When I glanced over at Andy, I saw the look on his face, and I knew he was reliving it. He reached for the first box he came across, ANDY/SUPERHEROES, and he ripped it open. All the usual suspects were in there, but he dug through them, dozens of tiny plastic figures in search of something special. The one that stood out. The one that meant something.
It was the only one not there.
He slammed the box down and shook his head. “I had a Superman,” he said in a pained voice I had never heard from him before. “I took it everywhere. It was… shit. I loved that thing.”
He grabbed another box, and once again he came up short. Again and again he searched, digging through the pile, finding nothing more than junk he could not care less about. As I watched him, silently taking in the pain and desperation on his face, that alien feeling grew deeper. I thought once more of Mom, of how I acted whenever her name was brought up. Every time, I struck back, throwing the issue back at anyone who dared question me.
I was the one who was hurt.
I was the one who never got to know her.
I was the one who really lost.
But now, as his desperation grew into a frenzy, I couldn’t feel anything other than pure, empty guilt. I had killed his mother, and for that, I should feel guilty. The truth at the bottom of it all was that Andy had been hurt a thousand times more than I ever could be.
“Stop,” I said, putting a hand on his shoulder.
“No,” he whined. “The ones I cared about. The toys she gave me. They’re all gone.”
The still-bitter part of me wanted to ask him why, if he loved them so much, he had let them rot up here, but I think I already knew the answer to that. Dad, as lost and confused without my mother as Andy was, did what he had to do to survive. That meant that life as they knew it, these two, drifting bachelors, had to begin again. Every nook and cranny of the house before I was born had been packed with reminders, and now those reminders were here, stuffed into boxes and labeled in black ink.
I wanted to tell him it would all be okay, but that felt wrong somehow. There was no easy answer here, and giving him a simple solution would probably just make him mad at me. Instead, I took a different tactic.
“We don’t know what this thing is or why it’s doing this. So,” I said, kneeling down eye to eye with him, “the question is, what are we going to do about it?”