by Phoebe North
30
The night Jamie first came home, his dark hair was shaggy down his shoulders. He wore cheap clothes Mom had bought from a Walmart on the long drive back to New York State, a T-shirt with a surfing dog on it and a pair of navy sweatpants with a white tie at the waist. Jamie stood in our dim living room, staring at the cobwebs and Mom’s schoolbooks spread out across the coffee table and the candy wrappers I’d forgotten to throw out that were scattered across the couch cushions.
“I saw the ‘For Sale’ sign out front,” he said. Mom laughed nervously in the doorway, fussing with her keys. She waved her hand, dismissing him. Maybe we weren’t moving at all. Maybe my brother’s return had changed the future. Maybe we were all staying here now that he was back and everything was fixed.
It had been so long since I stood beside him that it was jarring in that moment: his unmistakable magic. It almost hurt, like staring directly into an eclipse. But it was sweet, too. Childish, like Christmas. Jamie was back! I wanted to throw my arms around him, holding him close. I wanted to sneak off to the woods with him and have him tell me all his secrets. But having Jamie back was like catching a powdery-winged cabbage moth between your hands. You didn’t want to move too quickly. You didn’t want to crush him.
“We’re taking it off the market. I’ll call the Realtor tomorrow. Now that you’re back—”
“Still, it looks different,” he said, his gaze hazy—like he didn’t even know how his presence shifted the air around us, giving it a new electricity. My brother, the ghost, back from the dead. “It’s changed.”
Beside him, Elijah scoffed. He was becoming surly, like Jamie once had. “That’s because Dad moved out,” he said, which Jamie knew already, but his shoulders sagged to hear it.
I felt a stab in my heart. He was disappointed by us. We’d failed him, somehow, by moving on, by changing. I guess he expected us to all stay frozen in his absence, preserved in amber for all eternity as we had been on the day he got in some man’s truck and drove right out of our lives. And I’d tried not to change. I hadn’t wanted to leave the Island of Feral Children, or to give up everything we’d always believed. Didn’t he understand everything I’d sacrificed for him? Friends. Normality. Vidya. Didn’t he understand that I’d never given up hope?
But still, I’d made my betrayals, too. Rolling my eyes at his poetry. Telling Vidya that she should have been mine instead. Being so, so angry at him right before he disappeared . . .
I looked down, scared that if our eyes met, he would somehow learn the whole story—every ugly bit.
Mom crossed the room to put her hand on his shoulder. He leaned into her touch.
“I kept your room for you,” she said. “It’s just like you left it.”
I braced myself. Because the room wasn’t just like he left it. The drawing he’d done of Vidya was gone, and I was the one who had given it away.
But now, in this moment, I was safe. Jamie was clearly exhausted. He licked his lips, which were chapped and pale, and nodded. Then he went up the stairs alone and slammed the door behind him. If he noticed now that the drawing of Vidya was gone—slipped inside her pocket on the night of our shared birthday, the night I’d first drawn her to me and drowned in the scent of her skin—he never said a word to me about it.
He was quiet that first night. We were, too. I cooked dinner with Mom, moving in a silent choreography around the kitchen while Elijah sprawled out on the couch playing video games.
“We’re really going to keep the house?” I finally asked as I scraped the vegetables into the pan. I’d begged her before, tears streaming down my cheeks. Now I picked my words carefully, though part of me suspected that it didn’t really matter to her how I spoke or what I said. Not when Jamie was back, alone, upstairs.
“We don’t want to do anything that will disrupt his life more than necessary. Not after what happened. We need to be stable for him. We’ll be the strong ones.” She pressed her lips into a smile.
I stared at her, my eyes wild and wide. Being strong for Jamie now? She had no idea what I’d sacrificed for him. Everything I’d done, or hadn’t done, had been meant to bring him back home. When I left Vidya’s house and tromped out into the woods alone, it had been his name on my lips. Jamie Jamie Jamie, I chanted, standing on one foot until I fell over, until I’d let out a ragged sob. I’d taken that knife—that stupid, stupid knife—and hugged it to my chest, trying to will him to come back to me. Then I’d buried it with my bare hands, until the hard-packed soil under my nails made my fingers ache. My mother hadn’t known about any of it. She hadn’t known how long I’d been strong for him. Not just that night, but for two years before that.
For my entire life before that, too.
That night, I felt the heavy weight of my phone in my pocket. I thought about texting Vidya, telling her the whole crazy story. Jamie was back, but it was nothing like I’d thought it would be. Maybe we would laugh about it, how my magic had worked, in a way, but it had been a black magic, a broken magic. Maybe she would have gently pointed out how it was obvious—to her, to me—how it was finally time for me to move on.
But how could I? My brother was here, sleeping upstairs. He’d experienced unimaginable horrors. And that wasn’t all. What your son did was very, very brave, the nurse at the desk had said when we’d gone to pick Jamie up from the hospital. Mom had nodded, but she didn’t look surprised. Of course she expected Jamie to do amazing things, even now. We all did. Jamie had been hurt, and now Jamie was a hero. If there was any time to think about myself, then this moment, this night, surely was not it. Not wanting to risk the temptation, I didn’t take out my phone until hours later, when I figured it would be dead anyway. I didn’t text Vidya. I didn’t text anyone. I waited.
Jamie didn’t wake up for dinner. He slept right through it. Mom went in to check and said that he looked peaceful, though there was doubt in her voice. She’d lingered so long in his room that her food went cold. Elijah and I exchanged wordless glances and got up to clear our plates.
31
He was quiet that first night, and the whole first week. But soon the bad nights started. My counselor had warned me to expect them, but I couldn’t anticipate the terror of waking up for the first time in our usually silent house to the ear-shattering sound of my brother’s screams.
“Don’t touch me! Don’t touch me! I’ll fucking kill you!”
My own heart pounded as I stumbled out of my bedroom and into the hall. Mom had already turned on the light and thrown open Jamie’s bedroom door. Elijah was at Dad’s that night; no one had been able to convince Jamie to go there yet. He wanted to be home, he said. His real home. His actual home.
So I watched alone in the yellow light of the hallway as my mother crawled into my brother’s bed and cradled his too-big body to her chest.
“I’m here, baby,” she said, rocking him, even though he wasn’t a baby. He wasn’t even a boy anymore. His big man hands were cupped over his face, and he screamed once more into them. Mom rocked him, her lips against the crown of his head, tears streaming down her cheeks.
Feeling exhausted and off-kilter, I stumbled back into my pitch-black room. Jamie’s sobs had died down, but his barky breath still came now and again through the thin walls. My heart raced. I reached up and touched the ancient drawings that hung above my bed.
“What did he do to you?” I whispered, and my stomach clenched for some reason at giving that thought voice. But of course I knew what had happened. Rape. He had been raped. The worst sort of crime against the best sort of person. I felt the smooth, soft grain of the paper beneath my hands, wondering how I’d never guessed at this, how I’d never imagined it. I’d known Jamie better than anyone. I’d once thought that we shared the same soul, the same heart. Obviously, I’d been wrong. What’s worse, people had said it. I’d seen them whispering to each other at school or on the bus. I thought about the girl who had given me that joint at the Madrigals trip after admitting that she stayed up all night sometimes reading theories abou
t my brother’s disappearance on Wikipedia.
Some people think some guy in a van got him, she’d said after we smoked, when our heads had started to get hazy and our mouths had filled up with cotton. Offered him a ride and then drove him out to the middle of nowhere. Like something out of one of those eighties movies about kids gone wrong.
Back then, I’d only scowled at her. Derisive.
You have no idea what you’re talking about, I’d said. I had been so sure that I knew where Jamie had gone. He was in Gumlea. The pirate had him. The pirate with hooks for hands, with his filmy eyes. The pirate had sung him sea shanties, smoothing down Jamie’s hair and then tying endless knots in my brother’s ropes. The pirate had been sick, yes. Perverted? Possibly. But rape? That hadn’t entered the equation. I had never even considered it. There was no rape in Gumlea.
There was only silence now coming from my brother’s room. After a long stretch of time—maybe minutes, maybe hours—I heard Mom get up and close the door and go to her own bedroom, satisfied that my brother was asleep.
But I didn’t sleep at all that night, or most nights after. On most nights, my stomach was too queasy. I’d be on edge, waiting for Jamie’s next nightmare, waiting for the screaming to begin. On the nights when I would finally succumb to sleep myself, I’d have nightmares of my own. The things that had happened to Jamie. Or, more often, the things that hadn’t: the pirate, spilling his grog over my brother’s bare skin, whistling ancient, tuneless songs. Pressing his lips to my brother’s shoulder blades, drawing his hooks down the curve of my brother’s back.
It was bad enough that I’d lost Vidya and Gumlea. Now I was supposed to face the real world, where everyone knew that my older brother had become a traumatized mess. If I could have buried the truth beneath a thousand pounds of concrete, I would have. But there was no escaping it.
Soon enough, I had to return to school. In a way, it reminded me of how my days had felt right after Jamie’s disappearance. All eyes were on me, but none of the kids knew what to say. A few of the teachers tried. At the start of lunch the day I went back, Mr. Macklin, the gym teacher, called me over. He reached out his hand. I awkwardly reached mine out. Then he put a hand over and under mine, like the world’s clammiest sandwich.
“I’m so glad your brother came back,” he said. “I always remembered how talented he was at running. I prayed for him all the time.”
I frowned, pulling my hand away. I never knew what to say to that kind of thing. Maybe Elijah or my dad would have appreciated the sentiment, but over the last few years I’d stopped praying for his return in any language but the languages of Gumlea. I’d said so many prayers, and they’d never done anything to get my brother back. And while I still went through the motions, my body unwilling to let the prayers go even if my heart had, the lack of answers had begun to make my faith waver. I wanted to ask Him why He’d returned my brother to me so changed when I’d always been faithful. But you can’t have a real conversation with G-d. He never answered, so eventually, I quit asking.
“Um,” I said, “yeah, thanks.” Then I quickly retreated into the cafeteria. My eyes were down on the linoleum tiles. I didn’t want to risk seeing Vidya or her friends. Instead, I just slid into what had once been my regular seat, at a table alone in the corner with Miranda, and buried my face in my hands.
Maybe under normal circumstances, she would have laughed. Or maybe asked me where I’d been for weeks, when I’d been obsessed with my first girlfriend. Maybe under normal circumstances she would have been annoyed at me for only coming back to our friendship now that the relationship with Vidya was over. But these were not normal circumstances.
“You all right?” she asked, not carefully or delicately like anyone else might have done, but like she actually really cared. I dropped my hands and looked at her. My friend. My oldest friend. Freckles on her nose. Her pixie cut all cowlicked. And her thin eyebrows, knitted up in worry for me.
“It’s been a month,” I said. She smiled vaguely and offered me some chips out of her snack-sized bag of Doritos.
“An entire month?” she asked.
I fished one out, loudly crunching. And laughed, despite myself. “An entire month,” I told her. “Two, even. First I bury my brother, then I finally get a girlfriend, then Mom says she’s going to sell the house, then me and Vidya call it quits and then—”
“Your brother comes back from the dead?” she offered.
I shook my head. Snorted. Laughed again. “Yeah, you could say that.”
Miranda paused, watching me for a moment. “Did you talk to him about what happened?” she asked, and for a moment, I thought she meant what had happened to him. To Jamie. I grimaced, and the horror must have been evident on my face, because then she added, “I mean, did you tell him about you and Vidya?”
She was looking past me, to where I knew Vidya was probably sitting. I wanted to look, too. But I couldn’t let myself. If I looked at her, I knew I’d want to go back to her. To sit next to her and hold hands under the lunch table. To take solace in the smoothness of her skin, to let her whisper comforting words directly into the snail shell of my ear. And I couldn’t. Not now. Magic was gone, dashed against the rocks finally—just like Vidya had wanted—but Jamie’s return meant a reunion with Vidya was a nonstarter.
“G-d no,” I said. “Not yet. We haven’t really had time to talk. . . .”
“You don’t have to, you know,” Miranda said quickly, like she’d been thinking about this for a while.
I arched an eyebrow, reaching for another chip. “What do you mean?”
“You don’t have to tell him that you and Vidya were together. I’m sure he has other things on his mind right now, but even after he . . . whatever, starts to get better. If I were him, I wouldn’t want to know about it. It’d be one thing if you were still together. But you’re not, right?”
I couldn’t help it then. I turned around, looking right toward Vidya’s table. It seemed like she and Harper Walton were cracking up over something, like they were having a swell old time. But then my eyes caught Vidya’s, and her face fell. She started crumpling up her lunch and got up to leave. It hurt, to see her run away like that. But it’s not as if I didn’t expect it.
I turned back around. “We are definitely not together,” I told Miranda.
She nodded. “Then skip it. Don’t tell him, if you don’t want to. Why make a complicated situation even more complicated? Even back before your brother disappeared . . .” She trailed off.
“What?”
“He was always kind of a jerk to you,” she said. “You were always so nice and I know you told him everything but I don’t know if he really appreciated that. He just kind of did what he wanted, right? And the thing is, that’s fine. He’s your brother, not your best friend. You can be supportive of him without, I don’t know.”
“What?”
“Without, like, peeling your skin off and opening your guts for him every time you talk. It’s okay to be different people. Even now.”
She went to take a Dorito, but I’d eaten the last one. She sighed, but not at me.
“Especially now,” she added.
As the days and then weeks passed, my brother quietly revised himself. Mom took him to get a haircut, and to the mall in Poughkeepsie for a new wardrobe, which fit him better than the hand-me-downs from the folks at Dad’s church. She took him to the dermatologist. And to see a new therapist, every single day. Not my therapist, but one who specialized in people with more complex trauma, like veterans with PTSD, shooting victims who had barely survived—and kids like my brother. While the rest of us went to school or work, my brother talked about his disappearance in a brightly lit office downtown five days a week. At least, I assume that’s what they talked about. Jamie didn’t offer anything to me, and I could never find the words to ask.
Actually, Jamie and I didn’t talk to each other at all. I didn’t even know where to begin. Sometimes I’d be doing homework or watching TV in the living room
, and he’d float on over like a ghost. He’d sit in the easy chair—the one he used to spend hours draped across, reading—and he’d laugh too loudly at the terrible sitcom punch lines.
“That’s funny, right?” he asked one night, not for the first time.
I tapped the cap of my pen against my notebook. “Yeah,” I said. I examined his features. I had liked his hair better long, actually. Even if his skin was getting better. He looked too wholesome now. Too much like Dad. “Funny.”
The corner of his mouth twitched. “You can change it if you want,” he said. He went to hand me the remote, but I waved my hand.
“No, it’s okay,” I told him. “I have like a million proofs to do. I should probably go work upstairs.”
Jamie looked at the remote like it might contain some sort of answer. Like it was a key. Or a knife. “Suit yourself” is what he said.
I carried my things up the stairs to my room and closed the door behind me. And then I took my notebook and hurled it at the wall, and kicked my garbage can over, too. I didn’t know what was wrong with me, couldn’t understand. I was supposed to be helping my brother get better. I was supposed to support him, like Mom had said. Like I always had, in a million tiny ways over the course of my entire life. But I couldn’t even talk to him. Every time I opened my mouth, all I could think about were the things I couldn’t say. Gumlea. Vidya. The night in the woods. And what else was there to talk about, really? His years spent in Pennsylvania, playing video games while his rapist went to work? His upcoming court date? The GED our father wanted him to get, if he could ever be bothered to study? He didn’t know me anymore, and I didn’t know him.
I sighed and started picking up my snack wrappers and pencil shavings from the floor. In that moment, brief and fleeting, I knew that I couldn’t do anything to help Jamie. I couldn’t even help myself.
32
Not everyone was so afraid to talk about what had happened to Jamie. Mom discussed it openly at dinner; she said that Jamie’s therapist had advised her that it was best to normalize the experience. Still, his eyes were closed off and shadowed when Mom rattled on about, as she had begun to call it, “The Thing That Happened.” You could almost hear the capital letters there. It reminded me of how Jamie and I had once spoken of Gumlea, with its Laws and Vows and Kings—only much, much worse.