The Window

by Amelia Brunskill

  Now I wanted there to be more options. I’d had no training wheels—while I’d once wound up at the hospital with a concussion and a broken arm after a rope swing accident, Anna had never had anything worse than a cold or a skinned knee.

  So it simply had not occurred to me that Anna could be hurt in any serious way, let alone be suddenly gone entirely.

  Of course, maybe not thinking about it was the only way to stay sane—anything else could drive a person crazy, knowing that at any moment they could lose everything.

  I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

  * * *

  —

  THE NEW TABLE ARRIVED THAT weekend.

  “I really think this will be better,” Mom said. “Don’t you?”

  “It’s nice,” I said. “The other one was ugly.”

  “I agree. Your dad bought it at a garage sale, and when he brought it home I didn’t have the heart to tell him.” She smiled and then shook her head. “The one nice thing about it being so ugly was that I never cared about water stains. Want to bet how long it will take before this one is marked with its first?”

  I began to smile and then I paused. “Wait a minute.” I jogged up to Anna’s room and began to remove three of the coasters from her bedside table. Then, as I held them in my hand, I imagined these things of hers absorbing water from our glasses, the cardboard buckling over time, until one of my parents deemed them no longer usable and tossed them away. I slid them back into the drawer.

  Not wanting to come back downstairs empty-handed, I walked to my room and grabbed some old paperback books I’d been planning to get rid of.

  “Here you go,” I said as I deposited the books on the new table. “We can use these until we get new coasters.”

  While I didn’t expect her to give me the third degree, I did think she might at least pause, silently questioning why I thought books would make good coasters—or—even granting that—why these particular books, when the living room was full of contenders. But her expression didn’t even flicker. “Okay,” she said. “Thanks.” Then she smiled at me and pulled a book over to her side of the table.

  Sometimes I wondered if I should find it convenient or unnerving just how odd my parents apparently expected me to be.

  Drinking in a bar, dancing. It felt like I was changing my story, rewriting my script, but it was rebellion lite—not really hurting anyone, not even myself.

  The boundaries between him and me, those remained clear. I might have been pushing other lines, might have occasionally had a third beer—gotten a little blurry from it—but I didn’t mess with that one. We stayed in our right roles.

  THERE HAD BEEN OCCASIONAL MOMENTS over the last week when I’d thought I might actually be getting better at this running thing. On Tuesday, my legs had hurt less, not more, than the day before, and I thought I’d turned a corner. Since then, I’d had a relapse, though, and now I was back to doing the sit-ups portion of the drills as slowly as possible to give myself a break from dashing around like a headless chicken.

  Beside me, Sarah was doing her sit-ups so fast she reminded me of a rower heading right for the finish line. I could probably bounce a quarter off her stomach, I thought. Not that I want to, but I bet I could. I bet it’d fly straight back up.

  Suddenly I found Mr. Matthews leaning over me. “You okay there?” he asked. “Did you get winded?”

  I blinked and realized that I’d paused between sit-ups and was staring at Sarah’s stomach.

  “No, everything’s fine,” I said, and slid back down to complete another sit-up.

  * * *

  —

  THROUGH THE SWEAT AND EXHAUSTION of my time in track, I’d learned the following about Mr. Matthews.

  • He drove a green VW Beetle, but only if the weather was bad.

  • He tapped the side of his leg when a race was close.

  • He began to stammer when he got annoyed.

  I had no idea if any of these things were relevant.

  I suspected not.

  Sometimes I found myself staring at him too hard in practice and had to force myself to look away. I couldn’t help but wonder, if it was true about him and Anna, how it could’ve started. Would it have been a slow process, a gradual accumulation of a million small movements, impossible to pinpoint exactly when the line was crossed? Or was there no doubt about when they became something different to each other, when he was no longer her teacher, her coach, when she was no longer his student?

  I didn’t know that either. The only thing that was becoming increasingly clear was that to get any closer to the truth, I’d need to supplement track practice with observations of him in other settings.

  Watching him when he wasn’t expecting it. Possibly, for example, in the privacy of his home.

  * * *

  —

  TWO DAYS LATER, I STRETCHED at the side of the school, attempting to look casual and sporty as I monitored the door, waiting for Mr. Matthews. Slowly, I rotated through all the stretches I knew. Once I’d exhausted those, I began making up others.

  I was starting to worry he was staying late at his desk and I’d be forced to head home for dinner before he even emerged. Or that he’d used the back entrance and I was turning myself into a human pretzel for no reason.

  Fortunately, not long after I’d begun to consider heading on home, he came out and started walking.

  Through a combination of stretching and running in place, I maintained a reasonable distance between us, enough for plausible deniability. If he’d turned around and spotted me, then I’d decided that I’d either run right past him, with a quick, breezy wave, or go in a different direction and circle back around. He never looked back, though, just kept walking with his eyes fixed straight ahead. It was almost disappointing how little subterfuge was required.

  We’d been going for about a mile when he left the sidewalk and proceeded up the walkway of a small yellow house with a neat square of grass in front and his green VW in the driveway. Along the side of the house was a narrow path to the backyard—my next logical destination.

  Once he closed the door I started to jog in place, looking around to see if anyone might be watching. The street was empty and there were no faces pressed against the glass of the nearby windows, but I kept jogging in place, suddenly feeling self-conscious. Was I actually doing this? Was this actually a reasonable plan?

  Then I thought of Anna. The notes between her and Lily, how Lily had lied about that night. Thought of how badly I needed to understand what had happened. To Anna, but also to us.

  And I stopped jogging in place and darted down the path into his backyard.

  I positioned myself beneath a large window and took some long, deep breaths to get my heartbeat back under control. It felt strange how easy it had been to do this, how no one had stopped me, how no sirens had gone off. The line between right and wrong was thinner than I’d expected.

  The window had blinds, but there was a gap at the bottom that I could see through. Mr. Matthews was hanging up his coat by the door. He took off his shoes and dropped them on a shoe rack.

  Then he disappeared from view. After a minute, I heard chopping sounds, from what I supposed was the kitchen.

  In his absence, I inventoried the living room. It didn’t take long. There were only a few pieces of furniture: a small, patterned green couch, two tall bookcases, a short-legged coffee table with two wineglasses on it, and a television mounted on the wall. There were no pictures on the walls or framed photographs on either of the bookcases. The room had a temporary feel to it, the feel of someone who hadn’t really moved in yet, who was awaiting the arrival of the rest of their things. The only indication of stability, of a continuous existence, was how densely filled the bookshelves were. They were almost spilling over with books. And many, I noticed, appeared to be books of poetry.

  A
few minutes later, he reemerged with an oversized bowl of salad. He flopped onto the couch with it, put his feet up on the coffee table, and proceeded to flip channels, eventually settling on a documentary about insects. A cat entered the room, swaying nonchalantly, and curled up beside him. It stared intently at the television, flicking its tail with interest as an insect slowly made its way across the screen. Mr. Matthews put his hand on the cat’s head and the cat permitted him to pet it for a while before it arched its back and stalked off to the far end of the couch.

  During one of the commercial breaks, he picked up his phone—a clunky old one that was anything but smart. He stared at it for a long beat and then he put it back down.

  I wondered who he’d been considering calling. I wondered if it was the person the second wineglass was for. If Anna had ever used that glass.

  The cat began wandering around the room, eventually managing to get stuck on top of a tall bookcase. It mewed pathetically, seemingly unable to remember how it had gotten up there.

  “We’ve done this before,” Mr. Matthews said. I froze for a second before realizing he was addressing his cat. “You’re perfectly capable of getting down by yourself.”

  The cat mewed again, and Mr. Matthews shook his head.

  After that Mr. Matthews ignored the cat for a while, the cat mewing ever more sadly and loudly. During the next commercial break, he sighed and got up. He and the cat stared at each other. “You win,” he said. He disappeared and then returned carrying a wooden chair.

  Standing on the chair, he coaxed the cat gently to the edge of the shelf. When the cat got close, he moved his hands gently around its sides, holding it so carefully it was almost as though he weren’t touching it at all.

  Before I could stop myself, I wondered if he and Anna might have been like that sometimes. Like butterflies circling each other.

  I backed away from the window, feeling suddenly that I’d seen enough for now. That it was time to head home.

  As I walked, I told myself I might not return. That it was probably a waste of time, that even if he was the one Anna had been with, I was unlikely to learn anything from watching him like this.

  But I was lying to myself. Because I knew I’d come back.

  Until I knew the truth about him and Anna, I wouldn’t be able to stay away.

  I’D NEVER SEEN SARAH SO happy. Her mom had the flu, so instead of her usual rabbit food, she had a tray full of Birdton High’s finest cuisine in front of her.

  “You wouldn’t be this excited about it if you ate it every day,” I said. “Maybe your mom’s doing you a favor, teaching you to appreciate it properly.”

  “Ha,” she said, not bothering to look up from her food. “You are hilariously, incredibly wrong. The only thing I appreciate is that now I don’t have to try to smuggle my tray out of the cafeteria and into the theater. The lunch ladies have eagle eyes.”

  “Did you always eat in the theater before?”

  Sarah briefly tore her gaze from her pair of English-muffin pizzas with their chunks of sausage and dollops of bright orange grease and shrugged. “Mostly. Occasionally, I’d sit with some of the other kids on track, but half the time one of the guys would try to talk to me about how hot my mom is, which was just so gross I couldn’t take it.”

  “I always ate with Anna.”

  “I know,” she said, wiping up some extra sauce with the edge of one of her pizzas. “I remember thinking it was funny how the two of you talked so much when you were together, yet on your own you were both pretty quiet—you in a kind of hostile way, her in more of a friendly way.” She paused. “I’m sorry, is it weird to talk about her?”

  “No, it’s okay.” I said.

  “Cool,” she said. “I mean—not cool, cool….You know what I mean. I didn’t want to upset you by bringing her up, but then I kinda worried I was being an asshole by not.”

  “Don’t worry. I’ll be sure to tell you if you’re being an asshole.”

  “Thanks,” she said. “I appreciate that. I think.”

  For a minute, we concentrated on our food, and then my curiosity got the better of me.

  “So what else did you notice about us?”

  “You and Anna?”

  I nodded.

  She stirred her chocolate pudding and considered.

  “I don’t know. It was like you both got lighter around each other, like you sped up. I swear, sometimes it was like you guys were talking in code or something—she’d say two words to you and you’d start cracking up. She was more self-conscious about the twin thing, though, I think.”

  “Self-conscious?”

  “Not in a bad way, just less comfortable drawing attention to it.”

  “How so?” I asked.

  Sarah raised a finger, closed her eyes, and ate a spoonful of pudding. Then she put down her spoon.

  “Remember back in middle school when you guys both wore gold headbands one day?” she asked. “And how Chris Marset made fun of them, saying you guys were too old to do the matching thing anymore?”

  I nodded.

  “Well, Anna took hers off immediately, but you left yours on the whole day.”

  I loved that headband. I probably still had it somewhere.

  But, thinking back, after that, Anna never again wanted us to get two of anything, had been sensitive about us wearing anything that matched, no matter how small it was. Sometimes she’d even change if we accidentally got dressed in clothes that were too similar. I’d assumed she just didn’t want to deal with people teasing us. Maybe it wasn’t that, though. Maybe she’d been embarrassed about being a twin. Or maybe, more specifically, she’d been embarrassed about being my twin. I pushed the thought away.

  “Chris Marset was an idiot,” I said.

  “Correction, Chris is an idiot.” She offered me part of her brownie, having polished off her pudding.

  “I wouldn’t have expected you to notice all that,” I said as I accepted the piece of brownie.

  “You were identical twins—everyone noticed you guys. Even if you pretty much ignored the rest of us.”

  “Anna didn’t ignore people,” I said.

  “No, she didn’t,” Sarah said with a laugh. “I meant you as in you, Cutter.”

  “None of you liked me,” I said. “I was just ignoring you all back.”

  “That’s your version of it,” she said. “I bet a lot of people would say you never gave them a chance.”

  Some nights after we left the bar, the road would feel unsteady, the asphalt almost liquid beneath the wheels of the car. I’d close my eyes and pray that we’d make it back safely. In those moments, all I wanted was to curl up next to you, fall asleep listening to your breath. Wake up centered again, on firm ground.

  Once I got home, though, I’d always go straight to my own bed. Because I knew if you woke up to the stink of smoke on my skin, alcohol on my breath, you’d make me explain.

  And if I did, you’d tell me to stop.

  MR. MATTHEWS AND I HAD settled into a rhythm.

  Well, I had. He wasn’t exactly aware of it.

  Twice a week, I’d follow him home. I couldn’t stay that long, usually only an hour. Occasionally, I’d do a weekend visit, but it was easier to go during the week. Plus, part of me felt like he should get the weekend off.

  Most days followed a similar pattern: he made himself something to eat and then settled down to either read a book or watch some television. He also drank a lot of tea, always letting it steep for exactly five minutes. He set a timer. I approved.

  One time, he ate quickly, took two aspirin, and then disappeared into a room I couldn’t see into because the window had blinds that extended past the bottom of the pane. That day I left early. I wanted him to call someone, have someone over, go somewhere other than right home—anything that might yield something more conclusive. That ha
dn’t happened. I’d only heard him talk to his cat, asking it if it was hungry (it always was) or if it wanted him to rub its stomach (its responses were more variable).

  I wondered if this was what life was like for most people who lived alone. Quiet, contemplative, a little sad. I wondered if it was how it had always been for him. Wondered who that second wineglass had been intended for.

  * * *

  —

  WHEN YOU START PAYING ATTENTION, start watching someone, it’s hard to turn it off, even when they’re not around. Particularly since until I could confirm something about Mr. Matthews, I wanted to be open to any stray scraps of information that might be useful, might set me on a different course.

  It was exhausting, paying attention. I never used to, not really, and I missed floating through it all, oblivious.

  Still, it was occasionally interesting what you could learn simply by watching people.

  For example, Lauren pretends the reason she weighs nothing is because she has an amped-up metabolism. That’s not true. In reality, she weighs nothing because she doesn’t eat. At lunch, she moves her food around and then talks about how full she is. The rest of her friends joke about how they should watch what they eat, but they do eat, while she throws all her food away. I’d initially thought her insistence on using the changing room was about modesty, same as me, but now I thought it was more about concealing the razor sharpness of her collarbone, the starkness of her ribs.

  Brian and Charlie are practically attached at the hip, although they don’t seem to be able to decide whether they’re best friends or worst enemies. Sometimes they seem relaxed around each other, joking and laughing—leaning against Charlie’s car in the parking lot, passing a flask between them, hiding it when a teacher strolls by—other times they look like they’re ready to fight to the death. When I mentioned this to Sarah, she said it made sense—that their dads were best friends from way back, so Charlie and Brian basically grew up together, were practically siblings. Which didn’t follow for me, because Anna and I were never like that. Maybe brothers are different, though.