Everyone We've Been

by Sarah Everett

  AFTER

  January

  “Mom.” My voice wobbles as I stand in the doorway of her bedroom, my entire body shaking, too. She’s setting a stack of work papers on her desk, her back to me. “Don’t lie to me. Tell me about Rory.”

  The name feels strange and loaded on my tongue, a bullet with a target, and she flinches when it lands.

  Slowly she turns around to face me. “Where did you…how…”

  “I found out about Overton. Then Caleb showed me a picture.”

  Her eyes widen, her face a canvas of emotions. First she gets angry. At Caleb. At Overton. They weren’t supposed to tell me. Next she’s defensive—deny, deny, deny—and then she looks worried. Finally she exhales, long and slow. She takes a seat on the edge of her bed, posture impeccable, shoulders set on a ramrod-straight back.

  “He’s my…brother?” I ask, my voice barely more than a whisper. I’m half expecting her to laugh, to blink and ask if I’ve lost my mind. Say he’s some cousin I don’t remember. There’s still time.

  “Yes,” she says, folding her hands in her lap.

  I take another step into her room, my whole body feeling like jelly.

  Her face and impeccable posture crumble. “He died when he was a baby. Eight months.”

  I can’t wrap my mind around what she’s saying: I have a brother other than Caleb.

  Had.

  “What happened?” I am still whispering.

  She shakes her head. “I can’t—”

  “Stop lying to me. I’m going to find out somehow. I’m not going to stop until I find out. You have to tell me,” I insist, savage, angry, scared.

  She blinks at me.

  “It was an accident, Addie. It wasn’t your fault.” My fault? I sit at the edge of her bed, the whole room spinning. “Your father was away for work. Caleb was out that morning. And I’d just put your brother—Rory—down and gone to take a quick nap. It was ten minutes, at most.

  “You’d just started lessons after months of begging and were in the basement, practicing a piece.” I picture our old house—light green walls, a ceiling fan in the landing, my room next to Caleb’s. I used to stand at the top of the stairs and belt out show tunes. I don’t remember why we moved. “And that’s when he started crying, and I didn’t hear him. So you went up to his room and took him out, and…” She inhales almost painfully and I can tell she doesn’t want to tell me this, but her words are coming out in a rush. It feels like I’m a priest and she’s at some sort of confession.

  What did I do? I’m scared to ask it out loud.

  “You took him out of his crib to play with him because you knew I was tired and we were the only ones home. You put him down in the kitchen to get something. He had just started crawling. You didn’t remember the basement door was open.”

  She gulps, tears streaming down her face. “I heard you scream,” she says, shaking her head, eyes wild with anguish, like she’s still hearing it all these years later. And I get this crazy image of her being locked in a chamber where the sound of my scream is played over and over again. And I’m wondering how this could be true—how any of this could be true. I would know if she was telling the truth. Wouldn’t I?

  My mother is leaning closer to me now, grabbing at my wrist, desperate for me to look into her eyes. “It’s not your fault. It was never your fault, Addie, but you blamed yourself. No matter what we said or did, you blamed yourself. The months afterward were hell.” Suddenly she is sobbing so hard that it sounds like she’s suffocating on her words. “One night—your dad wasn’t home then, either—I was cleaning out the medicine cabinet in our bathroom and I realized his pills were missing. He had the ones he took every day for depression.” Vitamins, I think, remembering what he told me when I was little and asked him about them. They make me better, he’d said. “Those were missing, as well as the ones he took for migraines and when he was jet-lagged. They were all gone, and I don’t know how, but I knew I would find them under your bed.”

  I feel like I am being ripped apart as she speaks, like all my ligaments and tendons are being stretched in opposite directions and I’m going to explode from the pain of it.

  “I asked you about it and all you could say was that it hurt too much and you thought your father’s pills would help you. They could have killed you,” she says. “You were so young. Still my little girl. And I decided right then that we couldn’t let you bear it. We wouldn’t let you bear it.” She shakes her head with such ferocity that I can only watch her blankly, trying to remember how the pieces of my life, of everything I’ve ever known, fit together. Wondering whether they do, or ever did.

  I was twelve when my father left. When he stopped having anything to say to me, when I started having to remind myself he loved me. When Caleb and I stopped being allies.

  “So you erased him?” I can barely breathe as I say the words. I feel like I’m in a dream—a dream inside a dream—or some badly scripted TV show.

  Tears continue to trickle down her face. “We used Dr. Overton’s procedure on you.”

  For a second, the whole world is silent. Neither of us breathes. The air is static.

  Of course I’d deduced this, but it stings to hear her admit it. My parents erased my memory. All the air has been kicked out of my lungs.

  “This is why Dad left,” I say quietly. “Because of Rory…” And when she looks at her hands, then at the carpet—anywhere but at me, just like he would—I know I’m right.

  “It’s so much more complicated than that, Addie,” she says. “He was so against you having the procedure. To this day, he thinks…” Her voice trails off, and she shakes her head, as if to shake off a memory. One I don’t have. “It caused a lot of friction in the whole family. But you understand why it was necessary, don’t you? Rory’s death was impossible to survive. For any of us.”

  Rory.

  I feel like I am back on the bus during the accident, everything swirling around me. I sink deeper into the edge of her bed.

  “And what happened to your younger brother wasn’t your fault,” she says again, like the most important thing is for me to understand this. But I don’t. I don’t understand any of it.

  After a few moments of silence, my mother, sounding like herself again, says, “Many people are having the procedure these days. For much smaller things. It’s very safe, it’s very affordable, and sometimes it’s the best option. People might frown on it, say it’s unnatural or act like it doesn’t exist, but it works.”

  She’s speaking like she’s on an infomercial, pitching a product she’s toiled over for years or one she’s tried that has finally cured her impossible case of bacne.

  I am still stuck on several seconds earlier.

  I am still stuck on “your younger brother.”

  On two lives I never knew existed—Rory’s and my own.

  “Caleb knew all this time?”

  “He was in as much pain as you were—losing his brother, watching you suffer. I thought he should have the splice done, too, but he was set on not forgetting. But the procedure seemed like the only thing that would help you. And you were willing to try it. You were a mess, Addie. You weren’t eating or sleeping. It was like living with a ghost. It killed me to watch you sinking deeper and deeper into your grief every day.”

  It killed her. Where was Dad?

  Gone, almost immediately, I guess.

  She talks for several minutes, hours even, and when she’s done, she waits for me to ask something meaningful or do something significant.

  But all I can do is whisper, “What?”

  And let her start again. Keep starting again.

  I had a brother named Rory.

  My parents erased him from my mind.

  I’m the reason my family fell apart.

  AFTER

  January

  After I leave my mom’s room, everything is in fragments.

  The whole world feels shredded, like strips of paper with all the sentences out of order.
r />   Soon my shock gives way to anger, to paranoia.

  I can’t focus on my homework. I can’t eat. I can’t look at my mother or at Caleb.

  How can any of this be true?

  Does it matter that they did it to protect me? That they figured they didn’t have any other options? That I agreed to the procedure?

  Would I really choose to forget?

  No.

  No?

  I have no answers. I don’t even know the girl my mother was telling me about. The girl whose brother died because of her mistake.

  The worst thing is that it makes sense. It explains the fog over my memories after age eleven. It explains my dad, my mom, my older brother. The way Mom sometimes reacts around little kids. The summers where it felt like our house was sinking from the weight of sadness in it—Mom said Rory died in June, five years ago.

  How did I not know?

  How?

  Hours after Mom’s revelation, Caleb finds me in the kitchen, holding a glass of water and staring blankly ahead.

  “Addie, I’m sorry,” he says, even though it is Mom who stalks around the house with swollen eyes and the shadow of a dead baby. She has done it for years now. Caleb, too, in his own way. I think of the R on his chest. I remember it raw, the black-purple of bruised skin, and I feel like I am made of freshly tattooed skin. It hurts. I want to go back to before it.

  R is not for a Rachel or Rebekah or Randy.

  It’s Rory.

  My other brother.

  “How could you?” I ask, not sure what I am asking.

  Erase him? Lie to me for six years? Tell me the truth?

  The glass of water sweats around my palm.

  “Did Mom drag me there? Did they even tell me what they were going to do?” I ask.

  Caleb nods. “Mom sat down with you before she made the appointment and told you what it was for, why she thought you needed it.”

  “And I told her I didn’t want it, right? I must have.”

  He runs a hand over his head. “You told her you could try harder, that you could be stronger, that you didn’t want to forget him, but then she asked you—we were sitting at the dining table and I’ll never forget it—she asked what you wanted more: to feel better and move forward, or to remember.”

  I chose moving forward.

  “Even after you had it, I wanted to tell you, but you were destroyed by Rory dying, Addie,” he says, looking down, remorse palpable in his voice. “That’s the one thing they got right—you needed some sort of help, and months of therapy wasn’t helping. Mom was sure it was the only way to save you, and what was I going to do? I was thirteen.”

  “So you just silently hated me instead.”

  He frowns. “I didn’t—don’t—hate you. I hated the pretending. I hated that we couldn’t talk about Rory. All those birthdays…he’d be almost seven now. I hated that we had to pretend like everything was fine. And then after all the bullshit and the pain, all you wanted was to go away and live like it never happened.”

  “I was already living like it never happened.”

  “Do you really think that’s true?” Caleb asks.

  I mentally rifle through anything and everything that has ever seemed out of place. My parents’ divorce. Mom’s overprotectiveness. The invisible boy.

  Oh God, the invisible boy. How can he be a coincidence, some fluke bout of crazy, after all this? Is he…could he be connected to Rory somehow?

  People don’t spontaneously appear and disappear; something makes them. And in any case, they have to come from somewhere. Somewhere like the past.

  Who is this guy?

  I look at Caleb.

  I want to say, Do you know why I went to Overton today? Because I’m seeing things. Because just like everything outside me, something is broken inside me, too.

  But I look at my older brother, and even though I’ve known him every day of my life, I don’t recognize him.

  I’m not telling him about Bus Boy.

  I slip past him and head upstairs.

  My mind is racing a million miles per hour, and I can’t even think about sleeping, though it’s past ten and I have school tomorrow.

  I think about texting Katy again, but what would I say? Guess what, my parents are crazier than we thought—they erased my dead little brother?

  I can tell from Mom’s and Caleb’s reactions that it wasn’t easy, that it hurts them just to say his name after not doing it in so long. Or did they do it in private, when I wasn’t around? Did they think about him at birthdays, random days of the year to me that made them want to crawl under the covers and hide? Did seeing me happy, normal, when they couldn’t be make them hate me? Is that what Caleb meant about me getting to live like it never happened?

  My chest hurts at how random things I never thought about must have devastated them.

  But I don’t have enough space to feel sorry for them. Not when the corners of my room seem to be crowding in against me.

  Not when there are tiny storms erupting in my head, thoughts of packing my bags and leaving and never coming back home, questions about what I can trust and who I can trust. Not when everything feels like a lie.

  I want to call my father and scream at him, scream and not have to see the hurt in his eyes.

  This is why he stopped loving me.

  But he’s probably in the air.

  I put on headphones and listen to my favorite piece from the concert, “Air on the G String.”

  Now the melody snakes its way around me. Every instrument’s part tangling and interweaving with the rest, like clasped hands tightly tucked within each other. One hand tracing the lines on the other’s palm; the webs between the fingers damp with sweat. This song makes me feel close to something, to someone nameless and faceless.

  I don’t want to feel close to anyone tonight, though. I want to be unreachable.

  So I pull out my viola, despite the hour, and play a different song.

  I play loudly and recklessly. I play angrily, for so long that I push the corners of the room further back and hold them there. Mom doesn’t dare ask me to stop, even though she has to get up early for her six-thirty report.

  My fingers tremble from the music or anger or fear, and I keep playing. Playing away the ghost of a brother I didn’t know I had, playing away all the questions that I still can’t answer.

  I keep thinking about Bus Boy, about the night on the bus. I can’t shake the feeling that everything that happened tonight, everything since the accident, started the moment that boy walked onto the bus.

  But how does that make any sense?

  Rory would be six now, not seventeen. How can they be connected?

  I don’t have any of the answers, so I play away the questions. Caleb pounds twice on my door, begging for quiet. I play harder.

  And then I stop.

  BEFORE

  Mid-July

  To say I float into At Home Movies the day after our kiss is an understatement.

  I blow in with the wind, weightless and airy and tangled up in the sunshine that beat across my face as I rode here. A stupid pop song is matted into my wind-battered hair, trickling into my ears and head and throat. I am buzzing.

  I find Zach in the Comedy section, kneeling beside a stack of DVDs on the ground, sorting them.

  I wait for him to notice me, my hair particularly thick and wild today and the pair of peach-yogurt-colored short shorts that prompted Caleb to make a face when we collided in the hallway this morning.

  On the ride over, there was a tiny bit of fear that last night never happened, or that Zach regrets it and will now try to steer us back into friends territory, but it dissipates almost immediately when I see him.

  Zach notices my feet first, and then his eyes travel up the length of me, twinkling by the time they reach mine, a smile already stretched across his face.

  “Dad?” he yells across the store. “I’m taking my break now!”

  And then he grabs hold of my hand and pulls me to the back o
f the store, tripping over the DVDs on the ground in the process.

  “Walking hazard!” he says as we run out the door, both of us giggling.

  “Hi,” he says when we get outside, his grin impossibly wide.

  “Hi.” I grin back, feeling the muscles in my face stretch, finding a new normal.

  And then we kiss behind his father’s store. It’s almost exactly the same as last night, only against the wall of the building instead of the garage door this time. The air is urgent and humid but perfect. And Zach’s one hand is at the back of my neck, while the other plays with the edge of my shirt. The skin on my stomach burns from his touch.

  I don’t ever want to stop kissing him. And happily, he doesn’t seem to want to stop kissing me, either. Kind of the opposite.

  “So, listen,” he says, playing with my shirt still, when we come up for air. “If we’re going to keep doing this, I think we should go out on a date.”

  “Are you saying you’d like to keep doing this?” I ask, husky-breathed, signaling at the space between us. I can’t believe the words that are coming out of my mouth. Confident words. Flirtatious words.

  Zach responds by leaning in to kiss me again, but I retreat a little and ask, “What made you change your mind? About being friends and all that.”

  He scratches his head now and grins. “I was trying to be friends, but last night—last night I kind of realized that I’m not interested in being just friends. I think the first kiss did it.”

  “Funny, I feel like they just keep getting better,” I breathe.

  “Should we test that theory?”

  When we kiss again, I loop both arms around his neck, and Zach’s hand feels like fire on my lower back.

  After what seems like mere seconds, the back door flings wide. We jump apart.

  “Zach,” Mr. Laird says in an even voice. “I will kick your butt to Timbuktu.”

  “I’m not smoking!” a red-faced, red-lipped Zach protests.

  “Damn straight you’re not,” his father says. “You are also not taking a twenty-five-minute break on my watch.”

  Twenty-five? Zach and I look at each other, incredulous.