by Amy Giles
“Blue. No, orange. No, wait, blue.”
“You’re already terrible at this,” Lucas says. “Favorite season?”
“Summer.”
“Favorite band?”
“Uhhhh . . .”
He makes a buzzer sound in the back of his throat. “Time’s up.”
“But I have more than one!”
“Keep going. Favorite food?”
“Pizza.”
“Come on. Give me one original answer. You sound like you should be saying, ‘I’m not a real teenager, but I play one on television.’” He drops his voice several octaves, and holds his chin in one hand, mugging for the invisible camera.
I burst out laughing. “Okay. My favorite food is actually kind of gross.”
“Now you have to tell me,” he insists.
“Okay, if I tell you, then you have to tell me something equally gross.”
“Deal. Go.”
“Rice and ketchup.”
He stops walking and slowly pivots to face me, the soles of his sneakers scraping against the sand on the sidewalk. His face is blank. “I was not prepared.”
“Gross, right?”
“So gross. Like, I’m seriously trying not to gag right now.”
“I warned you.” I laugh. “Now your turn.”
He raises a finger. “No, we are not done discussing this fancy cuisine of yours. I am now highly suspicious of all of your life choices. HOW did you stumble upon this questionable delicacy?”
“I was seven!” I laugh. “My rice got mixed in with the ketchup on my chicken nuggets and it tasted so much better than just the plain rice. And it just became a thing.”
“Really? Rice and ketchup has been elevated to a thing in your life?”
I clutch my stomach, ready to bust a gut from laughing.
“You promised you had something gross to share!” I point at him.
“I’m afraid nothing I’ll say can ever compare to that.”
“Pleaaaassse?”
He fights a smile, but barely. “Okay. Here’s one of my Lucas specialties. Bananas and mayonnaise sandwiches,” he confesses.
“Bananas and mayonnaise?” He nods. “That’s so much grosser, and you know it.”
He points a finger at me, like he’s letting me in on a trade secret. “It’s a Southern delicacy.”
“But we’re not from the South.”
“My family took a trip to Nashville one summer. We ate Koolickles too . . . Kool-Aid pickles. They were good. Refreshing!”
“Ew!”
My stomach lurches thinking about pickles and Kool-Aid, but he’s not done. “You know what else is good with pickles? Peanut butter. But it has to be crunchy peanut butter, on wheat bread. Sometimes I’ll even slap some peanut butter on my banana and mayo sandwich. Honestly, I think peanut butter goes great with anything.”
“Stop talking!” I cover my ears. “Seriously. I have a very vivid imagination. I’m going to be sick. I can’t believe you gave me grief over rice and ketchup!”
We reach the corner of Mott and McBride.
“Do you mind if I stop by my house really quick? Just to drop off the groceries.” I point up McBride.
“Sure.” He pivots and follows me.
Mrs. Alvarez is outside her house watering her handkerchief- sized lawn, a garden hose nozzle in one blue-veined hand, the other waving at me slowly.
“Hello, Jessica!”
“Hi, Mrs. Alvarez.” She stops watering. Her mouth opens wide in a smile as she walks toward us. Oh God . . . she wants an introduction.
“Mrs. Alvarez, this is Lucas. We work together at Enzo’s,” I say, trying not to make it sound like we’re all that close. It would be embarrassing if I introduced him as my friend when this is literally the first time we’ve hung out outside of work. I could just imagine his head darting over to correct me in front of her. “Friends?” I mean, he probably wouldn’t actually say it, but he’d think it.
“Hello, Lucas.” She looks between the two of us and her smile spreads even wider. Her eyes twinkle. I’m pretty sure I know what she’s thinking and my cheeks burn. She’s shipping us.
I turn to Lucas. “Wait here.” Then I reach for my grocery bag and he hands it over. “I’ll be right back. It’ll only take a second.”
I pull my key out from my pocket and open the front door a crack, just enough so Lucas can’t see inside as I slide through and shut the door behind me.
I drop the bag of groceries on the dining room table next to the mail and walk to Mom’s bedroom. The door is slightly ajar. I push it open, expecting to find her asleep.
Worse. Still in her bathrobe—because, why bother anymore?—she’s perched on the edge of the bed with a shoebox filled with photographs. Pictures spill across her lap onto her unmade bed.
“Mom?”
She looks up at me, her eyes raw, tired . . . done. She’s holding a picture of Ethan in her hands. As I step closer, I see that they’re all pictures of Ethan.
She shakes her head. Her mouth opens, but even she seems uncertain about what will come out.
“I don’t know how—” Overcome by tears, she covers her face.
“Mom.” I sit next to her on the bed to wrap my arms around her, squeezing, so she’ll feel me, so she’ll find her way back to me.
Her skin smells metallic and sour against my nose, like pennies clutched in a sweaty palm all day. I inhale, trying to find my mother’s scent, something familiar lingering underneath. I hold her for a while, waiting for her to say something, so we can talk about it. So we can share our grief together instead of compartmentalizing, her grief over here, and mine over there.
And then there’s a knock on the front door.
Lucas
Jess has been in there for a while. I thought she was just dropping off the groceries. Maybe she had to go to the bathroom.
My phone buzzes in my pocket.
Where are you guys? Hurry up! I’m starving!
I text Reggie back.
We stopped at Jess’s house so she could drop off her stuff.
Tell her to hurry her ass up! The water’s boiling!
I wave to get Mrs. Alvarez’s attention, who’s been watering the same patch of lawn in her fenced-in yard since Jess went inside.
“Do you think I should knock?” I call over to her, looking for validation.
She smiles at me. I don’t think she heard what I said.
I walk up the stoop and press my ear to the door to listen for any kind of sounds that would tell me Jess is coming. Nothing.
So I knock.
And wait.
After a minute, I knock again.
The door opens a crack, and Jess slides through it, not opening it any wider than she needs to squeeze out.
Once she’s out on the stoop with me she folds her arms across her chest.
“Ready?” I ask.
Something changed since she went inside. Her eyes are glassy and pink around the rims.
“Are you okay?”
“Yeah, I’m fine.” She nods briskly, folding her arms tighter against herself. “Turns out I can’t go. I forgot I had to do something.”
“What?” I ask, taking a step back so I’m straddling two steps. I sense she needs the space.
She stares somewhere off over my shoulder. “I just have stuff to do here.”
“Oh,” I say. I wish I had some clue what caused the change in her. “No problem. I’ll tell Reggie. Next time though, you’re coming!”
She struggles to smile but doesn’t make a move to go inside.
Waving me off, she says, “Have fun.”
When I reach the sidewalk, I turn and look one last time. She’s standing on the doorstep, waiting for me to leave.
My steps feel a little heavier as I walk away.
Jess
Once I’m back inside, I rest my forehead against the door, listening to the house sounds. The old fridge humming in the kitchen. The ticking of the clock. My mother crying in her bedroo
m.
I should have known better than to think I could just walk away from this and spend a night like a normal teenager.
My mother’s words ring in my ears. “I don’t know how—”
I can only imagine how she was going to finish her thought.
I don’t know how to make this awfulness go away.
I don’t know how to keep on living.
I don’t know how to love you without him.
I walk back to Mom’s bedroom to sit with her. When she’s too exhausted to cry anymore, she climbs under the covers. Pictures of Ethan fall off the bed onto the floor.
“Mom? I think I should call the doctor. Don’t you?”
She sniffs under her covers. “A doctor can’t make me stop missing him, Jess.”
I sit by her bedside rubbing her arm over the covers. It used to help me fall asleep when she did that when I was a kid.
Once I hear her steady breathing, I collect all the pictures of Ethan and put them back in the shoebox. Then I tuck the box in the corner of her closet floor and bury it under all the shoes and purses she never wears anymore because she never leaves the house. I don’t know that it’s the right thing to do. I’m just trying not to lose her too.
I retreat to my bedroom and plug my earbuds in, listening to music while I search through my videos for distractions.
A warning pops up on my phone: Storage Almost Full.
I don’t know how it’s almost full; it’s not like I’ve taken any new videos or photos lately.
“All right, ol’ Bessie. Let’s take a load off of you,” I say, to my phone, as one does when they have no one else to talk to.
I plug my phone into my laptop to try and free up some space. Instead, I get another error message: Your startup disc is almost full.
Cursing under my breath, I drag as many homework-related files as I can to the trash. It frees up enough space that I can view videos, but I can’t load anything else. And I’m not willing to get rid of any of my old videos. Some days, they’re the only things worth smiling about.
I click on a video from a year and a half ago, taken in Marissa’s backyard the week before our sophomore year started. Thirty people showed up for her back-to-school party. She had a movie screen up in the yard and hooked up the Wii Just Dance. What the video doesn’t capture is how the grass felt under our bare feet, damp and cool. How the air held the first crisp bite of fall. And how I sensed even then that it was the end of something. At the time, I thought I was just bummed about going back to school. But now I wonder if it was some premonition that it would be my last summer with my brother and my best friend.
What I did capture on my phone that night was ninety-two seconds of pure gold: Ethan and Marissa dancing to the Spice Girls, both of them flopping around like tangled marionettes to the music. It’s so obvious now that he liked her by the way he smiled as he watched her dance when she wasn’t looking. A smile unfamiliar to me, because whatever it was he was feeling for Marissa was something new even for him.
The video isn’t enough. My brother’s memory can’t be reduced to megabytes of data.
I cross the hallway and rest my palm, then my cheek, on his door. Once this door vibrated with his music, Ethan practicing guitar. Now it’s as silent and lifeless as he is. It’s the silence that makes my throat constrict, that makes my entire face ache with the pressure of unshed tears.
The house is dark but there’s a stream of light shining under the bottom of his door.
My hand reaches for the knob. This feels wrong. Like I should knock first. Only because Mom made me feel that way. But if the light’s on, I’m not the first person to breach the sealed crypt of my brother’s bedroom.
I enter slowly, looking around at all the things that are so Ethan: shelves of albums, his guitar, a stack of graphic novels on the floor in the corner. On his desk is his name tag from Key Food.
I pivot around in his room, taking it all in, signs of him everywhere and nowhere. The room is bursting with his stuff, his personality. But it may as well be an empty box without his energy.
As I turn around to leave, I look at his bed. There’s a shallow impression of a body dipped into the center of his blue comforter. A strand of long blond hair is on the pillow. My mother’s.
So this is what she does when I’m at school or at work. Hangs out in here, where she can be alone with him. Shutting me out from being close to my own brother. It looks like her rule about not coming in here only applies to me.
I grab Ethan’s laptop from his desk and go back to my room. Sitting down at my desk, I plug in the charger and flip it open. I can’t do anything without his password. But I also know my brother would lose his left hand if it wasn’t attached to his wrist, so I try the first sequence of numbers that he could never forget: his birthday. 0103.
And I’m in.
Just as I suspected, there’s way more storage on his laptop than mine. I plug my phone into the port and dump at least half my videos onto his computer.
With music playing, I click on one video after another. Marissa balancing a spoon on her nose while rolling a Hula-Hoop around her hips. Ethan and Marissa jumping off the swings at the beach at the same time, and Ethan hitting the ground so hard he crashed and rolled in the sand.
The song playing on my phone and footage on my screen start to meld together, giving me an idea. I launch iMovie and start cropping and editing old footage, carefully arranging each scene around the music. If I can’t have them in real life, I’ll keep their memories alive the only way I can.
Lucas
“Hi, Lucas. Come on in.”
Dr. Engel holds his office door open, wearing a rust-colored cardigan that matches his striped tie, which is pinned to his immaculately pressed shirt with a tiepin. My nonna would’ve said Dr. Engel was a snazzy dresser, up there with her beloved Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin.
I walk past him into his “As Seen on TV” psychiatrist’s office: two chairs, the obligatory couch, the well-kept fern, shelves bowing under the weight of academic books and journals, all neatly arranged in a small wood-paneled office. And there’s always something humming in the background: the radiator, the air conditioner, the humidifier, the dehumidifier—whatever’s seasonally appropriate.
Dr. Engel sits down in his chair and crosses his legs. His khakis have inched up over his thin ankles, exposing winter white skin and showy argyle socks that match his tie and sweater.
Every week it’s the same thing: I do the majority of the talking. Occasionally, we hit gold and he’s kind enough to sum up everything I said in a neat and tidy package to take home to think about later, like a psychotherapy doggy bag.
Dr. Engel didn’t beat around the bush; we got straight to work our very first session. He told me if I was honest about my answers and put in the work, I’d see results.
We established a few things early on in our first meetings:
I feel guilty that I’m alive and Jason isn’t.
Jason threw himself on top of me because he loved me.
It was a gift, one that I am having a hard time accepting.
He didn’t give me a choice, and sometimes that makes me angry.
Anger is easier to deal with than grief.
So our sessions are often about how to feel the love not the guilt. Dr. Engel always points to his heart (love) first, then his head (guilt) whenever he says this.
“Same with grief,” Dr. Engel said. “Grief is something we avoid because it’s too painful. So we stay up here”—points to his snowy, neatly parted hair—“not here”—points to his chest.
“Ouch,” I said in my best E.T. voice. He smiled. Honestly, I can get away with anything in Dr. Engel’s office. It’s all part of the experience.
“When does it stop hurting?” I asked after one particularly messy session.
He leaned forward and handed me the box of tissues. “Grief doesn’t go away, Lucas. It just gets less hard over time. The trick is learning how to reach in, confront it, deal with it.
” He swept his hand down like a bird and then soared it back up again. “Swoop down, touch it, then come out of it again.”
As I take my seat today, he asks, “So . . . how’ve you been?”
“Okay?” I answer with just enough uncertainty that he raises an eyebrow, the “go on” nonverbal cue I’m used to by now.
I tell him about the most recent panic attack at Five Guys.
“I just thought . . . I thought I was done with those,” I say, wiping my hands down my jeans. “Like how you said the medication and therapy together would reset my thermostat?”
He clicks his pen a few times. “This is the first one you’ve had in months.”
I don’t tell him about the near attack in Dr. Patel’s office. Maybe being in the doctor’s office helped me fight that one off.
“Well, I do think the dosage of Lexapro you’re on is working, but I can prescribe Xanax for those times when you have an attack. If they continue though, we’ll need to reassess. I don’t want you to rely too much on the Xanax. Understood?” I nod. “Are you still boxing at the gym? Getting plenty of exercise?”
“Yeah.” I nod. “Even more actually. I’m going to compete in a match in May.”
He nods and smiles. “Are you nervous?”
“Well, yeah! But I chose to do it, you know? No one’s making me.”
“Of course,” Dr. Engel says. “But we’re looking for changes in your life that may be adding to your anxiety. Patterns or events that we can pinpoint. The match could be one.”
“So, what? I can’t try anything new without my body going berserk on me?”
I close my eyes and rub the side of my face. Sometimes talking to Dr. Engel makes me want to cry. Talking shouldn’t make you cry. But it does with me.
He shifts in his seat, crosses his other leg now. “I can only imagine how horrible you must have felt. Many patients describe panic attacks to me as debilitating. One patient told me even though she knew exactly what it was, she still dialed 911. Was there anything you are aware of that happened to maybe trigger this recent attack?”
I tell him about the door slamming, the chair falling at the same time. The woman screaming.
He nods in understanding. “Okay. So there were sounds that seemed like gunshots.”