I don’t know where or when or if I heard that somewhere, read it, or maybe I just thought it.
But it’s true.
I stand by the willow I used to climb when I was a kid, avoiding the house and the people inside it, watching its weepy leaves sway in a gentle breeze. It’s bigger now, the trunk, and the branch I’d lie on wouldn’t hold me up now. The little waterfall I’d watch back then is gone. The creek is just a winding, flat snake. It seems wider than I remember, and the water sparkles in the sunlight. It’s just a bit of magic. Just a peek.
I lean against the trunk and mourn the ghost of me that still lingers here. The ghost of a time before everything changed, and I could no longer stay.
I hear grass swishing behind me. I startle and turn to Glen, approaching cautiously.
“What are you doing all the way out here?” He places a hand above his eyes to shield from the sun.
I shrug. “Just wanted to see.”
Glen looks around as if there’s something to really see.
“You probably don’t remember,” I say. “But I used to come out here. When we were kids.”
“Oh.” He blinks at me. “No, I don’t remember that.”
I can’t get over how different he is. My scrawny kid brother is as broad and tall as a barn door. Hard labor and ungodly hours have chiseled and molded him into someone I’m sure my father was proud of. Even if Glen was not the son he preferred. Or ever thought would be the only one left.
I feel a wave of shame.
“Well, when you’re done,” Glen says. “Mom’s making some lunch.”
It just seems like something she shouldn’t do anymore. She’s hardly too old, but now she’s a widow. Making lunch for her sons seems like a cruel thing to make her do after losing her husband. I feel another wave of shame. I shouldn’t be out here,lolly-gagging, as my father would say, and did say just two days before I left home. I don’t remember what I was supposed to be doing, but I wasn’t doing it. I already knew I was leaving, and I just didn’t care.
I follow Glen back to the house. He wears denim with a shirt tucked in. On the last day I saw him, the evening before I left, he wore overalls over a wool shirt that came from the Sears Roebuck catalog. It’s funny how I remember those details. They stick out in my mind like spikes.
At the funeral, he wore a dark, pressed suit and shined shoes. He was stoic, didn’t shed a tear, but took care to ask everyone if they were all right. The shock of seeing me had cooled on our mother, stiffening her features to almost stone, as my father was lowered into the ground. She reached for Glen’s hand, but as for me, on her left side, it was like she couldn’t be bothered to remind herself I was there.
She reached for my brother, and it shouldn’t make my heart hurt. It shouldn’t make me feel as if I have something to prove and something to fulfill. If I left again, right after the funeral, it would be like I was never here. Their lives had adjusted to my absence, and I saw it plain as day. Only no one thought to preserve my spaces, keep my bed like it was, or keep my clothes in a mothballed closet.
I arrived in a foreign land, one I could have sworn I’d lived in before, but all traces of me had vanished, as if I’d only imagined it in my childhood spot, lying on my favorite branch only to come down and discover none of it had been real.
My father went into the ground after sixty-four years of life, of breaking his back, providing, and that’s all he got. And all we could do was sit in the house with neighbors and other family members I didn’t recognize and eat food. Everyone brought food. We weren’t fucking starving to death.
Glen had his fiancée with him. I stared at his shiny shoes when he introduced her. She was a Jessup. Lorianne Jessup. I stared at the shine of his shoes, the gleam, and thought of something else I’d just left behind. Something else I walked away from without a goodbye. Paul has noticed by now. He’s probably hurt, confused, and a vicious part of me believes he’s actually relieved. But after just a couple nights alone, in a cot my mother set up in the sitting room, my heart began to ache. I keep telling myself that I can still go back and resume my life. He’ll still be there. Maybe. And if he isn’t, my heart will ache for a time, I’ll dream of him, and I’ll miss him, but it’s just as well, isn’t it? It was better to do it this way.
I step inside the house behind Glen, consider the irony of it, and sit at the table with him and my mother. She’s made us sandwiches and iced tea. I begin to tell her that she shouldn’t do these things, that Glen and I can take care of her now, but she turns from me. She starts talking to my brother about Lorianne and their engagement. It’s pleasant and hopeful. Futures and families yet to be made.
And I’m the son that left.
I eat my lunch while they talk, and stare over at my father’s empty chair, wood painted black and walls white, a photograph taken and then forgotten.
Sometimes I’ll just wander around the house for no reason, if I don’t want to be outside.
It’s really hard to avoid; everywhere I look in the house, I have memories of my dad. In fact, it still seems as if he’s here. I keep thinking I’ll turn a corner and he’ll be there, a copy of the Farmer’s Almanac in his hands. Or he’ll be out in the north pasture, fixing a piece of fencing, a stable door. He never seemed to be still unless he was sleeping, and even then, my mother always complained of his tossing and turning. There was always something to do. Something to fix, plant, a chore to begin.
He wasn’t a hard man, really. He was certainly never an idle man and couldn’t stand it if he caught me daydreaming. It’s why I escaped to my willow tree. I fought to hang onto that part of me, the daydreaming part of me, the part that believed in things I knew weren’t real, but I wanted to be just the same. I clung to that part of me so desperately, but at some point, it vanished. At some point, my father managed to take it from me after all.
I try to think of when it could have been.
Before I left home?
After?
Maybe it was the day they put Jimmy in the ground. In the scheme of things, death became a reality to me early. That must have been when it happened. It must have been the moment my mother kneeled down beside Glen, both of them tearful, and she told him our brother was an angel now. Her words slipped right past me, like water down a drain. I didn’t believe her at all.
