“After Mikey’s funeral,” I said, “I never saw Katie again. We were together, kind of. Or close to it. We never got a chance to figure it out. And then I just left. I didn’t have a choice. I had to go.”
Meredith nodded. My fists had clenched, that same wet sand molding under the crack of my knuckles, the crush of my palms.
“At the time,” I said, “it really seemed like the only way out. That everyone—that whole family—would’ve been better off without me. If they’d never met me. If I’d never been born. And Katie’s mom... I didn’t know what to do besides go. That’s all I knew how to do. It’s all I know how to do, even now. It’s all anyone ever taught me. To disappear.”
Meredith stiffened at the word. And then, a breath later, she softened and was back to staring out into that dark and nothing horizon. What was out there? What in the world was she searching for?
Finally, she spoke.
“Would you like to tell me what happened? When you were kids?”
I closed my eyes and shook my head no. But a moment later, when I opened them, when that first hint of morning light stretched over the Atlantic, as the day began again across that endless and aching sky, I took a deep breath.
And then I started talking.
52
Tyler
December, Eleven Years Ago
Long Island
It was a completely ordinary afternoon. A Tuesday, a couple of weeks before Christmas break. The only unusual thing was that Ingrid, instead of making Mikey his typical fifteen minutes late to the parking lot, had agreed to take Katie shopping for some crap she needed for her upcoming winter musical instead. Mikey plopped into the passenger seat of my shitty car—it had been my father’s; he’d left that too—and everything else was completely and utterly normal.
There was Depeche Mode on the radio—“Enjoy the Silence,” a perfect song—and Mikey was talking about his call with a scout—was it Arizona State? Vanderbilt? No, it was Rice, it was definitely Rice, but Mikey was still thinking draft; his coaches were telling him he’d go top three in the draft easy, and that was, can you fucking believe it, four million dollars, and then his phone rang—he answered it on speaker; he’d been eating a massive sandwich; he never stopped eating, I think he must’ve eaten six thousand calories a day—and it was Ingrid, asking if we could bring cash to a thrift store up in Farmingdale, that they didn’t take credit cards and all Katie had brought was her mom’s Visa, and Mikey was refusing, he was telling her how he had one day off from training a week andwasn’t going to spend it catering to his little sister’s costume addiction, and then Katie started barking back that he had to help her, that he had no choice, that she was going to call their mom, and then Ingrid and Mikey were bickering too, and Ingrid was asking Mikey why he was such a dick to his little sister, why he couldn’t just shut up and say yes and support the one thing that mattered to her for a single afternoon, and then, just as I turned left, I said, “Mikey has a little sister? Weird, I hadn’t noticed,” and Mikey laughed and Ingrid hung up the phone because we were jackasses, because we were little kids, and then, out of nowhere, a flash of—
“TYLER! WATCH OUT!”
But it was too late, we were spinning, we were sliding; it all happened so fast, a whirl of trees, of ice, of white and brown and hazy gray, of blinding suburban winter, of screaming branches and screeching brakes, of the shatter of glass and the pop and shock and burn of airbags and one bloodcurdling scream, whose, I still did not know, because I was not in my body, because I had closed my eyes, could you believe it, I’d closed my goddamn eyes, and when I opened them, everything was coated in white, and I was sobbing, and—no, no, no—Mikey was too.
He was crushed into a mailbox. I’d hit a mailbox, a fucking USPS mailbox, iron and blue and halfway through my passenger window. There was blood everywhere.
“Mikey?” I said. “Mikey, man—are you okay? Say something, please. Fucking say something right now. It’s not fucking funny.”
He turned to me.
I watched the light in his eyes go out.
“My arm,” he said. “I can’t feel my arm.”
53
Katie
Present Day
The Hamptons
I woke up to the sound of the landline in my sitting room ringing. Well, that wasn’t exactly true. I’d been drifting in and out of sleep for hours, waiting for the calls to begin. I checked the time on my charging phone: 5:07 a.m. A record for my mother, to be fair. She’d never made it this long after daybreak, although it was possible she’d simply forgotten, for the first hour, that I didn’t have service here and dialed my cell a thousand times instead.
The call went how it usually went—a highly detailed timeline of my brother’s demise. How eight years ago, she and my father were visiting him in Pennsylvania. How he’d been working really hard, had made new friends, and everything was finally going to change. How he was going to come home soon. That there was a surgeon in the city who thought, maybe, just maybe, Mikey could grip his hand again. That if he could just stay focused, maybe everything could go back to the way it was before, and so on and so forth, until the stories blended into one another and into unintelligible sobs and weeps and moans and groans.
I listened intently for an hour, nodding as if she could see me, absorbing all her pain and saying almost nothing, being a good and quiet daughter, pushing myself to the point where I could barelybreathe just so my mother, for a minute, might. When it was finally over—she was doing a live-streamed motherhood podcast at eight, had to get her fundraising face on—I hung up the phone, crawled back into bed, and cried.
There was a knock on my door.
“Katie?”
