I hold the stubs close to my chest, missing Memory Zach, and then take them away.
There are a bunch of DVDs, a nun habit. There are pictures of me and Zach. In one, we are sitting in a room I don’t recognize—his?—and he’s smiling at the camera while I kiss the side of his face.
Something stings the inside of my chest.
There’s a picture of me and Zach and Raj, and I miss them, some kind of friendship I don’t know.
There’s so much I don’t know.
I look through the last items: the clothes I wore on the day we went to get Zach erased. A pair of light jeans, black kitten heels, a white button-down, and a blue blazer. Did we think these would make me pass for nineteen, for Kathleen Kelly? I can barely walk in heels.
Too soon, there’s nothing left to discover. Nothing that tells me more about who I was and what happened. These things are something, but I want more.
I want artifacts. Proof that I lived another life, a way to remember.
And what about Rory—what do I have of him? Why aren’t the walls lined with pictures of his face? Why don’t I have a box full of things to remember him by?
I allow everything to sink in—the things I’ve just seen that give me hints about my relationship with Zach, the things I’ll never know about being with him, about having a baby brother—and the force is so great I have to lie on my bed.
I keep drawing in breaths, even though my lungs feel like they are full of too much air. Several minutes pass like this, and then I reach for my viola. I hold it by the neck, fingers fumbling over its strings, over its curves, like following the ridges of words written in braille. I bring it to my chin and play. Just a few bars, a few seconds of the Prokofiev piece I’ve been working on the past month. Its sound is really more suited for a violin, and the piece I have is actually Katy’s, transposed to a lower key, but its mood—its wistful, desperate, heavy sound—is made for my viola. It does something to steady me, to help me find a kind of rhythm in the rushed staccato of too many and too few faces and seconds and emotions that are crammed in tightly packed corners of my mind. And then I improvise, making up my own melody, one about getting lost and finding your way home, about the thickest fog you can imagine and pushing, fighting, breaking your way through it. About waking up.
It’s not so good yet, but it’s familiar. And I can work on it—I can start writing my own story. One where no one thing—music, a boy, my broken family—is mywholestory. Anyway, Mrs. Dubois says what’s important is how joyfully you play.
Later, I head across the hall and knock on Caleb’s door.
“Hey,” he says when I walk in.
I hesitate. He hesitates, too. Then I sit on the edge of his bed. I know I’m making a face as I survey his room, but I can’t help it.
“When was the last time you picked up this room?”
“You can have it if you want,” Caleb says.
“What?” I frown at him.
“That day you used my computer, I was applying for aviation academies. Well, starting to fill out applications and then chickening out and then starting again. Around and around. But a couple of days ago, I sat down and forced myself to do it. To finish.” He shrugs. “Maybe I won’t get in anywhere. In which case, I’m keeping my fucking room.”
We both laugh.
“But you applied?” I repeat, shocked, delighted. He nods. He looks happy.
“Why didn’t you before? I mean, I know you felt like you had to stay and make up for my not remembering or something….” I trail off because it sounds stupid. WhydidCaleb stay?
“Everyone talks about the day Rory died,” he says.Nobody talks about the day Rory died,I want to argue, but I let him continue. “Dad was at work. Mom was sleeping. But where was I? Nobody ever talks about where I was.”
I ask the obvious question. “Where were you? Mom said you weren’t home.”
“I was at the Lyndale Air Show. Me and Victor from next door rode our bikes to the grounds that morning, even though Mom had told me not to go.” There’s a pause, and then Caleb continues. “Before he left the night before, Dad told me to ‘look after things on the ground,’ because he always did. Because I was the oldest.”
“Caleb,” I say, hearing where he’s going with this. “You were thirteen. Whyshouldn’tyou have been out with your friend? And what would you have done if you were home, anyway?”
“MaybeI’dhave taken Rory out of his crib when he started crying. Maybe I’d have seen that the basement door wasn’t shut before it was too late. I don’t know. I’ve always felt like I had to stay. Like I was atoning for something by sticking close to home, by never leaving Lyndale. And I wanted to look out for you, too, but whenyoustarted making plans for New York…”
“It made you angry.”
“You were going to leave me here, and none of it had fixed anything. Rory was still erased and you were going to have a life and I wasn’t.” He shrugs again. “After everything, I kind of just want to get out of here. Even if I don’t go to aviation school straight away, I’m ready to leave Lyndale.”
“To move on?” I offer.
