“Caleb, he looks just like you.” My eyes are blurring now. “Is he yours?”
“Addie,no!” Caleb says, then lets out one guffaw. Laughter. Shock.“God.”
“Is hemine?” Caleb laughs again. I’m not within a slingshot of puberty in that picture. But if I’m joking with that question, then it’s only a little bit. In the last hour, I’ve lost all comprehension of what is far-fetched or true or impossible.
“No,”he says.
Then what?
What?
“Ask Mom,” he says, and pushes me out the door, but his voice is shaking now, too. “Make her tell you the truth.”
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—”
“Stoplyingto 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 IknewI would find them under your bed.”
