My hands are trembling as I continue tracing out the letters, and my eyes cloud with tears.
“Hi, Rory.”
I have no idea what to say or if I’m doing this right. How do you miss—someone you don’t remember?
Didn’t I love him?How is it possible not to miss someone you once loved? Or is it possible that Ihavemissed him, just without knowing? Is it possible to miss someone in a quiet, unspoken way, the most hushed of whispers instead of a shout? Is the world shaped a little differently for me because I once had someone I loved, someone I lost?
Some of my anger toward my parents returns, but it’s overridden by a sadness I can’t shake and guilt that something in me didn’t justknowwithout having to be told.
“I’m sorry,” I say, choking a little on my tears. “Sorry for not watching you more closely that day. You should still be here. With us.”
I sit back on the ground now and dig my fingers into the snow. “You know, I obviously don’t have the details, but I’m pretty sure I liked being a big sister. Beingyourbig sister. I bet I liked carrying you around and playing games with you and watching you toddle around. I bet I played my viola for you constantly. I was kind of obnoxious about it back then.” I laugh a bit as I speak. “So, sorry if you didn’t like that.”
It hits me then that he used to be aperson,not a concept, not something that happened to us. He liked and disliked things; he took up space and had a particular voice and smell. He was going to grow up and do stuff someday that people would have remembered him for. It feels unfair that he will never get the opportunity, that he’s been hidden here, buried without having had a chance to expand his world. To make friends and go to school and find people who wouldn’t forget him.
It is the saddest thing in the world that you can take away a person if you take away the people who knew them. And we basically did that to my brother. By not talking about him, my parents and Caleb erased him twice; it’s like he never existed.
Suddenly I am crying again, full-on sobbing in a way that forces me to gasp for breath. I just keep thinking,I’m sorry. I love you. I don’t know how I know, but I do.
All those moments when I’ve wished for a more complete version of my family, less broken, I’ve been missing the brother I lost. My parents’ separation, me and Caleb’s relationship. His absence has been all around me every single day.
“I think I’ve missed you my whole life,” I tell him now. “I always will.”Consciously, from now on.And although it feels stupid and like not nearly enough, there is a little relief, a little comfort, in knowing that. Missing a person every day for as long as you live is not something everyone has the right to. But he is my brother, and I am entitled to miss him, and I finally understand that I have, in a way, all along.
“I would have come sooner,” I say now. “And more often, if I’d figured it out. Iwillcome more often.”
I take a deep breath and touch the granite stone again.
“I wish I knew, Rory.”How to change what happened. What to say. You. If you were as much like Caleb as you look in that picture.
I wish I’d known all along that I missed you.
AFTER
January
Memory Zach is gone when I return to my car, but I decide to wait until I’ve seen the real Zach before I bring him back.
After I leave the cemetery, I get onto Park Avenue, retracing my steps from yesterday exactly, and wind up outside Meridian High again ten minutes before school lets out. But this time I stay in the car and wait for students to start trickling out to the parking lot.
I keep my eye on the bright blue car that Zach and Raj drove off in yesterday.
This time, they burst out of the building together, talking and laughing as they walk toward the parking lot.
I slouch in my seat while they climb in the car and it wails to a start. Zach pulls out, drives to the exit of the parking lot, rolls to a stop at the yield sign. I watch him roll down his window, and his upper body pops out of it as he yells something to a boy on a skateboard. The boy turns around and gives Zach the finger, laughing.
I see Zach laugh, too, as his window goes back up. I can’t tell whether his smile is the same as my Zach’s smile, the Zach I’ve been remembering or conjuring up or whatever the name for it is.
Then they get out onto the road, and before I think about it, I’m pulling my seat belt across my body, starting my car, too.
At a stop sign about a block away, Zach signals left. I let a car between us and then follow them.
I know what I’m doing is crazy—illegal, even—but I can’t bring myself to stop.
I desperately want to know this Zach.
I want to know what he knows about me.
Following them starts off fairly easy, straightforward. And then, just like that, I’ve lost them.
