Everyone We've Been (15 page)

On the way home, my hands are trembling so much I can barely grip the steering wheel. I feel like I've slipped outside my own body. I'm still at Overton, thinking about every single detail of that place. The gray walls of the complex. The
O
s stamped on every building in case you forget. The very deliberate way everything was set up, from the music in the waiting room to the warm, unreadable smiles of all the staff. The nurse with the purple streak—did she know me?
Have
I been there before? Was the doctor so nice because he recognized me? Apparently, he wasn't my doctor last time, but what about the receptionist? She made me fill out all that paperwork when I first came in, as if I was new.

I rack my brain trying to think of anything I recognized in there—the pattern in the carpet, the setup of the waiting room, anything—but nothing stands out.

And yet—they
erase
memories there. Does it mean anything that I can't remember?

As soon as I pull into my driveway, I whip out my phone and dial Katy's number.

Dr. Hunt was last time.
The words ring continuously through my mind over the ringing on the line.

I deflate as I hear Katy's familiar voice mail recording.

Hi, you've reached Katy. I can't come to the phone right now, so leave me a message and I'll call you back. Unless you're Jason or Mason or Grayson from Music Fest. I only gave you my number because I couldn't think of any other way to get rid of you. Anyway, bye!

As she says bye, you can hear me crack up laughing in the background.

“Oh my God, Katy!” I'd said after she flung her phone away from her.

“What?” She'd shrugged, looking innocent. “At least I'm being honest.”

The thing is, we both knew she wasn't. Jason (not Mason or Grayson) was a cute guy from Music Fest, a regional music festival that our orchestra had gone to in December. A bunch of other musical groups from Lyndale to Raddick combined for two days to “share our mutual love of music.” Or, if you were Katy, to hide in the shadows and make out with the best bassoonist in the tri-state area. And she
had
liked him; she'd whispered, cheeks flushed, to me about him nonstop on the bus trip back to Lyndale. They'd talked about visiting each other and had exchanged phones to put their numbers in with such solemnity that you'd have thought they were exchanging promise rings. But a week after we got back, Jason still hadn't called, and Katy insisted
he
needed to call
her.
A miserable week later, he was either Jason-or-Mason-or-Grayson and she recorded that message. Katy was hurt but not heartbroken. She moved on, two weeks later, to a guy my brother's age who worked at the music store downtown, and she genuinely forgot Jason's name. It was just that easy for her—people came and went in her world, an ever-rotating cast of characters, each one replaceable.

As I'm shivering in my car, waiting for her to call or text me back, it hits me that I've lasted a long time but might be next.

I dial her number again. Voice mail.

I text her:
Call me ASAP.

I stay in the driver's seat, my hands still shaking, watching the screen of my phone. But she doesn't call.

Maybe because of her distance the past few days, it's not hard to imagine this silence being as deliberate as her voice mail message, as the waiting-room music in Overton.

I'm on my own.

I climb out of the car and burst into the house, going over everything that happened at Overton again.

They said I needed a guardian's permission for any procedures. Does that mean…Could my parents…

It's just after five, but my mother isn't home from work.

I take the stairs two at a time, and before I know it, I'm knocking on Caleb's door. Letting myself in.

He's on his computer, but he turns to face me as soon as I enter.

“What's your problem?”

He's not asking why I barged in. He's asking why I'm shaking. Why I'm pacing.

“Addie?”

I never go to my brother with problems. It feels like we're hardly ever on the same side.

And yet…

He's staring at me, confused. He actually looks concerned.

“I drove out of town today,” I say.

“Where?”

“Overton. It's that facility for brain research and
memory procedures.
” I hiss the last part. They don't help you remember. They make you forget.

I'm pacing across his room as I speak, stepping over clothes and shoes and books and model airplanes and possible human remains. “You've heard of it, right?”

Most people have heard of it. But I've
been
there. As a patient.

God.

I need to sit down.

“I guess.” Caleb shrugs. He's looking at the ground. At his unwalkable carpet. There's a rumbling downstairs—the garage door opening. “Is that Mom?”

It must be, but I'm too caught up in what I'm saying to acknowledge his question.

“I think I've been there before,” I say, sounding like a balloon whose air is rushing out. “I think I had a procedure there. The guy at reception told me. I don't think he meant to, but he was training and…”

My brother is not looking at me.

“Caleb.”

He doesn't look up. His eyes are magnets, gripped by the carpet at his feet.

“Caleb?”

I take a step toward him.

“You know something!” I gasp.

“Addie, you have to talk to Mom about this,” he says, shaking his head. Still looking at the floor.

“So I
have
been there.” He's not even denying it. I lean back against the wall, needing to feel something steady. The world seems to be spinning suddenly, shifting beneath my feet. “Tell me what you know.”

“Addie, seriously. Just…just go to Mom. Shut the door when you leave.” If he wasn't frozen in place, he'd be pushing me out of his room. Letting the door shut in my face.

“No,” I hear myself say, suddenly ferocious. He's my brother. Why are we never on the same side? “I don't want to hear it from Mom.
You
tell me.”

“For fuck's sake, Addie,” Caleb says, annoyed, snapping out of his frozen state the slightest bit.

Good, let him be annoyed.
Now we're evenly matched.

“I don't know anything about Overton, okay?”

“Yes, you do,” I say. “And I need you to tell me everything. Right now.”

He's shaking his head.

“Addie, I—”

“Please,”
I beg.
Please.

It's the same tone he used when he pleaded with me not to tell Mom about his tattoo, when I pleaded with him to forgive me. Somehow, though I don't know how, I suddenly understand that we've been talking about the same thing for years, a continuation of the same conversation. Except it's one I don't understand.

Why aren't we ever on the same side?
It's an unspoken question, but my brother seems to hear it and then he's standing. Walking toward his closet. Digging around. Opening some kind of box and pulling something out.

A photo.

Small, like a Polaroid.

When he gives it to me, his hands are shaking.

It's of me and Caleb. I'm leaning over Caleb behind a couch I don't recognize, and Caleb is sitting on the couch, gingerly holding a chubby-cheeked baby with tight black curls and skin the same warm shade of light brown as ours.

My heart instantly beats a little faster.

I look about eleven, Caleb twelve or thirteen. It's
definitely
us. But I don't remember anything about it. I don't recognize where we are, what we're doing.

“What is this?” I ask him.

“What do you think it is?” he asks, a genuine question.

“That's us,” I say, my thumb hovering over our faces. My mother always says not to touch people's faces in printed pictures or they'll smudge, leaving headless bodies.

“Who's the baby?”

“Turn it over.”

I do, my hands clammy with sweat. On the back, in black ink, it says
Rory.

R.

Who is R?

The world starts to spin even faster. “He looks just like you,” I tell Caleb, remembering all the baby pictures I've seen of my brother.

“Yeah,” he says at last.

“He's…I don't remember this picture.” My voice is starting to falter, on the verge of breaking.

“I know,” Caleb says.

What is this? Who is the baby?

“What the hell is this, Caleb?” I ask. Now everything is shaking. I don't know if it's me or just the whole world. I don't know if I'm on ice, if I'm still on the bus, plunging headfirst into something horrible.

I need to sit down.
I don't understand.

“You have to ask Mom, Addie, okay? I…I can't tell you any more.”

“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 he
mine
?” 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.”

“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—”

“Stop
lying
to 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 I
knew
I would find them under your bed.”

I feel like I am being ripped apart as she speaks, like all my ligaments and tendons are being stretched in opposite directions and I'm going to explode from the pain of it.

“I asked you about it and all you could say was that it hurt too much and you thought your father's pills would help you. They could have
killed
you,” she says. “You were so young. Still my little girl. And I decided right then that we couldn't let you bear it. We
wouldn't
let you bear it.” She shakes her head with such ferocity that I can only watch her blankly, trying to remember how the pieces of my life, of everything I've ever known, fit together. Wondering whether they do, or ever did.

I was twelve when my father left. When he stopped having anything to say to me, when I started having to remind myself he loved me. When Caleb and I stopped being allies.

“So you
erased
him?” I can barely breathe as I say the words. I feel like I'm in a dream—a dream inside a dream—or some badly scripted TV show.

Tears continue to trickle down her face. “We used Dr. Overton's procedure on you.”

For a second, the whole world is silent. Neither of us breathes. The air is static.

Of course I'd deduced this, but it stings to hear her admit it.
My parents erased my memory.
All the air has been kicked out of my lungs.

“This is why Dad left,” I say quietly. “Because of Rory…” And when she looks at her hands, then at the carpet—anywhere but at me, just like he would—I know I'm right.

“It's so much more complicated than that, Addie,” she says. “He was so against you having the procedure. To this day, he thinks…” Her voice trails off, and she shakes her head, as if to shake off a memory. One I don't have. “It caused a lot of friction in the whole family. But you understand why it was necessary, don't you? Rory's death was impossible to survive. For any of us.”

Rory.

I feel like I am back on the bus during the accident, everything swirling around me. I sink deeper into the edge of her bed.

“And what happened to your younger brother wasn't your fault,” she says again, like the most important thing is for me to understand this. But I don't. I don't understand any of it.

After a few moments of silence, my mother, sounding like herself again, says, “Many people are having the procedure these days. For much smaller things. It's very safe, it's very affordable, and sometimes it's the best option. People might frown on it, say it's unnatural or act like it doesn't exist, but it works.”

She's speaking like she's on an infomercial, pitching a product she's toiled over for years or one she's tried that has finally cured her impossible case of bacne.

I am still stuck on several seconds earlier.

I am still stuck on “your younger brother.”

On two lives I never knew existed—Rory's and my own.

“Caleb knew all this time?”

“He was in as much pain as you were—losing his brother, watching you suffer. I thought he should have the splice done, too, but he was set on not forgetting. But the procedure seemed like the only thing that would help you. And you were willing to try it. You were a mess, Addie. You weren't eating or sleeping. It was like living with a ghost. It killed me to watch you sinking deeper and deeper into your grief every day.”

It killed
her.
Where was Dad?

Gone, almost immediately, I guess.

She talks for several minutes, hours even, and when she's done, she waits for me to ask something meaningful or do something significant.

But all I can do is whisper,
“What?”

And let her start again. Keep starting again.

I had a brother named Rory.

My parents erased him from my mind.

I'm the reason my family fell apart.