Everyone We've Been (20 page)

We hang out almost every day, before Zach works and after I'm done practicing. So that I don't completely neglect my viola, I implement a rule for myself wherein I am not allowed to see Zach unless I've practiced for at least an hour that day. We make a point of doing the sorts of mundane things people who are not obsessive cinephiles and viola players would do and tell great tales of. Summer things and outdoor things.

I introduce Zach to the strawberry-kiwi milk shakes—the Oreo pieces sprinkled in are the key—that Shake Attack only makes in the summer and Zach quickly falls victim to my addiction. We go there roughly five times a week. One time twice in one day.

We play Bigger and Better in At Home Movies when I visit Zach at work. Somehow Ciano always comes out on top, which is the best evidence I have that the game is deeply flawed and rigged.

We have a picnic on the grass by Bentley Lake, though it is a little bit traumatizing because these white and gray birds keep swooping down a few feet away from us, begging for crumbs. They never actually get within a foot of our basket, but that doesn't stop both me and Zach from ducking our heads and yelling whenever one dive-bombs out of the sky and lands not that far from our picnic blanket.

“Okay,” Zach says, “they're just birds. It's fine. They're not even getting that close.”

“So it's fine for them to just sit there and stare us down while we eat?”

“Should I give them a piece of my sandwich?” Zach asks.

“No! What if they all swoop down for it? Or that gives them the courage to come closer? Let's just try to ignore them.”

Which is impossible to do on account of the fact that they make quite the entrance when they land one by one and then they
all
just sit there, watching us threateningly. Soon seven are clustered on the grass to the left of us.

“Oh God, I'm breaking, Addie. I might have to give the closest one a cracker, just to leave us alone,” Zach says.

“Do not!”

“I have to! It's like that bigger, older kid that bullies you for your lunch at school.”

“Exactly. Ignore him and he'll go away.”

“That is
terrible
advice,” Zach laughs, shaking his head. “I have to listen to my heart. I'm sorry.”

“Oh my God, don't!”
I order him, but he's still trying to break up a cracker, so I lunge at him. We start laughing and I'm trying to pry it out of Zach's hands before he throws it, and he's trying to keep it out of my reach, crushing it in his palm. We're both laughing too hard to do either thing effectively, and then we're toppling over backward. The sun is warm against my skin and we're both lying on the grass, facing upward, and I have to squint against the sky. Who cares about some dumb birds?

If a stranger walked by, they would think we were having simultaneous asthma attacks. My stomach hurts like I've been doing crunches. Shaking with laughter, I find Zach's hand, warm and only inches from mine, and the feel of his skin still makes a current rush through my body every single time. I lace the fingers of my right hand between the fingers of his left hand, which is unfortunately where he's crushed the cracker but I don't care, and our palms are sweaty and warm on each other's, with hundreds of tiny little pieces crushed between.

And maybe we would lie there for a few minutes, maybe all afternoon, just cracking each other up over things that are not even that funny, our bodies rising and falling with each breath. The sun is making me drowsy and I could fall asleep with my head on Zach's chest, and I probably would. But just then another bird dive-bombs us even closer than the last, and we jump apart. Quickly and without discussion, we start to pack up our picnicking stuff.

We put the food away in Zach's mom's basket, hoping that will deter the birds, at least while we make the trek back to Zach's car. I carry the folded-up blanket under my arm, Zach takes the basket, and we make a run for the parking lot.

“We're almost there we're almost there,” Zach says as we run with a hand over our bowed heads, the way you do in a thunderstorm. Once we make it safely into the car, we discuss the possibility that maybe we are not picnic people.

“Do you know what would have helped?” Zach says. “A giant-ass umbrella. Maybe one from Two Dollars or Less.”

It's tempting, but we don't give up on the outside-summery stuff all together.

We go bike riding through town, coming up with names like Otis and Horatio and Michèle for the people we pass. We try one of the hikes out by Calamore, which is long and hard and sweaty, but still somehow fun. We go out boating once with Zach's family. They borrow their neighbor's boat and take it out on a lake two hours from Lyndale, and Raj actually agrees to come, even though he spends the whole time sitting on the boat in a giant straw hat that Zach's mom made him wear because he didn't bring one. He sits there, unimpressed by the sights of nature, by the glistening nearly green water, by Kevin's dirty jokes, or by Zach and me holding hands. He just sighs deeply.

“Dude,” Zach says, tugging on the black beanie he's wearing today to keep his hair under control. “I say this because nobody else will, but you're reminding me of a cranky old grandma right around this second.”

“A cranky old grandma at a rave,” I add. “Or a college party.”

Zach laughs but Raj rolls his eyes. “I only came because my cousins are
still
staying with us, and I needed to preserve my sanity.” He flips the brim of his hat up to give us a put-upon look. “But I think I went about it wrong.”

We try some new non-Lindsay-exposed restaurants and wash Zach's car (he cannot keep it clean to save his life). We talk on the phone, text, and hang out with his brother, and everything is ordinary and normal and slowly summer starts to turn into fall. There is a little voice in the back of my head that wonders whether people like Katy who post about great and exuberant normal lives are not pretending. If they are not embellishing the happy. Maybe their exuberance is even warranted.

Maybe mine—newly found and not broken in yet—really is.

Long after Katy leaves my car, the tears finally stop coming and I pull out of the school parking lot and drive in aimless circles around Lyndale. I turn off my phone so no one can reach me and turn the music up so loud I can't think. It doesn't work. My mind whirs with the same thoughts:
You erased him. Bus Boy. Zach. You chose to remove him. How could you do that? Why would you do that? You erased him….

Over and over and over.

I don't know I don't know. Why would I do that?

I think of what Caleb told me last night about Rory, about how I chose to move forward.

I erased my brother, too.

I drive around Bentley Lake and the park. I drive to the east side of town, weave through the streets, until I find the place where we used to live. Our old house, its walls light green on the inside, the outside made of dark red brick. There is a silver-blue minivan in front of it, in the driveway where Caleb and I used to play tennis with the neighborhood kids. Otherwise, it looks the same. I want to knock on the door and go inside. To stand at the top of the stairs, toes sinking into the carpet, and belt out show tunes like I'm a kid again. I want to be eleven so I can meet Rory and hold him and smell his skin and know what it's like to be a big sister. I imagine my whole family still lives there—not us now, but like we used to be. We haunt the house with our laughter, with Caleb's dream of flying, with my music, with the way my parents used to love each other, because I like the thought that things keep existing where they once were, where you leave them, even when life changes. I like the idea that the things we did and thought and felt are entities that go on existing outside of us.

My parents erased him.

Why did they do that?

Why did I let them?

How could I do it to myself again?

When I finally head home, it's almost dark out.

Dad's car is in front of our house. Mom's and Caleb's cars are there, too, which means they are all waiting for me.

I enter as quietly as I can, hoping, somehow, I'll be able to slip upstairs without anyone noticing.

I almost make it. Dad has his back to me. He's talking to my mother, his voice tired and gravelly, an indication that he hasn't slept since arriving from work. Mom, her face in her hands, is on the couch farthest away from him.

It's odd to see my parents in our living room, like we are five years in the past. What is different now is that the secret they've been keeping, the weight that has quietly torn our family apart, now sits exposed and obvious in the center of the room.

In this light, I wonder how I missed it. All the weird looks my family got over the years. I thought then that it was because of my mother's mild celebrity or my parents' breakup. Obviously, it was because people still remembered our tragedy. Most of them were too polite to say anything. Maybe they mentioned Rory at first and the name meant nothing to me. Or they said other things in a way I didn't understand.

Let us know if you need anything and how are your parents doing
could mean anything. I'd wonder self-consciously,
How do they know my dad hasn't been home in three weekends?

Now my question is this: How did I never figure it out?

The answer, of course, slaps me right in the face, as it has been doing all day.

My parents quite literally hid it, wiped it clean from my mind.

And then I did it again to myself.

“Addie, how could you!” my mother exclaims, asking the very question that is haunting me, before I have a chance to get upstairs unnoticed. “You went to Overton on your own? You
lied
to get your memory erased? Do you know how dangerous it is to have a procedure on your
mind
without your full medical history? Do you know all the things that could easily have gone wrong and we wouldn't have even
known
about it? For a whole year?” Her voice is breaking. My mother has cried more in two days than she has in years.

I want to point out that the procedure seemed perfectly safe—convenient, even—when
they
had it done on me, but I bite back my words. “Katy told you?”

She must have called and told them everything right after she left my car at school.

“Katy called me,” Mom says. “But when your father landed, he already had several missed calls from Overton. Apparently, some of the staff recognized you when you went in yesterday. After you left, they put together that you'd been there both as Addison and under that other name. They realized that if you were only seventeen now, you had to have been underage for the procedure last year. That the information they had for you under the other name didn't add up. When they figured this all out, they only had your father's cell phone number and the disconnected number from before we moved.”

“I came over as soon as I got into town,” Dad says now.

Which staff members recognized me?
I wonder.
The receptionist? The nurse with the streak?

“They can't believe you've had two procedures,” Caleb says. “It's really rare.”

“And now you're hallucinating? Why didn't you mention what was happening right away? Why would you do something like this?” Mom asks.

Dad looks at the wall behind me. Even now, with everything out in the open, he can't force himself to look at me. It makes my chest hurt. It infuriates me.

“Why would
you
?” I shoot back, since I can't answer her question.
I don't know why I would.

Maybe it's true that they succeeded in protecting me—I don't remember my brother's death—but they've also taken away the most valuable thing I had: the ability to know myself.

Dad surprises me by speaking then, instead of leaving it to Mom, as usual.

“Addie, there's more to the story than you realize. But we can get to that later. Dr. Overton wants you to come in right away for a scan. When I called the clinic back, he said when you saw him, you didn't tell him anything about the boy you were seeing.”

The boy.

Zach.

Zach, Zach, Zach.

I suddenly wish I was with him right now, my apparition. That I could tell him what his name is so he'd have a little bit more of himself.

Then a pang of something I can't name slams into my chest. My parents know him, too—Katy told me that.

Zach.

He is my memory, and yet I'm the only one who doesn't remember what happened. Who he is.

“There is no way,” I say slowly, “that I'm ever going to Dr. Overton again.”

“Addie,” Caleb says, “you have to.”

“I don't have to do anything.”

I turn and start for the stairs.

“Stop being dramatic, Addison,” Mom says now, following me up. “We need to know why you're seeing him. It could be something really serious.”

“Or something not so serious,” my dad adds quickly. Mom is always jumping to conclusions, anticipating the worst.

“Most likely it has something to do with the bus crash,” my brother says.

“I'm not going,” I say again, and slam my door shut. I fall onto my unmade bed, my whole body heavy from exhaustion. That sinking feeling I sometimes have, of watching everything around me vanish, wraps around me and won't let go. I ache for sleep, the kind of peaceful, uninterrupted sleep I haven't had since the bus crash, but it won't come.

I think about reaching in the dark for my viola, but for once, I am too sad to play.