I lowered my voice, trying to calm him down. Calm myself down. “I know that. I just want everyone to be happy.”
He laughed. “Yeah. Happy. We’re all so fucking happy in this family. It’s a regular Disney movie.” His face contorted until I couldn’t tell if he was about to yell at me again or cry. “This is stupid. It’s just so fucking stupid.” Turning away, he leaned over the case and braced himself against the top. His back rose and fell with labored breaths. “We should have made Mom go see somebody, you were right. Maybe you should see somebody.”
“Maybe. But I’m gonna do this too.” I walked closer to him and he jerked away. “And I think it’ll be good. Why not try something different instead of the same old shit that’s been making us miserable our whole lives?”
“I haven’t been miserable my whole life!”
“Really? I’ve been pretty miserable.” His shoulders were tense, raised nearly to his ears. “Neither of us can deal with anything because we refuse to let anything go. We learned it from Dad. Look at him, he killed himself rather than deal with anything. It shouldn’t be like this.”
One sharp slap and he broke straight through the glass. It rained down onto the animals inside and collected on the plastic baby Jesus’s face. When he raised his hands, they were coated with blood. “Look what you made me do,” he said, eyes watering. “I’m gonna get tetanus.”
“You get tetanus from rusty metal, dumbass. Not glass.” I grabbed his wrist and looked at the cuts in his palm. We were both shaking. “I know you don’t want to talk about it, but we both know why we need to.”
Blood dripped from his palm and licked across his forearm, down to the joint of my thumb. It dropped into the dusty linoleum and left behind bright patterns. “I hate talking about Brynn,” he whispered. “It always fucks me up.”
“I know, me too.” I dug out some of the glass from his skin. The slivers were small, difficult to grasp. “But don’t you think it’s weird that we both loved her and neither of us can talk about that? She was mine, she was yours. That’s something that won’t change. Even if she’s gone, that still happened.”
Blood kept leaking from the cuts, making it difficult to see what I was doing. A shard stabbed into my thumb, near the nail. I hissed and shook my hand. More blood flew off and spattered the cabinet.
He pulled away and stuffed his fists into the hem of his shirt. Blood dotted the tops of his sneakers. There were stains on my pants.
Still not sure what to do with my hands, I picked the wreath up off the floor, plucking flower petals from their green plastic stems. “We both loved Brynn and she’s gone. Left us for some person she’d only known for a month. This happened years ago, and we’re still not over it.”
“Okay, I get it.” He tried to laugh, but all that came out was a rusty croak. “We’re unlovable.”
Once I started talking, everything spilled out: fetid and stagnant, a backlog of sewage. “Dad killed himself because he couldn’t deal with his body breaking down. He couldn’t stand being weak. So he did something horrible.” I pulled more petals and let them drift onto the floor. Cornflower blue, bright pink. The fuzzy little heads of baby’s breath. “Instead of talking to somebody, which would’ve taken actual courage, he shot himself.”
With both his hands buried in the hem of his shirt, my brother looked like a shamed little kid. “You don’t know that’s why.”
“Yes, it’s exactly why.” I sighed and set down the wreath again, this time on the broken top. “He left me a note.”
Maybe I knew Milo better than I’d thought I did, after all. I could tell he wanted to read it. I could see by the twitchy way his eyes darted from my face and back down to the floor that he wondered if there was anything about him in that letter. And there were two things I could do: I could tell him the truth, that it didn’t mention him at all, or I could do the other thing. I could say the thing he needed to hear.
“He said he was sorry. He said he wished he’d been a better father. That he loved you very much. That he was proud of you and of the kids you raised.”
“Yeah, right,” Milo replied, looking down at his bloodied hands. “Let me see it then.”
“It’s gone. And we don’t need a fucking letter to tell us that.”
Milo sagged so slowly he seemed to be deflating. Then we were both sitting on the floor. I drew my legs up to my chin. Milo sat with his hands clenching and unclenching in his shirt.
“Brynn’s never coming back,” I said, letting the words roll around in my mouth, like foreign objects. “She’s gone. We act like if we wait long enough, she’s going to come back again and things can be how they were.” I rubbed my chin back and forth across my knee until the jeans chafed the skin. “But that’s stupid. It’s never gonna happen. She left because she didn’t want the same things we wanted. She didn’t want us.”
Remembering it was bad enough; talking about it felt like chewing tinfoil. Milo wrung his hands in his shirt and the bloodstains spread.
“What does it say about me that the only person I’ve ever loved never loved me?” he asked. His voice sounded very young. If I’d closed my eyes, we could’ve been teenagers again.
“That’s not true.”
“She only ever loved you.” Sweat beaded along his hairline and dripped down either side of his face. “She didn’t love me, and we had a kid together.”
Sitting on the floor should have felt awkward, but it was comfortable. Picking fuzz off the baseboards. Swirling prints into the dirt of the linoleum. I signed my name with a flourish. Drew a heart, then a star.
“Why did we have to love the same person?” Milo whispered.
“I don’t know. We just did.” Reaching over, I pulled his hands from the hem of his shirt. The blood had clotted. I examined them in the weak light. Glass was still trapped in the cuts, little slivers that glimmered like ice. “I think a better question is why we still love this person so much we can’t love anyone else. She’s gone. It’s over.”
He let me hold his hands as I began to pick out the glass again. “Did you and Brynn have sex when I was married to her?”
There was no use lying. “Yes.”
Tiny slivers transferred from his palm to my fingers. I was stabbing myself with the shards. Our blood mingled, skin rubbing together.
“I knew it. I mean, I knew that you were.” He laughed. “She and I didn’t have sex very often.”
“You don’t have to tell me about it.”
“I knew that you guys were together, even in high school. I didn’t care. I just wanted her.” Our blood darkened as it dried. It looked like menstrual blood, clots forming between our fingers. He looked up from our bloodied hands. “I saw you guys together. Lots of times.”
“When?” It was hard to think back, all the places that she and I had been together. In my room, in her car. The couch at my parents’ house. Outside, propped against the tree in the backyard.
“Lots of times. You guys weren’t very careful. Dad even saw you once, in the shop.”