There wasn’t much I could say after that. It was one thing to know that my brother loved me. Of course he did; he had to, just like I had to love him. I didn’t always like him. In fact, I rarely liked him, but I did love him.
Greg had been easy to like, and Jeremy had idolized him. We’d all suffered when Greg died. But it had been easier to focus on Mom’s suffering, and my own, than consider that Jeremy was suffering, too. I was beginning to realize that just because he didn’t show it the same way didn’t mean he didn’t feel as deeply. It was totally foreign for me to think of Jeremy that way, to know that he not only had those feelings but that maybe all along, he’d been considering mine, too.
It was a mind trip, and it messed with my brain, making me feel like I needed to apologize and hug him. I couldn’t remember the last time Jeremy and I had hugged. I felt like I needed to apologize for that, too. The words formed in my mouth, but I couldn’t give them breath. Instead I focused on the problem we shared.
“So what do we do?”
“For starters, we don’t take any family trips without the whole family. I don’t want her getting used to the idea of us without Dad.”
That made sense. We were fragmented, but that didn’t mean we needed to form potentially good memories that way. But even though I agreed with Jeremy—a fact that astounded me—I didn’t see that we had a lot of options. “We are literally packed and in the car. Little late to get out of this one.”
Jeremy was thinking. His face tended to scrunch up when he was concentrating hard on something, like the effort was painful. Brotherly breakthrough notwithstanding, I fell into my old habit and laughed. Jeremy reacted just as predictably by turning around and drilling me in the arm.
It was going to take more than one conversation to turn Jeremy and me into the kind of brothers who liked each other as well as loved each other. I didn’t need the throb in my arm to tell me that.
When Mom came back, her makeup was completely redone, which told me she’d cried the first application off. I wondered if Jeremy noticed. Maybe. His face wasn’t contorted, so I assumed he’d abandoned any deep thought as to how to get this road trip canceled, but I hadn’t. I wasn’t going to be able to communicate with him in front of her, but as I rubbed my arm, an idea formed...the barest fragment of one.
“I think that’s everything,” Mom said. Jeremy only grunted. “Grandma and Grandpa are really looking forward to seeing you two. You’ll be fine for a couple days without your electronics.”
I didn’t have any more time to think once Jeremy started the car. “Fine,” I said, deliberately letting my annoyance seep through.
“Ignore him,” Jeremy said. “He’s crying because he won’t be able to call his girlfriend for two days and the world is going to end as a result.”
What a predictable ass. I tried not to smile. “Careful. Forty-eight hours might be long enough for Erica to realize she’d rather not date a guy who has to shop at Baby Gap.”
* * *
We didn’t end up visiting my grandparents. We did, however, back Mom’s Geo into a tree, because Jeremy, short though he was, could still twist around and try to beat the crap out of me all without removing his foot from the gas pedal. Not at all like I’d planned.
We also didn’t get our phones back, nor were we allowed to go anywhere apart from school. That didn’t end up sucking as much as I thought it would, because for the first time in a long time, my brother and I actually talked.
Jolene
I barely remembered driving to the apartment, much less climbing the stairs to Dad’s floor, but when my toes stopped inches from his door, reality jolted back.
He was there. He had to be. I’d barely seen him in months, and he was going to open the door and see me, talk to me.
And it was my birthday.
He’d gotten me a car.
With a card. Or a note.
Maybe it had said things.
Maybe it had said a lot of things.
Maybe Mom had read it, and that was why she’d burned it.
Maybe it just said “Happy Birthday.”
Maybe it was just a card that he’d signed.
Maybe he hadn’t even signed it.
Maybe.
Maybe not.
I didn’t have my keys. So I knocked.
And he didn’t answer.
I knocked again. And I kept knocking. Rap, rap, rap. Boom, boom, boom.
And then I was crying in the hallway.
And it was my birthday.
And he wasn’t there.
He was never there. He’d probably never been there. No one ever was. No one wanted to be there.
Mrs. Cho was gone, and Cherry had been gone for longer than I’d realized.
My knuckles hurt, so I switched hands.
And then I stopped knocking on a door that would never open.
I turned until my back was to his apartment, and I slid down to the floor. So what if there had been a card or a note. So what. There’d been nothing—less than nothing—for so long, it wouldn’t have mattered. Nothing he scrawled on a card for my birthday would undo the fact that I’d barely seen him since my last one. All of my insides squeezed tight, as memories from all those missed birthdays piled on top me. It was pathetic, and it didn’t matter. And I had a car. That was great. Tons of sixteen-year-olds would love to get cars on their birthdays.
A tear splashed onto my cheek.
I could go anywhere, do anything.
Another tear, another splash.
It was my birthday and I was free.
And I cried.
* * *
The hallway made my eyeballs crawl. It had to have been designed intentionally ugly. The carpeting on the lower floors had been replaced during the past month, but Adam’s dad hadn’t gotten to our floor yet. It had the old forest green carpeting with tiny burgundy swirls everywhere. And it looked dirty. The carpet was packed with so many years of accumulated filth that it no longer matched the paint on the walls. And I’d been sitting on it for hours, even knowing that my dad would most likely never show up. Maybe especially knowing that he would never show up. He probably had a different place, a nicer place where he actually lived.
I turned my head with an indifference I didn’t have to fake when I heard footsteps dragging up the stairs.
It wasn’t Dad or Shelly or anyone I knew. It was a guy in his thirties with thinning blond hair and pale blue eyes. I vaguely remembered him from months ago when I’d been waiting for Adam so that we could build a snowman. He carried a bag of groceries in one arm and a bicycle helmet in the other.