It’s impossible not to notice that Julian’s home. My father is making chicken potpie, his favorite. My mother has the laundry basket on the coffee table, and there’s a pile of Julian’s folded shirts on the couch while she watches television.
Even if they hadn’t given me fair warning (a verbal countdown, each morning), it would be obvious. So much of our family life revolved around Julian’s ball games and his schedule these last few years, it’s like we don’t know what to do with each other now that he’s gone. So my parents take it upon themselves to make his return visits as welcoming as possible, to entice him to want to return.
They do his laundry. They cook his favorite meals. They leave him be. There’s a calm in the house when he’s home, like I know my place again in our family unit. Without him here, I feel my parents’ focus too strongly, like they’re surprised by the person I have become.
“Where’ve you been?” my mother says, her substitution for a greeting because I’m supposed to be engaging in family time, now that Julian’s home.
“Helping Eve with the packing,” I say.
“Oh,” my mother says, and her voice falls, her face falls. She moves around the couch, places her hand on the side of my head, and I look away, too aware of her gaze. “How is she? I can’t believe they’re really doing it. Really moving.”
I don’t answer any of it, because really, what is there to say? Sean’s gone and Caleb’s gone and soon they’ll be gone, too. Nothing more to remind us.
“I need to go back tomorrow.”
I feel the tension through her arm before she trails her fingers through my hair, and she shifts her focus. “But you’re going to miss seeing your brother. He leaves tomorrow evening.”
“I’m seeing him now,” I say.
She shakes her head. “He’s going out after dinner. Some baseball thing. Oh, you should go.” Then, she calls louder, “Julian! Do you think you could bring Jessa with you?”
“Ugh, Mom, stop.” The last thing I want is to be dragged around as an appendage to Julian. It’ll be a bunch of people I’ve known for what feels like my whole life, mixed with my classmates who know me with Caleb. A blending of worlds, and I won’t know which person to be.
“It’s fine,” he says, stepping out of the kitchen, where he was undoubtedly helping my father, because Julian can also cook, of course. “I’m going back to talk to the team at the coach’s place.”
It’s fine, he says, like I am the chore.
“God, don’t do me any favors, Julian. What if I don’t want to go?”
My mother mumbles at the television, picking up another shirt to fold. Julian grins and tilts his head. “Would you rather…,” he says, letting the thought trail off. He raises his hands in a balance of scales, as if to say: Pick, Jessa. A night home with your parents asking you questions, trapped in this house? Or an escape.
“Ugh, fine,” I say. I roll my eyes at him, and he laughs. I hate that I like my brother as much as I do.
I’ve sort of inherited Julian’s car, in that the car is here, and Julian’s usually gone. But when he’s home, I’m reminded that it belonged to him first. He takes the keys from their familiar spot hanging in the kitchen. He sits in the driver’s seat. I stew silently, wondering if he’s noticed the keychain with my name (well, it’s really a Jesse, the e turned into an a with red permanent marker, the closest name Caleb could ever find on the store display; I was always searching for my name, everywhere), or the seat that’s been adjusted to my height, the mirrors angled to my field of vision.
He adjusts things smoothly as I make a show of sliding into the passenger side, but he leaves the radio on my station at least.
The coach’s house isn’t far from campus—an older colonial that makes me suddenly wonder how much history teachers–slash–high school baseball coaches are paid.
Julian, as if reading my thoughts, says, “Mrs. Peters works in banking.”
There are cars already filling the driveway, a few parked along the curb. “So,” I say, “you’re giving, like, an insight-to-college talk or something?”
He shrugs. “They do this yearly alumni-family gathering thing. Like a chance for the kids to ask questions about applying, or scouts, or whatever.” He fidgets with the controls on the car, turning the lights off. “We don’t have to stay long. Maybe we can catch a movie on the way home. Or get some ice cream. Or whatever.”
He stares out the front window as he says this, and I groan. “Oh my God, did Mom put you up to this?”
“No, I just thought—”
“I’m fine, Julian.”
“I know, I know, it’s just—”
“We broke up,” I say, and he sits straighter. “Caleb and I had broken up.” I did not lose my boyfriend. That, at least, was a role I could figure out how to fill. The tragic figure left behind. A future full of never-haves and what-might-have-beens.
“Yeah, I heard that. Still…” Still. You missed a week of school. You stopped showing up to cross-country. You don’t see your friends. You go to school and back, stuck in a lifeless cycle, like a ghost.
“Still, what?” I’m going to make him say it, sharing in the discomfort of the moment.
But before he can answer, someone knocks on the window; another alumnus, a year older than Julian. Terrance Bilson. He smiles widely, and Julian launches himself out of the car, laughing, embracing his old teammate. I trail behind as they walk together toward the house, and then Julian gestures toward me, saying, “You remember my sister, Jessa?”
Terrance’s smile fractures for the slightest moment. If the outside porch light hadn’t been trained directly on him, I wouldn’t have noticed. But I did. I do. Then the smile is back, and he says, “Right, hi, Jessa. Nice to see you.”
Inside, there’s a spread of finger food on the long dining room table. There are kids I recognize from school who nod their hellos after they fawn over Julian. Sometimes there’s a benefit to being Julian’s sister, to fading into the background, to being generally ignored. I let the conversation hum around me. I check out.
I sit on a hard-backed chair with a plastic cup of soda in my hand, and I take out my phone, pretending to look busy. Pretending like anyone has texted me in the last month.
Someone’s knee nudges mine, and I ignore it at first, assuming it’s an accident. I shift my legs farther to the side. But then they’re bumped again, and I look up, catching Max’s eye briefly before I look back at my phone. “Oh, hi,” I say. “My brother’s in the kitchen. Though I see you’ve picked your seating strategically.”
But he ignores me. His leg is bouncing beside mine. “How long were you over there today? I left for work, and your car was still there.”
“Yeah, till dinnertime.” And then, in the silence, I tell him. Hoping it will mean something to him as well. That he will sit a little straighter, lean a little nearer, drop his voice in surprise. “I can’t find his glasses,” I say.
His leg stops bouncing. “You mean the ones from middle school? Thick rimmed, black?”
I nod.
“I haven’t seen those in years. He still had them?”
“Yes, he still wore them.”
He laughs, and the sound makes me mournful. It was a piece shared only with me, then.
“Maybe he finally tossed them,” he says.
Nothing. No spark. No meaning.
“I’ll check again tomorrow,” I say.
I feel him looking at the side of my face. “You’re going back?”
Of course I’m going back. It’s all that’s left of him, whether his mother is punishing me or not. It’s the first time I’ve been invited back into the house since before that day. It’s my last chance for answers, for some sort of absolution, to see if I can uncover what he was doing, where he was going. The cause and effect that led us all here. “It’ll probably take me at least a week,” I say.
“You don’t have to do that. I’ll do it. Don’t show up, and I’ll just do it, okay?”
“Max,” I say, and I am so serious, so deadly serious I grasp onto his arm so he will understand how serious I am. “Do not touch that room.”
It’s mine. My grief, my guilt, all of it—it belongs to me, and it’s mine to go through. I had no idea how possessive I felt over Caleb, even now. Even though Max probably has more claim to that room, if he wants to make the argument. But he doesn’t.
Instead Max seems to remember that he doesn’t look at me anymore, and I remember that I don’t touch him, and we quickly disentangle and look away. I find Julian, sit beside him on the couch, listen to him tell the stories about college, poised and filtered because of the fact his coach is listening, and so is the coach’s wife.
And then he says, “I need to get Jessa home,” and I roll my eyes. He says a thousand goodbyes, all perfect smiles and perfect handshakes. Even his hair, which is the same color and texture as my own, obeys him, while mine inevitably succumbs to chaos by the end of the day, with either static or humidity, depending on the time of year.
On the walk back to his car, he says, “Thanks for the excuse. That was totally painful, right?”
“Totally,” I say.
We go to a movie. We get ice cream after. It’s midnight when we arrive back home, and our parents are asleep, and I sit in the car beside Julian in the driveway as he drums his fingers softly on the steering wheel, like he’s working himself up to something.
“I’m sorry, Jessa,” he says.
I want to tell him to stop, but it’s too late. He’s already said it, and everything comes back in a rush, like a flood. I feel my eyes burn, the hot tears on my face, as I look away.
He sits beside me with the engine off, until the cold from the outside seeps through the steel door, my jacket, the layers of clothing, my skin.
I wipe the side of my face before opening the car door, and he hands me a tissue without saying a word. I take it, ball it up, say, “Of course you have a tissue. Of course.”
“I should’ve come home,” he says. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t. Mom was right. You needed to stay, get used to college. Acclimate.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “Did she really say ‘acclimate’?”
“She really did. I overheard her talking to Dad about it.” I look straight at my brother then. Give him the absolution I so desperately want myself. “There was nothing you could’ve done. Really.” And then I push the door open, step out into the November night.
“No,” he says as he exits the car. “I should’ve been here. She was wrong.”
I turn around, grinning. “Oh my God, don’t tell her that. Never tell her that.”
He smiles as we walk to the front door.
It’s my key that lets us back in, where my parents have left the entryway lights on. I head up the steps, and he lingers near the kitchen. We don’t say goodbye, even though I know I won’t see him tomorrow.
Everyone says I’m so lucky to have Julian as my brother, and I roll my eyes. But I know this. I know I am.