Bailey used me for a chair. Leaning against me, she planted her bony elbows into my back. Echoing my sigh, she rolled her head to look at me. “You seen Seth?”
“I’ve been trying not to.”
Soft laughter bubbled from Bailey. Digging one elbow in, she leaned over to whisper. “He’s pretty miserable.”
Closing my eyes, I sank into the bed. Breathing Bailey’s perfume, still tasting the buttery-salty-sweet of the cookie dough in my mouth. This room was familiar as my own; maybe more than mine. This is where I spilled my secrets, and I was safe enough to let my heart lurch here. The breaking up was ugly; the being together had been good.
There was more of the latter than the former, so I said, “I don’t want him to be.”
“Uh, Denny?”
“I’m not happy,” I clarified. “I just wish things were different.”
Agreeably, Bailey nodded. She looked to a faraway place, probably one where senior year and two different colleges weren’t looming. She plucked at the seam on my jacket, fingers working without thought. “I liked it better when we had everything planned out.”
Didn’t we all? Sometimes, it seemed like it should be possible to give up now. To reboot back to fourth grade, when we were old enough to have our own minds but young enough that nothing mattered. It seemed like it should be possible, but it wasn’t.
Everything ended: fishing season, summer break, fourth grade . . . There was no comfort in that. So I reached back to pat her awkwardly. Then I picked the one thing that I knew would make her recoil.
“At least nobody cuts the crusts off your tuna fish anymore.”
Spasming, Bailey elbowed me in the gut in her hurry to flail off the bed. “Gah, I hate that! I hate it! If you cut the crusts off, it’s a goo sandwich! It’s just goo, Willa! Augh!”
Yeah, it was inconsequential, but it was nice to know that some things did stay the same.
All around me, the world was a secret.
Every door in Broken Tooth led to a story I was never gonna know. Walking home in the dark, I glanced at houses, familiar addresses. There had been enough block parties and co-op parties and Christmas parties that I knew what plenty of those foyers looked like.
But the lives behind them: mysteries. I felt like a mystery too. As much as Bailey and Seth knew me, they didn’t know me. Likewise me for them. It was the kind of talk I usually walked away from at the bonfires. You got the Jewett twins high and they were regular philosophers.
“What if we’re somebody else’s dream?” Amber asked once.
Ashley’s eyes went wide, and she held out her hands. Like they might suddenly disappear on her or something. Staring at them, she murmured, “What if they wake up?”
Then Nick dropped a SweeTart down Ashley’s top. That was real enough that they stopped worrying about being the spark of an idea in a space alien’s brain. It seemed to me like Levi smoothed that over. I didn’t remember how. He was subtle.
My brother was subtle. And sweet. And starting to go hazy in my memory.
I hadn’t been to his grave since the funeral because he wasn’t there. I’d been in his room a hundred times. Mom had sent me up there to get his leftover laundry, so she could wash it and donate it.
It never got washed. It was still sitting in a basket in our basement.
Levi’s books, I thumbed through, then gave to Seth and Nick. The manga, I gave to the school library because he always complained they wouldn’t buy any of the good stuff. His CDs, I parceled out; some I kept. Posters, I packed, along with his ribbons from school science fairs. The trophy he got for a Washington County talent show. The stack of report cards he kept in his desk, because he was actually proud of his grades.
Those went to the attic. I made his bed. I left the curtains half open, all his drawers completely closed. And I stacked his sheet music on his desk.
Levi wasn’t coming back. Every time I went in there, I went in knowing that. He didn’t need his Death Note figures anymore. He wasn’t gonna screw up the alphabetical order on his shelves ever again. He didn’t care if I made his bed wrong; it made no difference if I arranged his shoes with the right one on the left.
He wasn’t at the graveyard, and he wasn’t in that room anymore.
Still, sometimes, it felt like he should have been somewhere. Alone, outside, at night. That’s when I missed him. That’s when I felt absence, the presence of nothing. The first couple weeks after he died, I dreamed him. We were always outside. Walking to the wharf. Climbing down in the caves. Watching the harbor seals on the shore.
When I dreamed him ordinary like that, it hurt when I woke up. It was an ugly trick of the brain. Dreams resurrected Levi; waking put him back in the grave.
He’d always been one door over from me, even when he was brand new. There was a picture of me, all of two years old, on an ugly couch that moved to our garage a couple years back.
Somebody had put Levi in my arms—I was a little kid, and he was a big baby. He filled my whole lap. My hand rested on his downy head, and he dozed away, unafraid. I was nothing but a pink triangle of a nose and a fall of hair.
I didn’t know him then. And I didn’t know him the last time I held him either. Like all the doors on Thaxter Street, his was closed. I knew the foyer, but the rest was a mystery. It always would be.
Instead of going home, I walked down to the water. Fog drifted in, and the lighthouse beam cut through the night. Sitting on the rocks, I shivered in the dark. It wasn’t comfortable, and I was gonna have to bolt sooner rather than later. But I wanted a minute. Some quiet.
If I’d told Levi about Grey, he would have believed me. Probably would have written a song about it. Maybe even waited for me after school to ask more questions that would have turned into a comic book. He probably would have named the character in the book Emma, though. He’d had the hots for Emma Luchies since second grade.
Covering my face with my hands, I breathed heat onto my own skin. Levi was gone, but parts of him remained. Shadows, glimmers—unmade memories built on expectations. For just a moment, I wasn’t alone. And then, just as quickly, I was.
Waiting for the light to pass overhead again, I wondered if I could sleep in a town without a beacon at night. Nick said it took him forever to get used to Broken Tooth because he didn’t have train tracks behind his house.
It was funny, the things you could live with and the things you learned to live without.
THIRTEEN
Grey
The fog comes and goes on its own now. I feel its currents. I could direct its tide. I won’t. I’m not. Instead, I stand in the lantern gallery and watch the shore. All those flickering lights, just out of my reach. All those flickering lives, going on and on without me.
One hundred years.
I asked for evidence of myself once. I wanted proof that I had been someone before Susannah’s kiss. That my life was no imaginary thing. And this after I had loathed it so much in the living. After hating my father and his dreams for me. After hoping to flee my mother at the very first opportunity. I wished for evidence of it; I no longer believed I’d been real.
The curse provided. Inside the gold-wrapped gift at my breakfast that morning were two slips of newsprint.
My father’s obituary was a plain affair. He passed fifteen years after I surrendered my soul to the mist. He died in his sleep, the memoriam said; he was survived only by his beloved wife.
A grainy photograph immortalized my mother in her obituary. So claimed the caption. The woman depicted there was decades older than I remembered her. She wore black; she looked past the camera.