“They were probably just concerned about you.”

  In truth, they were probably concerned for his mother, who’d died alone and unvisited. Aaron said, “I guess.”

  “Did anyone ask about us? Like, why we weren’t there?”

  Sarah had wanted to go to the funeral, but Aaron had convinced her not to. He didn’t want her or Elijah anywhere near that town, that house. She’d gone to his father’s funeral, but that was the only time, and that was before their son had been born. He wouldn’t expose his Elijah to—

  “They understood.”

  “What did they understand?”

  “Sarah…”

  “I just don’t want people thinking badly of us. Who doesn’t go to her mother-in-law’s funeral? Who doesn’t take the grandson?”

  “It doesn’t matter what they think. In a couple of days this place will be banished from my life completely.” That thought struck Aaron hard, and he felt a burst of pure joy so radiant it burned away the fog of annoyance creeping over his mind. “They won’t think of us; we won’t think of them.”

  “Yeah, anyway. Elijah’s standing here jumping up and down for the phone, so I guess I better let him talk to you before he explodes.”

  After some rustling on the other end, Aaron heard, “Hi, Dad!”

  “Hey, buddy. How’s it going? Did you really almost explode?”

  “Ummm, no. But on Power Rangers today there was this bomb bad guy, I can’t remember what his name was, Bomb-something, and he was made of bombs and threw bombs!”

  “Wow, was that a new episode?”

  “Yeah. It was awesome.”

  Elijah was obsessed with Power Rangers. He either wore or carried around a Power Rangers backpack at all times, filled with various Power Rangers action figures. When Aaron had time, he’d watch the show with him.

  They talked about the episode and then said goodnight after Aaron promised to be home soon.

  “I love you!”

  “Love you too, buddy.”

  Aaron’s mood lightened as he stood and pocketed his phone. Then he turned around and his heart instantly sank at the idea of walking back into that house.

  Standing just outside the front door, Aaron wondered why he was there at all. Did he really need anything from inside? He hadn’t for the past fifteen years. He should let an estate person deal with all of it. They could donate or trash whatever couldn’t be sold.

  He should walk away. He should spend the rest of his life hiding from a past he could barely remember.

  It was that thought that sent him through the door, to the base of the stairs.

  Aaron paused, one foot on the bottom step. He could at least wait until morning. A closet door might or might not have opened on its own. Either way, the situation was obviously beyond his courage. He could tell Elijah about that, about how his father had been terrified by an open closet and had to scurry away with his tail between his legs. Yeah, the Power Rangers daily battled giant monsters threatening to crush entire cities beneath their clawed feet, but they wouldn’t be able to withstand the horror of some loose hinges.

  Aaron walked quickly up the stairs. Outside his old bedroom, he stopped again. The landing and the upstairs rooms had been dim before. After spending an hour outside watching the sun set, the house was totally dark. He couldn’t see anything beyond the shadowy portal of his bedroom door, couldn’t see the closet or whatever might have slunk out of it now that the fallen night had extended its territory.

  If he was afraid of the monsters, he could start in his mother’s bedroom, instead.

  Aaron turned on the landing light, then stepped forward, reached through his bedroom door and slapped his palm along the wall. His heart pounded harder with every beat as he sensed hungry, unseen creatures slinking nearer, stirred up by his flailing. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, and after he was sure he’d slid his hand over every inch of the wall several times before the switch decided to appear, Aaron flipped the lights on.

  The fist that had squeezed his heart in fear remained in sorrow as he took his first close look into his and Bobby’s childhood bedroom in fifteen years. He’d been avoiding it all day. Even when his father had died seven years before, he hadn’t set foot upstairs, instead leaving to stay in a hotel, telling his mother she had enough to worry about without looking after a houseguest.

  The posters, the stacks of magazines, the bookshelf full of comics…it was all the same. Even the action-figure battle scene stood complete. His mother must have dusted the figures and put them back in place.

  He’d left her there utterly alone in that house for the seven years since his father had died, alone with her memories and keepsakes of when she’d had a family, when she’d been happy. And yet he could still barely stop his legs from carrying him down the stairs and out the front door.

  He let his eyes drift over to what he felt was the reason: the open closet. Below a shelf stacked high with board games hung Bobby’s old clothes. Yet Aaron didn’t trust it, and watched the closet as he prepared to leave the room, flipping the light back off.

  The closet changed.

  Aaron leapt back in fright, colliding with the door frame, which sent him sprawling on his hands and knees on the upstairs landing.

  “Aaron, wait.”

  He didn’t, instead scrambling to the stairs on all fours, gripping the banister and getting his feet beneath him just in time to again barely avoid taking the same head-over-heels tumble that had broken his mother’s neck.

  But this time he stopped at the bottom of the stairs, turned, looked up. He stood crouched, his hand reaching out behind him for the front door so that if anything appeared, he could turn and run all the way back to California, childhood mementos be damned.

  He stared so hard the walls pulsed, the house quickened by his own heartbeat. Nothing stirred.

  Something had been in the closet, something besides the clothes, board games and sports equipment that should have been there and—in an instant—weren’t.

  When the lights went out, the closet changed into a black hole of nothingness.

  He could have been mistaken. Maybe the shadows had simply been deeper than he’d expected because the landing light didn’t illuminate the room properly; except something had stepped into view, had stared at him from that dark tunnel.

  Not something. Someone.

  Aaron, wait.

  His vision blurred and sweat suddenly beaded his forehead; his guts twisted like wet rags, forcing bile up his throat and then splashing onto the floor.

  His head swam as the forgotten past and the impossible present collided. He wiped his mouth and listened. Nothing moved. No one spoke.

  He should leave, but he couldn’t. He could have before. It might have hurt his pride, but he’d known he was a slinking coward for a long time. That would have bothered him. This would drive him insane. He had to know.

  Aaron started up the stairs once again.

  * * *

  He stuck his head into the room, praying to find a normal closet, to find that he’d just had a momentary break with reality brought on by stress.

  Bobby sat cross-legged in the closet, his backpack beside him on the darkness that served as solid ground though it appeared no different from the darkness that surrounded him on all sides.

  “It’s been so long,” he said, watching Aaron with those eyes that had always been too perceptive for his age.

  His age…

  Aaron’s laugh lurched like a slipping gear. “I thought you were really here, that you’d come back. But you’re still a kid.” He shook his head, trying to fling the scene from his brain. But there Bobby sat, still fourteen, his blond hair dyed black. “I’ve just lost my mind.”

  “I’m here. You’re not crazy. Dumb, but not crazy.” He smiled that weird little grin, the one that only showed on the right side of his face, like he thought that if he looked too optimistic the world would work to prove him wrong.

  Aaron reached for the light switch.

  “No, don’t do that,” Bobby said.

  “Of course. Light would mess with my hallucination.” Aaron stepped into the room. He leaned in, squinted, stepped closer. He closed his eyes. Rubbed them until multicolored neon flowers bloomed in the darkness behind his eyelids.

  When he opened them again, Bobby still sat there smiling his awkward little smile.

  “You’re not hallucinating, doofus.”

  “A hallucination would say that, though, wouldn’t it?” Aaron asked, aloud but mostly to himself. After all, he was talking to himself.

  He stepped closer and felt himself start to choke up. He was close enough to see the sparse, blond teenage mustache, thicker than when he’d left home. It had had another year to fill in before Bobby disappeared.

  Was that the sort of thing his unconscious mind would compensate for?

  Again, as the fist of fear released his heart, the fist of sorrow and regret tightened. Within arm’s length of the closet now, he reached out.

  “No,” Bobby said, rising and taking a step back. “Not yet. You’re not ready for that yet.”

  The sudden movement startled Aaron, made him freeze in his almost unconscious approach.

  “I always wondered what it would be like to be crazy,” he said.

  Bobby shook his head, his silky black hair swishing back and forth across his exasperatedly rolled eyes. “You haven’t seen me in fourteen years and all you can talk about is your state of mind. I see you haven’t changed a bit, you self-absorbed prick.”

  Even though Bobby’s smirk said it was brotherly ribbing, the jab stung.

  Aaron had abandoned Bobby. To what, he still couldn’t quite remember. But he’d run away. He knew for certain he’d run away, even if he couldn’t remember what he’d run from. Had he ever known, or had he been like a child dared to walk into a dark basement, the tension building until the sprint out of the subterranean world and into the safety of the light was inevitable?.

  “How should a person react to a hallucination?” Aaron asked.

  “I guess it depends on what it is. In all these years, have you wanted to talk to me?”

  Aaron searched Bobby’s face. It was a sincere question. He took the few steps back to the foot of his old bed and said, “Of course.”

  “Then here’s your chance.” Bobby walked forward to his previous place just beyond the door frame and dropped into a cross-legged position. It was the movement of a teenager, something Aaron couldn’t imagine doing after years of folding himself into a desk to spend hours slouched over a keyboard. Not with the tightness in his back and the pain in his knees.

  “You know that, right?” Aaron asked, sitting on the bed.

  “Know what?”

  “That I’ve wanted to talk to you. That I’ve missed you.”

  “I wasn’t sure. The last time, you told me to stop calling.”

  Aaron’s head dropped into his hands. He had said that, but it had been out of some desperation he didn’t understand. If only Bobby had been able to go with him… It wasn’t that he didn’t want his brother to call him. It was what threatened to emerge whenever Bobby did call, panicked and begging for help.

  “I’m so sorry about that. If I’d known… But I’ve missed you so much.” Though there were five years between them, they’d always been close. Some of that was the forced proximity, but Aaron thought that less compatible siblings crammed into such close confines probably grew to hate each other. He and Bobby had been best friends.

  But there was something else to it, something other than their personalities that had bonded them together. In his head, Aaron could feel something begin to pound against the brick wall separating his consciousness from his memories. The old mortar crumbled and drifted as dust to the ground.

  They’d had the bond of soldiers, and of a secret they didn’t want to keep, but which everyone else closed their ears to.

  “I missed you, too,” Bobby said. “All I’ve had these years were my memories, and you’re in almost all of them. I think that’s the weird thing about being a younger brother. You remember life before me. You remember when I showed up. But in my mind, you were always there, like the sun or the air or something.”

  “I do remember when they brought you home. I was pissed that you’d kept Mom at the hospital so long. I didn’t like you at first.” Aaron smiled at the memory. “Everybody stood around staring at you. I didn’t see what the big deal was.”

  “I think Mom said they were just happy they’d finally gotten one right.”

  “Hur hur.” The guttural laugh was an easy childhood response to a good jab. Then it hit him: this was all easy. After all these years, he’d slipped right back into the pattern. If their relationship were an engine, he’d been rotating alone for all this time, but he still had the teeth and they slipped right back in place.

  “I’ve missed you so fucking much,” Aaron said, covering his face so the tears wouldn’t come. “Where did you go?”

  It was crazy to ask that question of his own hallucination, since, being born of his sick mind, it only knew what Aaron knew. But the whole situation was crazy, so why not give it a shot?

  “You’re not ready to know yet. You’ve forgotten too much to be able to understand.”

  Aaron took several deep breaths and uncovered his face. “Why? Why have I forgotten what happened to us? I started forgetting as soon as I left for college.”

  “I don’t want to talk about it. Not yet, at least. Tell me what you’ve been doing all these years? Did you ever start that metal band we always talked about?”

  Aaron laughed, remembering back to afternoons spent plunking out earsplitting melodies. Their poor, indulgent mother. “I never had the drive. You were the one with the talent.” He looked over at the guitar leaning against the small amp in the corner. Who ever heard of a little brother playing lead guitar while the older played bass? There wasn’t much to the mystery. The bass was much easier to play sufficiently. He still had it, down in his basement with the rest of the things he didn’t use but couldn’t throw away.

  “You always said that, but you were pretty good,” Bobby said.

  Aaron shrugged.

  “So no metal band, huh? Lame. Did you at least get some tattoos?”

  “One,” Aaron said.

  “One? Like, one that covers your entire body? Because that was the plan.” Bobby snorted a little laugh, but not at Aaron’s expense, at how lame he’d grown up to be. Despite the fact that Bobby still looked like a teenager, he seemed to have matured in some respects. Aaron didn’t get it.

  Then he remembered that he wasn’t talking to Bobby because Bobby had disappeared fifteen years ago, and even if he were still alive he’d be nearly thirty years old and Aaron probably wouldn’t even recognize him. Aaron was sitting on the end of his childhood bed having a conversation with a hallucination, a blend of what he remembered about his brother and his own mind filling in the gaps. If Bobby seemed more grown up than he should, it was because while Aaron remembered Bobby as a teenager, his mind could no longer think like a teenager’s.

  “So do I get to see this one tattoo? It better be badass.”

  “I can’t do this,” Aaron said, standing up and lurching toward the door.

  For a moment, Bobby didn’t say anything, but as Aaron reached the head of the stairs, slowed, steadied himself before stepping down, Bobby roared, “Run away again, big brother!” His voice boomed through the house like a steam engine, only a trace of the sweet boy Aaron had known audible beneath the cacophony of rage and frustration given vent.

  What scared Aaron most of all wasn’t the power of his delusion, its ability to create false sensation strong enough to almost bowl him over, but that this was obviously how he thought his younger brother should feel about him.

  He ran down the stairs, went out to the front porch and sat on the steps to catch his breath.

  Did he deserve all this anger? Did he deserve to take all the blame? He’d wrestled with that question for years, punished himself for almost half his life, wondered what would have happened if he’d done something differently.

  If only he could settle on the answer, maybe he could face it and move on. Aaron’s problem was that he teeter-tottered back and forth endlessly, feeling more and more guilty for abandoning his younger brother to whatever fate he met, until the guilt crossed a tipping point and he began to feel anger instead. He hadn’t been a parent. He hadn’t run away, hadn’t abandoned anyone. He’d done what every eighteen-year-old kid does: he went out and established his own life. Bobby had gone down a wrong path, but in the years they’d had together Aaron had guided him as best he could. He couldn’t be responsible for his brother his whole life. He’d had to go out and make something of himself. It wasn’t practical. It wasn’t fair.

  So why did all that feel like excuses? And if they felt like excuses, he obviously thought he needed excusing from something, and the teeter totter tilted back.

  Aaron returned to himself, out there on the porch, night having completely fallen. They’d lived on a quiet street. Not many cars went by even during the day. None at night. And the streetlights stood far apart, dimmed by the bare branches of trees. At the back of the houses, the river flowed quietly along.

  This was his chance to stop the endless cycle of emotion. As strange as the situation was, as necessary as it would later be to determine exactly what had gone wrong with his brain to bring this about, this was Aaron’s chance to set things straight. For years he’d wanted one last chance to talk to Bobby, to maybe stop the endlessly grinding gears of guilt and anger, each driving the other on without end.

  The thought of solving anything by having a discussion with his own hallucination seemed silly, but he realized as he sat there on that porch that it might be the very best solution. After all, what he needed wasn’t to answer to and receive forgiveness from his little brother. His little brother was gone, almost certainly dead, and had found peace long ago. He needed to answer to and receive forgiveness from himself, from his own injured pride and burdened conscience. If his damaged psyche wanted to take the form of his long-lost teenage brother, he could deal with that.

 

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