When I get home from working on a school project, aka lurking on Internet forums and avoiding going home for dinner, I find a note on the counter: Mom even signed it, as if anyone else could have left it for me.
As I pull the Tupperware out of the fridge, I realize what the note means. Audrey must be on a date! Why else would she be at Starbucks, unless she made a new friend at Peak? I guess that’s also a possibility. It’s not like either of us knows what’s going on in the other’s life anymore.
I zap my dinner in the microwave and then head to the basement to eat while watching Netflix. The new season of Stranger Things is out, apparently. That’s something Adam would have known.
I swallow hard and press play.
It feels wrong watching without him. Whenever something scary happens or I want to comment on something, like Joyce and Hopper’s constant bickering, which is getting annoying, I glance toward Adam’s side of the couch. And each and every time I do, the pain of his absence pierces my chest. That’s the thing about losing someone: there’s one major death followed by a million little deaths.
I can’t watch this show without Adam, so I stop looking and just talk as if he’s right there beside me, and a kind of peace I haven’t felt in months settles over me. It feels good to talk to him again.
When the show ends, I turn off the TV, and as the screen turns black, I close my eyes and allow the darkness to surround me too. I stay perfectly still and try to feel for Adam. Could his soul still reside in this basement, like the ghost bride’s soul that’s trapped in the Fairmont Banff Springs Hotel? The folklore goes that as she descended the staircase toward her lover, her wedding gown brushed up against a flickering candle flame and caught fire, and she tumbled down the stairs. Ever since guests and hotel staff of the famous hotel swear they’ve seen her floating up and down the staircase or dancing alone in the ballroom, pining for the first dance denied her by her death. The one and only time we stayed there, Adam dared us to sneak out of our room in the middle of the night to see if we could catch a glimpse of her. We didn’t, but I’ll never forget sneaking through eerie hotel hallways behind my big brother, my entire body buzzing with expectation and fear.
“Hi, Adam,” I say now with my eyes still closed. Addressing him directly is harder than making comments about a show. I have so much I want to say to him, so much I want to tell him about my life. “I made a new friend. Taylor. I think you’d really like them. They’re like you, Adam: independent and kind.” My voice quivers on the last word, and I have to take a deep breath before continuing. “I miss you. I just want you to know that. I wish I could talk to you about everything that’s going on right now.”
The only response is the air spilling from the vent and the fluttering of the curtain, but I keep talking.
“I think I might have messed it up with Taylor today. I hope I didn’t. I really hope I didn’t.”
I open my eyes and my gaze lands on the cabinet against the wall, the one that used to hold all our toys when we were little, before it got populated with video games, craft supplies, and board games. I look inside and feel a jolt of excitement. It’s still there! The lid of the box is faded, the bottom of the box broken at the corners because Audrey sat on it one Halloween—she didn’t notice it under all the candy wrappers littering my bed. We’d snuck treats into our room and stayed up way too late, riding a sugar high and hoping to conjure some spirits.
I rest my fingers lightly on the planchette and close my eyes again. I’m not playing anymore.
“Adam, are you here?” I hold my breath and wait, praying that the planchette will inch toward the top left corner of the board, the yes. But it stays frozen in place, lifeless. Maybe it needs more energy. Maybe it doesn’t work without our twin connection. That Halloween night, I was certain Audrey was nudging the planchette along, but now I want to believe.
I try again. “Adam, if you’re here, please give me a sign.”
A door slams upstairs and my eyes pop open. Was that someone coming home, or was someone already in the house? Directly above me, the ceiling creaks as they move down the hall toward the kitchen.
Audrey’s voice. Not her regular voice, though, her old voice, the one I haven’t heard in years. She’s talking excitedly, the way she used to when we were kids and she could tell the ’rents full stories of our adventures without even taking a breath.
I move to the bottom of the stairs, but it’s not good enough. Audrey is walking around above me, her words bouncing off walls and disappearing around corners. I still can’t hear anything, so I ascend higher, step by quiet step, straining to hear . . .
Suddenly Mom yanks open the basement door, and I cry out in surprise. I also grab on to the bannister, which is briefly strong enough to prevent me from tumbling backwards, but not strong enough to save itself—it falls right off the wall.
“Clare! Oh my gosh, are you okay?”
“I’m fine.”
“That bannister is a death trap!” She bends down to inspect it. “Was it even screwed into the wall?”
Good question. My breathing is ragged, my body still vibrating from the shock.
Moms straightens. “Are you sure you’re okay? I was just checking if you were home. Did you eat your chicken? How’s your project coming along?”
“Yeah. I did.” I purposefully don’t respond to the project part of the question, but of course she pries anyway.
“What’s your project on?”
“I just did homework, actually.”
“For what class?”
“Uh, bio.” Why is she so interested in me all of a sudden? It’s Audrey she’s supposed to be worried about. “Bio reading, I mean. Lots of memorization.”
Mom nods, but she doesn’t look convinced. “That bannister. Thank goodness you didn’t fall! Were you coming up?”
I look over my shoulder at the empty basement, the silent TV, and the still curtains of Adam’s room. I’m very much alone down here, I realize, and suddenly I want to be anywhere else.
“Yeah, I think I will.”
Upstairs, Audrey is already in her bedroom, and the house is quiet again.
Even though I read for an hour before turning off the light, I toss and turn for hours and sleep doesn’t come. Instead I lie in bed in the darkness, staring at the light fixture Audrey and I used to call our boob light. It’s one of the many old fixtures in the house my parents never updated, and now there’s an orangish tint to the inside of the glass.
It’s 2:15 a.m., but I need to get out of here. Out of this room I shared with Audrey, out of this house full of old memories too painful to face. I want to ride. I want to glide as fast as I can under the stars.
So that the ’rents won’t hear my bedroom door click, I twist the knob as far as I can and hold it that way as I close the door behind me, then carefully release. I’ve only taken a step away from my bedroom when I hear it: a strange noise, kind of like a hiccup or a whimper. A line of light crisscrosses the hallway, shining up the stairs from the hallway below. Someone is downstairs.
I don’t want to deal with it, but somehow I find myself at the top of the staircase anyway. I creep down slowly, already knowing what I’ll find, and peek through the railing.
Mom is on the couch, clutching a photograph to her chest, her knees drawn up. She looks young like that. Like a child mourning a child. Adam’s photograph is missing from its place on the mantel.
“I’m sorry,” I hear her say. “It didn’t mean I wasn’t happy with you. I was disappointed when I had the ultrasound . . . I admit that.” She chokes on a sob.
I feel frozen to the spot. My hand is wrapped tightly around the bannister, and my mouth is drier than sand. I don’t know what to do. I want to say something to let her know I’m here, but I don’t know if she’ll be upset with me, like I’ve walked in on her secret.
Mom drags in a ragged breath. “I’m so ashamed, Adam. I’m so ashamed that I wasn’t a better mother, that I wasn’t the type of mother who was just so happy to have a healthy baby.” She pauses to glance up at the ceiling. When she closes her eyes, fat tears slip down her cheeks. “But you have to believe me that I loved you. I shouldn’t have favored the girls, and for that I will never forgive myself.”
At her last sentence, I pull back in shock, and the stair I was standing on creaks. Mom freezes and then glances up.
“Clare.”
“Hi.” My tone is colder than I intended.
Mom wipes away the tears with the back of her hand. “What are you doing up? Did I wake you?”
“No. I was on the way to the bathroom.” And I heard you.
“I’m sorry, sweetie.”
“I said you didn’t wake me up.”
She stands, turns away from me to wipe the remaining tears from her face, and replaces Adam’s photo on the mantel. Her hand shakes a little bit, and for a moment I think the photograph might fall and my heart does this awful leap, but she catches it just in time.
“Did you hear what I said?” she asks me without turning around.
“No,” I lie, but the anger is boiling within me again. Anger for Adam. Anger for Sam, who was worried about telling his mother his secret. Anger for me, who is terrified my mother won’t love me as much if I tell her I don’t always feel like a girl.
Mom returns to the couch and pats the spot beside her. “Come talk to me.”
I want to run back upstairs. I want to hide under my blankets with a flashlight and read Adam’s Harry Potter books knowing he’s sleeping peacefully in the room across the hall. I don’t want to have this new information, don’t want to have to ask the question that’s burning its way up my throat.
“Would you not love me as much if I were a boy?”
Mom’s hands fly to her mouth. “You did hear me. Oh, Clare, of course I would love you. I loved all of you the exact same.”
“But you just said you favored Audrey and me. The girls.”
“I think maybe I did. I know I did more things with you growing up, which I regret. But it wasn’t that I didn’t love Adam as much as you; it was that your dad and I naturally fell into a pattern of him doing things with Adam, like taking him to baseball practice, and me doing things with the two of you girls. I wish we’d taken turns so that I was just as involved as he was with Adam.”
“Okay,” I say, but I still don’t move from my place on the stairs. I’m still processing everything I’ve heard.
“Come talk to me.” Mom pats the spot beside her.
“I’m really tired.”
“Of course you are.” Mom scrubs her face with her hands. “I should get to bed too.”
I turn and quickly go back up the stairs. At the top of the landing I go into the bathroom and sit on the closed lid of the toilet. I dig the heels of my palms into my eyes, but I still can’t block out the image of Mom crying on the couch alone. I can’t stop remembering what she said about feeling ashamed and how she’ll never forgive herself.
This whole time I’ve been so worried my mom might judge me, when really she’s been judging herself.
I wait until I hear Mom pass the bathroom and close the door to her and Dad’s room. Then I hold my breath, open the bathroom door slowly so it doesn’t make a squeak, and sneak back downstairs.
Using my phone as a flashlight, I lift Adam’s photograph off the mantel.
His hair is sandy blond, his eyes blue. He has started spiking his hair with gel because it’s the cool thing to do. His smile is relaxed, calm. He gazes out at me from behind the wall of glass and I wish I could reach out and, like Alice with the looking glass, my hand would go through and I could touch his face.
I didn’t feel like that at the funeral. The same photograph sat at the front of the church, blown up so that people could see it all the way at the back, and when I looked at it I felt nothing. Maybe it was because there was no glass. He’s waiting behind it in another dimension, I tell myself now. He’s in the upside-down, if only I can find a way to get there.
My entire family cried at the funeral, except for me. I just felt angry. I wanted to run to the front of the church and kick over that huge photograph. I wanted to yell at everyone to go away because they didn’t understand, they could never understand. They dabbed at their eyes with tissues, but once they left the church, they would be on the way with the rest of their day.
Our family will feel that pain forever.