ZAIDIE
Dear Jon,
Today you would have been twelve.
I TORE THE SHEET FROM MY NOTEBOOK AND CRUSHED IT INTO A ball. The next page was blindingly empty. Somehow my brother was twelve. A seventh grader in a school I’d never seen, waking up every morning to a house, a life that was locked to me. Did he still order the pizza with baby fish, then pick them off and taunt the nearest girl? Could he catch the lonely sound of a train when it was still miles away? Was he happy?
Maybe I had it right, after all. Today the brother I knew would have been twelve. Ma would have baked his favorite chocolate chip cake and invited Jeffrey to dinner. Then a ragged chorus of Moscatellis would have sung to him and cheered his most secret wish as he blew out the candles.
All I knew about him now was contained in the evolving signatures on Michael Finn’s annual Christmas greeting.
Agnes pointed at the reindeer on the first card when I opened it in our room.
“Doesn’t he know you’re Jewish?”
“Oh, he knows, all right.”
Inside, he’d written Love, Dad (two words that felt like more of a taunt than the reindeer). Beneath it, Jon’s name was scrawled in familiar eight-year-old penmanship. I traced it with my finger. Had he forgiven me for letting him go alone? Or did “Dad” force him to sign?
The next year it was Love, Dad and Evelina with my brother’s name tacked on like an afterthought. Jonathan, he was calling himself now. Who was that?
This December, there had been another addition: Love, Dad, Evelina, and Marisa, it read, with Jonathan’s name set even farther apart. Still, I was filled with jealousy over this new sister, the stepmother with the exotic name.
A generous check fell from the cards as soon as I opened them, but I never cashed it. “A hundred dollars!” Agnes cried when I tore another one up. Then she listed all the things we might have bought—roller skates with a real key! when she was eleven. Birthstone earrings from Menard’s Jewelers and fancy school clothes from Jordan Marsh as she entered middle school. This year she’d been dreaming of tickets to see Herman’s Hermits. “For a hundred dollars, we could hire a limo and sit in the front row, Zaidie!”
“It wouldn’t hurt to deposit it in your college fund,” Ma put in. “If you were a little friendlier, he might call next time and maybe you could—we could—”
“He won’t, Ma. And even if he did, he wouldn’t let Jon come to the phone.” I’d never told anyone how Jon had vowed to hate us forever.
It was months after he screamed those words at me before I understood why Michael had let me make my choice. Not because I’d earned his respect, as he’d said. No, it was what he’d seen—what we’d both seen—that day he dragged me to the mirror. My coloring and some of my features were indeed like his, but it was Sylvie who looked back at him from my face. Sylvie and all the ways he’d wronged her. Separating Jon and me—and forcing me to choose it—had been a final and devastating strike at my mother.
I began every letter to my brother the same way, attempting to bring him to the place where I was, make him see what I saw:
Dear Jon,
I’m writing from your old bed, looking out on the lilac bush where you used to hide whenever we played hide-and-seek. Do you remember the day Jimmy asked why you always chose the most obvious spot? “Because I like the smell of the flowers,” you said stubbornly.
Since it was November, we all laughed at you. But sometimes when I pass that bush in winter, I swear I catch a whiff of those lilacs myself. It’s all still here, Jonny—the worn spot by the garage where you parked your bike, even our picnic table, though no one has sat there much since you left. But you—sometimes you seem as distant and unreachable as our mother, Sylvie.
I can’t see her face anymore. No matter how hard I try, I can’t, but I still feel how she squeezed me when her friend brought me to visit the hospital the day you were born. We’re going to be so happy, she promised. Just the three of us.
They’re still the saddest words I ever heard.
The first lesson I’d learned as a Moscatelli kid was how to forget. It was how Jimmy and the others survived, and it was what I needed to do, too. So I let go of my mother and erased the smell of sickness and death that permeated the rooms she’d painted sunny colors, filled with music and plants back when she still believed in her own promise. And when Aunt Cille brought me pictures of her when she was young, I stashed them in my drawer. They didn’t look like her anyway. The face I remembered, transfigured by heartbreak and illness—but even more by love for me and Jon—had been much more beautiful. So beautiful, in fact, that it hurt to look at her. For seven years I hadn’t.
BUT AFTER JON left, everything changed. “You’re too quiet,” Ma complained, worry grooves forming between her eyes.
Agnes didn’t like it, either. “Why are you always writing in that stupid notebook? Talk to me. Look at me. I’m right here, Zaidie.”
Only Jimmy, who had been tugged away by a mysterious force himself, seemed to understand. One night when Agnes was complaining about all the time I spent alone, he slammed his fist on the table in the way that rattled everyone. “For chrissake, leave Z alone about her damn writing. Maybe she’s gotta do it. Did ya ever think of that?”
It didn’t help that I kept my notebook secret from everyone. Why had I started writing—to explain why I stayed behind? To apologize? To prove something to Michael Finn? Maybe even to win a skirmish in the long war between him and Sylvie? I didn’t know.
Jimmy’s explanation was the only one that felt true. I did it because I had to. I did it because no matter where I looked for Jon in the neighborhood or in the city, the only place I ever got a glimpse of him was on the pages of my notebook. Day after day, I filled them with swirly writing, doodles, and memory. But there was something else there, too: hope.
When Ma looked at me suspiciously and Agnes tried to hide my notebook, I went to the playground and sat in the empty bleachers at the field where Jon had played Little League. After many attempts, I even found my way to our old apartment building, where I sat on the steps and chewed on my pen.
Dear Jon,
I’m sitting on the steps of a place you’d never remember.
That was as far as I got before the woman who lived in our old apartment came out and asked what I was doing there. When I had no answer, she reminded me this was private property. “Go on now. Move along.”
I closed my notebook but stayed put. Then I pointed up at the window: “That was where my mother slept. My brother and me—our rooms were across the hall.”
Maybe she’d heard about us, the fated young woman and her two orphan kids who’d lived there before her, because she closed the screen door gently when she went inside. A minute later she returned with a glass of lemonade. “Just don’t make a habit out of it, okay?”
I nodded and then I began my letter again.
Dear Jon,
There are some places on this earth where no one has a right to chase you away. Places where all you can do is stand your ground. Even if you’re scared.
I’d never visited my mother’s grave—even on the anniversaries when Aunt Cille begged me to go. But a few months after Jon left, I took the bus to the other side of town and walked to the cemetery. Soon I was visiting the stone marked SYLVIE MENDELSON FINN every week—another secret that separated me from my family.
Sitting with her name, all my letters ended the same way. Has her promise come true, Jon? Are you happy? But those questions would probably sound silly to a boy his age, so I always crossed them out.
By then I was living two lives—my own and the one I re-created for my brother in the stories I wanted him to feel as much as I did. I took care to listen well to Ma and Dad’s conversations—both what they said outright—and everything that lay beneath—so he would catch every inflection. I wanted him to hear Flufferbell’s caterwaul the night she was left out, smell Ma’s pork chops frying on the stove, experience the loneliness and the immense peace of the field of stones where I sat with Sylvie Mendelson Finn. To feel the smoothness of her marker when I pressed my face against it. If he knew every detail of life in Claxton—from the wonder of Gina Lollobrigida’s beehive hairdo to the modern elementary school they were building on High Street—a part of him would still be here.
I told him about Jeffrey’s broken arm, and Jimmy’s various jobs (though I omitted the hope that filled the house whenever he started a new one and the gloom that descended when it didn’t work out). I filled pages with details about my new boyfriend, Charlie Putnam, describing every goal he scored in his soccer game, the plots of every movie we saw at the Claxton Drive-in. Though Jon probably wouldn’t be interested, Charlie had infiltrated my mind so completely, I couldn’t help myself.
Jimmy hates him, I admitted for the first time in a letter. But do you want to know the real reason I fell for Charlie? Because he was the first boy I ever met who was as nice—okay, almost as nice—as the one who called you Shadow. Sure, it doesn’t hurt that he’s cute and smart, “popular” even. I suppose that’s what drew me in. But it wasn’t till I went to his house and saw him playing with his little sister, Abby, who has Down’s syndrome, that I was hooked.
Mostly, though, my letters to Jon were filled with what I didn’t say. I didn’t tell him about the day Jimmy left for Vietnam, or how Dad, haunted by the daily death count on the front page of the Gazette, had stopped reading his newspaper altogether. Nor did I tell him when Princie lost interest in running away—even if the gate was wide open. It wasn’t long before she turned away from her food bowl, too. Nor did I say that on certain days—like this birthday or the day we first came—Ma still took to her bed like she had those weeks after Michael Finn took him away and how we all held our breath until she came back down. How fragile everything had become since he left.
After a while, I wasn’t just writing to Jon anymore. I wrote to see. I wrote to know. But most of all, I wrote because that was who I was. It was my brother’s gift to me. Did it come at the most bitter cost? Yes. Just like the cigar box Agnes had kept in the closet since she was small. And for that reason, I held on to it like she did. Fiercely.
I looked around the room Agnes had made her own when she moved in two years ago. She’d searched every paint store in the city for the perfect summer green color and enlisted Jimmy and me to help her paint. Then she’d asked Jools to imagine Buskit’s River without the junk and to draw what he saw. The five sketches she’d framed and hung on the wall were the result. Though it smelled of her—a mixture of chlorine and the rain-scented cologne she wore—though it was filled with her things, Jon was there in every corner.
Dear Jon,
Today you are twelve. Do you still order your pizza with baby fish? Can you hear a train from miles away? Do you still smell lilacs in November?