After Ma died, I received a manuscript in the mail. It was from Leif. He had, despite my substantial doubts, finished his book. The novel was a fictionalized account of his relationship with his brother. Leif had stuck a yellow Post-it on the cover page that said only, Thoughts? And though I began to read it, I couldn’t make it through the whole thing. I couldn’t bear to have Leif’s voice living inside my head for two hundred and fifty pages. All I could hear was what I’d lost.
I skipped to the end where Leif had reimagined the months before his brother’s death: a whole chapter in which Erik had finally called Leif and invited him out to Cali. Lance cooked elaborate vegetarian meals for the three of them, and they took the dogs for short walks around the property; they made up for lost time. I was crushed by these depictions, especially the sugariness of them, and they left a bad taste in my mouth as if I’d eaten too much candy. My tongue felt as if it were coated with chemicals. It seemed unfair of Leif to worm his way into the end of his brother’s life, even fictionally, because Erik had been so adamant that Leif stay away. Though I was curious if this imagining had comforted him: How much had it soothed his guilt? I waited for the part at the end where this fictional Erik would tell this fictional Leif what had happened to my fictional Dee. But, at the end of his life, this version of Erik never said anything about Dee.
In another section of Leif’s book, I found the story of the last Fourth we spent together. I was astounded to discover that in Leif’s telling of this story, Dee, though mentioned, is merely a backdrop for our acid trip. And though he mentioned the photo, he did so only to explain that somehow he knew Erik had seen it and that, after seeing it, Erik disowned Leif altogether. Leif didn’t even mention that Dee was the one who took the picture. And according to Leif’s book, it was incidental that she was there but crucial that I was there, when really, it was so obviously the opposite. How could he tell it this way?
I realized then that we must choose to believe the stories we’re told. Even the stories we tell about one another. We dedicate ourselves to our own versions, and yet we are slow, reticent even, to admit how much we participate in the creation of these stories we tell about our lives and about the lives of those we love. Sometimes now, for practice, I tell myself all of the stories at once. I say, Here are the scenarios; here are the possibilities. What does it mean that each and every one could be made to seem as probable as the next?
Sometimes, for example, I let myself fantasize that Dee had left with Erik, and that they’d gone to live somewhere warm near the ocean. That they’d grown old together. Sometimes I lived in this reality—where Dee and Erik were still alive and moving through a different, better world that didn’t need so desperately to hurt them. Other times I imagined the kind of scenarios I never used to, before the psychic, before the article—the ones in which maybe Frank killed her or maybe he didn’t. Maybe it was a stranger. Maybe it was an old boyfriend we’d never known about. Maybe it was Frank’s wife. Or maybe it was an accident. Maybe she’d gone for a swim and been carried away in a river or taken out to the middle of Lake Michigan, where she’d sunk into the shipwrecks that were decomposing in the deepest beds of the lake. I allowed myself these possibilities and more. But even so, I was never able to shake my belief that the most compelling possibility, that Frank had murdered my sister and destroyed her body, was also the truest.