someone had just woken. I heard Daniel at the front door and I pulled the comforter up quickly, smoothing out the bumps and ridges.
I opened both windows—the one with the lock that worked and the one with the lock that broke sometime in middle school, which we never got fixed. The screen was gone, which was no great loss; it had been torn and warped from years of abuse. From me pushing out the bottom, crawling onto the sloped roof, dropping into the mulch that hurt only if you misjudged the distance, night after night. The type of thing that made perfect sense when I was seventeen but now seemed ridiculous. I couldn’t climb back in, so I’d sneak in the back door and creep up the stairs, avoiding the creak in the hallway. I probably could’ve sneaked out the same way, saved myself the jump, saved my screen the damage.
As I turned back around, the room now bathed in light, I noticed all the little things that Daniel had already done: A few of the pictures were off the walls, the yellow paint discolored where they’d hung; the old shoe boxes that had been up high in the closet, stacked neatly against the wall in the back corner; and the woven throw rug that had been my mother’s when she was a child, out in the middle of the floor, pulled from under the legs of my bed.
I heard the creak in the floorboard, Daniel in my doorway, box fan under his arm. “Thanks,” I said.
He shrugged. “No problem.” He angled it in the corner and flipped the switch. Heaven. “Thanks for coming, Nic.”
“Thanks for starting my room,” I said, shifting on my feet. I didn’t get how other siblings had such an easy relationship. How they could ease back into childhood in a heartbeat, dropping all formalities. Daniel and I were about to spend the day tiptoeing around our empty house and thanking each other to death.
“Huh?” he said as he turned the power up on the fan, so the low hum became a steady white noise, muffling the sounds from the outside.
“My room.” I gestured toward the walls. “Thanks for taking the pictures down.”
“I didn’t,” he said, pausing in front of the fan and closing his eyes for a second. “Must’ve been Dad.”
Maybe. I couldn’t remember. I was here a year ago, the night after we’d moved him out, but the details . . . the details were lost. Were the shoe boxes down? Were the pictures off the wall? I felt like I would’ve remembered that. That whole night was a blur.
Daniel didn’t know I had come back here instead of driving straight home, like I told him I had to—I have work, I have to go. I came back here, wandering from room to room, dry-eyed and shaken, like a kid lost in the middle of the county fair, searching the crowd for a familiar face. Curling up on the sheets in the empty house until I heard the engine out front and the doorbell I didn’t answer. The creak of the screen, the key in the door, his boots on the steps. Until Tyler was leaning against my bedroom wall. I almost missed you, he’d said. You okay?
“When was the last time you were here?” I asked Daniel.
He scratched his head, stepping closer to the fan. “I don’t know. I drive by, pop my head in from time to time, or if I need to get something for Dad. What is it?”
“Nothing,” I said. But it wasn’t nothing. Now I was imagining the shadow of someone else in the room. Rifling through my boxes. Moving my rug. Looking. Searching. It was the feeling that my things were not where they should be. It was the uneven imprints of dust, revealed in the sunlight. Or maybe it was just my perspective. I grew, and the house got smaller. At my place, I slept in a queen-size bed that took up about half my apartment, and Everett had a king. This full-size bed looked like it was meant for a child.
I wondered, if I curled up on the mattress, whether I would feel the indentation from someone else. Maybe just the ghost of me. I yanked the sheets off the bed and brushed past Daniel. The crease between his eyes deepened as he watched me.
By the time I got back upstairs after putting in the load of wash, the room felt a little more like mine.