with D. OLSON printed on it. Right next to the little handprints and footprints. The hair and bracelet pasted with clear plastic tape that yellowed over time.
Ambrose couldn’t believe that the lock of hair from his little brother’s baby book was now in a plastic evidence bag on its way to a forensics lab in Pittsburgh to confirm that the skeleton they found in the Mission Street Woods was, in fact, David. If it was, Ambrose would finally be able to bury his kid brother after fifty years. His mother and father had never allowed a funeral.
They always said David was coming home.
For years, Ambrose had tried to make that dream come true. He looked for David everywhere. For years, he thought he saw him in other children. Sometimes he had to look away so that no one would think he was a creep. Eventually, though, deep in his own quiet, Ambrose understood that David was never coming home. He knew that David was taken like children are. Not for ransom. But for something far more evil. He watched his mother and father lie to themselves that David was taken in by some childless family. Not a monster with a van. Or some freak making movies. Or some coward who needed to destroy something small to feel big. Eventually, Ambrose was forced to trade his parents’ war at home for another war abroad. In the army, Ambrose had seen worse things than a child gone missing. He had seen villages of them torn apart by bombs. He had seen girls sold to pay for rice and men disgusting enough to buy them. And when he returned from the war, and his wife wanted children, he said he couldn’t go through that much pain again. He failed his little brother. And he could never forgive himself. And he didn’t deserve his own son.
Ambrose took the bandages off his eyes.
He squinted through the haze. He looked at his reflection in the window and the snow falling behind it. Ambrose studied his bald head. And the single strip of grey hair that wrapped around his scalp above his ears like Mrs. Collins’ mink stole. David never saw his hair go grey. He never saw it fall off his head and leave traces of itself like pine needles on a pillow every morning. He never heard his wife lie to him about how great he still looked.
Ambrose stared at the baby book.
He turned the pages and saw his little brother grow up all over again. He saw a picture of a baby with no teeth become a little boy crawling and walking and eventually running into the coffee table so many times that he called the hospital the “stitches store.” He saw his little brother crying in Santa’s lap. A little boy smiling under the family’s Christmas tree when he got the baseball glove from his big brother Ambrose. The one that smelled like new leather.
“Ambrose, can we go play catch?”
“It’s snowing outside.”
“I don’t mind.”
Ambrose turned the pages. Over and over. Trying to see as much as he could. His eyes were not healing. He would be blind soon. His eye doctor warned him that it could happen as soon as Christmas. But as long as he could squint, he would look at this baby book. And remember everything he could about his little brother. Not the crazy stuff at the end. Not the headaches. The fevers. The talking to himself. The bed-wetting. The nightmares that got so bad that by the end, he didn’t know if he was asleep or awake.
No.
He would remember the David from these photographs. The kid who loved that old Steelers hat and had to play catch in the snow because he loved the baseball glove that his big brother gave him. The kid who begged to go everywhere with Ambrose and loved every minute he got to spend with his big brother. The kid who sat down next to Ambrose at the barbershop and smiled when the barber pretended to shave him and said,
“David…you have a great head of hair.”
Ambrose got to the end of the baby book. The last picture was David at the age of eight. Then, there were dozens of pages that were going to be blank forever. Fifty years ago, they were clear white from Sears. Now, they were yellow and cracked like the skin on his hands. Ambrose went to his bed and lay down on the pillow. He took out his teeth