“Get out of my room.” It’s all I say, and I should say more, but I don’t.
They leave, laughing to each other as they do.
I don’t sleep that night. Not a single wink. And when my alarm goes off at 4:20, I get up from under the covers and look out my window. I wait for her door to open, watch as she peeks outside. I look on from the darkness of my room as she sits at the bottom of the stairs, continuously checking the time. And as the minutes pass, I can feel time slipping away, feel the cracks in my chest start to widen.
After waiting for an entire hour, she finally gives up.
And I finally give in.
I reach under my bed, pull out the old shoebox, and lift the lid.
Hundreds upon hundreds of photographs come into view.
Hers is the first one I see.
On top of the pile, right in the middle, her light brown eyes stare back at me.
I hold it in one hand while I go through the others, flipping them over to read their backs.
Three words.
All different.
Because it’s all my mother asked.
It started a year before the cancer diagnosis. She was worried about me; I could tell by the way she looked at me. She didn’t look at my brothers like that. They’d always been fine, always spoke up, or spoke in general.
I was quiet.
Too quiet.
Until I wasn’t.
I’d have “outbursts,” Mom called them. Sometimes verbal. Sometimes physical. “Leo can’t handle his emotions,” I heard her telling Dad one night. “It’s like he keeps them buried, and then he just… explodes.”
The next day, she brought me a ton of random photographs, mostly of my family, but some of images she’d cut out of magazines and catalogs. I was sitting at my desk, staring out the window. She slid a picture toward me. It was of me holding the twins right after they were born. Lucy was beside me, making sure I was doing it right. I was grinning down at the twins the way Lucy was at me. “How do you think you felt when this happened, Leo?” Her tone was gentle, soft. “Or how do you feel looking at it?”
I stared at the photograph a moment before looking up at her. “Happy,” I said, my voice low.
She smiled then, dragging the picture toward her. She flipped it over and wrote on the back: Happy. “What else?”
“Grateful,” I replied.
Her smile widened. “Why grateful?”
“Because they were here, and they were healthy.”
She nodded, wrote down: Grateful. “One more?”
“Scared.”
She looked up; her brow dipped in concern. “Now or then?”
I shrugged, looked out the window again. “Both.”
“Why, Leo?” she asked, placing a hand on my shoulder.
I kept my gaze trained on the tree line ahead. “Because I don’t want to break them.”
For a long moment, my mother didn’t respond, but I could feel her watching me, and I’d wondered how long it would take her to realize that I was the broken one.
“Do you think you could do some more of these?” she finally said. “For me?” Then she added in a rush, “Or just for yourself. You don’t have to show anyone.”
Without waiting for a reply, she walked over to my door. “Just think of three,” Mom said. “Write them down.”
In the photograph, Mia’s sitting at the bottom of the porch steps, her phone in her hand. She was sad. I could see it in her eyes, in the way her lips pulled down at the corners.
I don’t know what it was about that particular moment that had me rushing to my sister and asking to borrow her phone. I snapped the picture, emailed it to myself, then deleted it from her device, leaving no trace of what I’d done.
It was the first summer Mia had spent with us, and it was odd to have someone stay with us at the beginning. We’d all just gotten used to her mom being here and now… now there was a girl around my age who seemed to appear and disappear without anyone noticing.
I noticed, though.
There was something internally, as if I had an off switch whenever she was present. It was as though I would check out, but at the same time, be so aware of her.
Just her.
I didn’t know what it meant.
I still don’t know.
And maybe that’s the reason why there are no words on the back of her picture.
Not a single one.
It’s
Blank.
Void.
Empty.
Just like me.
Chapter Five
Leo
Mia doesn’t leave the apartment in the mornings after. I know, because I watch out