shoves a cup of tea in my hand. Someone else appears with a tin of meat for Abek, an extra from dinner. My brother holds it awkwardly under his arm because he still has his satchel in one hand and I won’t let go of the other.
Josef. He was just standing here. I scan the room, sure he must still be in the crowd, but by the time I catch him, it’s in profile. He’s already turning to slip out the door.
“Sit down. Are you hungry? Sit down,” I babble to Abek, too emotional to think about Josef. “Or stand, if you’ve been sitting in a wagon all afternoon. Or maybe we should go somewhere?” I ask. “Mrs. Yost, can he come to my—”
“Of course, don’t be silly.”
I offer to take his satchel. He doesn’t let me, holding it close to his chest as he follows me past the happy, envious residents.
In the cottage, I realize how incomplete my imagination has been. The part that I pictured a thousand times is the part that’s already over: the first minutes of our finding each other, the first joyful tears.
I also pictured the parts that come much later. I envisioned a future life, one where we live in Sosnowiec, find our old friends, and piece together our lives.
But it’s these intermediate minutes I didn’t plan for. The ones where we are blood-related strangers who haven’t spoken to each other in years. The ones where I’m waiting for my brain to catch up with itself, to realize that I’m going to be okay now.
My brother stands in the doorway to my room, cautious, while I ramble on for the sheer purpose of filling the silence. I tell him nonpertinent information about the squeaky desk chair and cold floors; I tell him about how one of my roommates snores. I think about asking to take his satchel again but see the way he’s clinging to it, the only familiar object in a world of strange ones.
And me. I am familiar now.
“Are you hungry?” I ask again, as if I hadn’t just asked ten minutes before. He nods toward the tin in his hands, still unopened, indicating that he could eat that if he was hungry. “I could get you a fork,” I offer. He shakes his head. He’s not hungry.
I’m making him nervous. I’m making myself nervous. I force my hands to stop fluttering. Finally, I gesture for him to sit on my bed, while I lower myself onto Breine’s across from him.
His face. I feel like I’m doing with it what I did with the buildings in Sosnowiec: trying to make sense of the way it looks now and reconcile it with what I remember of then, layering Abek’s appearance over the top of the one that exists in my memory. The hazel eyes I’ve thought of so often. The brown hair, a bit darker than it was when I saw him last, the way mine got darker, too, as I got older. And there’s some on his face, I’m stunned to realize—a smattering of fuzz above his upper lip.
The biggest difference, of course, is that he’s almost a man now. I’ve missed all the connective moments of the transition between the Abek I remember and the new one before me. It’s as if I’ve been given the first page of a book and the last, and I have to use only those to make up the plot in between.
What was his story? What have I missed? What did he have to live through alone?
As I prattle on, Abek takes in the room the way I did when I first arrived. His eyes sweep over the beds, the desk, the basin. But when his eyes reach mine, his glance is wary, and he almost immediately looks away. He’s shy with me. I can’t blame him for it. It’s got to be unnerving, the voracious way I’m staring.
Finally, after what feels like a long time, I run out of things to tell him, and I fall silent. It’s only when I allow this quiet that I realize why I was trying so hard to fill it. And it’s only when I let there be stillness that I realize why I couldn’t stop fluttering around earlier: There are things I’ve needed to say for the past three years. The monsters I’ve kept trapped, the thoughts I haven’t wanted to examine. The apologies I’ve hated myself for not being able to make.