Part Seven: Drew’s Photographs
About two weeks after they moved in, I brought a box down from my closet.
Photographs. Aaron and me as kids, filthy and grinning after some long-forgotten adventure. Aaron in the hospital the day Drew was born, holding him with the concentrated careful expression of a man who had never held something so fragile and was not about to drop it. Me standing beside him. Aaron asleep on the couch with infant Lily on his chest, one of his hands spread across her back.
Drew looked through them one at a time.
“Dad knew you?” he said.
I almost laughed. “Knew me?”
I pointed to a photograph of us both covered in mud at thirteen and fifteen. “Your dad spent thirty-five years annoying me.”
Drew smiled. A small one. But real.
“He liked you?”
“He loved me.”
I swallowed. “And I loved him.”
Drew looked down at a photograph for a long time.
“Did you stop liking us?”
There it was. The question he had been carrying for three years, the one I could see he’d been working toward since the moment I carried him up my porch steps. The question of a child who has constructed an explanation for an adult’s disappearance that placed the fault somewhere in himself.
“No,” I said. “I believed an adult who told me you needed space. I should have checked.”
“Were you mad at me?”
“Never.”
“What about Lily?”
“Never.”
He turned the photograph over in his hands.
“I thought maybe we were bad.”
The thing in my chest cracked along a specific line.
“You weren’t bad. You were children.” I put my hand on the couch beside his without making him take it. “You were Aaron’s children, and you were mine to take care of, and I didn’t know you needed me. That’s on me. Not on you.”
After a while, Drew placed his hand on mine.
We sat like that for a few minutes, not talking. Lily was in the other room making the specific kind of noise that three-year-olds make when they are content and have a certain amount of space to move around in.
I thought about Aaron.
He had trusted me the way brothers trust each other after a lifetime of shared history — completely, without formality, without thinking to put it in writing because at thirty-five neither of us believed he needed to. He had never asked me to protect his children because the protecting was assumed. It was always assumed.
I hadn’t understood until now what the assumption had been worth.
