I feel like I am being ripped apart as she speaks, like all my ligaments and tendons are being stretched in opposite directions and I’m going to explode from the pain of it.
“I asked you about it and all you could say was that it hurt too much and you thought your father’s pills would help you. They could havekilledyou,” she says. “You were so young. Still my little girl. And I decided right then that we couldn’t let you bear it. Wewouldn’tlet you bear it.” She shakes her head with such ferocity that I can only watch her blankly, trying to remember how the pieces of my life, of everything I’ve ever known, fit together. Wondering whether they do, or ever did.
I was twelve when my father left. When he stopped having anything to say to me, when I started having to remind myself he loved me. When Caleb and I stopped being allies.
“So youerasedhim?” I can barely breathe as I say the words. I feel like I’m in a dream—a dream inside a dream—or some badly scripted TV show.
Tears continue to trickle down her face. “We used Dr. Overton’s procedure on you.”
For a second, the whole world is silent. Neither of us breathes. The air is static.
Of course I’d deduced this, but it stings to hear her admit it.My parents erased my memory.All the air has been kicked out of my lungs.
“This is why Dad left,” I say quietly. “Because of Rory…” And when she looks at her hands, then at the carpet—anywhere but at me, just like he would—I know I’m right.
“It’s so much more complicated than that, Addie,” she says. “He was so against you having the procedure. To this day, he thinks…” Her voice trails off, and she shakes her head, as if to shake off a memory. One I don’t have. “It caused a lot of friction in the whole family. But you understand why it was necessary, don’t you? Rory’s death was impossible to survive. For any of us.”
Rory.
I feel like I am back on the bus during the accident, everything swirling around me. I sink deeper into the edge of herbed.
“And what happened to your younger brother wasn’t your fault,” she says again, like the most important thing is for me to understand this. But I don’t. I don’t understand any of it.
After a few moments of silence, my mother, sounding like herself again, says, “Many people are having the procedure these days. For much smaller things. It’s very safe, it’s very affordable, and sometimes it’s the best option. People might frown on it, say it’s unnatural or act like it doesn’t exist, but it works.”
She’s speaking like she’s on an infomercial, pitching a product she’s toiled over for years or one she’s tried that has finally cured her impossible case of bacne.
I am still stuck on several seconds earlier.
I am still stuck on “your younger brother.”
On two lives I never knew existed—Rory’s and my own.
“Caleb knew all this time?”
“He was in as much pain as you were—losing his brother, watching you suffer. I thought he should have the splice done, too, but he was set on not forgetting. But the procedure seemed like the only thing that would help you. And you were willing to try it. You were a mess, Addie. You weren’t eating or sleeping. It was like living with a ghost. It killed me to watch you sinking deeper and deeper into your grief every day.”
It killedher.Where was Dad?
Gone, almost immediately, I guess.
She talks for several minutes, hours even, and when she’s done, she waits for me to ask something meaningful or do something significant.
But all I can do is whisper,“What?”
And let her start again. Keep starting again.
I had a brother named Rory.
My parents erased him from my mind.
I’m the reason my family fell apart.
AFTER
January
After I leave my mom’s room, everything is in fragments.
