The whole world feels shredded, like strips of paper with all the sentences out of order.
Soon my shock gives way to anger, to paranoia.
I can’t focus on my homework. I can’t eat. I can’t look at my mother or at Caleb.
How can any of this be true?
Does it matter that they did it to protect me? That they figured they didn’t have any other options? That I agreed to the procedure?
Would I really choose to forget?
No.
No?
I have no answers. I don’t even know the girl my mother was telling me about. The girl whose brother died because of her mistake.
The worst thing is that it makes sense. It explains the fog over my memories after age eleven. It explains my dad, my mom, my older brother. The way Mom sometimes reacts around little kids. The summers where it felt like our house was sinking from the weight of sadness in it—Mom said Rory died in June, five years ago.
How did I not know?
How?
Hours after Mom’s revelation, Caleb finds me in the kitchen, holding a glass of water and staring blankly ahead.
“Addie, I’m sorry,” he says, even though it is Mom who stalks around the house with swollen eyes and the shadow of a dead baby. She has done it for years now. Caleb, too, in his own way. I think of theRon his chest. I remember it raw, the black-purple of bruised skin, and I feel like I am made of freshly tattooed skin. It hurts. I want to go back to before it.
Ris not for a Rachel or Rebekah or Randy.
It’s Rory.
My other brother.
“How could you?” I ask, not sure what I am asking.
Erase him? Lie to me for six years? Tell me the truth?
The glass of water sweats around my palm.
“Did Mom drag me there? Did they even tell me what they were going to do?” I ask.
Caleb nods. “Mom sat down with you before she made the appointment and told you what it was for, why she thought you needed it.”
“And I told her I didn’t want it, right? I must have.”
He runs a hand over his head. “You told her you could try harder, that you could be stronger, that you didn’t want to forget him, but then she asked you—we were sitting at the dining table and I’ll never forget it—she asked what you wanted more: to feel better and move forward, or to remember.”
I chose moving forward.
“Even after you had it, I wanted to tell you, but you were destroyed by Rory dying, Addie,” he says, looking down, remorse palpable in his voice. “That’s the one thing they got right—you needed some sort of help, and months of therapy wasn’t helping. Mom was sure it was the only way to save you, and what was I going to do? I was thirteen.”
“So you just silently hated me instead.”
He frowns. “I didn’t—don’t—hate you. I hated the pretending. I hated that we couldn’t talk about Rory. All those birthdays…he’d be almost seven now. I hated that we had to pretend like everything was fine. And then after all the bullshit and the pain, all you wanted was to go away and live like it never happened.”
“I was already living like it never happened.”
“Do you really think that’s true?” Caleb asks.
