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“No, we were all back at my house when a squad car pulled up in front about an hour later. We watched from my window while the cop turned him over to your mom. He was wild then, and no stranger to having the police bring him home. He somehow made it without ever being arrested, though.”
Those days sometimes feel like they happened to someone else. In a way, I suppose they did. We’ve all changed so much.
“Lucky little bastard, huh?” Oliver teases, and the little half smile he flashes looks so familiar it brings tears to my eyes.
“He really was.”
His head tilts. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah, of course.” What else can I say? That sometimes looking at the face he shares with the love of my life is pure torture, yet I’ve never been so grateful for him being a twin? Because I still get to see Alden’s face in more than photographs.
It’s confusing. The last thing Oliver needs is more confusion.
“Did I ever do anything crazy?”
“You weren’t afraid to get into a little trouble, cutting school occasionally, but you weren’t wild. You were the level headed one, the smart one everyone could count on. I’m sure you got him out of trouble more than once when you were kids.”
Oliver sips his drink. “I sound really boring.”
“You weren’t. You just liked different things. We always had a lot of fun together. You were a good influence on Alden as an adult too. You’re the reason he invited your father to our wedding.” The doctors wanted him to recall things about himself naturally, but it’s hard to see him struggle with his identity. There’s one thing that’s important for him to know.
“When your father told you he had a year to live, you took him on his dream trip. For almost a month, you helped him cross things off his bucket list. You’re a good person. A good man. That’s who you are, Oliver.”
His smile is shy. “That’s good to know.”
We finish our food and spend the afternoon walking around the park, feeding the ducks, and watching kids play at the playground. Oliver seems lost in thought for most of it, and once we get back home, he excuses himself and retreats to his room until late in the evening.
I’m running out of ideas on places to take him to jog his memory. It’s wearing on both of us. I know he had friends that he hung out with before but they’re people I don’t know. He had his own life outside of his brother and me. It’s not something I can reintroduce him to. Those friends had to have seen what happened to him, though, and none ever showed up at the hospital or the shop to check on him. Maybe he’s better off.
There’s one idea that I’ve put off because I wasn’t ready, but I’m not sure what else to try, so I pull out the box of pictures that’s tucked into the corner of my closet. It contains years of memories, most of them from my childhood.
The ones from our late teens are mostly stored on the cloud, but I have a ton of prints from our earlier years. I take the box downstairs to the living room, then tap on Oliver’s door to ask him to join me.
He’s seems reluctant, especially once he understands my intentions for dragging out the photos. “Does your head hurt?” I ask, as he sits down beside me on the couch.
“No, I’m fine.”
“We’ll work our way backward.” I mirror my phone to the TV, so we don’t need to hand it back and forth and go to my albums. It’s hard to see the most recent pictures since they were taken near the wedding day that never happened. But it seems logical that he’d remember more recent things first.
The first picture on the screen is the one I took in the yard not even an hour before they ended up in that convenience store. Dressed in tuxes, Alden and Oliver stand in the yard with their arms slung around each other.
“This is the last picture I have of you two together.”
Oliver stares at it for a moment. “Whose car is that?”
The sports car Alden insisted I get in the picture shines in the background. “It was a rental. You surprised him with it for his wedding day. It made him so happy. He was like a little kid, excited to get behind the wheel.”
Someday, when it doesn’t tear my heart out to look at it, I’ll have that picture framed. Painful or not, it’s a reminder of how overjoyed he was to be on his way to our wedding. How much he loved me.
I swipe to bring up another photo. “This was at your college graduation party.” Oliver poses with a group of guys, beers in hand. “I wasn’t there. Alden sent it to me. I’m sorry I don’t know any of the guys’ names. Any of them look familiar to you?”
His lips thin while he studies it. “No.”
“This one is all of us by the firepit out back on my sixteenth birthday. The guy with Tori is Sawyer. He’s a police officer now.” There’s no reason to mention that he’s the cop who called and gave us the terrible news.
We spend over an hour flicking through the photos while I describe what’s happening. He asks a few questions but gets quieter as we go.
“Let’s look at some of these,” I suggest, opening the box. “As a kid, I loved taking pictures and dad used to buy me a new disposable camera every few weeks. Look, here’s our treehouse back then.”
