Cady thought back to the weeks following Eric’s death, when college admissions had been the last thing on her mind. It had been impossible for her to think of her future when he no longer had one. If he was going to stay a twenty-year-old college junior forever, then it seemed that she should stay a seventeen-year-old high school senior for the rest of her life. She and her brother were three years apart, she was never supposed to catch up to him. But when the letter of acceptance arrived, it was as though the decision had been made for her. To go anywhere but Harvard was to willfully not know, to stick her head in the sand. She had done plenty of that when Eric was alive, and she regretted it keenly. She had learned that unasked questions were more dangerous than unanswered ones.
Cady had tried keeping the why questions locked away, but most of the time, not thinking about Eric was like pushing a beach ball underwater. She had trained herself to run through a series of questions with very specific and unchanging answers—a pilot’s checklist against emotional nosedive. Why did Eric change? Because he was schizophrenic. Why did Eric choose to die? It wasn’t a choice, it was his mental illness. Was it because she, his only sibling, had let him down? It was nobody’s fault.
But did she believe that?
Every single day she woke with the same questions, and every night she struggled to fall asleep in the misery of not knowing. If any answers existed, they would be here, at Harvard.
It would be cowardly not to go, and she had been a coward long enough. She owed it to Eric. It was the least she could do.
She didn’t want to be here. She needed to.
Cady looked again at Eric’s freshman dorm, catercorner across the green. He had been happy that first year, so excited and hopeful. Cady recalled helping him move in three years ago with fondness. She tried to recall his exact room, her eyes traced the building’s facade to find it—there, the fourth floor, leftmost room on the center section, his bedroom faced the Yard. Now the window was dark, save for the places where the panes of glass reflected the bright green, yellow, and orange elm leaves, dancing back and forth in the wind. A gust blew, and the colors swept aside to reveal a figure behind the glass.
Cady felt a shiver down her spine.
She had thought she’d seen his red hair, but it was only a reflection from another tree.
Cady stood there looking, wanting it to happen again.
2
FIVE MONTHS EARLIER, Cady was sitting between her parents at Eric’s funeral. It had been four days since Eric’s death, and she was still in shock. He had been at college when it happened, so she hadn’t seen him in person since that January, and it was April. He should’ve been coming home soon for spring break, she’d have seen him again then. But he wasn’t, and she wouldn’t. It seemed impossible. Only the surroundings made a convincing case: the church she hadn’t been inside since she was a girl, now filled with familiar people dressed in uncharacteristic black, the scent of white lilies, the murmuring of sadness. Perhaps this was the purpose of funeral ceremonies, to signal to those minds numbed by grief that this was for real.
Still, her brain rebelled against that reality and bounced everywhere but the present. Cady’s parents hadn’t called her right away when Eric died, and she held that against them. She had spent the weekend in Myrtle Beach for a choral competition. The drive was so long, the buses didn’t get them back until Monday after the school day was over. Cady drove herself home from the parking lot, thinking only of how lucky she was to have missed class. She should have known something was wrong when her father greeted her at the door, but he said he was working from home that day. He should have told her the truth right then. Instead, he let her sit and babble for fifteen minutes about the crazy bus driver and Liz’s graduation party. And that was after he let Cady make her usual after-school snack, a package of Top Ramen, so add five minutes for the water to boil and three minutes to cook.
Not once did Cady think to ask where her mother was, she assumed she was out showing a house. She didn’t know her mother was in bed upstairs, having been there since the campus police called at four in the morning. Later, the medical examiner said Eric died at 3:17 a.m. It was already 4:36 in the afternoon when the hot soup burned Cady’s tongue and her father broke down and told her everything. Thirteen hours and nineteen minutes went by that Cady still thought she had a big brother, but didn’t.
She dwelled on this as she sat in the pew. It disturbed her that she hadn’t known the instant he passed. He was her only brother, after all. It didn’t make logical sense that she would know; she was in a hotel room in South Carolina, he was on the ground outside his dormitory in Cambridge, Massachusetts. But still, she thought, she should have felt the earth shift or the sky crack, at the very least a tiny sting or snap or click, even a hiccup, some signal that he had died, that she had lost someone irreplaceable.
But even knowing that instant would have been too late. She’d have to retrace her steps farther back to find the moment when their paths diverged and she could no longer pull him back. She had lost him sooner than that.
Cady had never known life without Eric. It was one of her family’s favorite stories that the surefire way to get Cady to stop crying when she was a baby was to bring in Eric. Growing up, she wanted to be just like him, to the point that when Eric came home with lice in fourth grade, she scratched at her head until her mother agreed to use the smelly shampoo on her, too. There was an old photo from one Halloween in which both Eric and Cady were dressed as the purple Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle because Cady couldn’t bear to be a different color Turtle than Eric. She must have been an awful nuisance, but Eric was always patient with her, happy to be her hero. He had been happy once.
She remembered when they went to see an exhibit on King Tut and the ancient Egyptians at the museum. The golden sarcophagi, the sculpture of Queen Nefertiti’s egg-shaped head, at once elegant and alien, the scale model of the Sphinx, or “Spinks” as she said then—she felt she was meeting history for the first time, and it was love at first sight. Eric’s favorite part of the exhibit was the hieroglyphics, which gave birth to one of their favorite games. Eric created an alphabet code with symbols for each letter, and he taught it to Cady so that they could leave each other secret notes. Cady would take a flashlight under her covers and try to memorize their new alphabet, but still she had to carry with her the crumpled cheat sheet he had made her. Eric memorized it right away. She would leave him stupid, short little notes that translated into minor revelations such as “Halloween candy behind coffee can,” or “Dad farted at breakfast.” But Eric would leave her long ones with real missions, complicated step-by-step directions for childhood adventures, and without fail, when she had completed the final step, Eric would be there waiting for her with a proud smile.
Cady’s favorite was the one he titled “Mission: Mantis Mommy Revenge.” The week before, Cady had found a praying mantis in the driveway whose abdomen was hugely swollen, and Eric told her it was pregnant. Deciding that the driveway was no place to raise a family, they constructed a praying mantis birthing suite out of a cardboard box, complete with a twig jungle gym, a bowl of water, and a bed of grass and leaves. Eric went around back to catch some grasshoppers for the mantis to eat, while Cady watched it explore its new home. She liked the way the green bug held its hands, as if she was knitting hundreds of tiny socks for her hundred tiny babies. While Cady was alone, their next door neighbor Jeremy and his friend walked over.