He won’t leave your windowpanes alone.
When you first met Cary, he was a blaze of a boy, older than you but not by much, with eyes made up of mischievous flashes and a grin sharp enough to cut anyone who got too close. The first time you saw him smile like that, he was fumbling with his keys in the hallway, shaking his head and waving a half-hearted, half-friendly hand at his other neighbors, the Simmons, that older couple whose doormat, he told you later, smelled like cat piss. You remember his eyes, blue and narrowed, glancing your way as you climbed the last step and he managed to turn the knob. His smile had faltered when he saw you there. You swear to this day that he slammed the door.
His apartment had stood empty for more than three years before he got there, almost as long as you and your mother had lived in the one on its right. The day he moved in, there was an electricity in the air; your mom had chattered to you excitedly while she untied her apron, and even Mrs. Green, the pucker-mouthed widow from down the hall, stopped by to whisper with her over a cup of instant coffee.
You knew him first because of their descriptions of him: a too skinny young man who, in Mrs. Green’s opinion, needed a haircut and a proper meal, but who had seemed well-mannered at the very least. That ear piercing, she said, was just awful, and she didn’t understand how or why he had managed to arrive with only one suitcase. Your mom called it thriftiness; she called it cheap. That afternoon, though, she managed a full hour in your mom’s company, laughing after long intervals, scowling more often. His arrival had been marked with a kind of excitement that the hall hadn’t seen in a long time. Still, it took you nearly three days to get that first, jarring glimpse—no matter how often you looked, no matter how long you lingered at the top of the stairs with sweat in your hair and a muddy soccer ball in your hand, he always managed to avoid you.
“Must’ve been pretty disappointing,” he said one night, as the two of you sat in the dark on his sofa, your head in his lap, telling him the story. He looked away from you and laughed, tossing hair so blonde it looked white out of his eyes. While he took a sip from a beer you watched his Adam’s apple drag itself up and back down. “Sorry, Johnny.” He smiled and you put the bottle on the other end of the coffee table, where he couldn’t reach it without leaning over you.
Sometimes, you try to retrace the steps, searching for the moment when you knew the right name for the hollow, airy feeling that filled up your chest each time you took him in, whole among his own wreckage—ice cream containers stacked inside of one another on his kitchen counters, old newspapers and empty bottles casually cluttering his coffee table, scarves thrown haphazardly over the arms and backs of his mismatched chairs, and him, tangible and static on his well-worn sofa.
For a long time, he wouldn’t open the door to his apartment no matter how many times you knocked, but every time you left a paper on his doorstep it would be gone the next morning. His apartment seemed as empty as before he’d moved in; save for the sound of footsteps on the concrete landing at two in the morning, there were almost no signs that he existed at all. Your mother would tut over her pots of spaghetti, telling you how that boy just needed a friend. You didn’t need her to tell you to look for him; there was something in that first look in his pale eyes that piqued your attention and kept you trying.
He finally looked you in the face and told you to leave him alone. “Just stop, kid,” he said, glaring at you from a crack in his doorway, “I don’t want one of your stupid subscriptions.” You laughed and told him that you knew, that you’d given up your paper-boy duties for this once, and when he shut the door in your face you didn’t miss the puzzled furrow of his eyebrows.
You didn’t stop knocking, and then he started to ask you in. You dragged him out of bed and watched Godzilla with him on his tiny television screen; he helped guide you through the words of Moby Dick when all its letters scrambled themselves before your eyes and you were faced with writing a ten-page essay on a book you couldn’t decipher. You took him for ice cream and he seemed lost in the people down in the subway so you grabbed his hand to guide him out into the street. He came to your matches with his scarf pulled up over his nose and he cheered even though you knew that he didn’t understand the rules. He invited you to a New Year’s Eve party which wasn’t even really that, just a bunch of sad-faced high school graduates like him, wringing their fingers and telling bad jokes.
He kissed you in front of everyone and you wouldn’t speak to him for weeks. Or, you couldn’t. You’re still not sure what difference the word makes.
He apologized and apologized. Then he got angry. You walked past his door with a girl from school on your arm and you heard his door slam shut before you even noticed that it was open. You didn’t know anymore whether he wanted you to remember or just forget about it, about him, about the two of you.
He apologized again after you kissed him while he was trying to piece together insults from the spaces between his teeth. You laughed in his face. He smiled back.
He disappeared for days and came back smiling every time.
Then, he disappeared again and didn’t come back, though he left a stack of unfinished crossword puzzles and six carefully balanced cans of terrible beer on his bedside table for you to find.
Once, when you were together, he asked you what you thought you would do when you died. “Do I have a choice?” you laughed, leaning on one elbow, straining your eyes to see his face. His eyes were closed, trapped behind their lids, and he didn’t laugh with you. His face was doing that thing again, mouth set in a grim line, chin held, just stubbornly so—it made him look like a marble statue, that expression, drained all the warmth that the pale shine from the streetlight outside his window hadn’t taken from him already, and you knew he was locking you out again.
“Of course,” he sighed, and you’ve still gotta wonder if his hands were tingling, crossed behind his head for so long. You waited longer than you should have—for him to say something, for him to explain, even if you knew he wouldn’t—listening to both of you breathing, counting to twenty. Twice.
“So,” you said at last, and you smiled even though he wasn’t looking, nudging him with your thigh, “what are my options?” He looked at you with a kind of urgency, and told you everything he knew about dying. He explained to you about ghosts and blackness and something further away than you, he thought, could imagine. You didn’t know which parts to believe but you could feel your pulse beat a little faster. You sat together in the dark until the streetlight faded, gave way to pink and orange and blue.
You listened to him, but in the end, you still couldn’t decide. You hadn’t even thought about it until he brought it up. “What about you?” you asked, “Would you be a ghost?”
“Never,” he said, absentmindedly gnawing at a thumbnail and settling back into his greying pillows, “I can’t think of anything sadder than that.”
He told you once, back then, that there was nothing more important than the truth, but these days you think maybe he was crossing his fingers while he said it. You never knew where he went off to.
Now he scratches at your window in time with the branches outside, like he’s back to apologizing—slips in with the howl of the wind, hums a tune behind the sound of your shower, says your name with the rattle of your radiator. When you call back in answer, he pretends not to hear.
You wonder what made him change his mind.
“Lyra.” The last time you saw him, he appeared at your door in the middle of the night like some kind of phantom, and you didn’t know where the bags under his eyes ended and the bruises began. His knuckles were covered in Band-Aids. His hair was dirty, which you knew drove him crazy, and the clothes he was wearing were wrinkled and torn at the seams. When you opened the door, the only thing he had to say was your name. You nudged it all the way open with your knee and locked it once he’d walked through.
You’ve been living on your own for almost a year, and when you moved in, he’d come tumbling out of your oldest brother’s car with a gleam in his eyes that starts to hurt when you remember it now. It’s been three months since that night, when you pulled out a chair and sat across from him at your kitchen table—the same one he’d hauled in with the help of all three of your brothers, your sister watching, orchestrating from the sidelines— and waited for him to speak.
You made it through your third cup of tea—chamomile, for the nerves, in heavy green-and-yellow mugs you had just found in a secondhand shop a few days before—before you managed to get him talking. Even then, you were the first to break the silence. “What’s up, Cary?” you asked. “What’s going on?” You passed him a plate with a slice of stale birthday cake that your siblings had officially abandoned on your kitchen counter. You’d been trying for days to finish it off, even though the smell of the frosting is starting to make you sick. He took it from you with a look of thanks that he didn’t bother to vocalize.
“Nothing,” he said around a mouthful. When he laughed his smiled didn’t reach his eyes. You watched him pick off the crunchy frosting letters of your name. “I just wanted to see my favorite cousin, s’all.”
“At 2:30 in the morning.” You practiced all your life for the expression you cast his way, screwing up your face in the mirror for hours at a time, trying to train your eyebrows into critical, opposing angles. The two of you were born with your parents’ faces—his mom’s and your dad’s—too soft around the edges for the type of expressions both of you cultivated for so long. When you were younger you would watch his face so that you could match it. People at the zoo, at the park, at your parents’ fancy dinner parties, would ask if the two of you were twins. He hated that, would twist his mouth into a scowl and call you a copycat, and you just laughed at him and jabbed a finger into his ribs.
You know that your face looks its best when you smile, tiny crows’ feet settling at the edges of your icy blue eyes. You think he knew the same about himself, but he still wore that scowl so often that it was hard to tell.
That night he smiled, swallowing. His teeth were stained blue with the frosting, and to you, looking at him across the table, he looked the same as he did when he was a kid, aside from all the bruising. His hair hung in his eyes and crumbs caught in the corner of his mouth, while his eyebrows rose in amusement. “I figured you’d be awake.”
“Hm.” You rose a finger to wipe a blue smudge from his chin. He flinched, then pretended that he didn’t, thanking you under his breath and looking embarrassed as he did. Sometimes you wonder if he knew just how transparent he was, if he practiced his expressions in the mirror, too, because as much as he tried, ever since he was five and drowning in the stream behind your parents’ house, he still wore his heart on his sleeve.
You have always been willing to help him pretend that his skin was thicker and his heart steady.
Without his late-night visits your house is quieter. When you found it you thought it would be just big enough for you—the place you always dreamed of, with bookshelves lining the walls and a comfortable silence filling all the spaces you don’t. Your siblings lost interest a few weeks in, and as much as you appreciate the peace and comfort of your own space in the world, in retrospect you’ve realized that you never minded sharing it with him—at least, every once in a while. There are nights when you come home from your job at the bookstore and the balls of your feet are so sore you wonder if you might wake up the next morning and find yourself unable to walk. If he was still around, he would bring you crutches.
After years of force-feeding him worms and getting him injured on dares, pushing him into your brothers while you cackled, hiked your skirt up around your knees, and ran, you figure that maybe you owed it to him to save a space. Once, when you were too old for it, you had leapt onto his back from above, playing panther up in the rungs of a spruce so that he couldn’t see you coming. He had caught you as well has you could have expected him to; he had stumbled forward while your arms wrapped around his shoulders, and you shrieked with laugher, and he broke his nose on the sidewalk. When your parents asked, his face had betrayed him, but he told them he had tripped over the roots. But everyone knew he was a little too careful for that.
“How are you, then?” You asked, taking a sip from your mug and burning your tongue. His eyes flashed towards the door, past the windows, like there was a secret—you knew there were secrets, things he had locked up inside of himself—that he wanted to tell. But he sucked the frosting from his teeth behind closed lips and then smiled again.
“And thank God for that.”
Now you miss that gleam in his eyes, the way he used to groan before agreeing to give you a piggy-back ride, that scowl he reserved only for you, the copycat, thief of his face. You wish there had been things that you could help him carry—or that you had offered outright, that you had asked the right questions, pushed him in the right directions. You guess you’re selfish that way, taking responsibility for yourself, but always afraid to ask where the blood on his knuckles or the skin under his nails came from in the first place. By the time he disappeared, he wasn’t the same as he was before—not so eager, not so confident.
You think about all the things he carries—carried—in his bones, and wonder where they will go if he’s laid down beneath the earth. Maybe, you think, they’ll just disappear.
Sometimes you go days without looking in the mirror, afraid that the person that you will see there is no longer just yourself.
You’re getting tired of goodbyes.
The first time you officially met him, you were fourteen years old and angry, separated from your brother for the first time by a bogus system that put you and him in dormitories on opposite ends of the campus. Your parents had sent you away to boarding school—the kind of place that really, they couldn’t afford anymore. You heard them talking behind closed doors about assets, furniture, things that they could get rid of. You were worried that you were one of them, but when you hissed what you’d eavesdropped into your brother’s ear, he had told you that you were just being paranoid. You believed him. Then, he was no longer the top bunk in your bedroom, and it wasn’t as easy to believe.
Instead of your brother you got Caradoc, some spoiled rich kid with a bad haircut and a father who worked somewhere high-up in the government, high enough that when you wrote home, your parents knew his last name. For the first few months, he didn’t speak to you or any of the people in the dormitory, though you shared a set of six drawers and a toothpaste-stained porcelain sink. There was something about his face, this smirk that he wore when you sat in front of him in English class and answered a question wrong, that irked you to no end and you resolved that, before the end of November, you would find a way to wipe it off his stupid face.
You didn’t plan, really; that had always been Gideon’s job in the pranks the two of you played. Instead it just happened. One night in the middle of the cafeteria you were standing in line for a plate of corned beef and cabbage, half of which you probably wouldn’t even eat, when he brushed just a little too close to you. You felt the hairs on your arms raise. “Watch it, Carebear,” you hissed, and he stopped in the middle of his tracks to turn on a heel and stare you down. You think, now, that that must have been the first time that he met your eyes. He stood half a foot shorter than you but for some reason, while the two of you stood an arm’s reach apart, it felt as though you were on the same level.
“Nice insult,” he said, smiling wide so that his teeth gleamed in the fluorescent lighting. You had a feeling that if his canines were any sharper he could have used them to rip you apart—but you weren’t, exactly, afraid. “Did you come up with that all by yourself? You should be really proud, Fabian. I can tell how much effort you put in.” And he turned on his heel and walked away.
After that, it’s sometimes hard to keep track of what happened. For a long time the two of you danced around each other, spitting first scathing and then worn insults and nicknames, jabbing one another with sharpened pencils if you ever managed to sit close by in class. Then, you were spending more time with him than trying to track down your brother, ditching class to choke on the smoke of his contraband cigarettes behind the bleachers. You dragged him by the collar to the party where he first met Gid, and where the three of you first met Frank; he sat with you at three in the morning and held up flashcards for your Biology exam in-between yawns. You calmed down and he warmed up, suddenly smiling more often even when he struggled to meet your eyes. On the last day before winter break of your Sophomore year, the two of you sat cross-legged on your bed with two cartons of ice cream—pistachio, his favorite, and strawberry, yours—and even though you had a strict unspoken rule between the two of you that you would not speak, at least in clear words, about feelings, he told you with shaking hands about the boy he’d spent three nights in a row sneaking out to meet in the dark.
He disappears three weeks before the end of Gid’s school year.
Sometimes he does that, you know, locks himself up in his shitty little apartment, buries himself deep down between layers of pilly blankets and sagging pillows that you know for a fact he stole from his parents’ house when his father finally kicked him out. He was doing it before, too, but even in school it was never as bad or as frequent as it was after all of you moved into your own lives. It’d always been one of the three of you—you, or Gid, or Frank—to track him down, grab him by collar, drag him back up into the real world. But Frank was in the hospital and your brother was away, and since maybe, just maybe, you miss your best friend, you decide that this time you’ll go and do it yourself.
You let yourself in with the key that he’s tucked away at the top of his doorframe.
He’s been out of touch for weeks. His living room sits like an abandoned battlefield, with dusty bottles like soldiers standing tall, wayward newspapers kicked beneath the couch, borrowed tapes stacked like corpses on top of the television set. Still, this is how he lives—like he’s been robbed, the whole place ransacked, left with junk and useless trinkets. Everything looks exactly how he would have left it, down to the tooth-marked pencils and unfinished crosswords—and six empty cans—on his nightstand in his white-washed bedroom. The only thing missing, really, is him.
The last time you saw him, he was knocking at your door at four in the morning. When you cracked it open you could see the pink light of sunrise spreading across the sky over his shoulder. His lips were chapped and scabs were starting to fade on his knuckles; you wondered when it was that he started to pick fights without you. You could see his hands shaking before he started to speak. “I tried calling,” he said, focusing his eyes on the empty tiles between your feet, “but neither of you picked up.”
You opened the door wider as if to ask him in, but he still doesn’t look up and that’s when you felt the panic start to settle into your gut. You noticed the quiver of his chin and the way he kept shifting his weight from one foot to the other. “What is it?” you ask, “Cary, what is it?” The few seconds that you waited felt like an eternity, and you wished that you had the mind for facts that your brother did, so that you could tell him how many people were being born, getting sick, dying as you stood there waiting for him to find his voice.
“There’s,” he started and then stopped, folding his arms over each other and continuing to shift, right-left-right-left, looking as anxious as you’ve ever seen him, stifling a laugh that dragged itself out of him more like a sob, “there’s been an accident.” You learned later, sitting in the waiting room of the hospital, that it wasn’t an accident. Frank’s car had been towed away from the scene, the entire front end smashed up like an accordion at rest. There was no other vehicle at the scene. You and Gid counted the bruises on his face and Cary loomed like a specter in the corner of the room.
Frank was still in the hospital by the time Cary was gone. He should’ve been there. They told you and Gid, seated restless on the edge of hard plastic seats, that he doesn’t get to come back out. When you saw the look your brother’s face you wondered if yours was the same—is that a nature or a nurture kind of thing? Only two people in the world could tell you apart from the very first time you met, and neither one of them could be there to tell you who was who.
When you went to visit Frank again, he didn’t even know your name.
Cary’s family is planning a funeral. His parents are inviting all of their friends and family to their church to pay their respects to a close-lidded mahogany coffin. None of you is invited but his cousin—who suddenly looks so much like him, even though when you were in high school, you couldn’t believe that they were related—tells you everything. His stony-faced father ironing out details with pastors while his mother wept loud enough for all the ghosts in all the world to hear. Her brothers, pall-bearers, almost tripping over a wayward root as they plan the path they will walk towards the grave. She tells you how disgusting she thinks the whole thing is, will be—how empty the coffin, how ugly the tears. You put an arm around her to ask if she’s okay and she says “I can’t believe we’re giving up already.”
You hope, at first, that if you open the door and search beneath all of his cushions, you will find him there somewhere—that, really, all it is is him hiding his face in shame and self-defeat, the same things that have been fighting against him for as long as you’ve known him, but that have never defeated him before. Really, you’re there to sort through all the cartons and newspapers and empty bottles, to find the things that he left behind, to put it all in a box, to put that box away. He’s never been away for so long; even though you wrapped your arms around her, you knew when you saw his cousin that things were different now than they have ever been before. You knew that he wasn’t coming back this time.
You carry off a box filled with Polaroid photos and what little clothing he left in his dresser drawers. You don’t bother with cleaning; if your brother were there he would be considerate, but you never cared for his landlord and you don’t see the point in cleaning up all of his messes. On your way out the door you come face-to-face with the boy from next door, the paper boy dropping his newspaper at Cary’s doorstep. You never understood what Cary saw in him; you were never quite privy to that part of his life.
The boy—Johnny, you think—watches you with wide eyes for a moment before stepping out of your way. You can feel his stare on your back as you begin down the concrete stairs. The slam of his front door echoes behind you as you descend.
Twenty years old and you’re just starting to realize just how fucked up it is that your parents have named you all after a bunch of dead guys. Your oldest brothers laugh when you tell them this over a bottle of beer one night after they’ve managed to make it home safe from another round of their world adventures. Your mouth is set in a grim line, and Pat nudges you with an elbow.
“Cheer up, Cary,” he says, grinning, “There are worse names you could have.”
“Yeah,” Hue concurs, “like Patience. Or Humility.” They laugh around you while you drain the last dregs of your bottle.
Your mother hoards photos like she’s afraid of her memories, like if she doesn’t keep them scattered around the house in photo albums and cracked frames, the people she loved once would cease to exist. In a more permanent way than being dead, anyway. One day while you and the twins are cleaning out the house, Hue holds a photo up to your face and glances toward Pat. You can feel the scowl creep over your features.
“Look at that, huh? The resemblance is uncanny.”
You snatch it out of his fingers, take in glinting eyes and a sharp smile, pale hair too long for his face. “I don’t look anything like this guy,” you insist, dishwater curls moving in time with the shake of your head. Pat and Hue grin matching grins. You turn the photo over and find your own name scrawled there, in your mother’s messy cursive. You feel your brows furrow and hear your brothers’ low chuckles from either side.
“Make the face again,” they say, poking at your ribs and you betray yourself with your laughter. “Come on, Cary. Frown.”
