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He gets the call when he’s at what’s supposed to be Andrew’s study group. It’s a nurse, which makes him think that Andrew has to be hurt too. Maybe. He doesn’t actually know Andrew well enough to know whether he’d call if something happened to him. It feels weird to say that about his twin brother, but it is what it is.
Since he’s still being Andrew, he has license to just walk out of the meeting without a word and he ends up at the hospital, though if asked he couldn’t tell you how. He gets the room number from a nurse and stops short when he sees Andrew sitting up in his hospital bed, in the process of ripping an IV out of his arm.
“What the hell happened? Where’s Mom?” he says, stepping closer to Andrew to try to stop him. He makes the mistake of putting his hand too close to Andrew’s arm and is rewarded with a sharp pinch to his arm that leaves an angry red mark and makes him yelp. He sighs and says “Just stop for a minute and tell me what happened. I need to find Mom.”
“She’s dead.”
Aaron feels like all the air has just been punched out of his lungs. His head swims and the feeling of relief he’s experiencing is only rivaled by the nausea climbing up his throat. “What?”
“We hit the median. Her head hit the steering wheel. She didn’t make it.” Andrew pauses for a moment. “No that’s wrong. That made her pass out, but it was probably the glass shards through her skull that did her in in the end.”
It takes Aaron almost 30 seconds to suck in a ragged breath before he says, “What did you do?”
“I didn’t do anything. She did it to herself.”
“You know what I mean.” Aaron can hear his voice getting louder and more hysterical, but he can’t stop it.
“Shh,”Andrew whispers, “Shh, it’s okay Aaron. People are going to ask questions soon if they see you like this.”
“Is this...did you plan this?”
“I told her what would happen if she touched me. She dug her own grave.”
“That’s not...I can handle it.”
Andrew examines his fingers. “Clearly not.”
“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Aaron knows he’s yelling now, but he can’t stop, he doesn’t know what to think. It’s Andrews’s hand on his arm, squeezing hard enough to almost cut off his circulation that brings him back.
Andrew looks like he’s about to respond, but a nurse walks in at that moment. She skitters out of the room when she sees Andrew’s glare, but it breaks the moment enough that Aaron is able to pull away.
The rest of the night is a blur of details. Uncle Luther asks him to call his cousin Nicky to tell him what happened while Luther talks to Andrew. Aaron hasn’t spoken to Nicky since he went to Germany, but he remembers that he was always nice to him when they were kids.
He doesn’t remember much of the phone call, but he hears himself begging Nicky to “please come home, I can’t look at him, I don’t know how to do this, please.” He hangs up the phone the second Nicky says yes.
He collapses exhausted at around 4 in the morning and thinks about how all he had wanted his entire life was a brother. How ironic.