Chapter Text
Gabe was six when he stumbled across the pictures buried in the closet.
The first was of a baby. But it wasn’t of him. He wasn’t sure how he could say so with such certainty, but it wasn’t him. The face was off. The second was of him, this time, but with an awkwardly empty spot next to him in the frame, like something should have been there.
“...Your sister,” his dad said when Gabe tentatively presented the photographs to him. Dan rested his elbows on his knees and held the pictures side by side, and something softened in his eyes.
He’d never known about a sister.
“We, um…” Dan swallowed, staring at the swaddled baby in the picture. “She was like you. Had problems with her intestines. But we…didn’t catch it in time, the way we did with you.”
Gabe didn’t like the feeling he got when he was compared to this other child he’d never known. I’m not like her, he wanted to say. I lived. I’m here.
That was all his father told him.
But his mother?
His mother had so much to say about his older sister. Her face, her smile, her favorite toys, her tiny laugh—details that Gabe was surprised she remembered. Diana’s eyes lit up when she saw the contents of the photos. She looked so lively, and Gabe couldn’t help but enjoy it for a little while.
Dan slipped the photos away with almost a frown on his face, disappearing down the hallway while Diana rambled on and on about the baby. He returned empty-handed.
“She’s lovely,” Diana told him near the end, tweaking his nose. Gabe sniffed and swiped at it. “She never cried as a baby. She’s always such a sweet kid. The most perfect one you could ask for.”
Dan sat at the counter, saying nothing. His eyes had cooled down again, hardening until nothing slipped out, the way Gabe was used to.
“And a great sister,” his mother added with a smile.
Even at the time, he’d noticed that Diana spoke in the present tense, like her daughter was still there. But that was before he knew the extent of his mother’s hallucinatory episodes and felt the full brunt of her neglect, so he’d just filed it away as something odd and forgotten about it for a while.
“She seems like the musical type to me. What do you think, Dan?”
He watched his father look very pointedly into his mother’s eyes and shake his head almost imperceptibly.
His mother’s light flickered.
“I think she’s a lot like you, Gabey,” she said when the silence went on for too long.
Again, the feeling.
I’m not like her, he wanted to say. It didn’t come out.
“You’re both so gifted, so smart. I can’t believe I got this lucky, really.”
Gabe eventually just nodded. That was the moment he learned it was better to ignore the squirming feeling in his gut—to play along. At least Mom was talking, and talking to him. Her hand was on his shoulder and he could smell her lavender shampoo.
He only realized later that his parents didn’t utter his sister’s name once.