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It’s been two weeks since her mother left.
She didn’t expect it to be as hard as it is. The house was quiet before, but that was a different kind of quiet. She was always braced, ready for it to break, because it always did. The quiet never lasted long. It exploded into sound that had her flinching, scenes where she never knew what she was supposed to do. Now that Mom is gone, Natalie finds that she still doesn’t know what she’s supposed to do. Her body still braces for what it learned was inevitable. Now that a new quiet has filled the space where the old one used to be, she’s unnerved. As in, the silence itself is unnerving. Something about it is wrong.
Natalie sits on a stool at the kitchen island and taps her fingers against the counter. Dad’s turned in already; he’s doing that earlier and earlier, which for someone like him means that he’s actually going to bed at a reasonable hour—though, to be fair, she’s not one to talk. She’s been alone with her thoughts for exactly two hours, three minutes, and forty-five seconds. Not that she’s counting. Not that she’s worried about being alone with her thoughts.
But she’s not alone, is she?
Someone else is here, too. The silence tells her that.
Well, not just the silence. The thing sitting on the countertop, wearing Mom’s old hoodie, fidgeting with his hands. The thing Natalie has tried to ignore for every hour of every day that he’s appeared since Mom disappeared.
He showed up on day five. Natalie chooses to take her ignorance of him as a win. Imagine how strong her will must be, how focused she is, et cetera et cetera. None of it is really true, and she knows that. Those traits don’t usually end up in the same sentence as her name, other than maybe stubbornness. She’ll cast that in a positive light if it means she can ignore him. And now she’s back to square one. Rinse and repeat.
One hundred and twenty-two hours, five minutes, and three seconds. When will he learn?
She wants him to go away. She thought he might after day one, that it was just her mind playing a cruel trick on her. Because if he kept showing up—did that mean he’d moved on from Mom to her? Is he not even what he said he was at all? Maybe he’s just a hallucination, not even a ghost. An indicator that the same thing is happening to her that happened to Mom. They say bipolar is genetic, after all.
It hit her on day eight that she could be turning into her mother.
She wasn’t sure when exactly her Not-Brother appeared; she always became aware of him gradually, in bits and pieces. But she was in the bathroom, blinking blearily up at the mirror, and she realized he was there with her. She ended up on the floor with no memory of how she’d gotten there, the tiles cold against her skin. And then she felt another kind of cold. A hand on her shoulder.
She whipped her head around and saw her Not-Brother looking at her not with the anger she remembered clearly, nor the elation that she’d caught a fleeting glimpse of when she was rummaging through Mom’s pills, but with a clear concern that stung more than anything else. His skin was pale and his eyes were red and there were new streaks of white in his hair that Natalie didn’t recall seeing before (though her time with him was blessedly limited, up to that point), but he didn’t seem to care about that. Just about her.
He probably did this same thing with Mom, she thought amidst her shock and confusion. He probably stayed with her when everyone else knew they should leave.
Natalie pulled away from him as soon as she came to her senses. She shouted something; probably with a swear mixed in, but she can’t dredge up the exact wording, looking back on it. Her Not-Brother jumped and let go of her, cradling his hand against his chest.
What Natalie does know is that her next words were, “You can’t have me too.”
The muscles in his face seized. He dropped his head, and as Natalie scrambled to stand, he stared up at her through his hair with eyes darker and rounder than she’d seen on him before.
She understood in a moment why it had taken Mom so long to shake him. Even if that shaking-off wasn’t entirely. Which terrified her more than the fact that she was seeing this thing and had allowed him to get this close, because what did that mean for her? If she could see him the way Mom saw him, if she felt him the way Mom felt him, if she understood why he’d been allowed to stick around for so long—well, didn’t she know what would come next? Hadn’t she seen it already?
Would it be the same for her? Would she be stuck with him? Stuck with the ghost of a brother that she’d never met, a reminder of everything that was wrong with their family?
She hopes she’s not stuck with him. But from the way he continues to show up, she’s being pushed closer and closer to a point where she has to acknowledge that it’s a much bigger possibility than she’d like to entertain.
He rarely says anything, when he’s here. He just sits there. He watches her. He watches the house. He flinches every time Natalie moves, even if the movement is small. He reminds her of a wounded puppy, and that pisses her off. A lot. If she isn’t preoccupied, she’s usually fuming silently about that fact in particular.
In the present, he fiddles with his hoodie strings, and Natalie watches out of the corner of her eye until she can’t take it anymore. She breaks the silence that’s weighed heavily on her chest for days, and she’s alarmed to find out that speaking to this thing feels freeing. “Why are you here?” she asks. “What do you want?”
This feels like a conversation she’s had already. She might have asked these exact questions before. From the way her Not-Brother turns to stare at her—it’s harder for her to keep her gaze fixed firmly on the fridge doors, but she manages—she assumes that she probably has. But this time, he’s afraid. He takes a shaky breath (like he can breathe?) and says, almost hesitant, “I’m trying to stay away.”
“You’re trying to stay away,” Natalie repeats. “Yeah. That’s going well.”
He leans away from her. “From Mom,” he clarifies.
She feels herself losing concentration, her eyes drifting naturally over to her Not-Brother. She hasn’t fallen that far yet. She won’t look at him if she can help it. She’ll make him disappear through her will alone, or more aptly her will and a lot of please let him go away please please please, if she has to. “So you decided I was the next best option,” she says flatly.
“Dad can’t see me, so.” Shuffling as he repositions on the counter. “Yes.”
Dad can’t see him. Gripping the counter a little tighter, Natalie says, “You mean, like he’s ignoring you?” Because she doesn’t want her father to see this thing too, but maybe if he does, that means it isn’t just her, that she isn’t just crazy, that her Not-Brother isn’t a sign of anything at all—
He’s silent for a moment, examining her. There’s something in his silence that Natalie doesn’t like. It’s as if he knows what she’s thinking, why she’s asking this question. And who knows, maybe he does. Maybe he understands her. Maybe this was why Mom…
“I mean he can’t see me,” her Not-Brother says. “At all.”
Oh.
“But I thought maybe…” Be it from the expression on Natalie’s face or the way he can feel her stomach dropping right along with her, he falters. He starts fidgeting with his hands again. “I didn’t know if you could—I just…”
He’s already shrinking away from her when Natalie turns on him. For the first time in almost six days, she gets an actual look at him, and she hates it. She knows that he’s not good. She knows that there are more facets to him than what she’s seeing now, because she’s experienced them for most of her life. But he averts his eyes and burrows into Mom’s hoodie (which, why does he have that, anyway? Who gave him the right to take it?) and acts genuinely ashamed.
He can’t be ashamed. If he’d held even a shred of guilt along the way, surely he wouldn’t have done this to their—to her family. He’s not ashamed. It has to be an act.
He’s one hell of an actor, though. Imagine how much he’s done this with Mom, a voice in the back of her mind muses, and she grits her teeth. Imagine how easy it was for him to get her to listen to whatever he wanted her to hear.
I get why Mom—
No. She doesn’t. She doesn’t get why Mom always reached for him above anything else. She doesn’t think that’s appealing. She doesn’t think about how her Not-Brother can shift seamlessly from one version of himself to another, becoming whatever his mother wants him to be. Whatever Natalie wants him to be, now.
Natalie wants someone to blame. She wants this thing to hurt in return for all the hurt he’s caused. And he’s giving that to her.
“Sorry,” he murmurs.
Natalie flinches hard. She pulls herself out of the seat and wobbles as she gets to her feet, bracing herself against the island with one hand. “No, you’re not,” she hisses.
His face falls, and he shuts his eyes for a moment, gathering himself. Natalie tells herself his uncertainty isn’t real either, that it’s just another performance, but it’s becoming harder for her to tell. “Nat,” he says.
“Don’t call me that,” she snaps. Her Not-Brother reaches out like he wants to touch her. She takes a step back so he can’t.
At her reaction, a flicker of frustration appears in his dark eyes, and he balls his hand into a fist and drops it. He turns his gaze on the ceiling. Voice filled with barely-restrained annoyance, he announces, “You haven’t been sleeping.”
Natalie scoffs. “Yeah?”
“Yeah,” her Not-Brother echoes. “And I’ve noticed and I want you to know I’ve noticed. Because I don’t know if Dad has. If you’ve told him why.”
She goes very still as he drops his gaze and focuses it on her again. She wants to squirm under the look he gives her, but she’s stuck. “And you know why,” she says, mocking to cover her fear.
He nods silently, his mouth a hard line.
“Like how you knew with—” Natalie cuts herself off. She swallows down the growing lump in her throat. “With her.”
He nods again.
Natalie drops her head into her hands. She forces herself to breathe as deeply and evenly as she can. This was not something she needed this late at night.
Her shoulders rise when she hears her Not-Brother speak again. He’s melted from caged hostility back into sadness again. It makes her want to throw something. “I want to help,” he tells her.
She doesn’t lift her head. “I don’t need your help,” she says, nails digging into her hair. “No one needs your help. No one wants it. No one wants you. How hard is that to understand?”
And really, he wants to help now? After taking her life away from her, after wedging himself in the middle of her family for as long as she can remember, after trying to bring Mom with him—now he wants to help?
She knows that her words hurt him, because they were meant to. He just pushes on and repeats, a little firmer this time, “I want to help you.”
“The same way you helped her?” Natalie drops her hands and glares at him. He stares at her with wide eyes. “You weren’t made to help people. You just—you hurt everything and you twist things for yourself and you come crawling back when you get caught in the crossfire, and Mom let you do that, and I won’t—”
Her brain catches up to her mouth, and she stops speaking abruptly. Her hands shake. She shoves them into the pockets of her cardigan and tries not to think about how her Not-Brother replicates the action perfectly with Mom’s hoodie.
“I won’t let you do that with me,” Natalie finishes. Her voice is rough.
He won’t look at her. “I know.”
“I’m not Mom.” I never will be. I won’t turn out like her. I won’t have this thing following me around day and night. I won’t. I won’t. I won’t.
He doesn’t respond to that. His silence feels like disagreement.