“I want to answer you,” he said, voice tempered. “But I don’t fucking know how.”
Jaime released a long, slow breath, sending static through the speakers of Brad’s cell. “Mom always told me you’re the one she worries the most about.”
Somehow disappointed by that reply, somehow wanting his big brother to have the proverbial answer to the flurry of thoughts and concerns and questions in his mind, even though it wasn’t like he was doling out exceptional wisdom in this conversation with all his I don’t knows and I don’t know hows, he sank down into the chair on that roof, the coolness that lingered on the plastic seeping in through his jeans, chilling the backs of his thighs, and forced out a cordial response. “Well, that makes sense,” he said. “I have traveled to some pretty sketchy places in my time.”
A beat of quiet.
Then, “Ask me when she told me that.”
Something in his brother’s tone had Brad sitting up a little straighter, tearing his eyes from the stars overhead and shifting them to the roof of the opposite building, even though he wasn’t really processing the rectangular lines. Instead, he stared at it, almost unseeing, a feeling of foreboding pressing heavily on him, anticipating that he was about to learn something monumental.
“When?” he asked, the question barely audible, even to his own years.
A long pause. “When she was sick.”
Brad inhaled sharply.
Their mom had been diagnosed with cancer when Brad was eight. He remembered it being a terrifying time, with her being in and out of the hospital for surgeries and treatments. She was healthy now, had been in remission for a long, long time, but he didn’t think he would ever forget the way she’d looked while in that hospital bed or the sound of her retching after she’d received the chemo.
He’d been worried he might hurt her, had been so afraid to touch her, to hug her.
To get close to her.
Jaime began talking again, intruding on those memories, but Brad was happy to let them go, relieved to be able to shove them down into the locked box in his mind. “I had gone to visit her in the hospital one day. It was when she was really sick, and well, you guys were younger, and I don’t think you recognized how touch-and-go it was, so I needed that extra time with her, I guess.”
“I knew,” Brad whispered.
That feeling sitting heavy in his gut, knowing that he was going to lose the single most important thing in his life. His dad had been around, of course, had been great then, just as he was now, but it wasn’t the same as it had been with his mom. There was just something special about moms, he supposed.
And though his parents had tried to shield them from the worst of it, he knew from firsthand experience that the type of battle his mom had fought permeated everything.
Colored everything.
“What?” Jaime asked.
Swallowing hard against that recognition, he said, “I knew that she almost died. Not as an adult, but back then as a kid. I knew.”
His brother was quiet for several moments. “I get that. It was probably hard to try to hide much from any of us, but I guess . . . I’d always assumed that you and Tammy were too young to understand, to truly get how precarious it was.” He sighed. “We’re lucky she’s here.”
“Yes, we are.”
“I wasn’t trying to bring you back there. It’s just”—Jaime hesitated—“I swear, I’ve never forgotten what she told me that day. I just didn’t know how it fit in, especially with—” He broke off. “I’d gone after school to see her before soccer practice, and she was white as a fucking ghost, lying there with her eyes closed.” His breathing was unsteady for a few heartbeats, and Brad had the sense that his brother was trying to hold on to his typically even-keeled personality in the face of what had to be a really dark memory. “Well, I thought she was dead, and I think I would have run screaming from the room if not for her opening her eyes.”
Brad stilled, a chill going through him.
Jaime cleared his throat roughly. “I don’t think I’ll ever be able to erase that, the way she looked, the horror I felt, and shit, it’s been what? Like almost twenty years since she went into remission?”
“About that,” he agreed.
“So, she opened her eyes and waved me over, and I sat down next to her, heart pounding, trying to pretend I was totally fine when I was a thirteen-year-old kid pissing his pants and wanting to crawl onto the bed with her, wanting her to just hold me and tell me everything would be okay.”
Brad clenched his jaw, eyes stinging.
“Instead, I started pulling out my homework before she even asked—because you know she would have asked.”
He laughed. “Yes, she definitely would have asked.” Their mom had always had her finger on the pulse of their family, somehow recollecting which of the four of them had a project due or a dentist appointment or needed to wear something special for an event at school.
“But she saw right through me. She knew that I was upset, that I was taking it really hard, and she ordered me into bed with her.” He released a breath. “I resisted, said I was too big, too old, but she wouldn’t let it go. She made it an order until I finally got into bed with her. And then . . . she just wrapped her arms around me and told me everything would be okay.”
Brad released a shaky breath.
“We laid like that for a long time, and I remember at some point looking up at the clock and realizing that I had to get to practice, so I packed up my things, got ready to walk my ass over to the field, and then just before I reached the door, she stopped me and said, ‘You
