“Still want that flamethrower?” he’d said with a wink.
It was the first time I truly understood what a talented woodworker Ash was, and told him so, but he had other plans. He’d worked two jobs for over a year after graduating from high school to save up, got himself a generous scholarship and left to study economics in Denver. I’d cried every day for months, but then Brad died, and with Mom already gone, Ash insisted on leaving college and coming home to take care of me. This was something else he no doubt couldn’t recall, more details from his life that had disappeared. Memories he’d left me to mourn.
“Maya?” Ash called out, his voice sounding uncertain now. “Is everything okay?”
No, I wanted to shout. Do you have any idea what you put me through?
Of course he didn’t. He wouldn’t know since he’d left two years ago that my life had been hell. How, at least three times a day, every single day, I’d opened the browser and plugged in Asher Bennett, crossing my fingers. My heart rate would accelerate, as it did whenever I searched for my stepbrother. I’d wonder if today might be the day I found something, hoped it would be good news but was always terrified I’d stumble across an obituary instead.
I’d never found anything pertaining to the Asher Bennett I knew. A man with the same name had been nominated for a music award in New York, but I hadn’t needed to click on the link to know it wasn’t my Ash, who’d always maintained he had no musical talent whatsoever, and would’ve preferred making an instrument to the torture of learning how to play one. He’d taken my school recorder as a joke once, and performed a mangled version of “Happy Birthday,” and I swear no mice had come within a hundred yards of the house since.
Every time I continued my searches, playing with the parameters, a little voice would sneak into my head, whispering all the terrible things that could have happened to Ash, conjuring up images of the different ways he might have died in an accident, his decomposing body lying in a ditch somewhere, yet to be discovered. I’d never believed it. I’d have known if he were gone, felt it deep inside my heart.
I’d been right.
I grabbed the photo albums and walked back to the kitchen. “Let’s see if these help,” I said, settling next to him.
Ash turned the pages, his fingers touching the photographs, lingering as I pointed out who was who. “These are my parents?” he said, touching the picture. Rosalie stood behind Brad, her arms wrapped around his waist, both of them smiling. Her hair was as dark as Ash’s, but he had his father’s eyes, the perfect combination of his parents. “What happened to them?”
“Are you sure you want to know? It might be easier—”
“Of course I want to know,” he snapped. “Tell me.”
I chose my next words as carefully as I could, not knowing how to break the news. He’d gone through so much already. Would it be so bad if he didn’t remember? “Not long after this photo was taken, when you were thirteen, your mom...oh, Ash, she...she committed suicide.” I exhaled, wiped my damp hands on my pants as I waited for his reaction, but he continued to stare at me, and so I went on. “You and Brad came to Maine, where he met my mom, and they got married a year after.”
“But now they’re both dead?” he said, and while he sounded cold and detached, I knew it was because he didn’t remember, not because he didn’t care. He’d loved Brad and Mom very much, had been devastated after they’d died. We both had.
“My mom passed a short while later, when I was thirteen. She had a brain tumor.” I touched the side of my head, trying not to remember how Mom had gone from vivacious and bubbly to a gray skin-and-bone skeleton of a human being in a couple of months. I didn’t want Ash to recall it, either. Why would he want to?
He blinked. “We were the same age when our mothers...?”
“Yes,” I whispered. The coincidence had never been lost on us. It had been something else to bring us together, our mutual loss and grief, which only the two of us seemed to understand.
“And my dad?”
I wanted to stop answering his questions. Didn’t want to relive it, or be the one causing Ash to, but he asked me again and so I complied. “He was a foreman, and one day the load fell off a crane at the building site... It was thirteen years ago, when you were almost twenty.” I didn’t want to elaborate. Unless Ash remembered it himself, I wouldn’t mention he’d been the one who’d gone to formally identify Brad at the morgue, that the only way had been the tattoo on his father’s forearm because his skull and torso had been so badly crushed. Ash had broken down that day and it wasn’t something I wanted him to remember. In fact, I’d do anything to make sure he didn’t.
Oblivious to the dark memories swirling in the air between us, Ash said, “Thirteen really is an unlucky number for us, isn’t it?” He shut his eyes and whispered, “Brad, Rosalie, Ophelia. Brad, Rosalie, Ophelia...”
“Do you remember them?” I said, reaching for his hand.
Startled, he pulled away, back out of reach. “Fragments, maybe. Bits and pieces I might be able to connect if I could grab hold of them long enough. What else can you show me? I need to see everything.”
We kept on going through the photographs, the ones where we rented a trailer and went
