Accidental Notes: A Novel
Chapter 22
Unpacking
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Catch up on chapter 21 here.
Christmas Day drags on, the ordinariness of it all almost insulting to the holiday. I get tired of working on my audition song, but I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know if I should text Grayson. I know he didn’t love his mom and I talking about him, but being with him was the one good thing about yesterday. Even moody and less talkative, Grayson’s company was infinitely preferable to my family’s. He said his phone would be off, but it’s Christmas. Saying nothing doesn’t seem right.
But now I’m supposed to tell him I’m leaving early and I’ll miss the concert. It’s nowhere near the kind of text I want to send on Christmas, so I don’t send one at all.
Dad’s still watching golf in the other room. That isn’t how I want to spend my Christmas. It definitely isn’t how I want to spend one of my last days in Bend. I have a mystery to solve and Dad won’t help me intentionally.
And yet in the last two days, I’ve found out more from his slips of the tongue than I could have imagined. Brennan died seventeen years ago, for one thing. His passing was so hard on him that it severed a friendship Dad had probably had for years.
Something clicks into place in my mind like a perfect harmony. My knees buckle as I think it and I trip over the stairs. Dad didn’t come with us to California because of Brennan. He wanted to live with the memory of my dead brother more than he wanted to live with me. I’m sure he’d never say as much, but it’s too obvious, too impossible for it to be otherwise.
Instead of going to my room like I planned, I turn the other way and slip into the spare bedroom.
Everything is just as Grayson and I left it. I trace the lines our fingers left in the dust on the box he directed me to open. It seems the most logical place to start, so I sit down and look, for the first time, underneath where the sheet music had been. There’s a stack of CDs, five bands I haven’t heard of, all with the same haircuts and eyeliner. Signed posters. A book of études. Then, on the bottom, in a pastel yellow that’s faded even lighter, a photo album. I’m not going to find out what led Brennan to suicide here, but if I start at the beginning, it would almost be like knowing him.
A teddy bear is on the front of the album and written in a fancy cursive in blue stitching across the stomach is “Brennan Jonathan Finley.” My parents gave my brother the same middle name my dad has. I smile as I open it.
I hardly have any pictures of my mom and dad this young. Mom pregnant, wearing a huge sweater that covers all but the tiniest hint of her bump, her hair teased out and bangs big. She can’t be very old — doesn’t look too different than the picture I have of her at her college graduation in 1989.
On the next page is the picture of a baby. They have fewer printed pictures of him than we have in my albums, but, I realize, they probably had to develop film for these. He feels like a relic from a time capsule, not a full-blooded sibling of mine. Brennan, in a blue knitted hat with a hospital bracelet on his arm. A few months later, a naked child on a changing table, rolls and rolls down his arms and legs just like the ones I had.
By one, a shock of dark brown hair already growing past his ears, like mine did. Copper eyes, oval and not round. Button noses. Thin lips. By elementary school, we share a mole just above our cheekbone, but mirrored. Mine is below my left eye, his below his right. Pastor Clark mistaking me for Brennan makes sense already, and I haven’t even seen him grow up yet.
Brennan played piano, too. By seven, there’s pictures of him in a tuxedo, playing a grand piano for competitions and concerts. I wish I could hear him, but all I dig up are VHS tapes, and not even Grandma still has the thing that plays them.
Beneath the photo albums I’d scoured, I find his school papers, Mom’s handwriting on every page, talking about his likes and dislikes, his favorite things from every age. If she has notes about me this meticulous, I haven’t seen them. Brennan was a good student. His birthday parties show him surrounded by friends, laughing in the middle, arms slung casually around the same boy and girl, one on each side, every year. All their eyes are bright. In the background of one from middle school, I notice the man who helped after our accident, leaning on a cane even here, twenty years ago. The girl next to Brennan is probably his daughter. She looks enough like him. My brother has the same close friends from the beginning to the end of this album. He never looks worried about whether he’s accepted with them. I’m getting impossibly close to him being fifteen, and I still have no idea what could have happened.
Did he fit in? Did he want to? Pictures don’t tell the whole story, even back then, before there was an entire internet to perform for. I know him better now, but my appetite to understand him has only gotten more insatiable. I want to know everything about the boy in the tuxedo, and how he became the teenager Meghan says overdosed on pills.
It doesn’t matter that I’ve only known about him for a few days. And it definitely doesn’t matter that I’ll never get to meet him. He still feels like my brother. I’m ready to open my third box — and these ones feel like my real Christmas presents — but there are footsteps on the stairs. Quickly, I shove everything back and shut the lids.
“Oh good. You’re here,” Dad says when he opens the door. “Ready to help?”
“Help?”
“The estate sale is in two days, so we need to get these boxes out of here now, since we’ll be driving you to Portland the day of the sale. Unpack the ones with valuables, set aside the junk, bring down some empty boxes to pack up the rest of the house.”
I tense, eyeing the boxes I’ve just opened. “What happens to the things you think are junk?”
“Recycling and Goodwill is the plan for most of it. I may keep a few things, too.” He looks down, and I wonder how many a few is. Probably more than he wants me to know. Probably everything to do with Brennan.
“Sure, I can help for a minute, but I really should get back to practice. I don’t have much time before my audition. Especially if I lose a day to travel.”
“I’d rather you chose a different song,” he says, but so quiet I pretend to ignore it. He tells me to move the boxes he wants to keep into his truck to take to his apartment. One by one, he directs me to every single box of Brennan’s things, until his truck sags with the weight of them all and he can’t see out the rearview mirror.
Then Dad grabs his keys and his snow boots and drives away.
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