Page 28 of Forget About Me

Lights rise overhead. Numbly gathering my things, I follow the other audience members shuffling slowly down the aisle and toward the parking lot like cattle in a chute, everyone still caught in the dreamworld of the play. I never thought dusty old Shakespeare could be so relevant, but the director used the play to mirror issues that plague Boston right now: racial divides, drug and alcohol abuse, even the gaps between rich and poor.

I really want to talk about the play with someone, I just don’t know who. Not Ben. Our paths have taken us in very different directions.

But just as I’m telling myself yet again that this is a side of Ben I’ve never seen before, a memory flashes. When he and his dad first moved in, my mom sent Tony and me to bring dinner to welcome them to the neighborhood. His house was unbelievably quiet. We couldn’t believe he was home all by himself or that he had to make dinner.

Hamburger Helper. Tony had been jealous. We’d only ever seen it on TV.

The grass is always greener, I guess.

As I sink into the driver’s seat of my car, another memory floats up.

I’m keeping busy in the kitchen, loading and reloading platters of food. If I don’t, I’ll either be sobbing or stuffing my face. I think the loaves and fishes story from the Bible must’ve had its origins in an Italian funeral. Every day for the past week, no matter how much we eat—me and Sal and Vinnie make a good dent, my parents, not so much—the next day, it’s replenished itself. Today, the food just keeps coming. Our house is stuffed to the gills with mourners, the sounds of talking and eating and laughing and drinking and crying rolling in a wave into the kitchen every time the swinging door opens.

Every time it does, I look for Ben in the sea of faces. Finally, I get glimpse of him.Wait—is he on crutches?

I drop the pan of stuffed shells I’m holding onto the counter and push through the door. There he is. My mom’s hugging him. When he looks over her shoulder and catches my eye, his face pales and he pulls away from her. She puts her hands on his cheeks, says something, and he nods. She hugs him one more time, awkwardly, because of the crutches and difference in height between them. She turns to greet yet another mourning neighbor or relative.

And his eyes are back on mine.

I haven’t seen Ben since I left to start college two months ago. Or talked to him or even gotten a letter from him, even though I sent him a bunch. That hurt—a lot—but I was dealing. School, new friends, even some fun dates were a good distraction.

This was not how I saw our Thanksgiving reunion going.

I want to talk to him, even though I’m mad at him for his radio silence, but not in front of all these people. I tip my head toward the back of the house and raise my brows at him. He looks at the door and nods.

Pushing through the crowd on my way to the back porch, my grimace-smile made acceptable by the fact that I just lost my big brother, I take in big gulps of the bracing air once I get outside. I have to beat back memories of Tony in this backyard, though: shooting hoops, hurling a baseball into a net, flipping a lacrosse ball in the air over and over again. He was rarely without a ball in his hands. I kinda wished we’d put a bunch in his casket. Just in case.

A sharp click, a scrape and a few thumps sound behind me.

“Lucy.” His voice sounds like he’s been smoking since he was ten. Or screaming into the wind from the side of the football field.

Or bawling for a week, like me.

I gesture to the cast on his leg. “What happened to you?”

Pain fills his eyes, and his face is white as a sheet. “You don’t know?”

“Know what? I haven’t seen you since August, you asshole.”

He slumps against the door, lets the crutches fall and covers his face with his hands. “Fuck.”

“That’s all you have to say? I left for school, I hear nothing from you, then my brother dies on the way to pick me up and bring me home for Thanksgiving, and that’s all I get?”

He squeezes his head so hard his knuckles go white. After a few beats, a horrible groaning noise grinds in his throat, then he drops his hands so quickly he loses his balance. Instinctively lunging for him, I try to grab him by the forearm, but he grasps my other arm and pulls me in so our foreheads touch.

“I was there too,” he grates out. “I was in the car, in the accident.”

I jerk back, my heart pounding, and stare at him for what feels like forever.

And then I run.

Watching all these people grieve over the brother that I killed with my selfish demands has my heart in shreds. But the fact that I might’ve killed Ben, too—I can’t face it.

Out into the cold, the wind, I can barely breathe. In my stupid heels and hose and black dress, I stumble around the corner of the house, duck between bushes and pray that Ben doesn’t follow.

Unfortunately, that prayer was answered.

A knock on my car has my eyes flying open. The Ben on the other side of the glass is seven years older than the one in my memory. Swallowing the wave of feelings brought up by it and the play, I crank the window down. “Ben! You scared me.”

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