Twenty-seven Years Ago
Twenty-Seven Years Ago
Garrett and his sister, Rebecca, wait impatiently in a hospital lobby just beyond the cafeteria. They had been there for hours, and this wasn’t the first time. Their brother Aaron spends a lot of time in the hospital, ever since their parents told them he has leukemia. Garrett always knew things were bad with Aaron when they weren’t allowed in the hospital room. Usually, they could sit on the bed with him and watch TV. Today, after a few minutes in Aaron’s room, their parents had sent him and Rebecca downstairs with their Aunt Heidi. They liked this better than the waiting rooms upstairs, which were somber and had no televisions or windows. The lobby is near the cafeteria and has huge windows where they can watch all of the families coming and going.
They sit in a row of three chairs, Rebecca swinging her feet out into the aisle. “Do you want something to eat?” Aunt Heidi asks.
They shake their heads.
“I want to go up there with Mom,” Rebecca says.
“You just have to wait a little while longer. She’ll come down and get you.” Aunt Heidi has been chewing her fingernails all day, but there is nothing left to chew.
“I want something to drink,” Garrett says.
Aunt Heidi perks up. “What do you want? Do you want something, Rebecca?”
“Coke.”
“I want a Coke if he’s getting a Coke.”
“I’ll be right back. Stay here, please.”
“Yes, ma’am,” they say in unison.
Once Aunt Heidi turns the corner, Rebecca asks, “How much longer do you think it will take?”
Garrett shrugs. “We haven’t seen them in a long time.”
She huffs. “I wanted to go to school today. I had a math test.”
“Maybe we can go tomorrow, after Aaron leaves here.”
A woman in black sits down in Aunt Heidi’s seat. Rebecca is alert and ready to protect her brother from the inevitable kidnapping she has been trained to expect.
“Is Aaron your brother?” the woman asks.
Garrett and Rebecca nod.
“Who are you?” Garrett asks.
Rebecca elbows him. “That’s rude.”
He tries again: “My name is Garrett. This is Rebecca.”
“Hello, Garrett,” the woman says, reaching out her hand to shake his. “We’re going to be great friends. You’ll see.”
Rebecca eyes the woman’s black suit suspiciously. “How do you know our brother?”
“You can trust me. I’m going to take care of everything.”
“What do you mean?” Rebecca asks. But the woman is already leaving before Rebecca can finish the question. They watch her walk around the corner toward the elevators.
“Let’s go outside,” Garrett says, his Coke and the woman forgotten as soon as he sees two boys racing each other down the sidewalk.
“Aunt Heidi will be mad.”
“We’ll just go right there,” he says, pointing at nothing in particular. “Please?”
Rebecca rolls her eyes, but her parents have specifically asked her not to make a scene in the hospital, so she starts toward the glass doors without a word, and Garrett follows behind.
They head down the sidewalk to a small courtyard surrounded by benches in front of the hospital. He sees a pebble lying in the grass and picks it up to examine it.
Rebecca knocks it out of his hand. “Don’t pick stuff up off the ground. That’s gross.”
“It’s just a rock.”
He reaches down to pick it up again and show it to her. After she looks it over, he winds up and throws it as hard as he can, over the birdbath in the middle of the courtyard.
“You could have hit someone!” Rebecca says.
“There’s no one out here!”
“There could have been!”
In the years to come, Garrett will wonder what he was doing when his brother died. What he was thinking about, or if he knew somehow that something big and terrible was happening. He won’t remember that he and his sister were yelling about a rock they had found and never seen again.
He won’t know that anything has happened until later that night. His aunt will drive them to her house, where they’ll eat McDonald’s and watch TV. His parents will finally come to pick them up, and they’ll race to the door only to find different people from the ones they had seen earlier that day. Their parents will take Garrett and Rebecca by the hand and lead them into their aunt’s living room and tell them that Aaron will not be coming home.
The next time Garrett sees Aaron, he is in a tiny blue casket. He had left without his toys or his blanket and without giving his older brother the chance to hold his hand and tell him everything would be okay.