“I’m pretty sure it was this one, right?” Patrick was saying, backpedaling to get a better look. “It’s been forever, huh?”
Emma moved her chin just slightly. Beside a pile of garbage bags a few pigeons picked at someone’s leftover pizza, and Patrick took a seat on the top stair, stubbing the toe of his shoe against a crumpled cigarette on the ground.
“I guess I wasn’t around much when we lived here.”
“I know,” Emma said, and the way she said it—so quietly, as much an accusation as an affirmation—made Patrick glance over at her.
“Hey, I was all the way in California,” he said. “Just wait and see how often you race home once you go off to college.”
Emma sat down beside him on the stoop, her bare legs crossed in front of her. “Annie was closer, though,” she said, and it was a struggle to keep her voice light. “She was in DC all that time, and she only ever visited at Thanksgiving and Christmas. And Nate had a job then, with sick days and vacation days and no schoolwork, and he never came home either.”
“That’s what you get for being the baby,” Patrick said, leaning into her with his shoulder. But when she didn’t smile, his face fell too. “Come on, it wasn’t so bad.”
She shrugged. “You guys all had each other.”
“And you had Mom and Dad,” he said. “Still do, in fact.”
“Lucky me,” she said, and Patrick laughed.
“It’s your great misfortune to have gotten stuck with an entire flock of odd ducks,” he said with a grin. “But it could have been a lot worse.”
“How?”
“We could have all been boring.”
This time Emma couldn’t help laughing. “Or stupid.”
“Or average,” Patrick said, widening his eyes.
“Hey,” she said. “Don’t knock average. That’s my tribe.”
“Nah,” he said. “You’re one of us. You just don’t know it yet.”
Emma looked at him sideways. “Why do you think they moved so much?” she asked. “Those years when I was little?”
She realized she was holding her breath as she waited for an answer, but she couldn’t help it. Her parents had lived most of their lives in North Carolina, and had now spent the past eight years in upstate New York. They were the types who preferred to be settled for long periods of time, who liked to let their books accumulate a layer of dust. But just after Emma was born, they’d done short stints, first in Washington DC and then later in Manhattan, leaving each city after only a few years. The pattern had always struck her as odd, a restless spike of activity in an otherwise level existence. It was almost as if they’d been chased north somehow, and it had always seemed to Emma that there was something haunted in their flight. Only now she knew why. Now the ghost had a name. And a part of her suddenly wanted to hear Patrick say it.
“Don’t know,” he said, flicking his eyes away. “Change of scenery, I guess.”
“It just seems kind of strange, them moving around so often like that.”
He shrugged. “I suppose they had their reasons.”
“So then why’d they finally stop?”
“Stop moving?” he asked, then smiled. “Because you told them to.”
This, to Emma, didn’t seem like an awful lot to go on. “So?”
“You don’t remember?” Patrick said, looking off down the street, his eyes faraway. “You got first pick of rooms in the house upstate, since the rest of us were mostly gone at that point, and you walked straight up to the smallest one, the one with the twin beds …” His voice seemed to catch on the phrase, and he swallowed hard before continuing. “… And you pointed at it and said it was yours. That it felt like home. And when Mom and Dad asked you why, you said it was because you wouldn’t get lonely there.”
Emma tried hard not to let her face slip. “So?” she said again, though with less conviction this time.
Patrick turned to look at her, as if he only just now realized she was sitting beside him, and there was something in his eyes she hadn’t seen before, something more genuine than the guy with the mind like a calculator, something sadder than the good-natured brother she’d always known. And somehow this was comforting. Somehow it made her feel just a little bit less alone.
He shook his head and then stood abruptly. “Nothing,” he said, adopting his usual goofy grin, allowing the moment to be snuffed out as quickly as it had begun.
Overhead the sky had turned flat and gray, and the trees above them shuddered beneath the first curtain of rain. Emma held out her palm to catch the drops clinging to the fire escape above.
“We’ve already had forty inches of rain this year,” Patrick said, hopping down a few steps, as if determined to return to his usual self. “That puts us ahead of the average by over ten inches. Do you realize that the volume of rain in Manhattan just for the month of June would be enough to fill—”
“Patrick,” Emma said quietly, cutting him off.
“Sorry,” he said, tipping his head back to squint at the sky. There was something about the way he was standing—the sun failing above him and the rain coming down fast now, the smell of the puddles and the cars splashing past—that slipped the heavy bolt of her memory, and Emma looked up at him through narrowed eyes.
“Do you remember that day in the park?” she asked, still trolling her mind for the details. “It was pouring, and nobody would take me, so I cried until you finally agreed.”
Patrick looked at her from beneath wet eyelashes. “And we were the only people in the whole damn park.”
“And we played in the puddles by the duck pond.”
“And I tried to teach you about the ducks.”
“But I wouldn’t listen.”
“Which just shows how far you’ve come,” he teased, reaching out a hand to pull her up from the step. Her clothes were damp now, but there was something leisurely about the shower. A few people scurried past to duck into coffee shops or pubs, but neither of them seemed in much of a hurry to find shelter.
“See?” Patrick said, smiling at her as he started toward the corner. “I wasn’t the worst brother in the world.”
Emma hesitated for a moment before following him, thinking of her other brother, the one she’d never had the chance to know. She hadn’t, until this moment, realized that she wouldn’t tell Patrick about what she’d discovered in the attic. There was still too much she didn’t understand, and it seemed as good a plan as any to act now and think later, to start moving in the right direction and save the questions for when she got there. She wasn’t sure exactly how it happened, but suddenly the quest to uncover a secret had begun to feel like something secretive too.