Every Other Weekend(113)

“Yes, sir.”

He gave me a nod, then he walked over to where Jeremy was dozing on the couch and relayed the same info. He left Jeremy with my phone and reminded him that I wasn’t to use it. If Jeremy opened his eyes, I didn’t see it, but he did take the phone.

Then Dad was gone.

I think I waited a full minute before moving toward Jeremy, but my blood was still pounding in my ears and it was possible my sense of time was off.

“Hey.” I kicked at the lump that was my sleeping brother.

“What!” Jeremy rolled over to glare at me.

“I need my phone.”

Jeremy tucked it under his pillow and started to lie down again. “Yeah, well, good luck with that.”

“I’m not messing around. Give it to me or I’ll take it from you.”

One eye opened. Then the other. Jeremy sat up, pulling my phone out and holding it in his lap. “Maybe you aren’t getting it, but you seriously screwed up more than your life last night.” He shoved me back a step without standing. “You’re always talking about what Greg would do when calling out me or Dad. What do you think he’d say to you right now, huh?” He shook his head and glanced down at my phone, swiping the screen to unlock it. “Forget it. I’m sick of you always acting like everyone else is the problem. Grow up, Adam. And here.” He tapped the phone a couple times and tossed it onto the coffee table. “Here’s your stupid voice mail from your equally stupid girlfri—”

“Adam, Adam, Adam.” Greg’s half-teasing voice started playing and Jeremy and I both froze. “Why do you even have a phone? So, listen, I’m bringing another dog home and I haven’t found a home for Baloo, so obviously Mom and Dad can’t know.”

Jeremy’s gaze lifted to mine, his mouth opened like he wanted to ask a question but didn’t want to risk talking over our brother’s voice.

“I need you to move Baloo to the other cage in the barn, the one with the blue dog bed. But watch his leg, because he’ll bite you if you pull his stitches. Maybe get Jeremy to help—”

Jeremy’s face twitched and he sat forward, his hand drifting toward but not touching the phone when Greg said his name.

Caught between the memory like I always was and the sight of Jeremy hearing Greg’s voice, I didn’t move as the rest of the message played. I didn’t even stop him when he replayed it.

“How do you have this?” he asked when it ended the second time, but what he really meant was how do you have this but you’ve never played it for me?

I took a slow step toward him, intending to pick up the phone and reassure myself that the voice mail was still safe and saved, but the second I moved, Jeremy looked up. His eyes were flooded, and he simultaneously looked like I’d given him the greatest gift of his life and tried to keep it from him all at once.

My stomach twisted. It wasn’t like I’d set out to keep it from him. After Greg died and I realized it was the last message he’d ever send me, I’d listened to it over and over again until it became a ritual. Whenever I thought about Jeremy and how he might want to hear it, I’d tell myself that he probably had a saved voice mail of his own.

But watching Jeremy replay Greg’s message for the third time, I saw instantly how wrong I’d been.

I sat down next to my brother, seeing the way his eyes swam as he got to hear our brother again. “Jer, I’m sorry.”

Jeremy nodded, not taking his eyes from the phone. The air I drew into my lungs turned thick and heavy, as though it fought every breath I took, not wanting to be inside me anymore than I did. And I didn’t know how to make it better.

“I should have played it for you from the start.”

He sniffed, then rubbed his eyes with the back of his arm, and nodded again. Or he started to nod but the gesture morphed into something more ambiguous. “We were better with him, the three of us, you know?”

I sucked my lips in, nodding when the pressure built behind my eyes and the words wouldn’t come.

“He knew what to say to you.” Jeremy turned to me, his eyes still wet. He slapped his palm with the back of the other hand to punctuate his next words. “Like, every time, he knew what to say to you. That’s not me. I don’t know how to talk to you. If it’d been me instead of him gone—” He choked on his own words and forced his eyes wide as he glanced away. “This wouldn’t have happened.” He made a gesture that encompassed not just Dad’s apartment and the fact that our family was living apart, but also me and him and the way our relationship had frayed over the past couple years. “He’d never have let it get like this, and I tried, but I’m not him. I don’t know how to be him with Mom or Dad. Or you.” He shook his head. “You think I don’t get that, that you’re the only one who’s smart enough to see how much better he was at everything, but I know.”

It was so wrong that I wanted to laugh, and the sound that came out of me was much harsher, more broken than a laugh. “And you think I know what to say to you? To any of you?” Jeremy wasn’t the only one who came up short. And it wasn’t that I thought I was so much smarter than him by realizing how far short we fell compared to Greg, it was that I hoped he didn’t feel it, too.

Because it felt like this gut-twisting emptiness. The grief was bad enough, but knowing that Greg had left behind a role that Jeremy and I were expected to fill for each other—one we couldn’t possibly take on—was sometimes worse in a way.