Emma nodded and picked her head up off my shoulder. The air was cool. She shivered and hugged her elbows.
“It’s hard for him.” She wasn’t touching me at all anymore, and her voice sounded strange. “It’s hard for both of them. I guess that means it’s supposed to be hard for me too, but I can’t even feel it the right way, you know? You’re the only brother I’ve ever had.”
I stared at my socks. They were tarry from the shingles, stuck all over with little pieces of grit. “Could we please not talk about this?”
Emma took a deep breath and turned to face me. “I’m tired of not talking about it. Have you not noticed that everyone in this town is desperately committed to pretending that nothing is wrong?”
I nodded, but I had to resist an urge to point out that sometimes it’s just so much easier that way. I scraped at the shingles with my fingers and didn’t say anything.
Emma crossed her arms over her chest. “You looked a lot like him.”
I hunched my shoulders without meaning to. She was talking about the brother she should have had, and everything about him, even the little things, made me feel heavy and sort of numb.
She just went on in a soft, dreamy voice. “He was blond, I think, like you. I know that he had blue eyes because you did too, for a while. But then it was like the blue just wore out. Or trickled off or something. Maybe there was a spell or a charm, but it faded, and one day the blue was gone, and there you were.”
“But you don’t actually remember what he was like?”
Emma looked down at the backs of her hands, scowling like she was trying hard to picture something. “I was really young,” she said finally. “I can’t always tell the difference between before and after. I’ll remember some detail and I can’t even tell if I’m remembering him or you. The thing I remember best is a pair of scissors. Mom had a pair of scissors that she tied on a ribbon over the crib. They were pretty.”
I thought about all the Old World superstitions. Tricks to guard the livestock and protect the house. It was obvious, more and more. They didn’t work.
Emma sighed. “I guess I don’t remember him at all,” she said finally. “I just remember the things Mom did to keep him from being stolen.”
She pulled one knee up so she could hook an arm around it. Her hair was starting to come down from the knot and she tugged at it, looking lonely and sad as a lighthouse. Sad as a nun.
I wanted to tell her that I loved her, and not in the complicated way I loved our parents, but in a simple way I never had to think about. I loved her like breathing.
