Chapter 3 - Your Brother
Mom sat down. Naomi stayed standing. Neither answered. Then I looked at Naomi, and she laughed once — a terrible sound.
"Mom. Tell her."
"Please," I said.
"You wanted to keep it buried for forty years," Naomi said. "You don't get another five minutes."
I sat across from Mom. "Who is Everett?"
She didn't answer right away. She looked at the bracelet in my hand. Then she said, "Your brother."
I actually looked toward the hallway, like someone else might walk in. "My what?"
"Your brother." Mom's voice barely held together. "Naomi was a twin."
Some sentences take a while to actually land in your brain. That was one of them. I just stared at Naomi. She had her arms folded tight across her chest.
"His name was Everett."
I looked back at Mom. "And where is he?"
Her mouth trembled. "He died."
My mind was spinning trying to catch up. "How old was he?"
"Four months."
I remember being furious before I even understood why. "Naomi had a twin brother who died, and neither of us ever knew?"
Mom closed her eyes. "Your father wanted to tell you both. When he got sick."
Our dad had been gone eleven years. That somehow made me angrier. "So everyone who could've told us decided not to?"
"Pretty much," Naomi said.
"That's not fair, Naomi," Mom said.
Naomi's voice sharpened instantly. "Fair? Your husband wanted to tell us the truth for over a decade, and you're calling me unfair?"
"He wanted to tell you both."
"Then why didn't he?"
"Because I asked him not to." Mom twisted the blanket in her hands. "I couldn't."
Naomi shook her head, disbelieving. "You couldn't say his name?"
"No."
"So you pretended he never existed."
"I did not pretend."
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"To us, you did. For forty years, Mom."
Mom started crying. Naomi didn't move toward her. Neither did I.
