You told me once that I should never ask for anything.
That’s what I was thinking about when I stole our parents’ car--that dumpy old hatchback we both learned to drive in--and I migrated east to follow your path and find you.
No one noticed. Dad didn’t notice anything anymore and Mom, she had baby Sherry to look after. Oh yeah, you’ve got a baby sister, in case you didn’t know. We thought she looked a little bit like you, ‘specially since you and her were the only ones in our family with blue eyes.
You told me once not to trust instincts because they were outdated. You said it was brain that would win battles in the end.
It rained on the day that I left, but that cleared up somewhere east of Los Angeles, past the mopey hilltops. Sky never cleared up, but for a rookie driver like me, anything was better than driving in the rain. Didn’t see the sun again until I reached Nevada. Was this the way you came?
Mom remarried. The new guy, Tom, he’s not so bad, but he doesn’t pay much attention to me, anyway. Sherry’s not his kid but she was born right around the time he showed up, so what’s the difference? He’s got the same kind of face as Dad, but he doesn’t have the sense of humor.
You remember how Dad could make us laugh with nothing but a funny expression? Guess it took a little more for Dad to get me to laugh these days, but he still tried, even in jail. Oh yeah, Dad killed a guy.
You told me once that dogs are the smartest when it comes to death. They always die happy, where they belong, doing what they love.
Mom and Dad were at a bar. A drunk guy came up to Dad and tried to start a fight. Dad fought back. They were outside and when Dad was tired of dealing with the guy—these are Dad’s words—he shoved him back a few feet. Drunk idiot fell off the curb into the road, right in front of a bus.
I stopped outside of Vegas to book a hotel room for the night. The manager found it strange that a teenager was booking a room, but couldn’t turn down cold hard cash. I stole that, too, from Tom. See, Tom was a lawyer, the same lawyer that unsuccessfully tried to keep Dad out of jail. I didn’t think he’d miss a few hundreds from his wallet. Don’t worry, I know what you’re thinking, but the lawyer didn’t sneak in right away with Mom. It was three years later that they married. Even Dad wasn’t surprised by the news.
If you ask me, I think they stopped loving each other after you left.
You told me once, life is not a box of chocolates.
At the hotel I unfolded a map of the United States—the one that used to hang in your room—and I tried to figure out where you went next. You never made any marks on the map, but I’d always see you staring at it like you were plotting a path. The logical idea was that you wanted to get as far east as you could. I tried to draw with my finger on the blue veins of our country which highway you might’ve taken. Ash from my cigarette fell over Wisconsin and I swiped it away.
In the morning, I grabbed a muffin and a coffee from the hotel office and kept going. It was awful hot in Nevada. The old hatchback overheated outside of Utah and I was lucky some family stopped to fill me up with antifreeze. I probably would’ve died out there if they hadn’t stopped. The family looked like we used to, only they had two daughters instead of sons. They offered to let me tag along with them, but I said no. I said I had to do this on my own.
You told me once that the only thing we need in life is to be self-reliant.
I stopped at a diner in Utah when I couldn’t stand hearing the rumble in my belly, and I ordered a burger from this place full of fat truckers and frumpy women. There was a hair in the meat. The cola was lukewarm. I wondered if maybe you stopped at this same place. I asked the waitress if a kid like me had come through here about six years ago.
She laughed and said, honey, I can’t remember a face from six days ago. Six years was a long time.
I wondered what you would look like now, being twenty-two.
Would you have a beard? A girlfriend? Would you have short hair, like always, or would you grow it out like Dad used to? Would you wear the same kind of clothes—that Rolling Stones t-shirt with the lips on it? Would you still be thin as a flagpole or did you gain some weight? It was hard to imagine.
You told me once that fear of change will destroy the world.
To be honest, the fear of change destroyed our parent’s marriage, and I don’t know enough about the world yet to see the bigger effects.
After Utah, in Colorado, I saw snow on the mountains and it reminded me of the first vacation our family took after you left. Like every winter, we went up to that cabin in Lake Tahoe, but without any enthusiasm, it was mostly out of habit. We were robots obeying commands. Literally no one said anything to each other. A whole weekend, we stayed in our rooms. I don’t know why we bothered. After you left, we couldn’t do things the same way as before.
Dad sold the cabin the next year.
Our parents gave it their best. I saw them try. They saw therapists, tried exercising more, made new hobbies, focused on their jobs, and for some of the time it seemed like they might pull through. But they never touched, never kissed, and soon Dad started sleeping in the living room.
You told me once the worst thing we can do is live inside the past.
Maybe that’s why I was chasing after you. While Mom finally moved on, she accidentally left me behind. As soon as I had my license, I left, same as you did. Was it your past you were running from, too? I don’t know why. You had a good past, didn’t you? Did something happen that we didn’t know about?
There was a hotel in Colorado with a mirror over the bed. It was weird to wake up in the morning and think it was you I saw laying on the blankets. I looked a lot like you did at this age. Maybe that was why Mom stopped looking me in the eye.
I smoked a cigarette in a non-smoking room and studied the map. Not the highway lines, but the creases and folds of it, the way it must’ve looked to you on your bedroom wall. We got this map from a gas station in Tahoe, long before you decided to leave. Did you know all along?
You told me once that our hearts come with a fixed amount of beats.
We are ticking time bombs, you said.
In Kansas I saw my first tornado. Some people waved me down under an overpass and told me, stay here kid, tornado’s passing through. We hid there and watched it swerve across the farmland from a distance until it passed. I met an old woman there who said she’d lost three houses to tornados in her lifetime. I told her she should probably move to a different state. She laughed and said, sweetie, a house is not a home, a home is where your heart settles. Kansas is my home, she said, and she asked me where mine was. I told her it left when I was ten years old and I’m out trying to find it.
We were friends, weren’t we?
Remember that night we rode our bikes to the beach and made a bonfire out of garbage, and you dared me to swim in the ocean and I said no, and you double-dog dared me, and so we did it together?
Remember that camping trip we went on and when Mom and Dad were asleep we snuck off into the wilderness and you told me where babies came from?
Remember all that time we spent together?
Room 16 of a weathered hotel in Missouri was decorated with framed paintings of horses. I had to smoke in the bathroom because the room had smoke detectors, and there was a painting of a horse over the toilet, and someone drew sunglasses over its eyes. I wouldn’t have thought twice about it, but the artist had signed their name on the earpiece. Your name.
No, I said, coughing smoke. It couldn’t be.
Were you once in this same room, smoking these same cigarettes? I sat on the toilet and tried to picture you here. The chances seemed slim that I’d actually taken the same route as you, but maybe we thought the same, being brothers and all. I cracked open the frame and took that painting of the horse.
You told me once we’re all different shades of the same cloud of atoms.
I drove through Illinois with that painting on the passenger seat. In a way, it was like having you with me. Remember the first day you had your driver’s permit? You took me for a drive to the top of Emery Hill and showed me the city at sunset. The smog was pink and beautiful below us, like a cotton candy fog. You gave me my first cigarette and said, even good habits are bad habits. I liked nothing more than being in a car with you. We really could have gone anywhere.
A rainstorm slowed me down in Ohio. I got dinner in a small town with a big name, a celebratory steak. The restaurant was playing country music. The interior reminded me of our Tahoe cabin. Someone broke into the hatchback while I was eating and stole the radio and my backpack.
When I was buying new clothes at a thrift shop the next day, I met a girl named Charlotte with a pretty Southern accent. She worked there and she helped me pick out clothes. We smoked a cigarette in the alley during her break. When she asked me where I was from, I said I couldn’t remember. I’d been on the road for ten days. I’ve thought of running away before, she said. I’m not running away, I said, because there was nothing there to start with. She asked me what I was looking for and I told her. She had to go back to work, but she said, good luck and I hope you find him.
You told me once that love is being alone.
In West Virginia I started to wonder if maybe you didn’t want to be found. I grew worried that this whole trip was for nothing—not because I wouldn’t find you, but because you’d wish I hadn’t. I wasn’t sure I could take that kind of rejection.
A late-night flat tire in Virginia really caught me by surprise. The stars were beautiful and I tried to count them to pass the time, wishing I’d brought a tent. Around midnight, a trucker pulled over and helped replace the flat with the spare. Forgot his name, but he looked like Santa Clause if Santa Clause got sacked for breaking and entering and spent ten years in prison. Nice guy. He led me to the nearest truck stop and pulled some strings with the mechanics to put a brand new tire on the car. Before he left, he asked me about the horse with the sunglasses in my passenger seat. I told him about you and I said you were leaving me clues to follow you. I’ve seen some work like that, he said, in a couple hotels up north.
Sure enough, he was right. The hotel where I’d found the first horse one was part of a chain, and all their rooms had the same horse paintings on the walls, with the same one over each toilet.
I booked a room in Maryland. I could feel you in the room. You’d been here. Room 16, the same room you booked at the first horse-themed hotel, the same age you were when you left and the age I was now. Your name was on the earpiece of the sunglasses you sketched over the horse’s brown face in the bathroom.
You told me once your only goal in life is to leave one everlasting mark.
Was this your mark? Some graffiti?
I didn’t know if I was close, but I knew that I was getting closer. You’d come this way, you’d made this trip. How far north did you go? I thought you didn’t like cold weather. Maybe that was why you left in the summer.
Mom and Dad sent me away that summer to stay with our Aunt in Los Angeles. Do you remember her, the one with all the cactus plants? I could understand they needed space to mourn. When I came back for school, we didn’t talk much about you, but we didn’t talk much about anything at all.
I marked all the locations of this hotel chain on the east coast, then filled the gas tank and continued north into Pennsylvania. I didn’t stop at every hotel because I wasn’t always tired, so I skipped the one in Scranton, though I did stop at a restaurant to order a plate of chili cheese fries.
Sometimes I could smell the ocean. I drove with the windows down.
You told me once the only thing we trust is a lie.
Do you remember that time I crashed my bike into a fire hydrant? I broke my arm. Mom and Dad freaked out because we didn’t have health insurance. Mom worked extra shifts for almost six months to pay for that. I told them I’d been racing you home from the park. They told me you had nothing to do with it. They told me I should never blame anyone else for my mistakes.
Why didn’t you come to the hospital?
While passing through New York one afternoon, a cop pulled me over for speeding. He looked at my license and studied my face, then went back to his car for a while. I was running out of money. I wondered if they’d tell Mom where I was, and I wondered what she’d do about it. Knowing I was so close to finding you, I didn’t want to have to give up now.
The cop came back. You’re far from home, he said. I’m looking for my brother, I told him. You know your parents put out a missing person’s bulletin for you, he said, and they flagged this car as stolen. I told him I wasn’t surprised. Afraid you’ll have to come with me, he said, we’ve got to get you back to your parents.
You told me once that impulses are never misleading.
I sped away from the scene like a criminal. The cop ran back to his car and gave chase. You should have seen it. It was like something from a movie. Your cool horse painting was flapping in the wind. I never felt so free, it felt like I was flying. I swerved around cars going ninety. The old hatchback had never been pushed like this before. I knew I wouldn’t be able to get away.
I was ten miles from the Connecticut border when the car died.
Four cop cars surrounded me on the side of the road, their sirens wailing in the sunset. I was handcuffed and brought to the nearest police station and the old smoking hatchback probably wound up in some junkyard impound. I only wished I’d been able to take the horse with me.
I’m not sure what the process was, but it took a day for them to put me on a plane and send me home with a chaperone, a young cop that was probably only a few years older than you. He said, this is costing your parents a lot of dough. I told him I didn’t want to talk about it. I said, I would’ve found my brother if they’d only let me go. The cop said I was too young to understand, that people can’t just go around taking and doing whatever they want.
I told him that we should never ask for anything.
Mom and Tom picked me up from the airport. Neither of them was happy to see me and Mom didn’t even try to hug me or anything. I’d been gone for two weeks. In silence, we drove home and Mom told me to go wait in my room. Nothing looked different. I tried to sketch a horse wearing sunglasses, but I’ve always been a lousy artist. I thought about Charlotte from the thrift store in Ohio.
Later, like a prisoner, Mom brought my food on a tray. She stood in the doorway and watched me eat. You need a shower, she said. I wish you wouldn’t have run off like that, she said, calmly. I was hoping you would’ve grown out of this by now. I told her how close I’d been to finding you. She started crying. I told her about how I could smell the Atlantic Ocean and how it reminded me of you. Just stop it, she said, please stop talking. This is crazy, she said, and she closed the door.
You told me once that I was special.
There will never be another person like you, you said.
I could hear Mom and Tom arguing that night in their room across the hall. He had a deep, trembling voice like a lion. She sounded like a deflating beach ball. He always won their arguments.
In the morning, Tom came into my room.
You need help, he said. I asked him what with. You have to give this up, he said, and he looked at the half-finished sketches of bespectacled horses on my desk. It’s not healthy, he said, and it’s making your mother sick. Tell her I know where my brother is, I said. Tell her we could find him together. Tom shook his head and told me there was no such thing. No such thing as what, I asked. He said, you don’t have a brother. Don’t you realize? You’ve never had a brother. You invented him when you were a child.”
You told me once, when I was young, that we’d be friends forever. It was the lie I took as truth.
I guess I’ve known all along that you weren’t real, but I still thought I could find you when you left.