I Don't Know What I Did Last Summer

I sat with my pencil poised over the piece of blank paper and stared blankly at the words written on the chalkboard. “Write two paragraphs about what you did this past summer.”

What did I do last summer?

Around me the soft scratchings of lead tracing letters set a counterpoint harmony to the buzzing of the fluorescent lights above. Somewhere a faucet dripped a nanosecond ahead of the ticking clock, which set my eye to twitching in a third off-beat rhythm. The rasp of my own breathing resonated against my eardrums like the storm I felt rising inside my chest.

What did I do last summer?

At first there was emptiness. My mind was as blank as the paper. The memories hiding in shadows darker than the blackboard, diving like hissing vampires into the recesses of my thoughts so I couldn’t drag them out into the light. Then…

Slowly.

Fleeting images.

Waking up the morning of the school’s Spring Festival, excited and nervous. Hurrying to get dressed so my Dad could drop me off to run my class’s Fishing for Prizes booth. Only…

He wasn’t home.

My aunt giddily explaining that he’d had to rush Mom to the hospital because my brother was ready to come into the world. My uncle apologizing that he wouldn’t be taking me to the school festival because my Dad could call any moment to have them bring me to the hospital. Didn’t I want to meet him?

Something inside me had kindled in that moment. Beyond the simple feeling of disappointment. He was a full week late and somehow, I became certain, he’d chosen that day of all days on purpose.

I heard him for the first time, crying in the background, as my Dad apologized over the phone and tried to convince me how I’d feel differently once I’d met him. The ragged, sharp cries, however, cut through my head like a knife and set my teeth on edge, so I was pretty sure he was wrong.

Small, frenzied waves washed through me as we rode to the hospital. Excitement, then disappointment. Joy, then sorrow. Anticipation, but also…

Something new.

Something I had no word for at the time.

It burned an icy hole in the center of my heart.

I tapped the pencil on the white paper, leaving a single small dot of lead amongst the empty blue lines. Concentrating on that last memory, I pushed it to dredge up that unnamed feeling. I turned it in my mind like a gemologist studying a previously unknown jewel. I tasted the tartness of it. Smelled its bitterness. Felt its edges.

It had gotten weaker at the sight of my newborn baby brother and then strengthened ten-fold as I gazed into those stormy blue eyes. It warred with the intense feeling of possessiveness that blossomed as my Dad placed him in my arms.

Mine.

My brother.

Protectiveness also entered the hospital room as one of the nurses walked in and tried to take him away. My Dad had to convince her to give me a few more minutes to get used to him. She left with a promise to return in fifteen minutes.

Not time enough.

Did my Dad sense it?

That unknown feeling that spiked again as I looked at my Dad holding my Mom’s hand.

Tiny fingers wrapped themselves around my own, and in doing so, wrapped themselves around that cold fire in my heart and put it out. Emptiness rushed in to fill the hole it had burned. Then, just as quickly, love rushed in to fill the emptiness.

Then.

It overflowed.

Through me.

Out of me.

To…

Him.

And across the room, to those dark, red-brown eyes watching me from the hospital bed. Eyes filled suddenly with hope, pride, and a rapidly shrinking echo of pain already forgotten.

She was as pale as the bleached paper that sat on the desk in front of me months later. The empty paper rose back into view as if called back into reality in a magician’s trick. I stroked the smoothness and whiteness of it, closing my eyes. For a moment, the lines between now and back then are confused.

The images leap forward.

The hospital room was gone, and I found myself holding a plastic bottle filled with warm, white liquid.

Milk?

No.

Formula, my thoughts whisper.

I looked around to find myself in the living room, in my own house, sitting in my Mom’s favorite red velvet chair. A thin cloth blanket stretched across my lap and a small towel slung over my shoulder. For the spit up, my thoughts whispered and elsewhere in my mind I recognized that I’d done this before.

“Here sweetheart,” my Mom murmured, leaning down over me to place my brother gently onto my lap.

He seemed bigger, heavier, cheeks chubbier, eyes brighter, deep red hair longer. I ran my fingers through those curls as I cradled his head in the palm of my hand and with the other placed the rubber nipple of the bottle to his pink, cupid lips. I smiled proudly as he began to suck the formula down in loud gulps, squeezing his eyes shut in perfect trust.

My Mom stood a moment longer watching with a soft, almost sad smile.

The memory that was me didn’t notice the sadness, too preoccupied with the small person snuggling into my lap, drinking from the bottle I had offered.

Her shadow moved across us, and she sat down heavily into the twin chair beside me. The chair gave out a low creak of complaint and I looked over to find her smiling back at me with tired eyes. Her skin was paler than in the hospital, shiny and almost glowing as if the light inside of her were trying to escape. But I didn’t notice any of it back then.

Nor had I noticed how the sadness leaked from her smile into her eyes as they glided slowly over the two of us, as if tracing every line, every shadow, etching the image of us into her mind like a polaroid picture. Memorizing our colors, our sounds, our scents. She had let out a soft sigh then as my brother let go of the bottle and I carefully lifted him to my shoulder to burp him.

They both had fallen asleep then.

The memories jumped again, like my Dad fast forwarding through a video tape to the not-so-scary parts. I sped through feedings and diaper changings, dangling toys and shaking rattles, failed and successful attempts at wrapping my brother in blankets like a burrito. I wiped away drool and tears, laughed at burps, and cleaned up spittle. We giggled, his blue eyes sparkling against red, chubby cheeks dotted with dimples, and those eyes gazed so deeply into mine that I felt I’d fall in and drown in them.

He got sick during his baptism and soiled his beautiful white outfit so horribly my Mom collapsed into inconsolable tears. My Dad watched her with eyes filled with confusion and a touch of fear.

I didn’t notice then.

Watching, remembering, the emotions flood in and the storm intensifies, winds of fear and confusion roaring in my ears. Waves of sadness and guilt crash over me and threaten to drown me. A crack of thunder…

I found myself knocked back into reality, staring down at the broken tip of the pencil in my hand. I brushed away the broken tip and tried to catch my breath, but a lump had formed in my throat and a tightness had begun to constrict my chest. Oxygen came in choked gasps, and I glanced furtively around the room to make sure no one noticed. I checked the clock, praying enough time had passed that the teacher would proclaim the activity over and come around to collect the papers.

That white paper, empty but for two dark spots of lead amid the blue lines. There was a small hole, like the one in my heart, that I must have torn with the pencil tip before it broke.

The hands on the clock had hardly moved.

The red hand ticked slowly through time as I tried to fight the threat of the tears gathering in my eyes. With each tick, the memories dragged me closer to the abyss I felt lurked in the shadowed parts of my mind. There was something there I didn’t want to remember. Something that held onto the rest of the summer and kept me from remembering.

I tried to force myself to think of other summers.

Disney with my Mom, Dad, Aunts, and Uncles.

Pool parties with my friends.

Summers filled with fun and laughter, family and friends. Road trips and amusement parks. Lakes and mountains and trips to the movies and…

One by one the memories pop like bubbles or shimmer out of existence like a mirage. Like a mirage they began to show me the dangers that lurked beneath their illusions. The monster’s eyes began to glow from the abyss in my mind, and I could feel its cold grip tightening around my heart.

My throat closed. My mouth went dry. I wished for the desert to engulf me, to dry me out so that the gathering storm might subside. That the tears that had already begun to loosen from my eyes would dry before fully released.

I don’t know what I did last summer, I wrote then at the top of the paper. The letters shimmered through the blur of tears as they grew too heavy to hold in. The pencil kept moving, writing other letters, other words, though the thoughts in my mind were no longer coherent, lost in the shadows that lured me ever closer to the abyss and the monster within.

But the words flowed smoothly onto the paper, filling it with images of my brother’s first day. Then weeks. His first month.

I think then, I know what that new emotion was.

Jealousy.

I choked on it for a moment as it tried to rise from the depths of me where it had lived since that first day. Forgotten. Abandoned.

I think I was jealous of him at first, the letters formed next, and I added, but I realized I didn’t need to be. I filled the second paragraph with words like happiness, joy, laughter, smiles, protection.

The pencil stopped at that last. Protection.

It caught in my throat like a fish bone, and I choked again. The tears let loose at last, and the pencil continued to write three more words into the third paragraph.

The final chapter of my summer.

I couldn’t read them at first, through the tears, through the storm that enveloped me.

I didn’t need to.

They formed the monster, and the abyss. They were the shadows that hid the rest of that summer from my view.

They are etched into my heart with indelible ink even still.

I don’t know what I did that summer after my world fell down around me. I simply don’t remember.

I do know that I protected my brother. I held him close, kept him fed, changed diapers, played with him, sang and read to him. I taught him all the things I’ve learned. I’ve shared all my memories, even the ones born from those three words, that single sentence.

That simple paper's The End.