Julie sat in her bedroom, the sound of people moving about the house an oddity to her ears. She had gotten so use to being alone, with only her memories to keep her company. Now there were people, actually living beings invading her space. It was an odd feeling. Part of her wanted to run into the hallway and scream for them to all leave, to leave her alone with her past. The other part took comfort in knowing that life surrounded her once more, and not just the ghosts of the dead.
She heard a knock at her door.
"It’s open." She looked up, her mind still in a slight daze.
Roy peaked his head inside the room, hesitant to enter. She nodded, and he stepped in.
"I just wanted to make sure you were okay." He sat on the end of her bed next to her, his hands folded in his lap, his eyes taking in the familiar surroundings.
"I’m fine." She laid back, letting out a loud sigh. "How are you holding up? Heard the nurse gave you a pretty good beating."
"I’ll live." He grew silent, his eyes falling on her dresser.
She sat up, and saw that he was looking at Brian’s picture.
"You miss him?" His voice shook a little as he spoke.
"Yeah." She walked to the dresser, picking up the picture. She handed it to her cousin.
"It feels like a lifetime ago, doesn’t it?" His eyes were glued to Brian’s face. "You weren’t there were you?" He looked up. "When it happened?"
She shook her head.
She had stayed on the dock, sunbathing with Carla when the guys took out the boat. At the time she hadn’t had a great feeling about letting Brian go, but how many other times had they all followed that same routine? Almost every weekend during the warm months it was hanging out on the dock or taking out the boat. Brian had practically grown up on that speedboat.
Julie sat down, taking the picture back.
"How did it happen?" Her fingers traced Brian’s face over the smooth glass.
"I don’t know." Roy looked towards the window, then the door, but never at her. "We were just hanging out, talking. Then Brian was at the front of the boat. We were moving, and I guess we must have hit a wave or something, because the next second he was gone." Roy paused, his hand gripping the bed spread. "Then the next thing we saw was a red cloud forming in the water behind the boat."
Julie knew the rest. She had seen Roy and Paul diving off of the boat, searching for Brian. She could remember the fear twisting in her gut as she watched, waited for her brother to break the surface, okay. He didn’t.
Paul had been the one to pull him from the water, and the first thing Julie had noticed was that her brother’s right arm didn’t look right. It seemed, from the elbow down, to just be a tangled, red mess of flesh. There was no hand, just this stringy flesh.
His head had been hit as well. The doctors said that was what had killed him. They had retraced his actions before dying for her parents, and she had been unlucky enough to overhear.
Brian had tried to block the propeller with his hand, but it hadn’t worked, and he had been pulled into the swirling blades, one of them connecting with his skull, cutting off the left half of his scalp and cracking his skull.
Roy stood, not looking at her.
"I’m sorry." His voice gave away the fact that he was crying.
"For what?" Julie reached out, placing her hand on his.
"I should have been watching him." He looked down at her, his face streaked with tears, his lips trembling. "I should have kept him from going out on the front of the boat. I was... I was to caught up in Paul. I wasn’t paying attention."
"Brian knew what he was doing. He wasn’t a little kid Roy. He was a teenager." She gave his hand a gentle squeeze. "So were you. It was an accident."
Roy nodded, but he couldn’t speak. He leaned down and kissed Julie on the forehead, then left the room, leaving her alone with the vivid memory of her brother’s death now newly refreshed in her memory.
She stood, placing the picture back on the dresser. She couldn’t take her eyes off of her brother’s face. The picture had been taken a year before he had died. He was only fifteen, she was seventeen. Still, he looked older. He had gotten so tall over the past year, and his face had seemed to fill out more, loosing the softness of childhood, replaced by the refined edges of a growing man. His brown hair had been long, falling in front of his face in strands, blocking his left eye from the camera’s view.
She left her room. It suddenly felt to small. She needed space, life.
She rushed to the main staircase, through the kitchen, and out onto the back porch.
The lake air hit her, and she realized she had been holding her breath. She let the cool, slightly humid breeze enter her, fill her lungs. Instantly she felt calm. The sounds of the lake, the birds and frogs, blocked out her thoughts.
She leaned against the wooden railing, closed her eyes, and let herself vanish into the dusk that surrounded her.
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