LOCKET

Bridget Pierce

12th Grade • Oak Park River Forest High School

This summer, my cousin came back from Juvie. We received a call from my aunt late in the afternoon. The nonchalance of her cigarette stained voice wafted into the living room as Mom, Dad, and I huddled around the phone. "Jake?" Mom asked, "already?"

Mom's face crumbled. She took a deep breath. "Tell him to visit us soon," she said.

When I was ten, Jake showed up on our doorstep with a busted lip and an offer to mow the lawn for a week. Mom pulled him into our house, Dad cleaned the wound on his lip, and I made sure to remember to set an extra place at the table. Jake woke up at six a.m the next morning, but my dad had gotten up uncharacteristically early and had already taken care of the yard work. I remember being stirred awake by the sounds of footsteps across the creaky flooring of our house. I peeked my head out of my bedroom and peered into the living room.

I watched Dad put his arm around Jake's shoulders, "you don't have to earn a place in this house."

I heard a broken inhale and Jake began to shake. Silently, I closed my bedroom door on the sound of Jake’s sobs and snuck back into bed.

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Jake never explained why he came to our house in the middle of the night with a split lip and a red stain on the crisp white of his school uniform collar, and I never asked. Instead, we spent the week side by side with our knees knocking, playing video games, and watching reruns of old black and white T.V. shows. We gorged on junk food and I almost choked on a french fry from laughing too much at Jake’s horrible impression of one of the snotty old detectives on the show we were watching.

At the end of the week, I awoke in the middle of the night still lying on the couch and surrounded by empty cookie tins. A pink blanket was draped over my shoulders, and I had felt the fading touch of someone kissing my forehead before whispering, "goodbye."

That next morning my breathing seemed to echo off the walls of the house. I turned on the T.V. to watch the same show Jake and I had found so funny the day before, but none of the jokes seemed to land. I was alone.

My parents don't talk about my older brother often. I was seven. We got the phone call in the morning and suddenly I no longer had a brother. It didn’t rain at Jamie's funeral like it does in the movies. But I cried until my body didn’t have a drop of water left to spare me. Jamie had been sixteen. Four years older than Jake.

Jake is the only one who offers me his memories of my brother.

Once, in the fall, we were outside kicking around a soccer ball. I had managed to sidestep Jake and had landed a smooth shot into our makeshift goal.

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Jake smiled, "Your brother always beat me, too."

I felt the wind whip through my hair, and for a second, I remembered my older brother's soccer cleats sitting in the doorway, tracking mud into the house. I have carefully stored every memory Jake has gifted to me. They are dearer to me than the dainty silver locket Dad gave me on my 12th birthday. More precious than the gold barrettes Mom insists I only wear for fancy dinners.

Last year on October 30th, an unsuspecting Tuesday filled with long hollow silences from my normally chatty parents, Jake landed on our doorstep. He waved to my parents who were sitting pensively at the dining table and then motioned me towards the kitchen. He opened his backpack and set a lily-white box on the marble tile of the kitchen island. I opened it. Inside revealed a small cupcake with orange frosting and bat-shaped sprinkles. My gaze shot up.

He looked bashful. “It’s all I could find," he said while scratching the back of his neck. "It's perfect."

Together, we stuck a candle shaped like a 2 and another shaped like a 1 into the top of the cupcake. When Jake lit the stems of the waxy 21, my eyes began to water. "Happy Birthday, Jamie," I whispered, and I blew out the twinkling double flames.

It was Christmas the last time we saw Jake. He had been staying with us for a couple days, and the night before, I had heard him on the phone with his father. Snippets of their conversation, as small and indecipherable as paper gone

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through the shredder, had slipped under my door and into my room. It was another one of Uncle Richie's angry drunk monologues.

That morning when Jake came into the dining room, his eyes were wine rimmed, and his jaw was tightly clenched. He didn't speak a word all throughout breakfast. Still, the three of us tried to make pleasant conversation, and once the pan of blueberry pancakes was empty, we circled around the Christmas tree. Jake lingered in the back. "Come and sit," my dad had said, pulling a ribbon wrapped box into his lap. Jake's eyes widened, he looked startled by this proposition. "I think I need to leave." He inched further away from us. "Don't leave now, we all got you something," my mom said, riffling through the gifts and trying to find the one we had picked out for Jake. "No, I need to leave." He turned around and grabbed his coat from the banister. "Jake, wait," I said, standing up.

He whipped around, his expression was dark, "No. Okay? I don't belong in this house."

Mom frowned. "Honey, that's not true. We want you here." She spoke slowly, almost as if she was trying to sound the words out. That seemed to irritate Jake even more, his face flushed and his mouth turned sharp and ugly. "If you want me here, it's only because you need a replacement for him."

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Mom, Dad, and I all froze. All caught by the cruelty of the phrase. Our momentary pause was enough for Jake to slip away and disappear into the cold Christmas morning.

A week later, Aunt Clair gave us a call to tell us that Jake had been sent to a Juvenile Detention Center. "What happened?" my mom had asked. "Does it really matter?" I could hear the shrug in Aunt Clair’s voice, "I've told you time and time again: that boy is bad news." I had to bite the inside of my cheek to prevent myself from screaming.

It was a lazy summer Tuesday when the doorbell rang. I opened the door and found Jake standing on the doorway. His t-shirt was blue, and his eyes didn't meet mine. "Who is it," my mom said, coming to the door with my dad behind her. They both froze when they saw Jake, "oh."

Jake shifted from side to side and his ratty sneakers kicked up dust. Then he looked up through his dark brown bangs, "I don't want to bother you guys, but I just want you to know how deeply sorry —"

I pulled him into the house.

My dad held Jake when his shoulders began to shake.

My mom set four places at the dinner table.

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