It’s been years since Janice has called her brother on purpose. Not that she doesn’t want to—she just doesn’t think to do it. But she forgets to lock her phone. So when she shoves it in her pocket, it’s prone to call whatever number is pinned to the top of her “Favorite” contacts, which just so happens to be her brother’s. He always answers.
“Hello,” he says. “Janice?”
And every time, after Janice lifts the phone to her ear, she asks him what he wants.
“You called me,” he says, which for a moment throws her off, until he agrees to chalk it up to not knowing who called whom.
But he knows.
Her brother’s name is Jeff, but he’s in her phone as Toboggan Sled. She’s saved plenty of people’s names as things that capture who they are better than whatever name they’ve been given. Greasy Hair’s real name is Ben, and Manspread Man is Gary. As Janice sees it, if you meet a guy named Manspread Man, you’ll remember him nine times out of ten. But Gary could be any number of schlubs.
“How are you?” Janice asks her brother, because what do you say to someone you didn’t choose to call except the same thing you say to everyone?
“Fine,” he says, before moping—or, at least, that’s how it sounds to her: like he’s kicking a rock with his hands stuffed in his pockets. “I mean, not really fine, but you know.”
She does, but she isn’t ready to go there, since she wasn’t planning on talking to him in the first place.
“How are you?” he asks.
Janice considers the question, deciding whether to really answer him this time, until her daughter lumbers in with toilet paper glued to her hair.
“I’ve got to go,” she says.
And after he says, “Have a good one,” Janice slides the phone back in her pocket.
Weeks pass before Janice butt-dials her brother again. She thinks of him only once, when she’s in a hotel pool in New Jersey, the same one their parents took them to when they were children. Now Janice takes her daughter there, and the way her daughter splashes around reminds her of Jeff. They used to race in this pool—freestyle, breaststroke, backstroke—and Janice beat him almost every time. But one time he won, and out of anger, or maybe jealousy, she announced that he had cheated.
“Did not,” he said, but Janice insisted until he seemed to believe it.
She remembers the look on Jeff’s face when his victory smile began to crumble. And even now, as her daughter splashes and laughs, she hears the way he cried softly, leaving her to float on her own in the pool where he’d never race her again.
In early April, Janice hears her brother’s voice in the dairy aisle of a grocery store. It startles her. Her mind has been on two different things: what to cook for dinner and a song playing over the ceiling speakers, whose name she can’t remember. It’s a song she likes, one she’s heard a thousand times but had forgotten about until now. And then, from her pocket, she hears her brother say, “Janice?”
“Jeff?” she asks, holding the phone to her ear. But the phone has dialed him on FaceTime, which her brother explains while looking into the darkness of her ear canal. Janice lowers the phone and sees him, as handsome as she remembers but skinnier, with less hair on top. She can see through to his scalp, which makes her sad: that her brother has aged.
“What’s up?” he asks.
She figures this is just fate punishing her for not calling him, when she’s always known deep down that it would make his day if she did.
“Oh, you know,” she says, searching the shelves for the kind of string cheese her daughter likes, the one with a smiling yellow duck on the packaging. “Just trying to get by,” she adds, which isn’t entirely true. She doesn’t know why anyone says that—trying to get by. As if a tree has fallen across the road and you’re late for something.
“Yeah,” Jeff says, as if he knows what she means. “Same here.”
She holds the phone in one hand and pushes the grocery cart with the other. She wants to tell her brother she should get back to shopping, but then she remembers the song playing above her and asks if he can tell her what it is. She raises the phone toward the ceiling so he can hear it.
“Keane,” he says.
“Oh shit, you’re right.”
“‘Somewhere Only We Know.’”
She wants to smack her forehead. “It’s right there in the lyrics, isn’t it?”
“It is,” says Jeff, who is smiling, and she’s happy she can see his face, because the sound of his voice wouldn’t have told her he’s smiling.
Later that night, as Janice lies in bed with that song on loop in her head, she remembers how her brother would play it on their basement keyboard, belting out the lyrics as if he’d written them himself. She remembers envying him: the way he not only connected with the singer’s words but absorbed them; how he closed his eyes and sang as if performing for an arena full of fans. As she sat at the top of the stairs watching him, she realized how little she knew about him, how there were things she never would have guessed.
She wonders how many of her memories exist like this, buried beneath the clutter of her mind but able to crawl their way back to the surface through a song. It scares her to think what might be lurking in the dark—not because she’s afraid to face them, but because memories like this, of her brother when he was happy, could forever remain tucked into some corner where only the music could reach.
How sad it would be, she thinks, to leave them there.
When things come undone, they often do so in pieces: The string cheese Janice’s daughter likes, which she dangles above her mouth like a Roman empress savoring grapes. A thin layer of reservoir ice splintering in jagged shards as a six-year-old on a toboggan sled careens onto its surface.
Janice wonders if Jeff remembers that: How she lectured him the whole way home, his body frozen from the icy water. How she made him drag the sled behind, his fingers almost too stiff to wrap around the rope.
But Jeff doesn’t remember it that way at all. He remembers it from afar, as if he were watching them from above: Two kids in all-black snowsuits, dragging their sled together. The snow driving in sharp, unforgiving angles, graying the world around them. How he saw nothing at times, except for his sister’s hand, reaching back to guide him home.
The last time Janice butt-dials Jeff, she is scrolling through pictures when she comes across one she took of him many years ago, on a California beach with his hair windswept and cheeks flushed. She remembers sitting beside him on a slab of driftwood large enough to sail to Hawaii or China or Japan—wherever Jeff imagined going, if only he worked up the nerve to lie down on it and let the current steer him. She remembers him talking about letting the wind carry him to wherever it chose, instead of deciding where to go himself.
She remembers what she thought of, sitting beside him on that cypress trunk smoothed by the crashing waves. She remembers remembering when they were children, and she’d have to find him in the dark spots of their home: the basement, the attic, the room above the garage. It was like a game they played: find where Jeff had holed himself up. She found it endearing at first, but then less so. She remembered thinking all he needed was a little bit of sunlight, only to realize no amount of sun would coax him from the dark and quiet he preferred.
As they sat together on the cypress log overlooking the sea, Janice wondered if she was the one who needed to drift off, away from her brother, on whatever winds were willing to carry her. He was still so much a boy, despite his age. Late thirties, but not for much longer. Even his face had hardly changed, his eyes soft and expressive, his cheeks plump but not fat, as if he were hanging on to his baby weight. She remembered the times she’d gone to find him, curled up and alone, moping as he always did about God knows what. How everything for him was about getting by, shuffling around whatever lay in his way as opposed to moving confidently forward. She had felt them coming apart for years, little by little, as they shed their sibling tether and grew further from one another.
Janice had expected some driving force to sever the relationship. Wasn’t that one of Newton’s laws? An object in motion stays in motion; an object at rest stays at rest—until an outside force intervenes. But there was no force, just a slow unraveling. And as they looked across the Pacific, she wondered if there was anything left to say.
When Janice slides the phone back in her pocket, she sees its screen brighten through the fabric of her pants and knows, even before checking, that it’s reaching out to Jeff with whatever autonomy a phone might have. She clicks “end” before he can answer. She doesn’t want them to start the way they always do, as if startled by one another’s existence: Janice? Jeff? Hello? She wants his phone to ring because she’s decided to call him, with something she has to say. And when she unlocks her screen, she locates his name—the name she chose to give him so many years ago—and taps it, waiting for him to answer.
