Page 28 of My Unfinished Heart

I pull the porcelain mortar and pestle from the highest shelf and set it on the counter in front of me. It clanks to the countertop as it leaves my own shaking hand. For a moment, my vision blurs, and my heart rate spikes. The thick layer of dust is reassuring, allowing me to come back to the present.

Maybe she stopped using it when it stopped working on me.

One of the more upsetting thoughts I’ve actively avoided since coming home and learning I had another little brother is that he died exactly as sick as I was when I was his age.

Around ten o’clock, I’m at the point where I want to dump everything into trash bags and toss it. I’m done sorting. It’s the hall bathroom that pushes me over the edge. There are about five-hundred sample-sized shampoo bottles in one of the cabinets. The others are filled with mismatched linens and half-empty cans of hairspray. It’s all crap. Fortunately, I have yet to find anything as disturbing as the mortar and pestle. Tristan isn’t quite so lucky.

I’m heading to the kitchen to get more trash bags when I hear him gasp and then shout, “I’m saving you a lot of future trauma, Archer Brennan.”

He’s in my parents’ bedroom. Literally a room I have never set foot in. His tone doesn’t suggest anything particularly dark, so I can only imagine what he’s found in there. Likely something sexual.

I decide to go in. Not because I want to see for myself, but for closure. Approaching the door, I get a primal, fear-based adrenaline rush. As suspected, Tristan is crouching down near a nightstand. He glances my way and half-grins with a mischievous gleam in his eyes.

“Are you traumatized?” I ask.

“I’m getting there.”

“I’m fine with letting the movers do this room,” I tell him.

“Yeah?” He stands, one wary glance at the nightstand later. “Maybe that’s for the best. This was definitely your mother’s side of the bed, by the way.”

“Didn’t dear old dad move out?”

“She didn’t really accept that, from what I’ve gathered.”

Once again, I have to wonder how much Tristan knows. “Weird,” I say. But it’s not surprising. My mother was actually insane.

I look around the room. There’s an opulence to it that verges on tacky. Too many prints on the wall, too many pillows on the bed, a plush rug that doesn’t match anything but looks like it cost a fortune. A framed picture on what would have been my father’s nightstand catches my eye. I step into the room, approaching the familiar image in the dusty frame.

The scent of the room itself is so much worse than the eucalypts in the foyer. It’s my mother’s scent—unchanged after all this time. It’s powdery and peppery and triggers my gag reflex. I swallow hard as a wave of nausea grips me. Determined, though, I keep moving toward the frame and pick it up.

No fucking way.

I turn it over, remove the backing, and on the other side of the small painting, written in my handwriting, is my name. Archer B. 7th grade. Cardigan.

I take out the small watercolor and turn it over again. It’s Connor’s face from when he was little. Maybe Bryan’s age. I block that thought out and stare at the subtle, careful brush strokes. I painted it from memory. I painted it when I was twelve years old and two thousand miles away. It was the first face I ever attempted.

“Has this always been here?” I ask, in complete disbelief.

“I don’t know,” Tristan says. “I’ve never been in here before.”

He’s beside me now. So close I can feel his warmth at my side.

“Is that Connor?” he asks.

“Yeah.” I show him the back. “It’s one of mine.”

“You did that in seventh grade?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Wow. I’d love to see what you can do now.”

When I don’t say anything, he asks, “You okay?” His hand is on my shoulder blade. I turn to find him looking at me. He’s only a couple of inches shorter. Not much at all. Up close, I feel his presence viscerally. Deeply. Want is too small a word for how I feel. Desire barely scratches the surface. Need is such a cliché. It’s more than all those things, and it aches.

Am I okay? These feelings aren’t. But maybe they’re only a distraction from what I’m holding in my hand. Something else that hurts and stabs and tries to penetrate the armor I wear like skin.

“This is the only thing I’ve seen of mine in this house.” I say it because it’s the first piece of proof I’ve found that I was ever here before. That this is really where I came from.