Dr. Jaleel II

Not by much. You would not notice it walking through. You would notice it if you were sent to fetch something and had to count the doors, and the count came out wrong, and you stood there with your hand on the light switch, doing it again. Four doors on the left. Three on the right. The hallway had been built in 1962 and there had never been a fourth door on the right. My mother said this the way you say a thing you have said a hundred times. The sound came from that wall.

The note was folded into eighths, small enough to sit in a coin pocket, and it was in the shirt I had just hung up. I found it because I do a stupid thing: I check pockets twice. My mother did it. Now I do it, and the second check has never once caught anything. That night it caught a note in my own handwriting. Do not take the 7:40. Wait for the 8:05.

Amitriptyline, 25 mg. Her dose. Her name on the label, spelled the way only she spelled it, with the small accent she'd added at the DMV and never let anyone drop. I hadn't refilled anything. I hadn't opened the app since the funeral. But the receipt said the order was placed five days ago, from my account, and the pickup was authorized with a short code I did not remember choosing.

"Nine-one-one. What's your emergency?" "Someone's in my house." A woman, maybe fifty, steady. "In the hallway. I can hear him breathing." I ask for the address and she gives it, slow and clear, and I type it into the field, and the field does something it has never once done: it stops me. The cursor goes red before I finish. A note unfolds under the line, the way the system writes when it's telling you something is over. PREMISES LOST. FIRE. 2019. NO SURVIVORS.

We moved in on a Tuesday, and by Friday I had learned the house repeated me. Not everything. It was selective, like a bad line that only keeps the important words. I would be at the sink and hear, from the landing above, my own voice at low volume, finishing a sentence I had not started. The first time I thought it was a phone, a radio, a neighbour's television bleeding through the wall. We had no neighbours. The house was the last on the road and the woods did the rest.

The listing said SLEEPS 2 in capitals, the way you write a warning before you understand it. Mira found the cabin. Four hours north, at the end of a gravel road that gave up and became a suggestion for the last half mile. No neighbours in any direction. A woodstove, a hand pump over the sink, and two mugs on the shelf. Two chairs at the table. Two plates, two forks, two towels folded to the same width. Two of everything, arranged like an answer to a question nobody had asked.

My brother could wear my voice before he could find his own. Our mother would call us down to dinner and he would answer in my throat, and she would set the table for one boy twice. At nine I heard him explaining me to our father. Not reporting. Explaining, the way you explain weather. He used my voice, and the words were mine, arranged the way I would never have arranged them, and he was right about every one. I asked how. He said, I listen. I am always listening.