Chapter 2 - The Brother He Barely Remembered
Elijah climbed onto the couch beside his mother.
He pulled his oversized sleeves back until his fingers appeared.
“What didn't you tell me?”
David looked at the boy's face.
There were pieces of Jordan everywhere in Elijah.
The same dark brown eyes. The same habit of tilting his head when something confused him. Even the small wrinkle between his eyebrows appeared whenever he was trying hard to understand.
But Jordan had been ten when Elijah was born.
He had been a big brother from the moment he first held that tiny baby at the hospital.
David remembered the pride on his older son's face.
“Can I teach him basketball when he gets bigger?” Jordan had asked.
“You can teach him anything you want,” David had answered.
Jordan had taken that promise seriously.
When Elijah learned to crawl, Jordan crawled beside him.
When Elijah began walking, Jordan followed with his hands extended, ready to catch him.
And whenever Elijah cried, Jordan somehow knew whether he wanted his blanket, his bottle, or simply someone to sit beside him.
“He loved you,” David finally said.
Elijah looked down.
“How much?”
Renee wiped her cheeks.
“Oh, sweetheart. So much.”
She smiled through her tears.
“Jordan used to come home from school and ask about you before he even took his backpack off.”
“Really?”
“Every day.”
Elijah looked pleased.
“Did he play with me?”
“All the time.”
Renee described the cardboard rocket ship Jordan had built for his baby brother.
It had crooked windows and paper flames taped to the back.
Jordan had spent an entire Saturday painting it blue.
Elijah had been two years old and more interested in chewing the cardboard steering wheel than pretending to fly.
Jordan hadn't cared.
He sat inside that cardboard rocket for hours, making engine noises while Elijah laughed.
David remembered watching them from the kitchen doorway.
At the time, he had thought there would be hundreds of Saturdays just like it.
He hadn't known how quickly ordinary days could become precious memories.
“Then why don't I remember him?” Elijah asked.
“Because you were little,” Renee explained. “Very little.”
Elijah thought about that.
“Did he get sick?”
David's shoulders stiffened.
Renee glanced at him.
They had never explained the full story to Elijah.
Jordan had developed a serious heart condition when he was nine. His doctors had tried different treatments, and for a while, the family had allowed themselves to believe the worst was behind them.
Some weeks were almost normal.
Jordan attended school. He teased his friends. He argued about bedtime.
Other weeks involved hospitals, medications, and long nights when Renee slept beside his hospital bed.
He hated being treated like he was fragile.
He especially hated being separated from Elijah.
Once, after a particularly difficult appointment, Jordan had turned to his father and said, “Everybody keeps asking if I'm okay. Nobody asks whether Eli misses me.”
David had laughed softly.
“I'm pretty sure Eli misses you every time you leave the room.”
Jordan had smiled.
“Then I need to hurry up and get better.”
He never did.
Four years earlier, complications from his condition had taken his life.
Elijah had been three.
He remembered almost nothing clearly: an older boy's laugh, a warm hand holding his, someone calling him “little man.”
But he had no way to connect those fragments to a face.
Renee took a careful breath.
“Yes, baby. Jordan was very sick.”
“Did the doctors help him?”
“They tried everything they could.”
“Then why did he die?”
David lowered his gaze.
“Sometimes people get so sick that even doctors can't make them better.”
Elijah became silent.
He rubbed the shirt's cuff between his fingers.
“Was he scared?”
The question struck David harder than he expected.
He remembered his last private conversation with Jordan.
The hospital room had been dim.
Jordan had asked him something that David had not known how to answer.
“Dad, if I don't come home, will Elijah forget me?”
David had held his son's hand.
“Don't talk like that.”
“But what if he does?”
“I won't let that happen.”
The memory returned with such force that David pressed his palms together.
He had made a promise.
Then grief had made him break it.
After Jordan's funeral, David stopped telling stories about him. He couldn't bear seeing Renee cry, and he couldn't bear hearing Elijah ask where his brother had gone.
Whenever the conversation became painful, he ended it.
He had convinced himself that silence was protection.
But looking at Elijah now, he realized what his silence had taken away.
His youngest son had grown up surrounded by photographs of a brother he barely knew.
Renee watched her husband struggle.
“David,” she said gently, “tell him.”
David looked up.
“Tell him what?”
“Whatever you were about to say.”
He looked at the shirt again.
Then his eyes settled on the crooked pocket.
“There was something Jordan wanted you to have,” he told Elijah.
Elijah straightened.
“A present?”
David nodded.
“What kind?”
David swallowed.
“That shirt was part of it.”
Renee's expression changed.
“Part of it?”
May you like
David closed his eyes.
And she realized her husband was carrying a memory he had never shared with her.
