Of the four Dahlbeck kids, I knew Matthew the least. I could recognize him if I glimpsed him through my bedroom window, ambling down the skinny path between his mother’s hydrangeas, but that was mostly because he was the only boy of the family and about a head taller than the rest of them. Without that context, though, he was just another unremarkable kid in an unremarkable town.
Maybe he was just overshadowed by his sisters. Miriam, after all, showed me the steps to making a real life. It’s hard to compete with that. I always saw her as a sort of motherly girl––warm and easily pleased, she had a round face that dimpled when she smiled, and when she babysat me and my siblings she made cookies. She was only in high school when I really knew her, but to an eight-year-old that’s practically ancient.
She followed closely the blueprint to building a life. Every few years or so my mom would say, “Miriam Dahlbeck is graduating college now, it’s so funny how time flies,” or “Miriam Dahlbeck just got engaged! Seems like just yesterday she was learning to drive,” or “Miriam Dahlbeck is pregnant! Isn’t that something?”
Matthew was the second oldest after her. Maybe Miriam’s perfect life construction gave him the freedom to abstract his own architecture, because all I ever heard of him was a brief congratulations my dad shouted across the street after Matthew made the varsity rugby team. It’s possible, I guess, that Matthew was just as perfect as Miriam and I simply never heard about it. I didn’t hear anything particularly bad about him, either. He should have baked me cookies. Then I would have cared.
Mary-Kate was the youngest after him, and there was no way he could have compared. I was in love with Mary-Kate. When she was in sixth grade and I was in fourth, I drew a picture of Abraham Lincoln and left it on her doorstep (Abraham Lincoln was the only thing I could draw). I signed my name, too, after much agonizing. She wrote me Thank you! <3 on a Post-It note.
Mary-Kate wore her hair in a ponytail. It made her headband entirely unnecessary, which only made me love her more. A girl of luxuries, of excess, of wasteful hair products and pink lip gloss. Where Miriam was the blueprint for a stable life, Mary-Kate was the model for a glimmering one. Matthew was too far away, hidden behind the mysterious doors of the high school or his car. But Mary-Kate was right there, sipping lemonade with her friends in the yard as they waited for their nail polish to dry.
And closer than all of them was Meredith. Three years younger than me, she was the baby of the bunch. She befriended my siblings, a pair of flaxen-haired fraternal twins her same age, and the three of them were a constant presence around our house. We got a trampoline because Meredith’s siblings were always hogging hers and the little trio wanted to play popcorn. We had lasagna for dinner because Meredith asked for it so often my mom learned to cook it without a recipe. We bought a cache of Nerf guns because Meredith had some at her house and it made my siblings jealous.
They were probably Matthew’s Nerf guns. The ones at Meredith’s house, that is. I know they were hand-me-downs, and I can’t imagine Miriam or Mary-Kate had much interest in play fighting. So that’s something of his I knew, at least. Kind of.
We moved into the house across from the Dalhbecks when I was seven; we moved out again when I was fourteen. My siblings still saw Meredith, though she almost never came over, and my parents had the occasional lunch with Mr. and Mrs. Dahlbeck––I was really the only one who was totally cut off.
There’s something strange about the way a person can just disappear from your mind after seven years of constant reminders of their existence. But while it pestered me like any unfinished story, I wasn’t too bothered because I could see where the stories were going. Miriam would add another pillar to her perfectly-constructed life. Mary-Kate would pledge to a sorority and find some boyfriend who posted pictures of himself fishing to Instagram. Meredith would join the middle school soccer team and see my siblings on weekends. Matthew would...keep doing whatever it was he did.
I didn’t forget about the Dahlbecks. I just didn’t think of them. It’s a perfectly normal thing. Out of sight, out of mind is a cliché for a reason. It’s not appalling or strange that when I hopped in my mom’s car after school some cold sunny day in sophomore year, and she said, “Something happened,” my first thought was that something had happened to me. It was a reasonable impulse. And it was reasonable to find more bewilderment than horror when she said, “Matthew Dahlbeck OD’d last night.” It might have even been reasonable to stare out the windshield at the line of traffic that kept us stuck just before the freeway, wondering if I had made a mistake in who I thought Matthew Dahlbeck was, because why would that kid be dead?
“I’m going to see his parents after I drop you off,” Mom went on.
His poor parents, I thought.
How old was he?
He was in high school when I last saw him, right?
Or college?
When did I last see him?
Did I ever speak to him?
Did he remember me?
What was the last thing he thought before he died?
Was he afraid?
What did his face look like again?
“Okay,” I said, and put on my headphones. I traced shapes with my finger in the condensation on the window. (Cubes and hearts. I couldn’t draw Lincoln very well anymore.) The rows of skeletal trees along the road were interrupted by the less fortunate ones covered in ivy, whose leaves, unlike those of the bare winter branches, would never grow back because the ivy had long since killed them.
My mom dropped me off at home. She ducked inside to grab the lasagna she’d made for Mrs. Dahlbeck, and then she headed back to our old neighborhood.
My siblings were out (had anyone told them?), so I had the house to myself to reckon with the fact that he was gone, and I didn’t miss him. This was my first day alive in a world where Matthew Dahlbeck was not somewhere breathing, and I couldn’t feel his absence.
I sat in the kitchen, absently devouring a bag of chips and picking at my nails. Mom had said they found him in the bathroom, medicine cabinet open and the pill bottle still in his hand. Who found him, I’d wanted to ask, but didn’t. I could picture the scene better than I could picture him. He had black hair, right? His siblings had black hair. Would Miriam be coming home for the funeral?
I reached into the bag of chips, but my salty fingers found only crumbs. I threw out the bag and made myself a grilled cheese sandwich. Well, it wasn’t really a grilled cheese sandwich as much as it was a slice of yellow American cheese microwaved between two pieces of bread, soggy and soft and much too hot. I choked that down as I scanned the fridge for something else to eat, holding its door open in a way my dad would hate and letting the cold envelop me.
What other vague specters of memory had dissipated without my even knowing? My second grade teacher, Mrs. Blume, retired a year after I left her class. Every surface in her classroom was covered by stuffed plush penguins. She taught piano to the boy in my class who lived a block away from me and the Dahlbecks.
I finished the melted cheese sandwich, got a glass of water, and grabbed the bag of pepperoni Mom kept for packed lunches. It was closed, so I tore it open with my teeth.
Mrs. Blume would be gone by now, her penguins sold or left to grandchildren. The boy in my class was still out there, somewhere. Though, if he wasn’t, would I know?
Stopping by the sink to rinse the smell of meat from my fingers, I closed the pepperoni and started to boil water for ramen. I kind of had to pee, but I stayed out of the bathroom. The tile must have been so cold against Matthew’s face. Had he felt it?
I left the pot on the stove and wandered down the hall. Then I came back. The water still hadn’t boiled. Back down the hall. Up the stairs––the long way around, not past the bathroom. Back down, back through the hall, to see the water still stubbornly refusing to boil.
I grabbed a slice of white bread, stuffed the whole thing in my mouth, and collapsed at the kitchen table. As I chewed, the thick wad of bread became Miriam’s cookies. My glass of water was Mary-Kate’s lemonade, and the smell of Meredith’s favorite lasagna lingered by the oven.
It was so hot in that room. A window sat right behind me, but I had left all my energy scattered in the wake of my trek about the house. So I just sat, motionless, and watched the steam flow up around the edges of the pot of boiling water. It looked like a ghost.