The morning before I flew away from Philadelphia, my brother and I went for a walk. It was a monochromatic, flat January morning. Luke was in his stroller, and the three of us walked over to the seminary campus near my parent’s house. There’s a half mile trail that circumnavigates the quad. We walked to one end of it, mostly in silence. Then we began our slow traverse back. I remember thinking that I wanted the walk to last forever, that I wasn’t ready for it to end. The inside of the path was lined with tall, barren oak trees, and every one we passed, Luke would reach skyward and say, ‘twee, twee.’

“Did I ever tell you how I met Becky?” Jackson asked me.

“No. You haven’t talked much about anything.”

My brother smiled in a way I hadn’t seen before. It was at once wistful and melancholy. Not for the first time, I realized that he has witnessed more than I can imagine. And somehow he’s survived it.

“Me and some guys were staying in this real bad motel in west Texas. I don’t know how long we’d been there. We were moving a lot, there was a few of us. We were working these bad jobs at Wal-Mart or like gas stations, and basically just stealing money whenever we could. Staying in abandoned houses or bad motels. Everything was blurry, days didn’t end, or a month would be like, a few hours or something.” He reaches down and takes Luke’s hand. “’d be gone so long then I didn’t even know how long it had been. I don’t think you and I had talked in like a year and a half. It’d been a long time, and things were pretty bad out there. Friends getting arrested, or overdosing. One day we had this party with some people. And there was this girl there, a girl I hadn't met before. Somebody's cousin, or the friend of a friend. No one knows how she got there. And I don’t know what it was, Nate. Just like this connection, I guess. That’s probably what you’d call it.” I laugh, he smirks. “But I’d never felt that kind of thing before. I wasn’t feeling much of anything. I remember thinking, ‘If I can feel this so strongly it must really be something. Cause I don’t feel anything.’ Maybe I’m making all this up, but I was looking out over Texas, and it was so, so…empty. The sun was goin’ down and it looked like a fire or something. There was all these oil rigs and drills, and they were moving up and down in this great fire. I think then I saw all this happening. Luke, is what I mean. I saw this life together, all while watching her across the room. She was smoking cigarettes, laughing. She has that tattoo on the inside of her wrist, and I kept seein’ it, and having these images of seeing that tattoo as she bent over to pick up Luke, or like, as she was opening the refrigerator in our home. I really think I felt that, or saw it, right then and there. I swear I did. I doubt you believe it. I don’t know why anyone would, cause it’s ridiculous. But I believe it.”

“No,” I said. “I believe you.” I smiled, looked at the frozen earth. “The same thing happened to me. When Sus opened the door the afternoon I delivered her pizza. She smiled. I suddenly had this whole life there, in that moment. Just like that.” I snapped my fingers.

　
“What happens about her?” Jackson asked me gently.

“I guess we become strangers,” I said.

“Twee. Twee,” Luke implored.

“It’s so strange, thinking back on things,” I said. “They don’t feel real anymore. It feels very distant, like a separate life. Already it feels that way.”

Jackson smiled, reached down to his son, tenderly adjusted the boy’s mittens.

“I feel that way sometimes, too,” he said. “About those lost years. I was a different person then. I know it was still me. But it doesn’t feel like it was. I don’t know how any of that happened, now. I don’t know how I made it from there to here. I guess that's what I remember most about meeting Becky. How far from here I was but that I could somehow see here. And now, here I am. Those days feel like the shadow of a life. That’s all.”

I walked as slowly as possible, but the path grew irrevocably shorter.

“Twee, twee.”

“Yes, Bean, tree. Tree, we know. They’re beautiful, aren’t they Bean? Can you say beautiful?”

“Twee.”

“Yes,” I said finally. “A shadow life. That’s what will happen, I guess. She’ll become a shadow life and a ghost. I wish I could stop it. But I can’t.”

“Well,” Jackson said, “we’ll be here for you when you get back. Whenever that is.”

“Thank you.”

He stopped pushing the stroller. We both turned to the end of the path, which drew ever closer. Luke kicked impatiently, reaching skyward.

“Thank you for not giving up on me,” Jackson said softly. “Thank you for being my brother still.”

I brought him close to me then, held onto him as my legs gave out and I threw all my weight onto him, my brother. “I'm prouder of you than any person in this world,” I said.

We stood like that for a time, amidst the grey devastation of winter, my brother holding me aloft.

“Twee,” his son said. The beautiful son with his father’s clear cerulean eyes. The son who saved his father’s life.

Twee.