hours that Davis spent, his fingers gripping a pencil and flying over the paper. Instead, an open void
yawns at me lazily, donning a Cheshire grin.
My movements become frantic. I flip through dozens of blank sheets as the cream-colored papers
disintegrate softly. I’m halfway through when I notice the fragments lodged in the metal spine of the
sketchbook, and I bite through my bottom lip. Davis once told me something about an artist never
destroying his own work. Now, as I pull paper strands from the dulled spiral, I begin to see inside
my brother’s mind – and everything he managed to hide so well.
The cover of the sketchbook reads that there were originally 250 pages. Out of that, 189 are torn
out. 60 are blank. And one is filled in, with the explosive force of Davis’s thoughts.
It’s somewhere near the end. The entire sheet of paper has been blacked out in thick, unforgiving
strokes. On the back, in my twin’s messy script, he’s written four words in thin, red ink:
Davis Adams, Self Portrait
V.
I need a pair of clean jeans.
It’s stupid, but nobody in the house does laundry anymore, and I’ve run out of clean pants that I
can wear, so I sneak into Katie’s room when she’s at the store to steal a pair from her. I flick on the
closet light and shadows slant everywhere.
The walls are covered in writing. Furious, haphazard writing, where the pen has broken through the
wallpaper and bled through underneath. There are paragraphs that cover endless space, which clash
with the shattered sentences that loop through the clothes. Between these, angry print shifts into
angrier cursive and becomes consistently messier as her handwriting spirals towards the ceiling.
Letters leap out, catching me by surprise and blinding me: I hate you, I love you, I miss you, God,
Davis, you idiot why didn’t you talk to us, you killed us, killed us in the worst possible way –
The air around me sits on my chest as Katie’s words claw into me, melting into my skin. I look
away, but for all the wrong reasons. Despite the fact that I just invaded Katie’s private sanctuary, all I
can think of is that I stumbled upon a graveyard of words.
VI.
72
I follow the map in my head to the place to where X marks the spot. Then, I stand at the edge of the
world and look over. Dear God, it is so beautiful.
I’m seeing what Davis must have seen in the last seconds of his life and my fingers bite into my
knee. Was it worth it, Davis? I think, fire spilling into my veins. I can almost imagine him drawing
me right now, with that quiet, manic gleam in his eye as he maps out the ice melting beneath my
skin.
Are you happy now? I ask the waves that whispered his name at two AM and the cold wind that
slowed his fall and him – because he’s everywhere, painting the sky around me a glowing orange.
God, Davis, I am so lost without you.
There’s no answer, but I listen as hard as I can anyways.
VII.
I give Katie two things whenever I see her at breakfast. The first is a water bottle, because I can’t keep
watching her drink herself to death. The second is Davis’s sketchbook.
She blinks. “Thanks?” she says, peeling the label off of the bottle, but not touching the book.
“It was Davis’,” I say, and, immediately, her eyes harden. But she can’t shut down now, and I begin to
speak faster, my voice pouring out. “I get it now, Katie. Not completely and – God, I’m so pissed at
him for deciding to leave because maybe we could’ve helped him, but it was his choice. I was in his
room, and I saw this – and, now, I get that he was in such a shitty place that he thought there was no
other way.”
The water bottle skids across the surface of the table. “Okay,” she says, standing up to go.
Desperation pulls at my lungs. “Look,” I say, and pull the cover aside. I swear, Katie’s eyes widen as
she sees the paper shreds. When I get to the blacked-out page, she turns away. “Maybe we don’t know
why he did it or what he was thinking when he did or anything else. But in the end, we couldn’t have
seen it, and the only thing left that we can do is to remember him – so stop pushing him aside and
pretending that he didn’t exist.”
And I see her trying to hold it in – hold everything in. Except Davis didn’t just draw art – he was art,
and art has a way of pulling stars into never-ending darkness and causing oceans to murmur broken
promises about life and beauty and love. It can build and shatter, and it shredded us like one of the
drawings he made that could uproot forests and move mountains.
“Stop hiding,” I tell her fiercely, because that’s what she’s doing: hiding behind the smooth marble
sheen that encases her features and freezes her tears. I put the sketchbook in her hands, and we share
the weight of ten million pounds of paper and ash. “Stop hiding, Katie.”
And, finally, she does.
VIII.
In the middle of the afternoon, the cliff is a sleeping giant, shuddering quietly beneath our footsteps.
We lean against the sturdy wooden fence, close to where the sky and water interlock with one
another– a clashing of light blue against a darker, more relentless shade.
“My little brother is dead,” Katie says. Her voice is hollow, cracking down the middle.
“So is my twin,” I reply softly, staring downwards. There’s something about the aching pattern of the
waves that catch me, smiling at me in the saddest way I have ever seen.
Minute after minute ticks by, fading into hours. I study the ocean and Katie sips from the water
bottle, as we think about how to put ourselves back together – because the edge of the world doesn’t
necessarily mean the end of it.
IX.
I sit in Davis’s chair, and smell the thin underline of vanilla soap that he used to