The Bandage on the Other Side

Aaron’s steps dwindled along the hall until the kitchen seemed to hold nothing but the hum of the refrigerator. Mom stood at the sink, running hot water over a pan that was already clean.

“Mom?” I said, keeping my voice low.

She shut off the tap. In the sudden quiet, the dish towel rasped against her hands as she dried them. Her fingers gripped the cloth so tightly that her knuckles paled.

“Ruby, this has to stop,” she said. Her voice had gone flat. “Aaron has been gone a long time. He’s worn out, and he needs a chance to settle in. Don’t grill him about some bicycle accident from years ago.”

“I wasn’t grilling him. I just thought—”

“You thought wrong.” She turned, her eyes bright and unyielding. “You’ve mixed it up in your head. It happens. Take your bowl to the dishwasher, then get ready. Your piano lesson is at eleven.”

She left before I could answer. The towel was folded into neat thirds and placed across the oven handle, as if getting it exactly straight mattered more than what she had said.

I stayed on my stool, staring at the place where Aaron had been sitting. My finger wandered along a thin vein in the granite. I was ten, and grown-ups still seemed like the people who decided what was true.

When an adult corrected you, you were supposed to accept it. If Mom said the sky was green, maybe you checked the window, wondering whether your own eyes had failed you. But I remembered that afternoon.

The bicycle accident had happened when I was seven. The memory was sharp in the way frightening things can be: bright, clear, and difficult to put away. It didn’t feel like something I’d invented.

I took my bowl to the sink. The house had been different before Aaron left for Florida. A baseball used to knock against a wall; sports played loudly on the television, and his big sneakers pounded the stairs.

Now every room seemed arranged for people who weren’t there. I walked down the hall toward the living room, quiet enough to hear the soft scrape of my socks on the floor.

One wall was covered with family photographs in black frames, all lined up with careful spaces between them. White borders surrounded school portraits, holiday pictures, and birthdays, a tidy record of our lives.

Some photographs had changed over the last couple of years. The ones with our father had mostly disappeared or been trimmed down. On the beige wall, paler rectangles showed where frames had once hung.

I searched the rows for the summer I turned seven. I knew there had to be a picture from then, though I couldn’t have explained why finding it mattered so much.

At last I spotted one from the park, taken about a month after Aaron’s accident. We stood beside the duck pond. Aaron wore his Little League uniform and shorts, grinning around a gap in his teeth while holding a trophy.

I leaned toward the glass until my breath clouded it. The photograph showed a little white square on his right knee.

Air slipped out of my chest. Relief swept through me, chilly as water. Maybe Mom was right. Maybe I’d switched left and right in my mind, the way I sometimes did when I was hurrying.

I stepped away, the tight feeling in my stomach easing. I’d made a mistake. That seemed simple enough. I turned toward the hall, then paused, caught by a detail in the picture.

The trophy’s gold batter swung above a little plaque. Its engraved letters didn’t look right. I moved closer, squinting through the glass: the writing ran backward.

Then I noticed the word on Aaron’s jersey. His team played for the community center, sponsored by a hardware store. The red lettering across his chest was supposed to read HARRISON’S, but the letters faced the wrong way.

The whole photograph had been flipped. It was a selfie, taken with Mom’s phone, and the front camera had reversed the scene.

So the bandage hadn’t been on Aaron’s right knee after all. The picture had turned his sides around. In real life, the white square had covered his left knee.

The heaviness returned to my stomach, dropping lower than before. Why would Aaron lie about something that seemed so small? And why had Mom hurried to defend his version before I’d even finished speaking?

I went upstairs, placing each foot carefully. The carpet swallowed my steps. Aaron’s bedroom door stood open just a crack, and I stopped beside it, holding my breath.

From inside came the zip of a bag, followed by the shuffling sound of clothes. Through the narrow opening, I saw Aaron leaning over his duffel, searching through it before pulling out a blue sweatshirt.

He tucked the sweatshirt beneath his mattress. I watched from the partly open doorway, frozen between fear and curiosity, waiting for Aaron to move so I could find out what he was hiding.