The Bandage on the Other Side

The pale crescent was the old bicycle scar. It sat beside the fresh cut, just where I remembered it. My mind had been right, even if everyone had tried to make it feel unreliable.

Aaron breathed out in broken little bursts and folded forward, his face hidden behind his hands. Under the desk lamp he seemed smaller than he had that morning, like the light had taken something out of him.

“Aaron,” I said softly.

He spun toward me. His elbow swept the scissors off the bed, and they struck the wooden floor with a sharp clack. His face went blank with fright, then crumpled into a look that begged me not to ask.

He grabbed for his pajama cuff, trying to hide his leg. The cloth snagged against one of the staples. He sucked in a breath and stopped moving. There was no point pretending I hadn’t seen.

I came all the way inside and eased the door shut. The folded clinic document came out of my pocket. I raised it into the lamp’s yellow light, though my hand wouldn’t stay steady.

“This says Bozeman,” I whispered. “You were there with Dad.”

Aaron fixed his eyes on the paper. His breathing sounded too loud in the tiny room. He didn’t argue or say it was a mistake. Instead, he glanced at the door as if Mom might be standing just beyond it.

“Ruby, please,” he said. His voice was rough and thin. “Put it away. Just go back to bed.”

“I’m not going.” I moved nearer. Everything from the day seemed to crowd into my chest: the made-up trip, the careful answers, the way Mom had looked at me. “She signed the hospital form. She came to get you. She knew where you were.”

I nodded toward his injured knee. “Why are we acting like you went to Florida? Why does she make you say that when she knows what happened to you?”

Aaron held tight to the mattress edge until his knuckles turned pale. The anger he’d worn earlier had vanished. When he looked at me, sadness filled his eyes, and I felt as if he pitied me for not understanding.

“She’s telling the story that way for you,” he murmured. “Not for herself. She’s trying to keep you safe.”

The lamp threw hard-edged shadows onto the walls. I watched the staples crossing his swollen knee, then the old, faint curve beside them. I couldn’t fit the two injuries together with the lies I’d heard.

His hands fell away from the mattress. His shoulders sagged, and he looked worn out, as though he had carried this secret all the way home and couldn’t hold it up anymore.

“I’m sorry about breakfast,” he said. His eyes stayed on the floor. “That mark on my right knee came from baseball. I slid into a sprinkler head in fifth grade.”

I stared at him, waiting. The memory of the bicycle accident had felt plain and certain. Now he was telling me he’d tried to undo it on purpose.

“I knew you’d search for the bike scar,” he continued. “So I wanted you to see the other knee and start doubting what you remembered. I needed you to think you’d got it wrong, so Mom would have to step in.”

His words hurt in a way I hadn’t expected. My brother had watched me question my own mind and let me do it, all so the story about Florida could keep standing.

“You lied to me,” I said. My voice was almost lost beneath the clock’s ticking outside. “Mom lied too. Why did you go there? Why wasn’t it Florida?”

Aaron clutched the mattress again and drew in a long, uneven breath. “Dad wanted me to come.”

For a moment I could only hear that sentence. Then Aaron said their father had begun messaging him just after Christmas, one text after another, when the holidays were over.

“He said he had a house in Montana now, and that he missed us,” Aaron told me. “But he kept talking about Mom. He said she’d made him leave. He said she’d pushed him out and never let him be a real dad.”

I thought of Mom’s spotless kitchen and the schedules she kept so carefully. Since Dad had gone, she seemed to manage every part of our days. I could understand how Aaron might have believed his story.

“I was furious with her,” he said. “I thought she was the one who’d ruined everything. In April I confronted her in the kitchen. I said Dad had invited me to stay with him.”

Aaron rubbed his palms against his pajama pants. “I told her that if she wouldn’t get me a ticket to Bozeman, I’d pack and hitchhike. And I said I’d tell you what Dad had told me about her.”

I moved a little closer to the bed. “What did Mom say?”

“She didn’t shout or cry,” Aaron answered. His eyes were red, and tears shone along their lower edges. “She got very still. Then she said I could go, but only if I followed one condition. She made it a rule I couldn’t break.”

He paused, and the quiet stretched between us. Then Aaron told me what Eleanor had required before she let him visit their father: I must never discover the real reason he’d gone to Montana.